[Suggestion] Tank Buster Cannon. Are you kidding me?

Tank Buster = need to get within GRENADE distance to one mag kill. Not to mention you have to get them in the butt, and Prowlers and Vanguards aren't exactly going to take it well and are armed with AP.

Try getting a Tankbuster Lib close enough to do that against an armour column. Come on, even try it!

Flying is one of the hardest things to get good at in this game, we're rewarded with the ability to **** over players with poor situational awareness and who refuse to pull hard counters.

You're only terrified of the Tankbuster if you're attacking a Lib at close range, which means you've already made the mistake of getting within close range or allowing it to get there. You deserve 44 Rounds of sweet explosive freedom. Not to mention the only way to get that one mag kill is in the butt, which means we NEED a belly gunner to try and gank you if we don't get the butt, which also exposes us to LOTS of fire.

You want to fear Libs? Fear pilots that know how to dodge dumb fires, and gunners who can compensate for three dimensional inertia, drift and irregular drop from flying upside-down. Those are the Liberators you should fear.

Skyguards don't KILL air unless the air is stupid or you use them en masse. Hence "Guard" not "SkyKiller" You want to kill a Lib, use AP rounds or Lockons, that's a Lib Pilot's fear. If he's hovering and 'farming'. DUMBFIRES ARE EASY TO COMPENSATE FOR AND HIT LIKE A DUMPTRUCK.

for it to be FOTM it would have to be something new, this cheese has been around for some time. ALTHOUGH i think the introduction of the valk and the more user friendly AA guns may have been enough to dethrone the liberator. at least on connery libs don't seem to circle like vultures anymore picking off anything that was guilty of not being a liberator.

i still get insta zotted by the tank buster every once in a while but now liberators seem at least somewhat concerned while they are flying around.

Doesn't change the fact that the TB is the only nosegun ever equipped on a Lib ever. Noseguns oughta be damage-over-time weapons, not insta-kill bombers. There's a problem when the nosegun can kill faster than the bellygun. I suggest a simple reduction in damage, a large increase in mag size, and better accuracy. It should retain it's 'Tank-Busting abilities', but make it something that won't just annihilate everything in 2 seconds.

Honestly, I've been a victim of this kind of thing too. When I roll my NC alt, I'd just be going down the road then WHAM, out of nowhere, I hear a few plinks of damage. By the time I do, my Vanguard is already blown up and I'm sent back to the warp gate to grab another.

There's no way to detect this coming in, as far as I know, no real way to defend against it, and no way to prevent it in a wide open area like Esamir. Granted, this only happened a handful of times when I was on my way to a combat zone, but.... are we really okay with this? Tanks getting instantly sniped? We're supposed to be driving around a few tons of bad attitude and problem solving, so why do I feel like everytime I get into one, I'm driving around an unstable bathtub whose only purpose is to fall victim to bad terrain physics and explode when something sneezes at me?

Not sure what you mean by what you wrote. Liberators are glass cannons. Their survivability is worse than ESFs, as they are too big and bulky. Unless we're talking about the dead hours of the day, Liberators are merely cert pinatas.



The picture above is a summary of the main MBT killers in the game. Liberators are nowhere in there.

Lets see what kills Liberators though. You'll find that, both NC & TR MBTs are prime reasons for Liberator deaths. Magrider is horrible against air, so it's unsurprisingly not on the list:



Should we perhaps nerf MBT anti-air capabilities instead?

If he lined up for the kill, the Magrider is doomed and no magburning will save it (not enough thust).

You know what OP? Totally agree with you. Tank burster is ********. Back when they finally got around to nerfing libs, my first reaction was being happy that the tank burster wasn't instagib tanks in .7 seconds. But then for whatever reason they decided to undo that nerf and left it the way it was. Which was crazy because it was one of the main things that needed to ******* go.

They need to put something in the game that kills libs just as fast as tank burster rip through through vehicles. You know sinces the tank burster is so far and totally not ********, I'm sure lib pilots won't mind getting blasted out of the sky in .6 seconds from a lib burster cannon.

50 meters != grenade distance

50 meters is 54+ yards which is well outside of grenade range.

TB damage is 334 before 50 meters and it goes down on an even gradient until it reaches 143 at 300 meters meaning (here comes the math)

the difference is 190 damage over 250 meters so for every 25 meters beyond 50 a TB loses 19 damage per shot. at 4000 hit points (from here on i will use values for magrider and prowler defense) and a

41% resistance x top armor of 58% = 64.78% so MBTs take slightly more than 35% damage from TB (as referenced from http://planetside.wikia.com/wiki/Vehicle_armor_and_damage_resistance)

1/ 0.35 = slightly less than 2.9 (which is the multiplier that gives us the effective HP of MBTs)

2.9 x 4000 = 11,600 (this is slightly more than the effective HP of MBTs vs the TB AFTER all resists have been applied, all approximations made lean in favor of the tank buster)

now we can get to the meat of it.

11,600 / 334 = 35 shots for a complete kill at 50 meters on a top down attack
11,600 / 315 = 37 shots for a complete kill at 75 meters
11,600 / 296 = 40 shots for a complete kill at 100 meters
11,600 / 277 = 42 shots for a complete kill at 125 meters
11,600 / 258 = 45 shots for a complete kill at 150 meters
11,600 / 239 = 49 shots for a complete kill at 175 meters
11,600 / 220 = 53 shots for a complete kill at 200 meters
11,600 / 201 = 58 shots for a complete kill at 225 meters
11,600 / 182 = 64 shots for a complete kill at 250 meters (YAY!! we finally made it past 2 full clips!!, you only have to be 250 meters away!)

so that is what 1/3 stock liberator can do.

now for the rest of your BS.

dumbfire launchers only have a hope of hitting really stupid liberators that are hovering VERY low AND you need to hit them at least twice which takes AT LEAST 5.2 seconds. while proper teamwork can be effective a lone HA with a dumbfire launcher is extremely unlikely to pose a significant threat if you are smarter than the average stump.

LOCK ONS!!! YAY!

liberators have a base health of 5000 and 32.5% damage resistance to lock on launchers.

32.5% damage resistance works out to an effective health multiplier of more than 1.4 (again skewing things in your favor)

5000 x 1.4 = 7000 effective health vs lock on rockets.

lock on rockets have a base damage of 1000.

so it takes 7 rockets to bring down a liberator.

with a reload speed of 5.2 seconds it will require a minimum of 31.2 seconds for a lone heavy to bring down a liberator WITHOUT locking on and solely using dumbfire functionality. again team work is more effective but any lone heavy or even a pair of heavies with lock on launchers can easily be escaped or killed by almost any liberator crew that can escape the warp gate without crashing. half a minute is a long time.

AIR DETERRENCE!

so imagine we took your liberator stripped it of any hope of defending itself from any flavor of air attack, no full auto nose guns, no AA tail guns, AND THEN we made it into ground "deterrence" (you get to annoy targets until they leave or decide to murder you). that is skyguard play.

when i am in my skyguard and any form of ground vehicle attacks me i have to pray that they thoroughly suck because skyguard TTK on ground vehicles is so horrible that if they are even close to as good as me i WILL die because almost everything can out DPS my AA gun. if i am to kill a ground target i need to be hitting their rear armor with my front armor facing them AND i need to hope their guns are small enough or their aim is bad enough that i can put enough rounds into them for a kill, OR i need to find an escape route toward some other friendly vehicle and hide under their skirts.

how often do liberators have to keep an eye out for infantry wielding C4 charges, because i always have to beware in my skyguard. i have even abandoned any other form of defensive slot item for proximity radar so i can keep C4 / vehicle mines off of me and keep rocket launchers out of my rear armor (it only takes 2 hits to pop a lightning from the rear).

i do love my skyguard and against the rest of the air forces i think it is well balanced and maybe even a bit OP against ESF, but liberators have been concentrated cheese for a long time.

ARMOR COLUMNS!!!

how many other vehicles get to face a full armor column and win? answer: NONE OF THEM.

us grounders die horrible gruesome deaths whenever we run into any flavor of vehicle column unless we are in a bigger column and kinda lucky.

you get no pity there, that particular complaint just makes it painfully obvious how horribly out of touch some lib crews are with how the rest of the game works. everyone on the ground dies A LOT, maybe you entitled liberator princesses should get a little dose of that.

just give tank busters to all the ESF. at least my skyguard can kill an ESF in around 4 seconds making it more like a fair fight.

You're also rewarded with the ability to **** over players with good situational awareness who want to play the game rather than sit around waiting in your "hard counter". You're saying that if I want to play the game the way that I enjoy and not get roflstomped by you, I should stop trying and sit in an AA turret for the rest of my life? Not playing the game would be more enjoyable.

I don't think Liberators need nerfed but I also don't think anyone can justify the way A2G works as good design.

A2G involves finding someone who can't fight back and killing them faster and with more ease than anything else in the game.

Burning forward does not save you. The way you counter getting ganked by air in a vehicle is to drive towards it. This forces them 2 choices: A) pitch down even more, risking crashing or B) abort the attack. I do this constantly to ESFs trying to pod my Magrider which drastically lengthens my lifespan, allowing others to take them out because it lowers the time in which they have to shoot at you before pulling up and turning around. Running away in the direction any aircraft is flying is the exact opposite of what you want to do. It will always get you killed.

This was what I was thinking while watching that video. The Tank Buster is extremely loud and obvious so even if you fail to hear the Liberator's engines you'll definitely hear the weapon. Plus, if you hear the Tank Buster and see a friendly die on the kill roster in the top right hand corner of the screen then its obvious a Liberator is blowing your tanks up. I kept wondering why they didn't just start driving backwards to make it harder on the Lib or at least turn around to protect their rear.

I don't think the discussion here is about how often X happens, but rather the way X happens and whether or not it is okay.

Kind of like if 1/1000 players spawned with an item that randomly insta-killed someone else on a different server for no reason. It isn't a question of whether or not it happens too much/too little, it is a question of the mechanic itself.

There obviously needs to be some kind of change. If any weapon is being used so, so much more often than any other weapon, it's a sign that there is a balance problem. The question is whether it would be best to nerf the TB, or buff the other options. Personally, I vote we nerf the TB (or rather, just make it less frustrating for everyone by decreasing damage but increasing clip size and accuracy) as well as buff the other options, Spur in particular.

Sort of how people whine about infiltrators sniping, while they hardly die from them?

In a way, but like my example neither is perfectly analogous. There are way too many different factors in each.

I'm just saying that looking at it only in terms of how often it happens is a limited perspective. Do you disagree?

I find the projectile drop on the TB kinda absurd, its as if it were a civil war era Gatling gun firing ball shots.

I think you mean 44 rounds of sweet technological might.

In terms of prioritizing, no, it's not really worth spending time on it.

There are 1200 PPA users and 200 Canister users. If the PPA users were 20, would it make sense to become a balance priority?

Something can still be bad design even if it isn't significant enough to be a priority for a fix.

Although, something infrequent can still cause enough problems at those times to be significant.

But weight doesn't increase drop.

It certainly needs it's AA abilities smashed into oblivion. It's so good at AA that there is never any reason to take the other guns. The Spur should also be buffed into the AA gun, maybe it give flak rounds.