PPA is UnderPowered and UnderPerforming

Too early to draw conclusions. People will need to adjust to the change in mechanics. A similar adjustment period was needed for the updated Saron.

The main change that I've seen from the stats so far is that the amount of users dropped to half. Still twice as many compared to the other two weapons. Of course this time we have double the amount of vehicles producing worse results, so that needs to also be taken into account.

How long did it take for the first Striker buff? Two days? The second one was what, two weeks? Of course that was a TR weapon and half the forum was full with every TR forum warrior pointing out how useless it was and how they were all going to quit right away but I can't recall seeing anyone suggesting they wait and learn how to use it (and that was a way larger rework then the PPA).

The striker did 50 damage.. beat that

Weapon adjustments are never fun but they do have purpose.

August 5th

October 30th

Seems like SOE is simply moving ahead with the goals they stated back in August.

As one of those players that used several weapons heavily effected back in August, I don't see a problem, we adjusted to the new play style on every other weapon. Having played long enough to have witnessed - from my view - how the overall game improved after the ESF lolpod got toned down, witnessing how the game improved after the Liberator adjustment, after the harasser adjustments, after the infantry HA launcher adjustments, the current patch's grenade adjustments I think the game is improving. Chant with me, "meta, meta, meta" to make it even better.

Playing all the factions it's my view that the changes are long overdue.

There's a reason other factions call PPA spam
Watching one or two magriders sitting on the side of a hill or some odd location that no other MBT could make their way to that was problematic (to say the least) to try and counter even by HAs and MAX infantry and being bombarded by huge monstrous blue flares called the PPA that never seemed to run out of ammo, shot every second without stop at capture points and spawn rooms from insane distances - in my view - was not in the spirit of healthy play.

I've already had my characters slaughtered by the current PPA after the adjustments and rezzed many players who went up against the same. I'd say to PPA users, just move in closer and take some risk the weapon still works just fine but not on that hillside avoiding most or all risk...

No - they do not, because they change just took place. Quit whining and let the devs do their job.

I can recall plenty people suggesting to adapt, but that's beside the point. It was too weak and was buffed. The PPA is an entirely different weapon now and trying to use it like the old one will only yield misery. It's probably too weak as well, hence - it will be buffed.

Except they released it in a weaker state on purpose. Anyone from any faction could tell that it was practically worthless in that state with the lowest effective range of any RL.
Also, you achieve nothing when you generalize players of any faction.

I highly doubt that if it really is underpowered at close range they will keep it as is for very long. They will just wait a little while to buff it so it's on par with some of the other weaponry, just like they recently did with the striker which was completely useless when it first had its revamp but now it's actually pretty nice. Just give the new ppa some time and it will be on par with the other AI weaponry. Although don't expect it to be as good as the ungodly long range anti infantry farming death beam it used to be.

You mean on the hillside like a locked down Prowler? Or you want us to go close with additional armor and shield? Oh wait, the Magrider has none of those and it's suppose benefit is that it's agile and don't go close because it has neither the damage or the armor to go in close and has to stay far away to use it's vaunted dodging ability... But hey we got ZoE etc. so we're used to SoE being clueless what to do with us (if ZoE was a NC or TR ability it would been fixed a year ago); we're used to play with NS weapons as our best faction weapons so nothing new here.

L2P VS Scrubs.

I fear Good VS now, They'll understand exactly how powerful the PPA really is.

Still need to give it some time though. it will take a while to see if people can find new uses for it

One thing is for sure, VS fronts are much quieter now.

everyone stopped camping far away and spamming bases. of course the stats are going to go down. that's the only way the vanu know how to use this weapon.

Canister says hi

Welcome to how the rest of us have had it for ages. Now stop crying and use the Halberd like the rest of us. Maybe then VS will stop crying about getting beaten in tank battles. No wonder since pretty much everyone ran with the PPA.

Just like they immediately fixed the Canister? Oh no wait, the Aegis Shield. Vulcan? ****, no, long-medium range weapons on the scatmax, yeah. No? What about the striker? Reaver profile?


****, I guess you just have to wait like everybody else.

I dont get the point changing weapons the way that is completely diferent from the previous... when u buy or prefer a weapons is because it adjusts to ur fight style... if u change u r forcing to find another one when u already maximized this one. Every time I got a nice full weapon they change the way it works so i have to change to another one... so u are just make me waist all my damn god certs in a useless weapon after u patched it.

Wow, just wow. The Striker had gotten quite a bit of flak even on the test server for the damage output. They decided to test it on live to see if a larger scale would solve it and it did not. They also saw that the first lock on range was too low to actually even work properly. It seems it was bugged as well. So the first buff was a slight increase and fix for the lock on range against air and a highly symbolic increase in damage from 100 to 200 with a corresponding adjustment to the resistance values for vehicles. The damage buff did exatly zero for the effectiveness and it was only to make people stop crying about a largely irrelevant number. The base damage for launchers doesn't really matter that much since everything is in the resistance values. So yes, we got a bug fix and a cosmetic fix to reduce the amount of pointless crying about stuff that didn't matter. It took them two weeks to do the actual balancing pass on it. The new one with a reduced COF and an extra rocket. Which seems to be based on player input. We were a bunch who figured that an extra rocket would be more interesting and rewarding than just a flat damage increase. So that we got and it's decent now. Not sure if we'll see another pass on it for quite some time. The Striker got a completely new roll with some brand new mechanics. That's a huge change.

Now the PPA had one flaw and that was the accuracy at range. Both TR and NC have short range weapons and on the tanks, they are mainly useful to defend against close by infantry. You had a weapon that was used to farm spawnrooms from nearby hills, something neither the Marauder nor the Canister can do. As a result, it was basically the only gun people ran with and it outperformed the others by a large margin. SOE figured they wanted to make it short range instead so they did some changed to make in really bad at long range. Just as the rest of them are. So now we have a rather large chunk of the VS population trying to use it in a similar way as before which can't be done. If we used Canisters and Marauders from faraway hills we would get **** statistics as well since they are bad at that. You need to relearn how to use it. I've heard it's quite good in its intended roll and that's from people who actually bothered to try it out in close range. Even when it was still on the test server people were saying that the forums were overreacting about the change. So how about you just chill out for a week or two and learn how the new gun works before you cry about it. Doing any major balancing after two days would be down right irresponsible since the current figures are not representative of actual game play. If it still underperforms in two weeks, I expect SOE to give it a buff.

Didn't you see the Canister OP thread?? XD

Of course it's not going to perform as well as it did before. That's because it was overpowered. It's never going to be able to spam or farm again, sorry that you want that back. The level of ridiculousness the PPA was before required it was changed for the health of the game.

That said, it's new form is actually something that isn't frustrating to fight against now, on the same field as the Marauder and Canister. Now that it's a fair weapon, I can understand that if it really is underpowered then it should be buffed. But given the terrifying implications of it's old usage (that is, it was used only for farming choke points) it's going to have some violent death throes in the stats and we should wait a good long while before we start judging where it's at.