Upcoming adjustments to Air vs Ground balance

Flak is not effortless to use, this is maybe one of the most ridiculous comments I've read on the forum to date, if anything it's one of the hardest weapons to land hits with because not only do you need to lead targets by a huge distance the targets can rapidly change speed and direction, I'd be quite comfortable saying that other than maybe sniping and achieving headshots on sprinting targets, Flak is probably the hardest weapon in the game to use.

The damage it does is not insanely powerful, even if you land most shots you'll likely still need to reload before you can kill a full health ESF, 99% of the time enough to let the ESF escape, being that Flak based AA is specialized into one role of only killing aircraft that is a bit of a problem.

Again this is maybe one of the most ridiculous comments I've read to date, have you actually taken the AA rocket launcher into battle and used it? I have, a LOT. I have +2 rockets certed and in a salvo of 7 rockets you can carry, maybe 5 will be lost to flares, at least 1 of the remaining 2 will either be outrun by a speed spec'd aircraft, or will simply miss and hit scenery or lose lock, maybe 1 out of the 7 will connect which will deal about 45% damage and result in the ESF to retreat.

HA AA is nothing more than a deterrent, I'm fine with that because HA isn't dedicated AA and fills multiple roles, so that's reasonable, HA is clearly well balanced right now, calling it powerful is just flat out misinformed.

Actually i don't have much of a problem with rocket pods, the power of them was never really the issue, the issue in this balance was that of no effective AA in the game, period. If this balance patch works then Rocket pods can stay as they are for all I care, air dominance at that point will be due to a failure on the empire not rolling AA rather than any specific strength of the enemy Air.

Almost all AV engagement from troops is with dumb-fire in close quarters since troops tend to stay inside bases and bases provide the right cover and range to pummel tanks with dumb-fire, the loss of it in this patch represents a significant nerf to the AV.

Pretty much agree with this, explosions in the game so far tend to be rather binary, even if you survive the first explosion the inevitable 2nd will likely finish you off anyway.

You can choose to if you'd like sir. I'd still tell YOU to **** YOURself with said cinderblock. My reasoning for doing so is the fact that you don't do balance the way you're suggesting (counter blatant upgrades with more blatant upgrades). Sure, you can buy these things with certs, but it would take a few days for each weapon. My point is that no matter how much you spend, you should always be sacrificing something and balancing aspects of the game with a bit more thought put into it. At the moment, ESFs don't sacrifice much by grabbing A2G missile pods and spamming them except for a slight disadvantage in A2A dogfight conflicts. This seems fair as is, but AA is getting the shaft in some aspects such as infantry. However, with the changes described here (such as flak armor being significantly buffed), it should make life less of a living hell for infantry and such who have been getting bullied by ESFs since launch.

Anyway, just my 2 certs for being a dick in your general direction. Take it as you will.

I've gotta echo the sentiment that removing dumbfire from AA rocket launchers is an unnecessary extra nerf. If you absolutely feel that you must nerf AA rocket launchers, give them a small damage reduction against tanks and infantry. I think even that would be unnecessary, but it would still be better than completely removing all ability to shoot without a lock on.

Most importantly, if the idea is that ground based AA should "deter" aircraft, than AA rocket launchers and flak based weapons must get experience for doing damage to aircraft. XP balance for weapons is currently centered around getting kills or assists, however aircraft who are "deterred" provide no such XP.

As far as AA MAXes not rendering at range, this is an extremely serious problem, one of the biggest and longstanding issues that aircraft need to have fixed in their favor. I understand that the devs are currently working on improving infantry render distances, but this goes beyond that. Any MAX unit that has even one Burster arm equipped needs to be flagged with a tag that forces them to render at a distance more like a vehicle does. This would be a far lesser performance hit than suddenly forcing all infantry to render at a distance, while permanently fixing this long standing problem.

The rest of the changes I'm ambivalent about. Not necessarily the changes I would have made, but I'm interested to see how they work out in live gameplay.

Hopefully the Decimator isn't too slow. Personally I'd like to see an across the board buff to infantry rocket speeds.

Umm, no. I payed $7 so I wouldn't have too.

Seriously though, for me at least, it's not about the change. It's about a purchase. I purchased a weapon that could do two things. Shoot down air and shoot the dumbasses trying to kill me while I'm shooting down air. Killing other vehicles with it was just a bonus.

If they want to give me a choice between AA and dumbfire, that's fine. I choose dumbfire, in which case I don't need the AA and wouldn't have purchased it if I had been given that choice before I purchased it. That's $7 I can spend on something else or in another game. Without the dumbfire, the AA has no value to me. I'm not going to put myself in a situation where someone comes along and sticks their gun up my *** and pulls the trigger. Switching to another weapon takes significantly more time than TTK is. It's a no win situation, you're almost guaranteed too die. So why would anyone pay $7 for the privilege? After I spend my certs on things I want, I can then use the excess to purchase things that worthless to my playstyle right now.

Currently: I can pop out from cover, take a sec to confirm my target, shoot (and pray), and get back to cover.
With Lock-on required: I can pop out from cover, wait for lock, wait, wait, .... oops, too late, sniper one-shot me while I was waiting for the lock-on.

It's one thing if I'm willing to sacrifice myself to the very high risk of counter infantry or vehicle fire if I think I really need lock-on to make a shot, but it's a whole other matter if you're going to force me to do so. You're basically asking me to paint a big bullseye on my chest, and I think I would rather re-spec then do that.

I bought the launcher for its double purpose of it being able to shoot better at ground targets (less drop) then the standard ground launcher and the ability to lock on air with it.
Your removing 50% of its use to me, such big changes require compensation for everyone that got one since they can be bought with cash.

No fire till lock on ... interesting. Entirely eliminates the usefulness of the rockets for anything except their primary purpose. Undecided on how I feel about it. Decimator sounds delicious ... watch yourself magriders.

That would be cool, but wont we need to kill crew in tanks too then? With AP rounds I guess.

Indeed, there is no excuse for the Skyguard to more ineffective at its intended role then a MANA Turret...

...And it also doesn't help that the Lock-on Rocket Launchers are being fundamentally changed to limit their flexibility.
Admittedly, I accepted their weakness as Anti-Air due to their ability to still engage ground vehicles with dumb fire...

Yeah AA MAX were the only AA that were actually working, which is making me hope they're buffing flak on an individual weapon basis instead of straight across the board...

Sure, Duel Bursters should make you a threat to Air, but you can change equipment at a terminal.

Yeah, it's people like you who don't understand the concept of "Combined Arms Warfare"...

If you're enemy is denying you Airspace, you send in Ground Elements to take out their Ground AA and your own Anti-Air elements to take out their Airborne AA...

If they have Mechanized Cavalry denying you land, you send in Air and Ground Elements to take THAT out...

If they have both...
Then it's just a matter of which side has the most skill backing them up.

...You were that guy who blew my Skyguard up in Beta, weren't you?

As I've mentioned in a few other threads,

Remove rocketpods, Lib is A2G, ESFs are Antilib & Antifighter, dogfighting comes back, problem solved.

*Edit: Also any fixes to jetpacks?

Just to add my tuppence worth on the "lock on required" thing. I bought both of the lockon launchers on day 2 of this game (Nov 21). Why? Because I wanted to help my empire out. I also bought a second burster arm for the lolz, but that's a separate story.

While neither launcher got me many kills they did have their place either in scaring away planes or helping kill tanks and sunderers.

But now, with the requirement to achieve a lock before being able to fire, these things have become collector's pieces I will only ever see when I change the filter in the shop to include unlocked items. Without the dumbfire option both of them are worthless pieces of junk and their situationality jumps to a level where no sane person would buy them if they went on sale with that description.

1. An AV rocket I can't use to pop off a quick round at the Vanguard bearing down on my sunderer.
2. An AA rocket I can't use to scare off a tank or infantry guy who comes round the corner.

So, it'll be interesting to see what Customer Service has to say when I ask for a refund on both my launchers.

Has anyone else decided on how to word their refund request? It would make a real statement if we all asked in the exact same words to be refunded. (Refund refers to SC of course, not cash).

Same, as a player that purchase Sony Cash and had invested heavily in Liberator and ESF along with heavy's I've just seen a major change in my purchased equipment with no mention of a recourse to reset those purchases for points. If you're going to do such drastic changes you should at least offer a character cert reset for affected customers of those $7 items.

I am curious why the Decimator is slower, if its a dumb-fire rocket then it should fly faster or its not going to get much use other than point blank. The RPG-7 in use today travels at 300m/s and thats a real life rocket thats been used for 30+ years, its not even current technology. Why are our future rockets slower? I am all for giving us a better non-lockon rocket but slower rocket speed will mean it wont get used much except stationary targets, this wont help vs strafing magriders or aircraft.

Currently Anti-Air rockets have a speed of 50m/s and the others have 40m/s. I hope the Decimator does not go slower than 40m/s

1) So the decimator is basically a straight upgrade from the default dumbfire everyone should buy?
2) Thanks to all you whiners, prepare for collossal tankzergs farming infantry over and over. Prepare for sitting around your base while your heavies spend hours just exchanging rockets with tanks. Welcome to tank and rocketside 2

I miss my cert point spent into rockets and reaver ^^

Spent some real cash on it, that was the last time i do that

I personally feel that the AA buffs are a bit overkill, but I'll wait to see how they play out. I am, however, very excited about the Decimator and hope that it functions as close to the original as possible, as it was my favorite weapon other than the Jackhammer.

yeah great idea, make snipers even more of a rip off. Awsome idea.

This is all OK if it weren't for this:

Because of the render distance ESF will now be near useless in big fights.

"I am requesting a refund of the Station Cash I used to purchase my Nemesis/Grounder/whatevertheotheroneis from the Planetside 2 Station store. The changes recently implemented to the weapon have removed core functionality (dumb-fire capability) that has been present in the weapon since beta. This change cripples the weapon, as it was already relatively ineffective against air vehicles, and now can only be used against air vehicles once a lock on is established."

sky gaurd wasn't that bad i thought. For the cost though the Walker was a terrible piece of crap.