So, about the Reaver vortek rotary nerf

Can anyone explain, how a Reaver is killing me in 1.5 seconds if they're so bad as people claim they are?

Hax? Its literally 1.5 seconds give or take a few milliseconds, and dead.

I hope they address our hitbox as well when they bring the others in line with our weapon (or ours in line with the others).

TBA though, If anything, don't nerf, just give the others a slight buff.

Don't forget, wile all 3 aircraft had the offset, the reaver had the same offset as the other two combined.

I could have sworn I saw pics of two vs maxes mating

It just needs a few bullets taken out of the clip so it requires a few certs to be spent on it to kill in one clip like the other 2 ESF

Sure, right after striker looses its ability to lock on to Air and NS bursters are removed from the TR MAX arsenal the minute you cert into lockdown.

No. Imo it would be quite stupid to buff rotaries. It's already annoying to have half your health gone in a split second by any ESF if they happen to be outside your view before you can react at all. I think they should buff the velocity (and equalise it for scythes) and lower the damage multiplier against ESF.

All 3 rotarties can do the same, it's just that the other two require magazine upgrades whereas the Vortek can do it right out of the box.

They looked like ScatMAX's to me.

Might have been ZOE MAX's but it's hard to tell. They both finished too quickly for it to really count.

It did have a big offset. But with the change to vehicle guns, that isn't an issue anymore.

All I am saying is that they should nerf the Vortek's damage to the point where it requires a magazine upgrade or two to do the damage it does stock as of the moment. Right now, a Vortek can kill another ESF outright with zero magazine upgrades. Purchasing magazine upgrades basically just gives them more leeway to miss, where as the other two rotaries need to purchase multiple magazine upgrades to get to the same damage per magazine that a stock Vortek has.

I am fine with the Reaver having the marginally faster TTK it has now when all are fully upgraded. It is a nice tradeoff for having a bigger hitbox.

It did, roughly 4x as much.

What about this, instead of a true 'nerf' we could take a few rounds out of the stock magazine and add them to the upgrades?

I am still more of a fan of bringing the others up to part though.

TTK with rotarys was much faster in beta, it was a lot more fun back then as well, A2A combat was faster paced and we did not have any of this 'limping back to warpgate doing crazy circles because it takes quite a bit of rounds landed to kill'. We also had momentum though... I wish they brang that back because you could do some cool maneuvers using it.

If this wasn't the reason, then why does the Reaver need a rotary nerf suddenly, even though historically it's been the worst performing aircraft in the game.

Any Rotary not belonging to the NC faction.

Yes, that is why the velocity would allow skilled shots to lead a target flopping like a fish outside water, but it wouldn't make ESF die in few seconds. It is incridibly annoying to have most of your health gone, then when you turn around to fight the agressor you are so handicapped you can't really win, and running away isn't really a option either since the guy can just chase you easily, and then you have to wait like up to even 10 minutes. Maybe this effect is amplified because right now nobody really flies. I frequently have this happen; i fly around looking to pick a fight with another ESF, and after like 10 minutes of cruising when i least expect it, being sure nobody is there anymore someone unloads a clip into me. Good reflexes would allow a good player to mitigate this handicap if the damage was lower.

That would work as well.

I just spent 7k certs around the rotary. Given that just about every other unit in the game is specifically designed to murder us, please leave it as is. Even if you made it shoot all barrels at the same time it wouldn't be enough rounds for the mossy Zerg on Waterson.

Factual number data here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Akqy-9TdLEOKdGVjRXNHM0g3bWk0cGloanQ4U1VYcmc&gid=14
If people on the forums actually care about such things above reading personalized opinions...
I believe these are up to date, but i not please post a correction with source.

Long story short: Reaver rotary >>> Scythe rotary > Mosquito rotary.
There aren't any tradeoffs really. The better gun is equal or better in all categories unless I've missed some detail.

The scythe and mossie ones are very close in DPS, DPS with reload, damage pr. mag ect. (DPS about 4% in the hailstorms favor and most of the other stats about the same difference relative to each other.)
The reaver vortek is in a class of its own and quite simply does everything better than the other two by a bigger margin. More DPS than the hailstorm (a further +5%), but perhaps most importantly a lot more death-pr-magazine. reavers can one-mag an ESF with no mag upgrades. scythes need 2 mag upgrades. mossies 3. As mag upgrades are added the gap in total damage pr. mag (at least as important as pure DPS in my opinion) widens significantly.

Looking at the math of the problem it looks like nobody took into account how the numbers would scale with magazine upgrades for the rotaries. They all add 10 bullets, but 10 vortek bullets do a hell of a lot more damage than 10 from the mossie rotary. That makes damage pr. magazine numbers and damage over time numbers have a fairly large advantage.
That oversight(?) can't explain pure DPS numbers though because they are unrelated to mag size, and they go like this:
reaver 5% > scythe 4% > mosquito, so draw your own conclusions from that about what may be intentional design and what could possibly not be.

Total damage pr. mag (assuming maxed mags):
reaver: 17460 (13,4% more than scythe)
scythe: 15400 (8,3% more than mossie)
mossie: 14220
Difference from mossie up to reaver, 22,8% damage pr mag advantage. That is quite significant, especially when that damage is just around the point where you barely have enough to kill a full health ESF if you hit with nearly all bullets.

I don't advocate everything being equal. Asymmetrical balance is nice in my book, but I think its a bad idea to have a rotary that works identical to the other to but is simply better in all categories. I'd much rather see some variety in the weapons so they have some different strengths and weaknesses. Feel free to add in an NS variant that is completely middle-of-the-road and open to everyone so if you hate the strengths and weaknesses of your specific empire rotary then grab that one. Should be quick work to clone a rotary and add some new sounds to it with the NS standard bullet/tracer graphics. 250CP/250SC in the store and then everyone is happy as SOE makes a few bucks in the process from people with way too much money to care what they spend it on

I'm not going to engage a whole lot more in this thread beyond this I think. I just wanted to put some actual facts on the table. Otherwise the thread is bound to get bogged down with equal parts of personal bias, pure speculation and outright false data

-Stigma

Oh great, nerf the NC EVEN MORE.

It's like they want NC players to stop playing or something, been nothing but crucial nerfs for months now.

Riiiight. I know that's not true.

Is he going to (( NORMALIZE )) the Scythe insane maneauvrability ? and overing ( deffault ) capacity ?

Iam curious it seams those devs are really confuse in their design , they give the mag riders a insane amount of maneuverability but they never give it a armor penalty or a stopping power penalty that could be meaningfull at all

and they are going to do the same with the scythe ? giving them as much armor as much stopping power and more handleling more
maneuverability

Its VS and ZOE alll over agains , how these devs cannont understand thats if you dont have any damage / armor penalty you ahve to give up the maneuverability ???

When in the hell they will understand that ?