Does the Prowler benefit too much from offset fix?

I find it funny everyone's screaming OP at the prowler in this thread and all ranks can do the same thing, he'll the magrider can shoot OVER rocks with its camera placement.

i mentioned 'all' tanks in my first post. Which is why in my own thread im asking they revert the change. I'd rather see a system like in PS1 were the x-hair's shifted if your barrel wandered into an obstacle, than have ALL tanks able to shoot threw terrain.

People who paid enough attention in grade school to understand how parallel lines work knew. They knew the shot would go the same distance to the side of the point of aim that the gun was from the camera.

The offset was consistent for each barrel. As long as you knew which barrel was ready to fire, you could judge it every time.

Sorry, I misspoke. "people who didn't suck at tank guns" could judge it every time.

Unfortunately, that seems to be a majority of PS2 players, so now we have magic phantom curveball projectiles that you can even shoot backwards with if you shoot at something closer to you than the end of the gun barrel.

I don't even know what point you are trying to make. I clearly stated in my post that before this change you could easily hit your targets, but you needed to not place the corsshairs on the target.

I'm indifferent to this change, but anyone who thinks this is a "game breaker" advantage are just bad at the game. I owned with a prowler before this, I own with it now, and i'll own with the prowler in the future.

Please note the post wasn't directed at you personally. And I agree we need shifting crosshairs AND a prowler turret redesign...

[quote="Fned, post: 1832224, member: 150127"so now we have magic phantom curveball projectiles that you can even shoot backwards with if you shoot at something closer to you than the end of the gun barrel.[/quote]

In my experience it's always been the case that you can hug the hull of a tank and yet still be killed with the main gun regardless.

Nothing that was broken was fixed. Something else was changed because fixing the broken part was too difficult.

Really, the whole problem with tank guns in this game is that the driver and gunner are the same person, so the view is less than ideal for either job. Put the sight where it's ideal for the gun, and you can't drive well (gun barrel takes up an entire side of the screen, or you zoom in so you can't see it, and you're trying to drive through a telescope). Put the camera where it's ideal for driving the tank -- that is, nowhere near the main gun -- and it becomes increasingly difficult to aim.

Getting 3 people to man an MBT, though, is a pain; so they compromised with . Using a rangefinder system to manually set convergence? Too complex. Automatic convergence on a specific target? That would still require the user to first specifically designate the target they intend to shoot at, since they have to aim off-target up to deal with the ballistic arc; again, too complex. Auto-elevate and converge so that the shell will always strike whatever pixels you're painting? While it would completely remove the skill component of judging elevation, it would actually be less immersion-breaking and more realistic than the weirdness we're getting now, while remaining simple to use. But there'd be that problem similar to the Reaver nosegun where a certain size target at a certain distance moving in a certain direction could be physically impossible to score a direct hit on.

So what they went with instead was an invisible projectile that fires out of the camera, and a phantom projectile that comes out of the gun barrel and curves to try and meet up with the invisible one, even if that means curving sidways or flying unimpeded through solid objects. It's an elegant solution, with none of the drawbacks of any of the other solutions; in fact, it has only one drawback, which is that it LOOKS FREAKING STUPID. Such is life.

The important thing to realize about this, and I know it may be difficult, so bear with me -- is: this solution is not a "fix" to something that was "broken". "The gun is here and the camera is here and the bullets come out of the gun" is not broken; it's obvious. 3 people manning an MBT is not broken; it's sensible. Rangefinding equipment adding extra complexity isn't broken; it's realistic and inevitable. None of those things are workable in Planetside 2 because of the one thing that is broken, is something that the SOE development team did not, could not fix:

That vital but ultimately unreliable component of the game that exists between the keyboard and the chair.

They didn't "fix" something that was "broken", they came up with a stopgap solution because a bunch of the simpler BKAC modules were throwing error messages regardless of the quality of input. Some of the more complex ones are piping up now, but we're robust enough to handle a minor exception without crashing completely or getting stuck in a loop.

Don't expect us to stop throwing errors every time we see an error condition, though.

As far as a "buff", all the balance on the Prowler was done based on how effective it was, statistically, when it had a higher skill floor for shooting small targets than any of the other tanks did. Now that all tank guns have the exact same skill floor, it's reasonable to ask whether the Prowler is now too easy to shoot with at the level of firepower it has.

i see your point, but if the shell originated from the barrel you'd have just rolled back 2 foot and shot round the tree from the other side, still the same amount of your tank would be covered by tree.

Conversly what this means is if you do try to do this from the other side with the way it is set up now, you'll hit tree even though the barrel isn't blocked. The tree still provides the same width of solid object that can't be shot through, same as before, it just doesn't line up in a sensible way now, it will have no effect on actual game play, it just looks silly.

I hadn't seen that exact scenario happen. I believe it was possible because the gun barrel could phase through objects, so the tanker could theoretically stick the gun through you and fire.

At least, to do this before, they had to be smart enough to aim the GUN at you and not just put the crosshairs on you...

Yeah, except then your camera would have been blocked by the tree.

To get both uncovered, you used to have to expose more of your turret. Or, if Vanu, pretty much your entire tank.

Being able to cover half your turret without firing blind won't affect gameplay?

Being able to put nearly an entire Magrider behind cover while still being able to fire the main gun won't have an effect on actual gameplay...?!

I admit, the looking-stupid part is a major factor. But the tactic of going hull-down has just changed, in one case VERY significantly.

You described it as "WHO KNOWS?" when it wasn't mysterious at all.

well tbh i'd see that as a a bug, your camera should point down your barrels who in there right mind would argue against that.

in terms of the prowler i don't think the difference if ther is one is worth worrying about, the way it's designed you could just stick the guns round the tree and hide the taller bit, or as it is now the barrels would be behind the tree but the long part of the dome will stick out, i'm not sure it's much of an advantage in terms of exposed profile.

If the magrider is able to shoot over rocks though that is a bit of an issue, because that's obviously effecting the available profile to shoot at

No one, but a ****ton of people not in their right mind didn't want the driver and gunner to be separate people, so they had to make the main gunsight have a field of view that was also usable for driving the tank around. It was a compromise from the start.

Every little bit helps when your enemy has lancers.

Also, it allows a tanker to change the profile of his turret when waiting in ambush. A few extra tenths of a second of "hey, is that a tank?" followed by a 120mm shell flying out of an innocent-looking rock could make a signifigant difference.

Remember that the dorito doesn't show up to enemies if the middle top part of the vehicle is behind a solid object. So a distant enemy who Q-spots will get the audio notice and the map icon, but won't see a marker -- which before would mean the tank probably couldn't shoot you without moving and exposing its dorito, but now means it could be ready to kill you even while you're trying to discern the un-marked pixels that are tank from the ones that are terrain.

I've tested this, if you can see it, your Supernova can hit it.

Law of Unintended Consequences, and all that.

Nah you have that backwards, the guns are on the left side of the turret, so with the guns as they are now the guns are behind the tree but the centre of the turret is exposed.

Hiding your dorito would have been easier with the old guns, because the guns poke round the tree and the centre is behind it.

I'm still trying to figure out how you'd see anything this way. Maybe you could describe what you mean a different way?

No, they simply don't fire from the position of the barrel. If terrain is between the point that it fires from and the target it does not shoot through terrain (unless bugged).

IMO they should adapt the models to fit the new firing points.

The fake visible projectile still fires from the barrel.

I'm no developer, but wouldn't it be easier to move the camera to where the guns are? Just sayin'.

Either way, you'd have a devil of a time driving while looking out the little hole on the end of the gun barrel, unless they made the main gun invisible from the camera's PoV. Which, incidentally, would ultimately be a much better solution than the one they chose...

I mean line up the barrels with the firing points, not imbed the camera inside the main gun.

You didn't need to see as long as somebody had spotted the enemy for you, then you could just shoot at the marker with only your barrels poking out left of an obstacle. Or take aim at a stationary target and pop back into cover to constantly fire I guess. Extremely situational but possible with a Prowler.

Now after the change only the Vanguard can do it (and see what he's shooting at) since the other two shoot from the center. Still, how many tanks can you hide that way? Hardly matters.

No. The shells curve left when fired.