Change the drop pod mechanic already!

It is absolute bullsh*t!

If it's not your Lib or ESF getting instagibbed it's your AMS being meteor showered with dozens of drops pods or its the squad that simply will not go away because their beacon is in an annoying, often unreachable spot and they refuse to stop deploying.

Change it, get rid of it, consign it to the dustbin of rubbish ideas (which incidentally for this game is getting rather full)...... I don't care. Just do something about it. It is awful.

I would rather see some lame Battlefield system where you simply appear on your squad leader than this stupid, unbalanced, over-powered method of arriving in combat when you hit squad deploy. As for the beacon, it can go completely. Having the ability to do this once every 5 minutes is fine as it is. A mechanic that lets you do it every 1 min is ridiculous beyond words.

Get rid of it already.

no

its working as intended. I like how it works now. OP did you get drop pod gibbed?

No. Though it could bear some changes.

Instant Action and Squad Deploy should deploy you to the nearest spawn point to the 'action' or your squad leader respectively.

Squad beacons should stay as they are directly counterable (you can shoot them!); so long as they cannot be placed inside pain fields/spawn rooms.
One change that could be made, is that the spawn beacon 'pulses' every 60 seconds, such that if you choose to deploy on it, all those members in your squad doing so come down at the same time, in waves. This makes it easier for the opponent to predict the dropping of pods, rather than them landing at random as people deploy.

But taking it out altogether I disagree with. Sure occasionally you'll still get your Liberator gibbed by a lucky pod hit, but the changes above would significantly reduce this.

Think they changed it on the ptr, but squad deploy is at nearest AMS or Respawn area

I think they should get of spawn rooms and make everyone spawn by sub-orbital drop, like in Section 8.

Isn't fun to see an enemy pod drop and when it lands, it's empty. No one can be seen until a nearby Lightning suddenly explodes because someone dropped C4 on it. Isn't that just a lovely mechanic?

No.

More sundy huts like they put on Esamir maybe. But the more 3 dimensional the battlefield is, the better.

Welcome to Auraxis.

That has nothing to do with drop pods. There's a delay anytime that the game has to re-render your player, exiting vehicles, teleporters, etc.

All I know is that the first squad beacon I used since starting yesterday, I drop podded into our own liberator and killed 3 friendlies.

It was then I learned that you can slowly maneuver the drop pod to avoid such things. But yeah, this was my first experience using a squad beacon.

Does it need to be change? It absolutely needs to be changed to prevent the drop pod being used as a delivery method to take out sunderers, but I doubt it will be since people like there free certs.

I kind of don't mind drop pods. And if they are really bothering you simply go to flight ceiling and shoot the bastards down.

Delete drop pods and this game becomes even more of a numbers game than it is now (zerglings don't use drop pods)

The whole deploy podding is a horrible mechanic. SOE has pretty much made transport vehicles extinct because all one person has to do, namely the squad leader, is move on up ahead of everyone, drop a beacon and everyone just redeploys. We have this huge map that only small sections even see combat in anymore.

Ofcourse it needs to be changed, and everyone that plays in a semi-organized outfit knows it.

Yes, better off to remove the function then trying to figure out how to make it work. Manuevering your forces and spawn allocation is part of the difficulty of the game. Being stuck with an organized squad that's drop podding in removes any sense of victory from a fight and turns it into more of an extermination exercise than anything else. If you want that function turn the tubes back into teliporters and have a squad deployable pad.

Check PTS
squad deploy is no longer a drop pod, just deploys you at the closest spawn spawn point

spawn beacons drop radius reduced to 50m from 150m

Crap, I'll have to use Air Taxis more often now =(

That'd be true if shooting at drop pods wasn't a waste of time and ammo.

Now they just need to make it so a new squad lead isn't given a new squad becon.