Reason to stay on NC?

What you just described is synonymous with slightly underpowered. Underpowered and Overpowered are not black an white, like anything else they are still measured in degrees. As previously mentioned though NC maxes are definitively underpowered vs the other 2 factions atm, no slightly about it.

Honestly they need to nerf the Fracture's anti-infantry damage, buff the falcon's anti-infantry damage, and leave the cosmos where it is at or only slightly nerf it. No other anti-vehicle weapon in this game is completely useless vs infantry, I don't want all AV maxes to be as useless vs infantry as the current falcons. With the state of maxes overall that would give you even LESS reason to pull an AV max.

The fracture currently can snipe infantry at long distances with good aim, decent ROF, and high damage. It's just too good all around vs infantry. The Cosmos is on the tip of balance. It seems like it could possibly be slightly too good against infantry in straight effectiveness, however it also is prone to running low on ammo and you really do have to aim. It can also be easily dodged at mid to long range with it's projectile speed. So it shouldn't get nerfed too much if any. Falcons are currently USELESS vs infantry on a practical level. Even if all they did was increase the splash radius Falcons need an anti-infantry buff. The Phoenix can never have infantry killing potential for obvious reasons.


I really don't want AV maxes to be helpless vs infantry across the board like the current NC max though. There would be little reason to pull an AV max instead of a heavy at that point. It just wouldn't be worth the resources. This is ESPECIALLY true with Max setups that have 1 AV weapon and 1 AI weapon. This would destroy the usefulness of such setups, same as with the NC max.

The fact you've played NC since release is irrelevant honestly because the landscape of balance has changed several times within that time. That's just a useless throwaway statement attempting to give yourself more credibility. Honestly someone who has played only since right after the last round of major NC nerfs, like the max nerfs, would ironically have a clearer perspective because they have no per-determined conclusions with which to apply confirmation bias to. Cognitive dissonance is a tricky thing.

To be fair if the Phoenix performed too much better the other sides wouldn't really have anything to match it. The Phoenix is not the only thing that has significant differences from PS1.

This says pretty clearly they know that NC weapons are underpowered. They perform definitively worse for your average player, while top ranked players have learned how to compensate. If you read the wording however they said that the issues were significantly lessened, not gone, meaning it still affects the top ranked players...just to a lesser degree.

Sauce: http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/1rxjym/we_are_the_planetside_2_dev_team_ask_us_anything/

Approximately 2/3 of the way down the page.

Before you go any further making yourself look bad, check out my stats please. Check how many days I've logged into the game. I've been here since it was good to be NC, and when they got the nerf bat hard. Check how many day's I've played just under my alt WaaWaa. I've stuck with them through thick and thin. You can't claim I haven't been here since "the last round of major NC nerfs". Thus, you are wrong in your suppositions that I have been absent when max nerfs went live.

As to the whole intent of your post and trying to fight me point by point, I will state that our equipment, again, is not underpowered, just imbalanced when you compare it to the TR/VS analogs. I posted my concerns in the "NC Balance" thread via Luperza's mediation in that thread, and supposedly those observations/opinions have been sent to the Devs. It's in their hands now what happens with so-called NC balance. I don't want buffs, but rather a level playing field, which hasn't been the case since release for NC, in certain obvious departments, which I went over in the NC Balance post already.

Last point, is it fair that our projectile is the only one in the game that can be knocked aside by another projectile or small arms fire? How is that balanced for the phoenix? That's just one point. The lack of proper movement while in camera mode and it's slow velocity compared to the Lancer and Stryker make it imbalanced to say the least in comparison.

Underpowered gives the notion that it's neigh useless and that's not the case. In the right hands, NC equipment can be deadly, and that's not the issue most NC have. It's that when you compare to how easy it is for stock VS/TR pubbies to do well with their weapons, it's way easier to handle those weapons and you spend less time learning and more time getting certs than on NC. As a result, NC do not have a loyal playerbase and their retention rate is very low. Make the stock LMG's perform equally with the VS/TR equivalents, and then we'll see a fair bit of balance. NC is not underpowered, just abandoned by the Devs. This issue could have been sorted easily within the first few months if they paid careful consideration, but it's taking one whole year for them to finally come around and admit that they allowed these empire imbalances to continue for too long. That's on them, and now it's on them to fix it.

If you paid attention I actually took your word at face value on that. Before you go saying I am making myself look bad you should actually take the time and trouble to understand what is being said. Otherwise you end up at the point you are at now, where you are arguing a point that does not exist.


To be more clear lets look at the exact statement: "Honestly someone who has played only since right after the last round of major NC nerfs, like the max nerfs, would ironically have a clearer perspective...". To spell it out all the way it says this: Honestly someone who has started playing after the last round of major NC nerfs, like the max nerfs, would ironically have a clearer perspective than someone who has played since release.

IE the person who has played since release has a better understanding of the mechanics. However they also have per-determined ideas on how various things in the game are, be they right or wrong. When things change, those ideas are resistant to change for various reasons and these reasons typically serve our own happiness. For instance one player might be outraged at nerfs/buffs and another player in the exact same situation might be in denial and think their play experience is essentially unchanged. The reality could be drastically different from what they player's perception of it is because their perception of it is highly tied to many concepts.

For instance in the case of cognitive dissonance, which I mentioned, you would tend to view the choices and side you have loyalty to more sharply and more favorably. You WON'T want to believe anything that will make you unhappy unless it's stark contrast. Yet people respond more strongly to negatives. Thus someone who is blatantly overpowered and is invested will tend to believe they are closer to balance than they are and people who may be "under-performing" will tend to think that they are better than they are in some way. IE "we are not UP", "we are UP but we are more skilled and make up for it", "etc".

Once such a mentality is formed it is then very subject to confirmation bias. IE the idea that once you have made a judgement you will favor it. A realistic example would be that you have already decided that X vehicle is balanced. You find out new facts that make it more powerful with proper understanding. You are more likely to still think it is balanced than if you were judging the situation for the first time. The more times you argue something the more invested you become and the more invested you become the less likely you are to change your mind.


It's a sticky wicket really and difficult to avoid even if aware of such things since they are a natural part of our thought process that requires awareness and effort to mitigate. Notice I say mitigate not overcome because no matter how good you are you will still have some tiny amount of bias.


These types of things are why someone with absolutely no previous experience and no investment in something gives more honest/accurate opinions on something generally.

Hard to say, it's a niche weapon. You'd have to try and evaluate how good at fulfilling it's niche it is and how valuable fulfilling that niche is. Then you'd have to do the same for the other weapons. People seem to polarize on the Phoenix and either think it's great or it's way underpowered. My personal opinion is that it is a useful piece of equipment in it's current state. Not useful as much as the other two, but fulfilling a niche that is unavailable to the other two factions. A niche that can be quite powerful in select situations.

No, that's simply hyperbole. To give an exact comparison I would say "Dimly lit gives the notion that it's neigh pitch black and that is not the case." Anyone that has had to deal with candles in a power outage before knows how huge of a difference there is between dimly lit and pitch black. The difference between underpowered and neigh useless is similarly large.

Try not to take every hyperbole on the internet seriously .

So to summarize: they are not underpowered but they are abandoned by the devs who need to fix the empire imbalances so that people will start playing NC again?

It's plain you do not understand what I am saying, but this actually suggests that you do not understand what you yourself are saying either lol. There are two types of balance changes they can make that affect the NC, changes that help the NC or changes that hurt the NC. Hurting the NC further will not bring people back so I'm assuming we are talking about changes that will help the NC. IE buffs to NC or nerfs to other factions.

Since this means buffs, why are things buffed? Things are buffed because they are not competitive, IE underpowered. If things are nerfed then that means that they were eclipsing their competition, IE overpowered. If other factions are nerfed, it is the same thing as the NC getting buffed as they are stronger by comparison afterwards, and thus were underpowered.



I look forwards to your response, considering your actions till now I expect it to be somewhat entertaining. Though honestly I half-expect you to cherry pick 1-2 small things and attempt to ignore the rest .

I'm going to skip the part where you're psychoanalyzing my responses, and try to steer the conversation back to the point: underpowered vs. underperforming. That was the original bone of contention. Moreover, I feel that NC is not due for a "buff", but more importantly a tweaking in the way their "underperforming" weapons work. I'll explain why I choose to use one word over the other later.

From my perspective, the NC isn't underpowered. I haven't really had the urge to jump ship and play TR/VS for an extended period of time. The "easy mode" factor in using their weapons doesn't appeal to me. I like a challenge.

It is frustrating to have weapons that underperform in a 1v1 situation when things appear to be equal repeatedly. It is not enough to make me leap to the conclusion that NC weapons are underpowered, just that they require a lot more care in usage to perform at the level of VS/TR weaponry, which let's face it is hard to do because they don't have to waste time watching their recoil, COF bloom, and lack of strafing ability while ADS'ing. And time is the issue here: time to kill (ttk) more specifically. Who can land the most shots accurately in the least amount of time. With NC weapons, that TTK issue is tied to your ability to control recoil, COF bloom, and not getting stuck ADS'ing. As long as you control that, you control how well you do with those weapons.

All of this is a lot to ask from a new player. That's three variables that TR/VS don't have to deal with as much as the NC do if they play as a pubbie with stock weapons. The rest of the NC who have had time to play with other weapons, and know which ones are good can use other weapons and have had time to field test these weapons and get good with them.

NC weapons might appear to be "underpowered" in that sense (which may or may not coincide with your version of underpowered) that for new players they don't even stand a chance against TR/VS equivalents, and it's gonna take them a helluva lot longer to understand that their weapons don't function the same way their TR/VS equivalents do. However in my view, that does not automatically mean that they are underpowered, just misunderstood. With time and practice, you could get closer to the TR/VS equivalent in performing the way they do, but there's always that little gap. That's why I prefer to use the term underperforming. To elaborate, NC weapons underperform in the sense that for the most part they perform well in most situations, but head to head in the ranges in bases where most indoor battles take place, there's always just something that is left to desire that leaves NC weapons slightly behind TR/VS ones.

Furthermore, in the internet parlance of game balance, where the pendulum falls when someone describes something as "underpowered" is the opposite of "overpowered". Overpowered refers to a piece of equipment that does so well at its intended role that it overshadows it's intended role, and that for some reason it does better in most situations than it's analogs. Underpowered in that sense refers to a piece of equipment that hardly ever does well in its intended role and that you have no chance of inflicting the same amount of damage that the analog weapons can.

That simply is not the case with NC weapons. I refer to weapons here as most of the "LMG's, Carbines, and Assault Rifles" in the NC weapon arsenal. They are not underpowered, and really once you get a feel for them they perform quite well and used right can be quite deadly. Most people quit and jump ship before they get to that level, and that's why they call the people who stuck with NC and got good with their weapons "gods". The "god" comment from Higby is actually a misnomer. It's not that a buff to NC weapons would make the already good players "gods". It just means that those good people decided to stick with NC and not jump ship to VS and TR. Practice makes perfect, and all that jazz. It's not magic.

There would be more "gods" if NC would have been able to retain more of it's "good" (not god) players, but hey in an era where stats mean everything these "goods" went to TR/VS where they could get a helluva higher K/D with their easy to use, unburdened weapons. This is especially true if these players were pubbies and not affiliated to an outfit.

P.S. The phoenix is in fact underpowered. It does not perform well at its intended role, and it falls short in almost every department of its intended role and the amount of damage output over time in comparison to its analogs (VS Lancer and TR Stryker). On top of that, you can shoot the projectile down. Just plain silly really. Arguing that it's "useful" is great and all, but it does need some tweaks so that it can be both useful and deadly, as the Lancer and Stryker are presently. Right now it's only good at making armor move positions and not stand still, not at actually killing armor in the droves that Lancer's/Strykers do. I know that there's issues with the Stryker so if a TR reads this yes I acknowledge it's not as powerful as it used to be, but it's still a helluva lot better than what the NC get as far as Empire-Specific AV.

P.P.S. I hope the ZOE nerf will bring more NC back to the table. That really was one major issue why a lot of NC quit the game or perhaps even jumped ship. Hopefully, we can get some more "goods" back on the ol' blue and yellow.

You even openly admit that the equipment imbalance is "less impactful", so who's playing word politics now? Contradictions are starting to appear.

Phoenix missile! It's actually not that great(handles like a turd in water, slower than any vehicle in the game, crap *** range, etc.) but it's a lot of fun and conceptually it's the most interesting weapon in the game. A remote controlled high damage missile that can fly around obstacles to pwn people that think they are out of line of sight and therefore safe!

Because, they won't get nerfs or buff because they'd be too week with nerfs and too powerful with buffs according to devs. They're not balanced compared to other factions, but it scares devs to buy the NC because the more experienced will start steam rolling with even the most minor buff apparently which reinforces an idea that the NC require actual skill to play as. (Not saying that's true, but it's what it seems.)

I keep playing NC because I've just gotten used to the weapons, and how they handle. Although they can kind of suck at CQC, I still find myself using the slow firing and heavy hitting weapons for almost every occasion. If you can get decent at close quarter with them, you'll be able to still have mid range killing power, so it gives you a bit more flexibility. Also, our max. It can be underwhelming at times, but when you're positioned right its complete slaughter, only thing I find a bit lackluster about it is the AV capabilities. Also it can feel a bit outclassed even at close range with dealing with ZoE or Fracture maxes.

On to our vehicles. Vanguard is probably the best MBT for close range destruction, and it is decent at long range due to Titan AP's velocity. (Although a lockdown prowler has a much greater velocity and DPS then a Vanguard, it loses all ability to evade incoming fire, which can be fatal if caught from behind.) The vanguard shield is also well suited for the Vanguard, and is quite handy for when you are caught from behind by an enemy MBT, or when a LA decides to make it rain C4. I've lost count of how many times vanguard shield has saved me from C4, actually. The Enforcer is a very good AV weapon imo, although it's outclassed by the Vulcan. (I don't have a good grasp on the Sauron, so I won't make any assumptions about it. But I know it has a pretty bad CoF bloom.) The modified enforcer is a joke tbh, but ah well. Moving on, the Reaver is actually a bit lackluster compared to the Mosquito and the Scythe, mainly due to its enormous frontal profile. However I haven't used to rotary for the Reaver, so I'm slightly biased because of only having used the default gun. I've also seen the Reavers shotgun be used to deadly effect at close range dogfights. But in general it seems to be on the losing end when two pilots of equal skill duke it out.

So what I'm trying to get at is the NC has quite a few good redeeming factors if you can get used to them, it's honestly not the gloom and underpowered faction its generally made out to be.

Ahh well, I gave you a chance to make a serious argument at least.

Everything you say is about underpowered vs under-performing. You fight so hard to make a distinction in this. However at the end of the day it is a ludicrous position. Even if your words are taken at face value the only way to fix the situation is to buff NC a bit or nerf the others a bit. Giving a gun better handling and control even if the damage stays the same is still a buff.

This is why you play a game of pointless semantics. Underpowered is under-performing and vice versa. Something can be lightly or heavily under-performing just as something can lightly or heavily underpowered. These are grey scale terms you are attempting to force your own definition on.

Realistically, your stance is actually "they are not THAT underpowered", though you deign to change the term to underperforming to attempt to obfuscate and use your own definition as if it is different. It is not. that is fact. Plain and simple.

Quite deadly and competitive are two separate ideas that are NOT the same thing. A knife and an LMG can both be quite deadly, however it would be foolhardy to say the knife was competitive to the LMG.








You cannot merely choose to redefine the world to your own personal whims. It exists as it is. Deal with it.

Of those, only the Striker is truly useful in the hands of only a single soldier and is commonly in the cross-hairs of people considering it overpowered to this day. Both the lancer and the phoenix seem to be intended to be used primarily in groups or for extremely select situations. They can be carried outside of those situations, but it doesn't mean they will be competitive to other options without being grouped.

I wouldn't be opposed at all to the phoenix no longer being able to be shot down. But the balance of that weapon will always be extremely hard due to it's nature and power when massed.

Its not made out to be. It is by several scored metrics and competitive events in 3rd place across the entire game, individual servers have some variance but the average experience of the NC statistically is the faction is dead last and quite often not even a contender for 2nd place, let alone 1st among the three factions. That's objective, that's factual. There isn't a concerted effort to have the NC appear as gloom and underpowered, there is a concerted effort to point out that there is convergent evidence that they are gloom and underpowered.

As a former NC, I have no stake in their future beyond wanting to take some pride in defeating the NC on the field of battle, as it stands now, there is no honor to be had in defeating the NC faction. The battle for first place is between the VS and TR, when they face each other the challenges are more clear and present, I derive much more fun from such a conflict of near equals from the overall perspective, the variance with the tools available are welcome differences rather than clear unchallenged dominance more common in defeating the NC. Playing the NC was enough of a trial that I have no desire to ever play that Faction again even if they were reworked
to be competitive, I hold that much animosity to the experience with the flawed mechanics even while I fondly remember the other gamers I played with on the NC.

Good gamers don't let fellow gamers play the NC if they can help it. Unless that fellow gamer is a Masochist, in which case, fine, whatever floats your boat, have at 'er.

I picked the NC because of the 666th Devil Dogs. Being a Marine myself it seemed a nice fit. I do not regret my choice. Awesome players on Connery. Great to play with and very helpful. Freedom isn't free....Let's roll.

Of course looking at it from an on-paper standpoint its clear the NC is the shortest straw to pick. But I think its more down to do with players, and less with equipment. I feel when I play NC as if numerous people playing support classes simply don't want to actually do the support bit. Ergo, medics running over your body and not reviving even when its safe, or engineers not deploying ammo despite multiple requests. When playing my VS on the same server, I get revived more often, and in general get more cohesion from allies. I also see more organized attacks while playing VS. This can also be said for my TR, however its on an entirely different server, so different group of people.

Also, from my experience, there are times that when the NC would have around 25% territory control on a continent, and both TR and VS would practically ignore each other and simply zerg NC territory. And obviously its hard to fend off two empires that are generally more organized then your own. (Not saying there is some bring-down-NC conspiracy, it's just easier to take territory from NC in general.)

Don't get me wrong, there are some fatal flaws in a lot of NCs gear, more-so then VS and TR (in general). Ergo our maxes being helpless against anything about 15m out. (and sometimes less) And infantry wise, we have probably the toughest starting LMG to get used to. But after playing it for a fair amount of time, I just think its more of a matter of getting used to the "mediocre" equipment and simply learning to flex around it.

You can only flex so much before breaking something. It all adds up until something gives and that means players quit the game or just move out of the faction.

If one faction has to flex around problems while others don't then that faction isn't going to do anything. Players aren't going to stay long enough to learn the quirks, outfits are going to die out, and only those that REALLY like that faction or have put cash/time in are going to stay. I can make a square peg go into a round hole with enough force, but that doesn't make it a good idea.

Im going to hold off on going into details till the balance pass nest week (Tuesday last I read) but as things have been since launch have just been wrong. Making one faction work harder than the other 2 for the same, and in this games case less, payoff is just wrong. I can't think of a better word that describes certain parts of this games balance other than wrong.

The "noob" arguement has been used thousand if not millions of times across all sorts of games. "It's not overpowered, your just a noob who doesn't know how to counter it", "the opponent I face isn't underpowered, they are just less skilled noobs", etc. It's been proven wrong in 99.99% of cases.

If you want me to believe that NC is truly less skilled you are going to have to do something with hard data that shows that. Because right now we have hard data to support that NC is underpowered and you have your subjective opinion. We have the devs themselves saying it, you have an extremely small sample size taken from the perspective of "why aren't these noobs dropping everything to keep me safe and supplied!!"

Also, lets play devil's advocate: lets say you are right? It could also be possible that imbalances do exist, driving away better team players (on average) thus creating your experience without invalidating the data. It's actually possibly for both opinions to be right.


Bottom line is NC need help.

We'll they're nerfing LMG hipfire on PTS. I'm not sure if that will rebalance the issues we've been discussing here.

To be clear (and the reason why I go to great lengths to argue NC equipment is underperforming vs. underpowered), I want the NC weapons tweaked to perform at least on par with the VS/TR analogs. I do not, however, condone outright nerfs to VS/TR weapons that already work well, which I think might be happening from some of the comments on the PTS and the reddit posts made, especially in relation to the LMG hipfire nerfs.

Is this really the way to go? I hope not. I hate when you have something that works, and the Devs make it useless and never want to use it again. It's a disgusting pattern that makes droves of people quit the game.

Just make NC weapons perform a bit better. The Devs just need to give 1 NC stock weapon the same performance that the TR/VS analogs have. That would help incredibly to balance things and solve the nerf/buff cycle. Not overpowered, just fair play where the NC LMG doesn't go all over the place when holding it down. It's not too much to ask, after all the other stuff NC have had to endure. We can wait if you're not sure how to do it. We've waited this long haven't we?

Yea dude your post is a legit observation, and if I had to guess I would wager it's the droves and droves of organized outfits that have left the game because A) the ZOE ruined indoor combat and B) the Devs abandoned the NC for the better part of a year and just nerfed nerfed nerfed into the ground, without considering that there were some serious imbalances with our weapons from the freakin start of the game.

So yea NC's poor performance is also due to a lack of organization, which goes back to the presence of those outfits that have left. Good post bro.

Good gamers play hard mode to demonstrate that it's not your equipment but what you do with it that matters. You're such a fatalist every post you make about the NC. It's a surprise you haven't tried to log out IRL yet.

To be fair, LMG's really shouldn't perform that well at hip fire, that should be the jurisdiction of much lighter and easier to handle weapons. LMG's are meant for aimed fire and suppressive fire but games have a tendency to just make them guns that hold alot more bullets with higher reload times.

I support LMG's being more cumbersome, heavies are not exactly in a bad place and this opens the door for the other classes to be more useful in firefights. Current some of the LMG's are extremely accurate and easy to handle, something you'd expect from an assault rifle or carbine that are actually intended for those traits.

A hipfire nerf won't touch the usefulness of heavies though. It may make them less viable in CQC without using the proper weapons however, and that seems fair.

Also, again on the "noob factor" here is another example from the PTS thread:

Notice this is Vanu. Every side suffers the "teamwork" issue, sometimes horribly, if you wish to avoid it squad up.