There is no point to using a Striker over an annihilator.

@axiom:

I believe what Paisty is saying is that your accuracy stat does not reflect missiles that you never fired because

*you could not obtain lock, due to slow locking
*you lost lock before firing all rockets
*you simply did not fire because you did not believe you could maintain lock
*you did not fire because you were sniped/killed

Axiom, I think that what Paisty means is that Annihilator fires almost twice as often as Striker which means that when your last Striker rocket leaves the tube, he has second Annhialtor shot ready to go... So - to make it simple... In time that you need to fire 5 Striker Salvos with 70% accuracy, dealing around 5250 DMG, Annhilator user will fire almost 10 times, dealing around 7000 DMG (with the same 70% accuracy)...

Same can be said with the Annihilator, so it is really a relatively mute point.

As I said before the Striker is now very situational, just like the Phoenix and/or the Lancer, but it does have situations in which it excels and those are where you want to hit as hard as possible as fast as possible, such as when in groups with other striker users and for finishing off wounded vehicles.

Your math is horribly skewed but ignoring that...
Yes on paper, but do it in game. With lock ons you rarely are going to get a 2nd or even a 3rd salvo into the same vehicle, because they are going to either evade immediately, launch counter measures then evade or they are going to get vaporized because there are 2 or 3 other lock on users or other things targeting the same vehicle.

Yes, if you are engaging a single target and it is going to take an extended period of time to kill it then the annihilator has a DPS advantage, but if you are looking to do burst damage then the Striker is better. Therefore as I have said the Striker is now much more situational, and is no longer the go to do it all lock-on launcher it once was.

Something you all have to also understand in the case of the Striker versus the Annihilator... The Striker gives the potential to do damage over the Annihilator. While yes, the annihilator will do more damage with one round and is also Fire and Forget versus the Striker, the striker, when not flared off or LOSed out, will put in damage versus an 'all or nothing' attempt.

While someone can argue that the Striker is better in group coordination, the overall potential is better in the case of the annihilator in group coordination due the damage and also the fact that you can switch to a new target after firing a round. While the Striker has the ability to do more damage per reload, the trade off for it is that they will need to stay focused on their target until all rounds are expended and hitting the target. The striker will also still have a chance of hitting a target that has broken LOS IF AND ONLY IF the missile was fired while it had a Lock and LOS and the target hasn't broken LOS for more than 1 second.

The Annihilator, as well as the G2G ESRLs will still run into the obstacles for the Fire and Forget based lockons.

This is something you all have to grasp in this situation. So the TR have a small advantage with the Striker over the annihilator and the ESRL Lockons still, but only a small one. (This comes from using the Striker and fighting TR using both Striker and other Lockon weapons)

not true.

even leaving everything else aside, the annihilator locks much faster. Even if you had to maintain lock the Annihilator would lose less shots than the Striker.

case in point: i rarely even finish locking harassers with my striker, but the annihilator is ez to get off.

I don't buy that the striker is somehow better with a coordinated group, or at least not in a way that wouldn't be equally true for the annihilator. The annihilator's main deficiency (relatively low damage/DPS) is solved by just having a bunch of them; the striker's issues (maintaining lock) aren't.

Deadly spelled it out much better than I.

That is what I'm saying.

There is no API to track how many rockets are fired per salvo with the Striker.

The only thing we know is the rockets that do get fired land roughly 70% of the time, pre-nerf.

Do you have any idea how annoying the turn rate, DPS and max range on the pheonix is? It's almost impossible to kill a target with a pheonix without coordinating with a dozen others.


If you want to buff the ESR, then buff the others. This is just a case of the grass is always greener.

Why do you expect to kill things alone with any rocket launcher? All the TR want is some unique gameplay, a reason to enjoy using the striker over "Oh My! GUYS! With my extra damage in my magazine I have a small chance of killing something several seconds before an annihilator can! Oh boy! Apart from the situations where the annihilator will kill it faster because the damage per magazine wasn't enough or we died before firing all the missiles or at long range because of the extra time to travel the distance... Oh boy!".

Now that they finally did their lockon revamp changes its time to give us a real striker - preferably without the lockon (which can't kill a vanguard on its own either SHOCKER!).

The Decimator did have limited camera guidance. You couldn't steer it but you could detonate it on command. I thought I mentioned it.

The striker is just one item on the list of next to useless ES weapons and abilities the TR have.

That's funny seems the OP's complaint and many others in here is not the uniqueness, but rather that the annihilator is now marginally better in most situations, in fact that's pretty much the title of the thread. Maybe, the NC should complain about a lack of uniqueness with the Jackhammer, that really isn't any better or worse then all of the other shotguns that ever other faction has as well. I am open to any and all suggestions to give it a unique function that is just as situationally limited as the Phoenix or Lancer, but we all know that isn't going to fly.

Hell, go ahead and give it a camera mode just like the Phoenix, just make it a swarm of 5 rockets, that force the user to be still during the camera mode, they travel at 80m/s and only have a range of 295m, can't be reloaded until they hit their target or user leaves the camera mode and does same damage as the decimator and instead of being able to be shot down, they may not all land on target all the time, since they are a swarm of rockets rather then a single rocket. I would be cool with that.

People are going to use what is best. Since the striker was Annihilator 2.0 they used it, its kinda boring but it worked - my favorite was when the missiles flew for 50m before turning - that allowed us to lock then move to cover and fire out of cover and the missiles would arc down onto the target avoiding terrain (like a Javelin type thing) - that was fun.

The striker has been through so many changes, mostly bugs (which effected all lockons but not Lancer/Phoenix). I always asked for something unique. My original expectation was basically the same as the Planetside 1 Striker. Almost no lock time with constant player locking required so its more of a skirmish weapon. You start doing damage immediately but over time instead of lock then fire and forget.

They just gave us the Annihilator Again instead.

Now that its finally worthless its a good time to actually make a fun weapon out of it.

Remote detonating it isn't camera guidance. You could not turn the missile at all, it just allowed users to watch where the missile was going, but in comparison to the Phoenix, the phoenix was actually guideable.

After being on the receiving end of a single cliff SC striker nub when inside a maxed sundy battlebus. I can safely comment that the striker is now balanced perfectly. Takes 1/3 of my hp in salvo and with clear sights, 2/3 can instagib tanks.

Apparently, you don't know that vehicles have wildly varying resistances against the Phoenix. ESFs "had" -295%, MBTs & Lightnings had -167%, harassers had -220% and liberators had -184% resistance against a Phoenix missile for example. All these examples are from before PU02, now it is even lower as stated on PU02, since per-missile damage is also lower.

The Striker should have been like the Red Glare in FO, give or take. Not a buffed Anni. Let me correct your title : "There is no point to using the Striker", that's all.

It should have been a lot of fun things, they chose the most boring design. Thinking about it even if it was a mini Fracture it would still not be different or fun enough.

Actually, a lot of you people are just failing to grasp in general what the Striker is.

The Lancer, The Striker and The Phoenix were the original Empire Specific AV weapons.

As much as you people wank and complain about how the Striker is not that much different from the Annihilator, the thing you are all failing to get through your heads is that the Striker CAME FIRST.

Get it all in your heads, the names of the factions, the names of the MBTs, the ESFs (Namely the Mosquito and the Reaver), the Gunships and the Light Tanks are also from the original game. The MCG, the Jackhammer, the Lasher, the Pulsar, the Cycler, the Gauss Rifle, the Comet, the burster, the pounder, the falcon, the scattercannon... All of it is basically from the game.

The three ES AV weapons are basically how they worked in Planetside 1 with some minor differences.

In Planetside 1, we didn't have ADS, we had the typical 'run and shoot' or 'shoot with zoom', and everyone could 'zoom'. With that in mind, the Phoenix, prior to a change in it, would fire in 'camera' mode all the time. The change allowed us to toggle it from being 'camera guided' to dumbfire.

For the Striker, it has always been a LOCKON Weapon. TR Infantry was able to fire it while running (At full speed) as long as they pointed the Striker towards a vehicle. The first iteration of the weapon as a 3 missile, could be fired and have the missiles locked onto a target while the missiles were in flight. It then changed to 5 missiles, still could lockon to a target while in flight, then changed again that it required a lockon first to be guided, but could be dumbfired, it later got a tweak to toggle on or off the locking, to allow TR to dumbfire the Striker without giving off the lockon attempt.

The Lancer was just a 3 shot Particle weapon that got changed to 6. No charging.

Now all this griping about how the Striker is 'unoriginal'... Just shut it... Seriously... The Striker is currently the reincarnation of what it was back in Planetside 1 based on the current game engine allowances. The Annihilator is basically a generic version of what the Striker is and was introduced before the ES AV weapons were brought back.

For now, the Striker is exactly what it should be, as its reincarnation of the TR AV weapon from Planetside 1... Stop griping about how 'unoriginal' it is from the Annihilator when you people don't f-in realize that the Annihilator is the COPY of the Striker, not the other way around.

@Keiichi - who cares which came first? The problem is it's not fun.