So what buffs does the TR need?

Yeah to me When I think of the factions I think of in terms of

TR: Modern military , Stormtroopers , Helghast , Imperial guard
NC: Crew of the Firefly ( TV show ) , rag tag Resistance fighters
VS: Elder / Tau from WH40k ( but TBH it's 2013 they could have let their imagination run wild with the VS rather than making them just a " Human cult " )

Give us back our signature hip fire dakka dakka

If the prowler is weak in tank vs tank than the magrider must be useless.

Its not?

Which one?

The basic problem of the TR is that for the last 9 months, their arsenal of OP toys has hidden the fact that they're the faction most in need of a facelift. Now that their toys have been overnerfed all that's left is their poor weapon sound design, relatively bland visual design (except for the revised ones all weapons look the same), the most boring tank and generally unoriginal ES gimmicks.

They missed their opportunity to make a badass army of freaking stormtroopers with manportable underslung chainguns
They do have awesome music though.

Magrider, realized what i left out right after i hit post, but for some reason can't edit posts, just get a big white box :/

At least we have a good ESF too.

Press the "More Options" button. Forum site designer is getting lazy in fixing that for Firefox.

Good discussion here. Wasn't expecting something so civil and logical from forumside.

You mistake angle bias for horizontal recoil. They're two separate things. Horizontal recoil exists on both guns that pull left or right, as well as guns that pull mainly up. Horizontal recoil determines how far off that straight or angled line the gun will kick in either direction - it does not mean our guns are recoiling in a predictable line. You cannot really pull your gun back and forth to compensate for each individual bullet.

Angle in many cases just makes a gun harder to compensate for, though sometimes there's a pay-off in a more predictable pattern and/or lower horizontal recoil. But not always.

TR just has too much horizontal recoil on both types though, especially for their weapons that aren't that high a RoF. We're typically dealing with .225 or higher, while VS has more .2 options, and NC has many guns with only .175. And often our TTK isn't making up for that or is even weaker, all we have is those extra bullets. But a more accurate 30 round gun with 167 damage bullets...makes for a better weapon in many cases and really makes TR's trade off of extra bullets for worse horizontal recoil a poor deal.

Having TTK balanced somewhat with accuracy does make some sense, but the problem is many of our lower RoF guns don't have higher bullet damage, smaller starting cones of fire, or significantly lower horizontal recoil to compensate...they end up just being bad versions of our CQC guns.

Actually, if you ask the top tier pilots, almost all of them will agree that the Mossy is the worst ESF, for dog fighting at least.

For one thing, I think they need to switch the Vulcan and Marauder's roles.

You just can't really make a good anti-armor gatling gun without also making it effective against infantry and air. Anything that shoots a large magazine of bullets with a high rate of fire is automatically effective against infantry (you can spray and pray). Anything that does this with enough accuracy to be reliable at most tank fight ranges, and especially at typical lockdown range, and while also doing enough damage to reliably bring down tanks, would automatically be good against air. It's an unfortunate fact that improving the Vulcan's effective range in any way would automatically buff it against *everything*.

So really, the Vulcan needs to be the anti-infantry weapon because there's no way to make it be an effective AT weapon on the Prowler without making it horribly OP on the Harasser and turning it into an anti-everything weapon. If we change it to small arms damage though (won't damage heavy armor, does small arms damage to light vehicles), then we can make it accurate and increase the rate of fire to make a great anti-infantry weapon. As a bonus, it only needs to be effective out to 300m rather than 1000m.

The Marauder, on the other hand, can have its magazine size and/or rate of fire reduced and its damage re-worked to become an anti-tank weapon along the lines of the Saron and Enforcer. It can also be given a higher projectile speed and flatter trajectory to compete with these weapons. As a grenade launcher it can be made effective against tanks without becoming an AA monster like the Vulcan would, plus its rate of fire and splash damage can be adjusted to keep it from becoming too strong against infantry.

The Striker just needs something to make its need to maintain lock a little more forgiving for AA. IMO it's perfectly fine at AT and I still use it as my general-purpose launcher to satisfactory effect, ESFs have just gotten a lot more slippery since its AA range was reduced. There's several ways this could be achieved, but only one of them should be necessary (doing them all at once would be OP):

1: Extend the time the lock "sticks" when you lose LoS/range by 1 second or so, maybe 2. This would give the rockets a little more time to reach retreating planes, would make the Striker more difficult to evade in general without really changing its effective range or damage.

2: Increase the projectile speed a little bit. This would make it more likely that the missile reaches its target before the target flies out of range, while having almost no impact against tanks because they can't outrun it anyway.

3: Bump the AA range back up to 500, while keeping the AG range at 300. This would straight up increase its effective range, but only against air.

4: Increase the rate of fire. This could be problematic because this would increase its DPS against everything, but would also make it more forgiving because you can get more rockets off in a shorter window.

5: Make it lock on faster. This has the same problem as 4, but makes it more forgiving because the aircraft you are targeting will likely be closer (because it has less time to retreat) when you complete the lock and start firing.

MAX lockdown is fine IMO. It's situational, but then so is the shield. A lockdown fracture MAX at a safe distance can cause serious damage to an armor column, while a lockdown Burster MAX is probably the second-best AA in the game (behind the Skyguard).

Changes to TR should be made carefully and in small increments though, preferably while also working to fix some of the other factions' issues (like the C85 Canister, still). Despite the things highlighted above, TR is probably closer to being balanced than they've ever been and what they need more than anything else right now is pop. Buffing too many things at once might cause their pop to spike drastically, which would swing the game balance too far the other way and make it hard to judge where they're at.

Changes that would make TR go from a faction I begrudgingly stick with because Connery needs more TR, to one I enjoy playing:

• More. weapon. diversity. VS and NC have TR guns, TR does not have VS or NC guns. TR has very little genuinely different feeling weapons to use, and far too many 143 damage tier guns with middling RoF and poor accuracy.
• Less emphasis on spray and pray. Turns out, it's not fun having less accurate guns with more bullets, it just means you throw away more ammunition for a higher practical TTK past short ranges due to misses. SMGs pretty much covered the short range spray and pray niche, we need more guns that shoot straight.
• Empire Specific stuff that's more unique and less fail. Striker NEEDS a revamp, it is a worse annihilator, there is no reason to use it right now. The Vulcan, yep it's a worse Basilisk. The MCG? A generally impractical weapon that doesn't even carry more bullets than the CARV...
• Our MAX sucks. Pounders are fun now, but Falcons are still often better, while TR has basically worse version of Vanu AI weapons, with the least useful MAX ability that's more likely to get us killed than do any good. We need better MAX weapons, and a better/more interesting MAX ability.
• Lockdown even on vehicles is not really fun. It's a boring ability that promotes camping and spamming, rather than the much more interesting abilities NC and VS get that can be used in a larger variety of situations while remaining mobile.
• Mosquito needs buffs/changes. I am not an experienced pilot but I don't doubt the TR pilots who've said Mosquito got nerfed because of strikers pre-useless stage ruining air for NC/VS rather than because the mosquito was actually a stronger ESF.
• Less terrible iron sights, and better scope selection. 3.4x with a simple crosshair, the NC-style 4x, and just a less squared tip for our irons, something like the Mercenary's irons which are great with a much finer point.
• Better aesthetics for our weapons. I think all factions need this, but it's worth a mention that newer weapons and NS weapons are noticeably better looking and sounding than the stuff the game started with and its time things were brought up to the new standard. Too many guns are near identical, and too many are just cartoonishly bulky in first person.

Carbines that don't suck
A faction-flavored rocket launcher that doesn't suck
AI MAX weapons that don't suck (bring back old mercies)
Remove the blue-green glow from biolabs so we stop lighting up like candles in there
Give us the long needed buffs to our SMGs
Add a defensive benefit to lockdown
Make our guns sound like guns, or just make all of them sound like the vulcan.
Make vanu purple again. Black is our color. Give it back!
Buff the mini-chaingun.
Add more variety to weapon aesthetics. A bullpup or two would be nice.


Just a few off the top of my head.

The facilities need to not be blue/purple-tinted. Minor texture thing, but VS just blend into some of those places.

and then suddenly

a wild ZOE appeared and everything went to hell

Weapons that don't look and sound like toy guns would be a huge start.

Personally I think that Claymore is quite effective the way it currently is; Betty and Proxy could use some more functional differences between each other if anything.

Other than that, a good deal of tasty-looking suggestions in here, IMHO.

Swapping the roles of Vulcan and Marauder sounds especially interesting.

Spin-up mechanic needs to go. In no FPS I've played it made a gun 'better' or 'more interesting' - on the contrary it made the gun in question quite a bit more sucky than it could've been without it.

If there is absolutely no way to ditch this and you still insist on copying bad ideas, at least copy from how Borderlands 2 did it: their spin-up guns do not only gradually ramp up their rate of fire, they also gradually ramp it down, thus allowing the shooter to reset their cone of fire or change targets without losing the precious rof too much if there is still enough ammo left in the magazine.

I do not agree with buffing either of the lockdowns - the thing needs to get replaced completely.

TR had several adantages that allowed it to be at least somehow on par with other factions:
- Striker: With recent fix SOE made it absolutely and completely worthless. Not everyone managed to switch to Annihilator and a lot of people stuck with useless gun.
- population - the only way TR could compensate it's overall inferiority - weakest weapons, weakest MAX, weakest tanks - is the population, now when people started leaving the game\switch to other factions TR became the usual outsider.
- Lack of effective weapons - NC and VS all had their weapons that are extermely efective -TR ones are a fest of mediocricy at best.

Some proof that your weapons are under performing would be nice.