After playing for a couple of hours last night, it seems too good. Here's what I felt it was trying to accomplish: Give a boost to help protect a Sundie from the lucky Engie/LA that makes a suicide run on a deployed sundie. We all know that for every N number of suiciders, it's that lucky 1 that manages to get through and pops the sundie... extremely annoying, especially if the sundie is in a well placed/protected spot. Basically, it stops a single player from completely ruining a fight with a suicide run. The fact that it also absorbs other forms of damage... I guess I can see that. Here're my problems: 1.) I can't see if the shield is up or down. You can only tell when you start to shoot at it. Hell, I can't even tell if a sundie is equipped with it. Having that information is fairly important to anyone who is choosing targets. 2.) For the amount of damage it absorbs (which is quite a bit), it recharges too quickly. Because I think it is designed to safeguard against the lone, random, high damage threat and not a straight-up protective shield, it should have a longer cooldown. If that lucky Engie or LA got in an dropped the shield... it did what it was supposed to do and should not be recharging in 10 seconds. Any damage damage to the shield should also stay for an extended period. If the shield is depleted, it should stay that way for a while. At that point, your sundie becomes a normal sundie for 30 seconds or so. Here are some random ideas for making it better (completely off the top of my head and not fully thought out): 1.) Shield starts out at ~35% when sundie is deployed and charges from there. (Gives defenders a chance to destroy an aggressive sundie early). 2.) Any damage to shield stays for ~30 seconds, at which time it recharges quickly to full strength. Same situation with depleted shield. 3.) Shield needs to be visible. Vanguard shield animation may be a bit too bright, but there should be some sort of "aura" that let's enemy players know that this sundie has extra protection. 4.) I was toying with the idea of disabling weapons... which I think is legit consideration as the shield stands now (and considering the upgraded weapons), but if changes were made, I wouldn't disable them.
I think it is working as intended More interestingly, how the hell did you get to BR 100 in 10 days and have a SPM of 1,344 ?
It's not "too good" Blockade is still superior in many MANY aspects. The only advantage shield offers is against one shotting. Otherwise, in sustained combat, Blockade is always superior, and effective on the move as well.
Shield cooldown is fine, Shield resistance is fine. Its main purpose is to stop a single person from instantly killing a deployed sunderer. A single engineer can still kill the sunderer, It just takes a little more time now. There are a couple ways to do this. Regardless the first thing you do is drop your AV mana turret in front of the sundy. THEN you place 3 tank mines underneath it. Here is where the plan gets tricky. The owner of the sundy is not going to know the sunderer is under attack until you pop the shield and deal damage to it. So, You can use the 3 tank mines to pop the shield immediently, Then go for the finishing kill using your AV turret. The second way is to use the AV turret to drop the shield, Then once dropped, You have 6 seconds to blow the tank mines. This will do an instant death to the sunderer without the pilot knowing its happening. The second method will not work however if and when they decide to put in a shield meter for the pilots hud.
On a deployed sunderer, its an upgrade to both mineguard and blockade simultaneously. Yesterday I parked a deploy shielded sunderer at a biolab's ancillary base teleporter. After a while, I noticed it was taking Phoenix rockets from some poor sap working alone. I followed the Phoenixes back to him and his (non-deploy shielded) sunderer and got my first ever Domination (on any character). His Phoenix didn't have the DPS to even break through the shield, and he must have hit it dozens of times before I even noticed he was there. No one deployed on his sunderer to help him, I felt sorry for him actually. But I think its BS that an undefended sunderer can't be killed by solo infantry without resource expenditure, unless you really know what you're doing, even given infinite time. Pretty much the only option that can fire fast and long enough is an upgraded Anti-Vehicle turret, and even then it takes about 1 minute of un-interrupted firing. I was also in a massive Amp Station fight, and more and more sunderers from both sides were appearing in the Amp Station without being destroyed. There was an insane fight going on, but no one could sustain or burst enough damage to kill them until the VS started to massively outpop 30 minutes later (its on my first stream of my two from yesterday, if you're curious). The fact is that Sunderers should be destroyed in both situations described above. They are far too strong now. This deploy shield is already having a very negative effect on the game, and this will only get worse as people learn to use them better in the future. IMO it should never have been added in the first place and should be removed. You want sunderers to last: Defend it. You want to foil the "suiciders"? Give Sunderers free 50 meter scout radar so you can see and kill them before they have a chance to place and detonate their explosives. Assuming you're defending it, of course. But making sunderers unkillable is the wrong way to improve PS2 gameplay.
this shield is a ****** idea and all it does is encourage afk sunderer drivers. this is the most important vehicle on the field people should not be leaving them afk and getting away with it. stop dumbing down the tactics in the game ffs. at this rate we might as well just have a spawn point attackers can capture that is then invincible until they cap the base
Here's what I would do: Remove Deployment Shield from the game, refund certs. Add upgrades to the AMS cert. Additional certs add "Deployment Radar" to the Sunderer, which works like Scout Radar (or maybe even Motion Spotter) for 12//25/37/50 meters as the cert line is upgraded, but only when the Sunderer is deployed. This effectively foils "suiciders", because if they get close to the sunderer and someone is paying attention, they'll be detected and killed before they can detonate their explosives. If no one is paying attention, the sunderer is vulnerable as usual. By making this an upgrade to the AMS cert, sunderers can still have Blockade, Ammo Resupply, Mineguard, Repair, or whatever. By forcing the sunderer to deploy for it to work, it doesn't invalidate infiltrators, because of no-deploy zones and immobility while deployed. A way better solution to the problem that doesn't encourage brain-dead gameplay, like the current deployment shield does / will.
During one particularly violent fight, the VS had positioned a Sunderer with the new shield on one side of a building, while we had a Sunderer with a shield on our side. If you were lucky, you could hop up onto the roof as LA and C4 the enemy Sunderer, except that the shield completely protected it from any damage. I made the trek three times. Each time I tossed down two bricks and detonated them, only for the Sundy to emerge unscathed. I have no idea if other people were managing to do the same thing I was, but it sure was incredibly frustrating. It's pretty darned ridiculous that a Sunderer can park THAT close to enemy infantry and still survive for far longer than it has any right to.
This I agree with. There should be a visual indicator for it for both the user and the enemy. But I'd limit the range at which it could be seen to encourage scouting. You shouldn't be able to tell a Sundy is shield equipped at ranges further than you can ID a Blockade Sundy. In fact it should be shorter. I'd say 100m or less is a good start. And of course I think the one who pulled and deployed the sundy should be able to see a shield indicator remotely. I disagree with this. Many have max rank shield due to getting acquisition certs back. So you're seeing the best of the best. In addition I don't think 850 certs warrants just protecting against a lone LA. It should be more of a force multiplier than that. Mineguard only protects against an Engineer and is only 330 certs. Blockade is 1350 certs and protects against a wide variety of threats (all but mines) but can remain mobile. A shield sundy is 850 certs to protection from everything, but only a certain amount of damage, and only when the sundy is deployed. Yesterday I observed a LA toss two C4 bricks on a sundy, blew off the shield but did no damage to the sundy. A heavy hit it with a rocket and did normal damage, another LA C4'd it and blew it up. So it takes 3 people to destroy a Sunderer, without vehicle support. I don't think that is OP at all. So three unmounted people can take on 3 mounted with a little coordination. That's not OP, in fact its a little UP, but because its a stationary spawn point that potentially 30 people could come out of at once, I'm going to call it balanced. Bring help and focus fire. Focus Fire destroys all vehicles in every game.
Between the new shield and respawn times it really feels like sundies bring way too much to a fight. Even small fights with 10-20 people feel like a never ending stream because of how quickly they respawn. Hell, people can respawn and be back in the fight before your shields even begin to recharge with a maxed out ASC. That's ridiculous.
People just cant handle the fact that one lone person cant crash the party bus. Get over it and those who complain obviously never had to stand there with two other engineers trying to repair while it blew up in your face. Prowlers, Magriders, Air, Max's and even Heavies can still tear a Sunderer to bits in no time flat. If anything is unbalanced right now it's the ability to spawn a near endless chain of Max's while on the defending side. Nothing like trying to take a Lab while getting farmed by dozens of Max's on the pad mowing you down the second you hit the pad. But that's for another post and one of which I feel no need to create unless people continue to moan about defensive capabilities. So before any defense gets touched we might need to take a good look at the offense first. There is just to much that engineers need to deal with to require a dozen of them babysitting the Sunderer the entire fight. Any other vehicle can defend itself and remain mobile while the Sunderer is stationary. And the FOV of a deployed Sunderer is often very limited depending on where it's parked. Adding to that a single light assault could rip it to bits before the possibility of a single engineer even dreaming of keeping it alive. What makes this shield truly balanced however is the fact that every player and faction gets the same benefit. It might suck when your enemy rolls over you because you could not blow up their mobile spawn. But when the shoe is on the other foot I'm pretty sure no one has a problem with it. Anyone who does would have to be a total idiot as it's the one thing that keeps a hardcore battle going. After all last I checked this was still an FPS shooter game. I don't see why anyone would want the enemy to go away and not give them a fight. Yes I understand wanting to win but not at the cost of putting your enemy at a total disadvantage.
Hey, the party bus is still beatable by a singe person: you just need 5 tank mines, reach the sunderer, detonate 3 mines, and afterwards detonte 2 mines. this will destroy the sunderer. Oh but you know, with the new recource system everyone and his dog can spam tanks for infinity.... Maybe they can help you with this sunderer problem...
