Flash buffs are overkill.

I for one welcome our new wraith flash overlords.

Police girl?

Flash isnt OP you can kill it with 1 tank shoot. It have weak guns and behave like it should move on ice. Battlefield bad company 2 have a good flash vehicle with good physics.

I have test it now and cant see the problem with the handling of the flash. Now it feels like a real vehicle that dont start to spin when you turn left or brake. Good work SOE!

So you're saying that you ran to the forums to create a completely unsubstantiated fear mongering thread just to preserve your own special play style?

Seriously? Who cares about facts, anyway, right?

Come back in a couple of weeks and let us know how overpowered the flash is. If it turns out that it actually IS, then you'll probably get a lot more sympathy.

My testing in VR suggests a single explosive crossbow bolt will finish the tank off, and is reasonably easy to use. Even then, it's still not as good as pulling another Flash, but you do get the humiliation bonus of killing tanks with a crossbow.

The flash is by far my favorite way to play PS2. Or was. Don't get me wrong, I love that the rumble seat can now hold a gunner instead of just a passenger. I love that I won't constantly flip over upon hitting a tiny bump. I especially love that cloak now works like it should. But what I love more than all of that - and the #1 reason I play PS2 - is having fun. The handling changes have made the flash no longer fun to drive.

And is it just me, or is the flash actually slower now, even with max racer? That strikes a heavy blow to its ability to escape, which is critical because it's so weak already. Like another poster said, I can no longer do sharp 180 turns with the handbrake. In that sense, it's actually less maneuverable! But worst of all, it doesn't reward skill anymore.

I've spent a long time using the flash with racer chassis, mastering its handling. Once I learned to control the slipperiness and to ride over terrain carefully to avoid flipping (which, granted, took more attention than most players can afford), simply driving the flash became thrilling, exhilarating. You watch the bumps on the ground, hit them at the right angle, control your speed, roll with left/right to counter your tendency to flip. I could even fairly reliably ramp off a bump in order to do a corkscrew through the air and land back upright again. Imagining what that looked like from the perspective of the tanks chasing me really made my day!

Now I can hardly do a flip if I TRY.

I haven't used ATVs much in real life, but they look light enough to 1) not take damage from being upside down, and 2) be flippable by hand. Isn't that better than making them not flip at all?

The handbrake used to be a way to intentionally lose traction for maneuvering and tight turns. That doesn't work anymore. Also, sliding let you weave left and right somewhat unpredictably to dodge tank shots. If you try that now, you just lose speed, and you're already slower than you used to be.

Speed is everything for a combat flash. You gotta get in and out before you start taking damage. The driver is exposed and has even less health than the flash itself - usually the driver dies before the flash does! Your body is exposed, but you can't strafe sideways to dodge bullets, so infantry can take you out in a second if you don't have speed on your side.

I think it's great that the flash is accessible to more players now, but the fun I had driving it was a precious part of PS2 for me, and I feel sad now that I can't play that way anymore. It's not like an old nintendo game that you can boot up in an emulator, either - it's lost forever.

tldr Flash driving was nerfed, not buffed.

On the bright side, now that you don't have to fight the terrain, you can focus on fighting other people. I find that rather makes up for it, myself...

We practiced this patch day with a couple squads. We called it spooky squad or spoopy squad cause of Halloween and what not. Its pretty fun and scary. I can forsee a lot of shenanigans with the update

hah

I think the only reason the Flashed worked for experienced driver before was that nobody really cared to worry about them.....so I think we really got to wait an see....

The only sympathy I will get is from the crowd of MBT and lightning lovers demanding a nerf that will completely destroy the state of the flash.


This is based on the fact that this scenario has happened with every vehicle that has received any significant buffs in the past (e.g. the harasser and liberator).

P.s. you should really try the deci + fury in the back. It is rediculous.

After a long session of HA+fury, we found that the best strategy against an mbt is to do a swift deci + 4 fury nades and a quick restealth before you engage the target. The MBT is softened for the kill while he doesn't know what hit him. Most of the time they jump out to repair, upon which you can kill them almost instantly. Granted, you need to have max wraith to do so.

Frankly, the only thing I fear is that they say "Cloak + seat is a bit strong, let's nerf cloak". :/

My thoughts exactly.

a nerf call already. *sigh*

its funny when people start saying thats not realistic in a game thats far from realistic as you can get and i disagree on it being overbuffed...that thing blows up SO easily...and ive not seen any increase of its use...size tanks etc..takes it out so fast you cant blink.From people's claims there is most Heavy assualts, they have rocketlaunchers...fire 1 at the bike...and its not there anymore.

I actually like the changes. The flash may 'feel' less fast, but it seems to have the same acceleration and speed as before. The improved traction is good because now you can use steeper hills for escape routes. The extreme reduction in flipping over means I'm spending less time trying walking back because i hit a tiny rock or a snowdrift wrong.

I get what you're saying about the powerslide thing, but I didn't have racer certed on my flash before the update, and had opted for surger 'because' of it's ability to climb hills better (which was a myth before) and it's reduction in flipping. Now I can run the racer chassis on my flash and have better hill climbing and less likelihood of flipping to tiny rocks than I did before the patch. So basically the patch made surger chassis pointless. I still see this as a buff to the overall handling of the flash, but there's practically no reason to pick surger over speed chassis anymore, since you can climb any hill with either just fine. I wonder if anybody's tested the hill climbing ability since the changes.

TLDR version: New patch was an improvement in my opinion, but it made surger chassis not required because now flashes don't flip over to death. Now racer chassis is hands down better than surger.

Some of the arguments for why it's balanced are pretty silly. "It costs a lot of certs so it's balanced". lolwut? Okay, so how about SoE add several additional levels to nanoweave so I can keep adding to my resistance until I'm nearly maxed out? Is that fair because it cost a lot of certs? I don't think so.

Then the, "it takes a lot of people to make it work" is bs too. . .it takes only 4 people for the flash thing compared to 2 people to run a tank. The problem is, MBTs have heavy spawning restrictions on them and are way bigger, slower, and more visible targets on top of that. They cost 9x as many nanites, cost 5x as much to cert out for intended effectiveness (more than 10x as much if we're including both tankers having a maxed tank due to crippling nanite cost requiring both be able to pull them as well as their repair tools), and can only be pulled from specific bases and ONLY if your faction has a tech plant that's connected (something that is completely out of your hands).

Flashes you can pull anywhere and basically for free after the comparatively small cert investment, you're a nearly invisible and very small target plus travel very fast. Flashes were balanced before, now I'm not so sure anymore unless they're more visible while cloaked or better yet have much louder engines so we can hear them in enough time to do something about it. C4 flashes were bad enough. . .now they don't even have to get close to kill you instantly? Yayyyy for "balance".

The only thing worse than this would be a Valkyrie that can cloak and infinitely do C4 drops from endlessly spawning people. Another extremely stupid idea imo.

When I flash run it's usually one sided (i get gibbed rather quickly). I am providing my enemies double exp for killing me. I still do it over and over because it's fun when it works and not penalizing when it doesn't.

I tried the group thing once or twice, where you get 2-3 people wraithin around trying to hunt tanks, but because of a lack of communication we weren't able to do what paqu did in his video. Yes there is great opportunity to do what they're doing, but they'll get maybe 1 or two kills per life that way, and as soon as the enemy figures them out they'll just blow them up with their main cannon. Also note that in the video very few of the tanks had people in the secondary gun and the secondaries they did run into seemed to only have AV weaponry. While not entirely useless against a flash, a cobalt gunner on an mbt will nearly instagib a flash driver regardless of their skill.