Hi guys, I had an idea for a video yesterday, so I recorded some footage and put it together. I tried to pay close attention to image quality - please watch in 1080p. I hope you'll enjoy it! It's my first PS2 video. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.
I like this video and how good you were with C4. I really miss using my C4 to mess up those tanks or those maxes. Good job on the video cruczi and if you plan on making more vids I'll subscribe. Also, the quality was great.
Video quality: 10/10 Skill: 10/10 Exploitation of mechanics: 10/10 I'm not denying that it takes incredible skill to drop c4 accurately from that high up unto a moving target, however this video epitomizes what I think is wrong with the C4/LA combo. MO, though. (flees incoming **** storm)
Thanks for the comments! Approved I guess no one else wants to pick up on this, so I will . Incoming wall o' text. I think the drifter jets + C4 combo is actually pretty balanced. It may seem imbalanced for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because it's underused, vehicle users don't expect it and don't employ proper countermeasures. If more people used it more frequently then tankers would be prepared for it. I've seen many times that enemies start to be more wary of your attacks if you repeat it in the same area, and it becomes considerably harder when you're spotted every time, and you're being shot at in the air, and tanks move out from under you. Secondly, its users tend to be higher skill players than the vehicles that are their prey. The combo punishes mainly vehicles that are sitting still, and players (especially MBT gunners) who don't have particularly good awareness. The best targets by far are HE/Viper Lightnings shelling bases. Moving vehicles are in general very hard land a brick on not to mention two, though obviously the higher you are and the faster the vehicle moves, the harder it becomes. You can see in the video that when expecting the vehicle to stay put, I'm content with dropping the brick(s) from a long way up. If the vehicle moves or is expected to start moving, I generally drop my altitude to increase accuracy (it takes less time for C4 to drop and the target is bigger). If the vehicle is moving forward at full speed, you're never going to land two bricks on it without having either a long head start (which requires luck or excellent execution) or boosted speed from a jumppad. Reversing vehicles are possible to keep up with, unless they have maxed out Rival chassis. C4 attacks can be quite easily negated with things like proximity radar and keeping on the move. Drifter jet users can however drop bricks from an altitude where the radar doesn't detect them, but then again, if you have both radar and keep moving, you will almost never be hit unless you just don't pay attention to the map. A single drifter LA is not a risk to any Sunderer with Deployment shield. But it does work extremely well in unison with damage done by your team, you can either be the well timed finishing blow or you can disable the deployment shield to make the sunderer vulnerable.
NO! GET BACK HERE DAMMIT! FIRE AND BRIMSTONE FLAMING BARG BLARG BLARG. In all seriousness though, admittedly drifters + C4 is kinda ridiculous. At the same time nerfing C4 would remove a lot of the tactical viability of the LA, so something needs to be added to compensate.
What are the countermeasures for a Drifter LA, if I can ask? Serious question. The only top guns that can really hit one (assuming they're aware of their existence and spot them) are the Walker and maybe the Basilisk and Kobalt, and of those only the Walker and Kobalt would reliably swat the fly. Other guns either can't pitch up enough or lack the range (Canister swats non-Drifter LAs easily, but not so much the ones too far/high to hit with all the buckshot). The only remaining countermeasures appear to be "drive forward at full speed on flat ground" or "unexpected turbo" or "have Composite Armor, assuming you're driving a Sunderer or Harasser." Most of these are less than desirable things for a MBT or Lightning to do. And as you've shown, someone with a general understanding of arcs and drop speed can very easily plant bricks on a vehicle. You're hard to see, impossible to hear, frequently don't show up on even Prox Radar, and can't be hit by any of the weapons of the vehicles that aren't actually capable of weathering your shots unless they have a Walker. So... what are they supposed to do?
It's not necessary to actually be able to shoot the LA with your vehicle weapons to counter him. If you know there's a LA above you (someone spotted him and you can see the icon drifting in your minimap), you can either step out of the vehicle and shoot him, or you can move your vehicle and dodge the C4. Or if you're in a 2/2 MBT then the driver can dodge and the gunner can get out and kill the LA. If you don't know there's a LA above you, then the best you can do is avoid being an easy target. Don't stay still for more than a short moment at a time, check your surroundings often, check your minimap often (especially if you have prox. radar), try to avoid spots where it's easy for a LA to get above you. Also, there's safety in numbers... the more eyes you have on your side the higher the chance the he gets spotted and/or shot down by your teammates. Because C4 fall so slowly and requires two bricks to result in a kill, the only situation where you have to drive an MBT forward at full speed to avoid death is if you'll die to one brick and the LA is only a few meters above you. Unless the attacking LA is simply very good at what he does and hits you despite you trying to dodge, he's not going to do full damage on you. Of course, in this case as well, you could simply get out and shoot him before he detonates them. Even if he does detonate them and kill your vehicle, you'll kill him in return, not exactly a victory for the LA. I should note that all of this is based on my experience as a Light Assault, but not as a tanker. So few people employ the drifter + C4 strategy that I've ever been actually blown up by one, that I know of... even though I have plenty of playtime in both a Lightning and an MBT. I can't really comment on the perspective of being inside the vehicle that gets attacked, as almost 90% of the enemies that attack me with C4 are jump jet Light Assaults and they almost never succeed, and the rest are medics or heavies doing desperate suicide attacks who also almost never succeed. All I know is what people have told me in chat... today, someone said: "It seems suspicious how you just appear out of nowhere and kill me" (paraphrasing). But he was staying relatively still in his Lightning, moving back and forth in the same spot so I could just time my attack and kill him. I told him he should try drifter jets too
Excellent argument that many people seem to forget. You can't play as vehicles in PS2, you can only play as infantry inside a vehicle, which you can instantly abandon at any time it stops being advantageous.
If someone gets out of the tank to try to shoot you (I am highly dubious that most people will even be able to detect the LA in time, but for the sake of argument...), what stops you from dropping the brick on them? If they're close enough to the vehicle you might even nail the tank anyway. If they move unpredictably you might miss, but certainly I think you have a bit of a speed and strafe advantage over somebody below you. And they have to actually hit you. It strikes me as a rather difficult thing to counter for tanks at least. A Sunderer should be able to handle it and a Harasser shouldn't be getting stuck by it unless they stop (and stopping is death in a Harasser, so they were asking for it). But even for a 2/2 MBT the odds seem stacked against them and the main limiting factor is how skilled the LA is (which most of them probably aren't against non-stationary targets).
I've actually never seen that happen. Every time I get out to shoot a jump jet LA trying to kill my vehicle, he either (a) doesn't even notice I exited the tank or (b) decides to keep attacking my vehicle anyway. FWIW, I think option b is smart because he's probably already dropped one brick by the point you get out, he's already invested into killing the vehicle. He's almost certainly not going to land a brick on an infantryman before he dies, but he might be able to drop the second brick and get the vehicle kill if he's lucky. The reason I think it's hard for the LA to kill you after you exited is that they need to be very close to you in order for you to not be able to simply move out of the way before the detonation - and if they're very close to you, then your carbine should have easily faster TTK even if they acquire you as a target the instant you exit. But as I said, that's never happened to me... when I shoot them, they're attacking my vehicle.
Few people are actually that good with drifters. Only after seeing this video I tried out hitting moving tanks, and I'm actually surprisingly good at it. Or maybe people are just that predictable. Still, in larger fights at day time, you often die. With drifters, you can basically only move down or forward, so exiting and shooting him is completely valid. Kobalt is actually a nice weapon, btw.
That's amazing. Sometimes i can land both bricks on a vehicle if I get lucky, but most of the time one brick misses if I'm at that altitude. How long did you have to practice with the drifters to get that good at landing C4?
