Vulcan buff is yet another example of a severe misunderstanding of vehicle balance

Holy crap, that thing is a beast like that! I feel that the Banshee is just getting passed on to the Vulcan...

Yeah, no. The Basilisk sucks.

A 2/2 AV Vanguard can take out a Magrider / Prowler from behind in an incredibly short amount of time, as well. And we don't have shields to at least somewhat negate extreme damage.

As far as I'm concerned (tanker here), the Vulcan can have a limitless magazine. It'll still be garbage compared to the Halberd, which still stands as the premier general-purpose AV secondary that performs well at range. It's the only weapon that effectively, consistently synergizes with the Prowler.

I mean, come on. The Halberd's projectile velocity is a scant ~25 meters per second slower than the Vulcan's rounds. At a laughable 300 m/s, it's oddly difficult to consistently land shots against moving targets with the Vulcan. It lacks alpha damage, which heavily negates its damage potential against partially exposed or fleetingly-exposed targets. Its damage fall-off is horrible. Its cone of fire destroys its accuracy at any sort of range. Its projectile drop makes it even more difficult to deal with at range. The list goes on. It's a bad weapon that fundamentally, inexorably does not work with the Prowler.

An anti-tank minigun with 600m+ of range simply cannot happen within the context of this game's balance. As long as it is a minigun, it will have to be short ranged because otherwise you'd have a weapon with the Tankbuster's damage, but the Kobalt's accuracy. So you'd be picking off infantry at render distance, swatting aircraft with impunity, and shredding enemy tanks at the same time. That doesn't fly.

I expect the PTS Vulcan to be insanely strong as-is if it goes live. Its new, fixed cone of fire is slightly lower than the Canister's (the Canister has 0.33 CoF plus 0.9 pellet spread, assuming these add together this means an individual pellet has a total spread area of 1.23), so what we're looking at here is a Canister that deals AP HMG damage.

Do you have any idea what kind of tears would flow if the Canister could damage tanks, sundies, Liberators, and Galaxies with the same damage type as the Tankbuster?

Edit: also I just did the math, and the new magazine size (90) would give it the same (raw) damage per magazine as the Canister. Well, slightly more. 15000 even for Canister, 15030 for Vulcan. So we're literally looking at an anti-tank Canister here.

you do realize that the vanguard primary is built with only one things in mind: VERY HEAVY Weaponry
the primary should be the main business end of any tank, not the secondary which is supposed to increase the mbt's survival and offensive capabilities

magrider should be the most maneuverable in combat
prowler should be able to spam rounds faster than any other mbt when bombarding an area
vanguard should fire rounds that no one wants to be on the receiving end of
ES stuff should play on the traits of their faction otherwise why have three factions with 3 different types of ideology on warfare ?

and common pool vehicles should have ES weapons but with different stats then their mbt counterparts

The Vulcan is still going to be hilariously bad against infantry, whereas the Canister is pretty viable as an AI weapon. The fixed cone of fire is nice, but it won't magically make dealing with enemy vehicles at range any easier after taking into consideration projectile speed, projectile drop, damage fall-off, and a fundamental lack of alpha damage. Sure, it'll be great for Vulcan harassers, but the Halberd is still going to be more viable on orders of magnitude for our tanks.

It shouldn't need to be repeated, but the Vulcan ought to be redesigned from the ground up as a long-range fracture-esque weapon. It should meet or exceed the Halberd's AV performance at long range while offering a lower potential DPS than the current Vulcan. Throw in a relatively low base damage to satisfy Infantryside and we're good to go, for the most part.

How hard can it be to swap the roles of the Marauder and the Vulcan? How hard can it be to add some flashy red particle effects at the muzzle, recycle some visual and audio projectile assets from the Fracture, and throw in some common-sense numbers for the PTS before releasing a final product? Relatively low damage per projectile to infantry; DPS that roughly matches or slightly exceeds the Halberd's; fast projectiles; a low amount of projectile drop; no damage fall-off. There. It's not a general-purpose powerhouse against both infantry and vehicles like the Halberd, but it's at least a viable alternative that synergizes with the tank.

I do agree that the entire concept of an anti-tank minigun is crazy and a nightmare to balance, simply because what makes weapons effective against infantry is not raw damage, it's the ability to put lots of bullets down range relatively accurately OR splash a decently large enough area that you can make every shot count.

The Canister is a perfect example of this. It only deals 125 damage per pellet, dropping off to 100 at any range that matters. But it puts lots of pellets downrange, 12 per shot, and accurately enough that you can generally expect to hit at least one or two within thermal range (180m). Back when it had fewer pellets and was less accurate, it sucked.

I have already been fairly successful with the current Vulcan, though perhaps that's because I'm already used to firing the Canister which has similar velocity and drop. The Vulcan fires about 13 rounds per second once it ramps up, so with a slightly smaller CoF than the Canister it should achieve similar bullet density but with higher damage per bullet (167-125 as opposed to 125-100).

I do expect its infantry hit rate to be slightly reduced due to infantry taking cover after the first couple of hits, but overall I expect the PTS Vulcan would have similar AI performance to the Canister, while also being the highest DPS AV weapon by a large margin. I don't think you fully appreciate the implications of this.

Yes, the Canister is not the best AI weapon to be equivalent to. There's several AI weapons that are better. But you will be effectively carrying a Canister and a Tankbuster at the same time.

THIS IS GOOD!
LORD ZOE MAY NOW RETURN!

Our DPS advantage is fairly negligible without lockdown, and it's negated by the fact that it's much more difficult to land two shots on a target at range as opposed to one per given reload. The Prowler's main gun is fine. Period. That is all.

Oh no one faction is getting one thing adjusted lets make 20 threads about it

Then lets change it to single barrel with 80% of current reload time (since TR keep on insisting they are missing so much anyway).

No wonder it took them so long to do something about Vulcan, they dont understand why the Vulcan needs a look at in the first place.
It doesent need to oneclip a vanguard or magrider. It just needs range. Thats it.

Rgiht then... Following this absurd buff I must make a request.

Seeing as we're returing things to former OP state, there is a long list that Higby (or whoever it is) that needs to be looked at.

Wrong

That last one is my opinion.

As much as I hate the Vulcan, I do respect it (especially if it's on a harasser with all of it's speed.) If I played TR to any extent I would have a Vulcan on something, oh yes. It screams, deal with me, which is not bad in a shooting game. Problem is.... I don't know how to deal with it. Respawn somewhere else is at the top of my list.

Unlike the Prowler and Vanguard, the magrider -needs- that to get on roughly even terms.
No damage advantage.
No durability advantage.
No velocity advantage.
Compared to the Mag, the other two gets two each.

Yeah it's hard to land the 2nd shot... if you're bad.
Then again, TR have proven time and time again that they'd rather be passive with Anchor from far away than spend time learning the ins and outs of their tank like NC and (especially) VS do.
In the context of actual MBT-MBT balance, the TR is "fine" because the TTK is still short enough to not go from noteworthy to substantial. If MBTs had 4 times their current health the Prowler would be the king, almost without contest, as then the damage advantage would be allowed to pile up.
Meanwhile the mag, who relies so much on the surprise and shooting first would get trashed.

Will the Mag and Vanguard get their respective main guns brought up to the same level of the TR's if the TR get secondary guns at the same level as the Mag/Vanguard?

Or is this just another line in the VS/NC nerfs?

It could have worked if the Prowler was designed to be a close range fighter but it isn't. If we had a way of efficiently or even reliably get close to the enemy tank, then it would have been interesting. At it stands, the basic mechanic of the Vulcan makes no sense at all on the Prowler. It makes sense on the Harasser where you can sneak or boost up to enemies and then boost away if you fail to kill. The prowler has no way to engage and no way to disengage. It is in no way designed around closed ranged weapons. The Vanguard can use the shield to tank incoming damage and the Magrider can strafe and boost to get away. The Prowler can lock down which has no synergy at all with the Vulcan. It seems like they failed to look at the overall weapons platforms when they designed the Prowler and only went for the factional trait. I really wish they would remove lock-down and give TR something else.

My translator must be broken, that or my Scouter, I don't know... Because all I'm reading here roughly translates into;

"TR should stay mediocre. Because TR would be good if TR weren't bad. Despite being mediocre. Because theory. Because in practice, TR bad, when they should be good, despite being mediocre. Vanu QQ. Numbers. Scrap Vulcan = AI, Marauder = AV thing because it seemed like too much fun and not mediocre enough, adding the possibility of TR being actually good despite being mediocre. Vanu QQ. Nerf TR, buff Mag. Mag bad. Despite being good. QQ. Fracture and Striker can also stay mediocre, nothing matters, because NS(?!). Prowler good, Prowler Life, Love. Vanu praise the Prowler. QQ. I'm bad. Need to L2P. Nerf TR. We need ZOE back because Vulcan is back to mediocre from bad(?)".

I am honestly confused and expect this post to be labelled as "Trolling" despite the fact that's it's really not, I think "Trolling" is what the TR get from the Forums to be honest. Especially when I read posts such as "OMG VULCAN 24/7 YAAAAH", namely the CURRENT Vulcan(TopKEK). What this discussion is, is tears and fear. Condensed. Do you guys realize how bad you lose your cool whenever TR get tweaked? That's right, not buffed, TWEAKED!

I'll just focus now on the important part of the whole conversation- Tweak the Vulcan as SOE may, it simply DOES NOT FIT the Prowler. Harasser, MAYBE. It's still a weak thing, I've been gunning for Harassers a while lately and we never use the thing. We explode when we do and we've yet to see the magic of it actually destroying Tanks even when totally flanked, with Stealth, with us having a margin of 2" of firing on the target. Where do you get these theories? We don't even see other Harassers with Vulcans on and definitely no swarm of OP Vulcan Troll Squads which some posts imply do exist. I play DAILY and I don't see these things, ever.

Lock-Down/Anchor both do not FIT THE GAME in fact.

And yes, what really happened to the whole idea of fundamentally changing the two weapons? Three, if we could the Fracs which definitely must change! Four, with the MCG- FIVE with the Striker.

Come on. TR is boring, give us something other than good on paper, bad in game stuff? A complete overhaul will please EVERYONE and we can all participate in that long process. Even the basics are wrong, ROF Faction? It's not going to work unless every other Faction is severely limited in ROF, ammo, mag capacity... Fastest(NOT MOST AGILE) Faction? Not unless all other Factions get a top speed of 20-40.