Take a look at average BR numbers for the weapons. (numbers taken from the 12th for the OoD) Scattercannon- 39, 70 Hacksaw- 75, 79 Grinder- 66, 70 Mattock- 83, 84 Heavy C- 34, 39 Onslaught- 72, 76 Mutilator- 53, 57 Mercy- 75, 69 Quasar- 35, 70 Nebular- 77, 79 Cosmos- 57, 59 Blueshift- 76, 74 I see a pattern of NC AI MAXes being a higher BR in general. Even the free Scattercannon has an average BR 4 levels higher than the other factions equals. The only version that comes close to Br averages is the Hacksaw and the fast RPM versions of TR/VS. Almost EVERYTHING else has a much higher BR average. With that much less use in lower BR players means there are a lot less skilled/certed players that even think of using a NC MAX and that will **** with KPU, KPH, and what not. The fact that you can't compare shotguns to HMGs by using and expecting the same stats is another fact as those are 2 weapon types that do not and should not share anything with each other. You also have to add that with a lower average user count and lower BR averages. This leaves NC to fight more MAXes without the help of their own MAXes more times than not. Making fights that much harder all thanks to forcing a niche weapon on a niche class. In truth, there will likely never be a way for use to know of any balance with MAXes till either NC gets a HMG and TR/VS gets a shotgun or if SOE gets off its *** and finally makes the NS weapons for MAXes I and just about every ******* NC player in the world has asked for since tech test . And a reply to anyone saying to use slugs. Let me show you the main reason I will never unlock them myself. 500 damage at point blank (till 8m) dropping to 334 damage at 45m. Against infantry those are good numbers. Against a MAX, you are 100% ******! Stock MAX has 10,000 effective HP to small arms. Meaning it will take 20 slugs to the chest at point blank to JUST kill a MAX. Or 14 pure headshots. A KA5 MAX has 16,000 HP to small arms and needs 32 slugs to the chest or 22 headshots, at point blank and max damage. Add range and the shots to kill rises by 30% or so with adding more odds of misses by a hell of a lot more. You should never be alone in a fight but slugged MAXes need to be aimbot good with making a hard choice of killing 1 MAX or 2-4 infantry, while HMG MAXes can half-*** and still be good at killing anything they want with having room to spare to change targets as needed. Grinders with 1K certs to double extended mags has just 24 rounds per mag, any other weapon will have 20 at most. You need to be an aimbot to even think about fighting MAXes when using slugs. And a MAX that can't fight MAXes has no reason to exist if you ask me.
Realistically, most MAX vs. MAX fights end with one or both MAXes backing off, so it's not like you're at a giant disadvantage fighting MAXes with slugs. Maybe you've been spoiled by the NC ability to give the Buckshot Hug of Death, but that's a faction-specific advantage, not the norm. In practice, I still consider myself to have the advantage vs. other AI MAXes when I'm using slugs, for a few reasons: Very few people actually run kinetic armor, let alone KA5. Maybe they should, but they don't. DPS. The slug shotguns still significantly out-DPS the other factions's AI MAX weapons at close range. If I can kill before the reload, I should win. Surprise. Lots of players think they're safe harassing me at 15-20m. I get most of my MAX vs. MAX kills shooting them in the back as they run with their tail between their legs. On a side note, does anyone know how much damage a MAX punch does to a MAX?
You do not know who you are talking to do you? Didn't expect it to be honest but Id at least expect that knowing that TR and VS MAX AI weapons are ready for MAX fights out the door before any certs but to buy the things would be common knowledge by now. Slugs only ruin your ability to fight other MAXes. They for a fact kill your DPS against MAXes as you can NOT kill another MAX under any live conditions but if the MAX is already very hurt and doesn't have charge ready. It takes 20 slugs to kill a MAX, not even the Grinders have that many shells without spending at LEAST 300 certs for the double slugs added to 500 certs for an extended mag on top of the 500 to buy both Grinders AND have 100% perfect aim WITH being no more than 8m out. That is just impossible and is also 1,300 certs a TR or VS MAX can use in a cheap 250 cert weapon and dump the other 1,050 in armor to make your slugs even more useless. TR/VS MAX AI weapons never have to touch extended mags but for maybe the Nebula and NONE of them need any type of ammo to give a chance at reaching someone at a great cost past cert numbers. Any MAX doing an AI role worth its iron will have kinetic armor. Bullets kill more MAXes than explosives as bullets are the things that put a MAX at risk for explosives. Get below 2/3 HP and consider yourself one shot range from a rocket. KA5 gives you a lot more time outside of that 2/3 danger zone and lets you face tank 3 or more players without melting from focused fire. C4 will kill a MAX at full HP but only if that C4 can be placed almost on the MAX, learn to avoid C4 and it becomes a no threat as C4 is very limited to height advantages or blind turns. You want to see what the TTKs of the 3 MAXe are for AI weapons and where I get my information that isn't a gut feeling or personal gameplay? https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/max-balance-part-4-everything-ai.139234/ I did that in July of 2013. And every bit of it is still good information as nothing has changed but some very minor reload times and Mattocks getting new damage drop ranges. You can find the updated Mattock info on page 9. Please take the time to read it and the links in the OP before giving a reply. I likely already dealt with just about anything you can think of somewhere in there. To put it short. NC MAXes are **** thanks to shotguns being **** on a MAX till well after you fully cert the weapons and have the MAX itself armored to survive the walk to get to shotgun ranges. Compared to HMGs of TR/VS MAXes that are good out of the box with or without certs but for a 2nd arm who can be done on a budget to boot. This can be seen if the data from this topic as well with few NC MAXes compared to TR/VS and that NC MAX AI weapons don't get used till much later BR levels where you have the certs to dump on the weapons to make them worth a damn. Maybe I need to remake that post again. Higby was talking about giving MAXes another pass not long ago. Clean it up and put the right info back on the OP instead of having 1 weapon being 9 pages out. Might just do that.
As far as I can tell, you're comparing average DPS WITH reloads and all body shots on a KA5 MAX. Aside from the fact that those numbers are extremely misleading, since they aren't relevant if you can break LoS for the reload, or if the target is damaged a bit already, or you get some headshots, etc., I think it was pretty clear that I was talking about non-KA opponents. A simple calculation will show that NC MAXes WITHOUT reloads have higher DPS than TR/VS weapons, even with slugs. In practice, I think landing all 20 slugs on a non-KA opponent is trivial at close range, and getting a fair number of headshots is not hard, either. Any further away, and we get into the range where one or both opponents typically back off before anyone gets killed--and the range where buckshot would be useless. On the extra costs NC is forced to pay to be effective, I agree, it's unfair and should be fixed. I wouldn't complain if the default mag size were buffed to the extended mag size. You can argue that MAXes should run KA most of the time, and I might agree, but in my experience, they typically don't. Most are terrified of c4 from above, so they run flak.
Headshots are counted for in those tests. If you went into the links I gave you'd see I got the shells to kill not from paper. But from making use of VR and headshots effected the math a lot in a few cases. Plus you can't get DPS without accounting for all the time spent to send that amount of damage. You aren't doing DPS if you aren't hitting the target so any misses, time spent in cover, or time reloading need to to counted for or else you end up with numbers from out of no where. Yes Hacksaws can do 4K DPS, but they can't use that DPS as the majority of the damage is wasted in the air. As for any other condition that is in live gameplay. They effect everyone at all times equally. To make some "what if" for this but not that isn't a fair test. And if something is off in perfect conditions then they can never ever be any better in the chaos of live gameplay outside of cheating. I took the time to repost that data and it should be on the front page for a while till it gets moved to the MAX sub-forum to die off again. If you want to keep with this debate, post there after reading it. Im going to bed for now.
MAXes themselves are underequipped, yes (ZOE and high heels). Weapons, however.... Vortex. Blueshift. Quasar.
They are still op as hell (just with a lower price tag then i expected them to be). Personally don't play skill suits, never bothered to check cert lines but i have been or the receiving end. Getting hit by something that you can not see in your vehicle or trying to get out of doors that are spammed from stupid distance that can kill you if he lands both shots is something i encounter all the time.
When the game is functioning properly, MAXes render further out than Ravens' maximum range. I'd also point out that Vortexes (the VS equivalent of Ravens) do just about as well vs. vehicles and have a much longer effective range. Fractures are much weaker than both Ravens and Vortexes and should be buffed.
In practice the effective range difference between Vortexes and Ravens isn't all that great. The lack of zoom and relatively slow velocity on the Vortex (charge level 3 is 550 m/s) can make hitting moving targets a problem at such ranges. That and the low damage at these ranges. Now the Lancer is a different animal: it has (low) ironsight zoom and it has a base velocity of 600 m/s, charge 2 velocity of 700 m/s and a charge 3 velocity of a whopping 800 m/s.
I hate slugs. Too erratic, and you lose damage point blank which makes max vs. max hard work. Still, you pays your certs... Go with Mattocks if you want range... surprisingly good to 20m. The NC Max excels at a particular role, and that's buildings and cover. No other unit or empire has a point hold device like the NC max. No; it doesn't have roaming range, but I can't think how many times I've been solo'd by an enemy max as a regular infantry at >20m anyway... maybe 10-20 times in 2 years? Nothing in recent memory. I think maybe it was an issue not having range... but with redeployside I don't think so quite so much. Let's face it, every fight is now a base fight.
The way they made it work in PS1 was the NC max had 3 fire modes. One was a fast firing close range shot with a large spread. Basically it instagibbed infantry at point blank range. The second was a tighter choke fired a little slower and had a medium range ...hurt quite a bit and still instagibbed at point blank ranges. The third was a slow firing tight choke that had a medium to longer range shot. Again hurt quite a bit but could still instagib an infantryman point blank. The problem was the trade for crowd control to accuracy. It worked well there.....I see no reason why it wouldn't work here. Honestly...I'm not sure why this was something the Devs chose to ignore.
Not sure what server you play on, but on Emerald NC struggle because the majority of the NC have a farm mentality and toss tactics out the window. 1. "MLG" outfits like AC who just farm regardless of where that farm is. Outfits that are VERY good at killing enemies. But not so good at killing them at the places that actually matter. 2. NC have a reputation for trying to take bases with 35% of their population sitting in tanks and ESF's, trying to farm kills. You can't take a base in Planetside from inside a vehicle, when 100% of the defenders are hunkered down on defense, so you lose. 3. Really sluggish at redeploying / defending territory. Players too reluctant to leave "good farms", and there's not enough leadership to effectively steer the herd into doing what they should. You think you'll win more alerts if your AI Max has more range in outdoors fights? Really....really?
You're missing a large point of this thread. Ammo capacity and kill capacity. If a VS/TR max can quickly and effectively take out infantry at range, they can more effectively and more quickly kill that same infantry in close quarters as their hit rate goes up significantly. So in close quarters their efficiency increases, now add this to a much much higher ammo capacity it allows for a much stronger/longer point defense in urban environments. An NC AI max is only going to get 2-3 kills average before it incurs a long reload time exposing itself. This means that when a squad or two rush into the building the NC max may take out a couple but by the time it's done reloading it's dead from being overrun where as a VS/TR max has a much higher/longer capability to suppress the opposing force. So in this way one could propose that the VS/TR have a better CQC effect in tactics on top of their ability to keep mobile and continue suppressive fire.
You over estimate the killing ability. The thing is....your assuming that the targets the VS/TR maxes are shooting at are static and not fighting back. More often than not they are firing back...and with great damage! yesterday I took a step into a room with 3 NC with my VS max and KA3....they didn't run they all shot at me. The VS/TR max will be forced to fall back. The thing is you don't kill them as fast as the NC max. The NC will likely kill two of those targets and render incoming damage smaller faster. In combat situations the quicker killing weapons is typically your friend. Mix that with the Sheild Ability the NC max gets and it covers his reload as he retreats...which the other MAX units don't get. Honestly I love the NC max when I play my alt. I eat up the infantry!
But you're missing the point. This game isn't about two or three guys. Unless there are C4 or rockets involved, any MAX, TR, VS, or NC, will win in a fight against 2-3 guys. The difference is that the NC MAX will have to reload after the 3rd guy and then gets killed by the 4th guy, guaranteed. TR and VS don't have to reload are more likely to survive Small magazines and long reloads have essentially relegated NC MAXes to camping doorways. For one, this is tremendously boring, and two, it negatively impacts NC's ability to push bases (which like I've said earlier is in part why NC struggles during Alerts).
Kill 3-4 guys, pop shield while reloading, kill another 4 guys. Wow that was hard! Seriously go play TR and check out their awesome Max units. You know, the ones you have to anchor to the ground and wear a "Decimator me in the face plz" sign around your neck to play optimally.
