Let's play 'Spot the OP Pounders'

Another complain. don't nurf the fun out of this weapon, it's fin. Get a better armor instead.

If pounders are nerfed again there isn't much anything TR maxes can bring to the fight..They are literally the only things in the arsenal that isn't either a total failure of a weapon or somewhat of a disappointment.

That's why people see so many kills on it, because any TR with a mind knows to use it or not use the MAX at all. It sucks, I don't like it, and I wouldn't think most of TR likes it either, but that's the way it is until DBG does something about it. I'd love to actually use my miniguns.

pounders are my second favourite max AV weapon after Ravens, if your aim and ability to account for drop and lead is better than a 2 year olds then they shred through everything, i run maxed out lockdown on my TR.
the BIG criticism that i have about pounders however is that 44 ammo just isn't enough, (unless you own a pet engineer)
they need their 71 capacity back.

What? Your post is completely taking things out of context. But you know what, I'll bite:

The difference between Vanu and TR AI are almost negligable, and fall within statistical deviation. The only AI weapons that 'over-perform' are Mattocks. If you are going to parse minor differences as being hugely problematic (1 KPH is not statistically significant) then we absolutely need to buff the Left Scattercannon. I mean seriously, BUFF THE LEFT SCATTERCANNON AMIRITE.

More seriously, Pounders are outperforming the other faction AV weapons, for total kills by 50%. That's statistically significant. Just like the Raven is outperforming in pure AV statistics by a statistically significant margin.

If TR wasn't using pounders in infantry fights so much their AI weapons would possibly increase in output by a small amount. The difference (excluding Mattocks and the oddball Right Scattercannon, wtf is up with that) between AI weapons from top to bottom is a few percent and may have something to do with the faction ability being not very useful in infantry fights thanks to vulnerability of max units to explosive damage.

A buff to lockdown, in regards to defense, would probably eliminate the gap outright in AI. If all the AV weapons were brought in line then we could probably have a clearer picture of AI stats. Yes, that includes buffing the facture (CoF I'd say) and nerfing the Raven (.5 to 1.0 second longer reload).

Ya'll need to stop reading into things that aren't there, and jumping to conclusions all the time about everything. Bunch of touchy nerds on this forum.

Ravens are overpowered against vehicles and a good Falcon Max can OHK you with one volley.

In what context are you speaking in? MAX weapon balance? Cheese cake?

More seriously, left Scat/heavy cycler/quasar are starter Max weapons. All 3 have lower KPH then their right counterparts, due to the learning curve of newbies having more of an effect than the weapon efficiency.

30 day data is rather small so there is variation to the point where individual data points might not be significant, but general trends are. Take the overall average of all faction AI weapons. TR is 9% worse than VS and 18% worse than NC. Go take a look at the 6 month data from Oracle-of-death. The KPH stays rather constant for all AI weapons, since they haven't been changed much. You can't argue that TR weapons aren't in general under performing to it's counterparts.

Sure, pounders are outperforming all other AV weapons in AI work. That's not under contention, but if you're going to come in with the guise of "balance". You would be hypocritical not to include all MAX weapons.

Speaking of jumping to conclusions, you have an interesting theory on weapon deviation numbers. The difference between the best and worst AI weapon isn't just a few percent, it's 30%, not including starter weapons. Maybe the difference really is just one weapon is better at killing than the other (Mattocks), instead of some convoluted theory. Stop reading into things that aren't there.

This is more or less the best way to put it. They aren't necessarily overpowered, it's that they're balanced incorrectly. They're set up for their intended role wrong. They end up being a jack of all trades weapons, instead of a dedicated AV weapon. They need a rework, just like fractures do. Though I do think that the short range AI weapons should be intended as anti-max as well as AV weapons.

I guess you missed the part where I said "Excluding Mattocks" and where I do say Mattocks are Over-Performing. Remove Mattocks and that changes the percentages. But you know, grind that axe and stuff that strawman.

The best way to figure out over-all balance (and it's going to be skewed regardless in many ways) is to total both arms:

67.0 Mattocks
56.5 Grinder
54.0 Hacksaws
54.0 Blueshift
53.5 Nebular
52.0 Onslaught
51.0 Scatter
49.0 Cosmos
47.0 Mercy
46.5 Quasar
45.0 Mutilator
42.0 Heavy Cycler

Yes, the Heavy Cycler is garbage and needs help, I'll grant you that. Mattocks over-perform but we ALL know that. Throw out the top and bottom and the numbers are not as bad as you make it out. And as I said before, I believe this could be due to TR preferring Pounders for AI duty and Lockdown being a death sentence and only really good for spray and pray with Factures (and not very good at that) and Anti-Air (pretty good at that). There's nothing convoluted about this 'theory'.

Fix the AV weapons WHICH IS THE CONTEXT OF THIS THREAD and we'll have a better idea of what needs to be done with AI weapons. Right now, it's clear Mattocks are too good and Cyclers are crap...any other conclusions are simply farting in the wind or faction bias. I'm not saying TR is fine, LRN2PLAY, I'm saying you can't just look at numbers alone. TR AI could very well need a buff over-all. Pounders, I feel, warp things currently.

Anyone who plays against TR knows that you'll run into Pounder Maxes constantly indoors. You don't run into many comet or falcon maxes, outside of noobs with starter Max weapons.

Is it due to the TR AI weapons being crap? Perhaps.
Is it due Pounders being just great at AI? Perhaps.
Is it a bit of both? Most likely this is the real conclusion, but it's a bit hard to tell right now, which is why we're talking about AV weapons specifically.

I said Ravens are over-performing as AV so I'm not sure what your point is other than to agree with my post?

As for Falcons, 'Good' means "Not Typical" because otherwise Falcons would be close to the AI performance of Pounders. Which they are not. In fact they are awful in total kills...but that might have something to do with NC preferring Ravens of course.

The thing with pounders is they trade in velocity and ammo capacity for greater fire power and splash. Pounders are literally a variant on the Fracture. Functionally, a TR works both the exact same way, one just requires a little more skill to use.

Truth be told, the only reason I take pounders over the fractures is because of the better AI capability. Nailing players with splash isn't going to get many kills, One still needs to land direct hits to really kill anything with either the pounders or the fractures.

As for our miniguns, I might consider lockdown if it improved weapon accuracy and I could crouch while in lockdown. Mercies do a lot of damage, but they're definitely more suppressive in their DPS output. Everything else is wholly so innaccurate I have to work the MAX like a scatmax, but that's a losing play style for obvious reasons.

If you use the weapon mostly against infantry (such as a biolab), then ofcourse your vehicle KPH and KPU will be lower compared to a weapon you use mostly against vehicles. Also, the average total KPH and KPU of an infantry weapon will be much higher compared to a weapon that is being used against infantry and vehicles. These values


You don't hear me state that the pounder is overpowered, however I do like proper use of statistics.

I still say officially make Pounders Anti-infantry and give the TR two half-vulcans for their maxes as an AV weapon.

Then give NC the HMG Max weapons they've been whining for

And give VS a new AI weapon as well (Now I'm not saying it should be a max-ppa but it should totally be a max-ppa)

No, that only means people are using them in an AI role more, either intentionally or unintentionally. People use Pounders for AI work because it's a grenade launcher, the AOE damage does your work for you even if you miss direct shots, AND you do damage to armor, it's a weapon that does AV and AI work, only debate is what area it's best at.

What would balance this out right quick would be tweaking the Pounder damage profile to do less damage to infantry, more to armor, and hell, balance Fractures to be a viable alternative. The reason people use Pounders so much is compounded by the fact they are the ONLY MAX AV weapons you can rely on to not suck completely, and when infantry show up you can shoot those to, because hello, grenade launcher?

Fix Fractures and tweak Pounders and this problem goes away. IF you just nerf Pounders we are back to square one of TR having no reliable AV option that is not available to everyone else as well.

Everyone has AV turret, dumb-fires, basic lock-ons, annies, decies, C4, AV grenades and AV mines. Only TR has Pounders (not optimal for AV) Fractures (bad at AV) Striker (bad at everything) and Vulcan (God-like up close crap at range and another weapon everyone want nerfed as well) and the list of TR uniques includes only ONE AV weapon that is not terrible, (Vulcan) and only one more that is acceptably good enough to do it's basic job. (Pounders.)

All NC arms are better at killing than any other faction arms, not just Mattocks. Weren't you the one to point out inconsistencies among individual weapons in the chart anyways? And here you are comparing it again? Either way, the general trend still points to TR AI guns being worse off on average than all other factions. I didn't exaggerate the difference, I explicitly stated it. The delta is 10%-20% and it generally caries across the 6 months data.

That's some faction bias to be screaming out nerf AI ability of MAX AV weapons, but ignore the MAX AI weapon differences. Right now pounder AI ability compensates for TRs worse AI ability. You can't go around knee jerk nerfing things without at least taking into account all the weapons in that category.

I don't follow how, TR would prefer a weapon that performs 40% worse at AI work to use for AI and therefore make TR AI weapons appear more ineffective in a KPH metric vs NC/VS.

What most people like to forget when calling the pounder OP is that they are a HE GRENADE launcher. They are not poorly design or overpowered in any means that isen't intended for the type of weapons they are. The HE GRENADE's it launches are supposed to be able to do more damage against soft targets and do less damage against armor than a regular AV projectile. It simply prefoms the way a HE GRENADE launcher should do.
It's basically listed as a AV weapon because of it's capability to damage armor.

You know why the interpretation of this chart is being done in a much too simplistic way?

17,75 NCM1 Scattercannon-Left
33,16 NCM1 Scattercannon-Right

Sooo... right arm Scattercannon is OP and needs to be nerfed? Or is there a problem with the left arm?

You see what I'm hinting at?

Yeah, the problem with the MAX weaponry stats is that the left and right arms are constantly stealing kills from each other. And it gets even more complicated when you start mix and match different weapons on each arms.

Instead of KPH. A better representation would be stats of actual damage dealt to target per hour. And even that probably still wouldn't be a perfect representation.

And with NC MAX scatter guns. It gets skewed further because of slugs, which drastically change the weapon's behavior without given a separate stats. Also consider the fact that we have good deal of people mixing slug in one arm and pellets in the other, which distorts the performance even further.

I like the Pounders. They're unique and they're a handy form of light artillery. They don't need any buffs against vehicles, they're strong as it is. Against infantry they can be a useful suppression tool or MAX killer, depending on the situation. The TR don't have much going for them right now, so quit nerfing their toys.

If you complain about Pounders and their AI capability, maybe you want to remember that dual Falcons can kill in one hit from any range and can in some cases be more effective than AI weapons with slugs.

And maybe, just maybe, bear in mind that infantry are supposed to die every now and then to something.

If TR AI weapons would as efective, more competitive as anti max weapons and if NC/VS wouldn't spam so much maxes, maybe TR use could something else than pounder and farm as well as VS/NC with AI weapons?

I pull maxes quite rarely, and when I do, it's 80% pounder nowday. Not because of it's versatility or it's ablity to fight infantry (yeah dual cycler are way more effective at this job), just because of brazillons of maxes i fight in every base and first gen AV weapon are the best at this job.

NC have still decent anti max tools with them shotguns and VS too with high alpha damages weapons.

Statistics can be a bit misleading if you dont really know what the numbers mean past the shallow "look at all the kills" stats.

That's a fair point, if you really think that pounders are compensating for weaker AI weapons over-all, then perhaps any possible AV rebalancing for TR would need some matching adjustments to the AI. Heavy Cyclers and Mutilators, and perhaps Mercies, could use something like a RoF increase, along the lines of 5% or so. This would increase their TTK and performance, while sticking to the whole 'more dakka' thing TR has.