Discussion on the current state of the Valkyrie

Passengers shooting out the side can give away your position just as easily as door gunners could. That's why it's up to you to put together a good crew. As for engineers repairing, that's a long gone strategy. All it takes is a cllip from the Banshee or a few rockets and those guys are toast. Even if they weren't free certs for the enemy, it's still a massive waste of resources to have 6 people keeping a gun up in the air that has half the dps of an ESF gun. These problems are exactly why you're having a hard time finding gunners, it's one of the least viable gunning platforms in the game. I don't say all this because I hate the Valk, I wish it were better as a gunship, but it's just not even remotely good at anything but dropping off C4 fairies.

It's not easy to find a good crew though, and most people would much more likely give away your position with a turret in their hands than just their normal gun. It's the same reason why stealth Sundy drivers often lock their vehicles. Not because stealth Sundies are so bad, but because the whole game is full of newbies who have no idea how to gun.

Even if this would be true (which it isn't, repairing is still very effective), they could just easily respawn into the Valk 5 seconds later. Perhaps you lose 1 person from time to time, but it's very unlikely that you lose all passengers at the same time. And with the latest patch you can now even use Fire Supression for the time that one Engie is gone while still having him respawn a second later.

You was talking about deterring 2 ESFs with the turrets... You don't need 6 people in a Valk to do this. 3 people would be already enough (with the Wyvern at least). And a Valkyrie is not for A2A anyway. Otherwise it wouldn't have anti-ground weapons only, with the Wyvern being the only exception as an alround weapon.

Plus like I already, 6 ESFs take much more certs, they take more skills to pilot, and the game has enough infantry-only players anyway, who would not miss a single thing by doing hotdrops with occasional repairing instead of running around on the ground. Apart from this, using your logic, you could scrab half of the vehicles in this game. Using a Flash? Naw MBT would be much better. Using a Harasser? Naw 2 MBTs would be better.

People are having hard times finding gunners no matter the vehicle. I also don't have a dedicated gunner for my Harasser, only randoms. For the Valk it's the same. I think people like you only talk bad about the Valkyrie because you are an *sshole. I can tell by how aggressively you write that you don't give a sh*t about the feelings of others. And the game has many such people.

Valkyries are not easy to fly. Most people in this game can't fly them for sh*t, because you can't just lolpod stuff from a distance and then hit the afterburner like in an ESF. You actually need good situational awareness and good positioning with them. So of course many people will blame it on the vehicle.

Wrel is... well... in my opinion Wrel is not a good spokesperson for PS2 because he's just primarily an infantry player. He only really understands about 1/3 of the game.

Before PS2, Wrel (based on his videos) mostly played Mass Effect with some Black Ops thrown in. He has not had significant experiences in vehicle-centric games like World of Tanks or War Thunder, at least to the effect that he streams them. He doesn't even seem to have much experience with combined-arms games like ARMA, which PS2 should be modelled on.

So whenever Wrel says something, it's from the point of view of someone who plays PS2 primarily as an infantry player. For an infantry player being able to go wherever you want at any time for no cost might be good for infantry, but would absolutely gut any remaining relevance that vehicles have to the game.

Really what DBG should have done is bring on three different "experts"... one infantry player, one tanker, and one pilot. Maybe even a fourth to overrule them all, the "combined arms" expert. Instead the bias is obvious with them only hiring an infantry-player, and it shows in how badly the game is performing.

I didn't mean to say he was right, I absolutely think the opposite. This game went way too far in the arcade shooter direction, of which there are a million better games than Planetside, instead of the combined arms simulation direction, where there isn't really much else. I think it was very cool that DBG took in a player, and he obviously really cares about the game, but I think he represents the solo CoD kind of players this game has, not the combined arms team players which this game should focus on.

Valk need pilot controlled gunpods.
Cos where is joy in flying one when one cannot shoot?

Same as driving a Harasser. Not every vehicle is for everyone.

After reading some of the comments I realized there is the argument about the transport part of the vehicle being core. I agree with that but I still think they should give players the added option of flying it as a gunship. The closest vehicle I can think of is the UH-1 huey. It was primarily a transport but could act as a gunship with rocket pods and miniguns.
The Valkyrie atm seems to feel like a one trick pony, a game where transportation and quick drops into combat are irrelevant due to the spawning mechanics. An aircraft dedicated to CAS more so than the ESFs or the Libs would be a nice addition, all this without removing the current things it has.

What seperates Valkyries from other transportation vehicles or quick-action function is, that you can more precisely and stealthy "inject" your troups. You can much better for example drop your people right above a tank to C4 it without being seen.

While a Huey would be configured in both gunship and transport roles, they generally did not fulfil both roles at once. They were either gunships or transports.

For the Valk, this would be the option of adding in rocketpods but at the cost of losing the transport cabin space.

The only helicopter that was designed to handle both roles simultaneously was the Soviet Mi-24 series. They would travel with both passengers and carry a heavy complement of weaponry. In practice though the design was too full of compromises and the Mi-24s simply acted as gunships while Mi-8s handled transport tasks.

Pretty much transport units should not be so heavily armed.

This is exactly what i had in mind actually. Either you transport or you play as a gunship with pilot equipable weapons. Both together imo would be broken. That would add variety to Valkyries instead of being a straight up upgrade. You forgo the light assault C4 drops or the 4 man Stryker but get something else which is also good instead.

In this way we don't **** the vehicle in any way. If you want to fly a Valkyrie just the way it is now that's great. But if you want the gunship playstyle you can do that to with a 2 man crew but as a gunship you sacrifice transport capability.

Maybe have some sort of cloaking ability, equipped in the weapon slot. Trades all combat ability in order to be a stealthy light transport.
Probably need to force it to land and decloak to disembark passengers when it's equipped, though.

Definitely a cool idea. I started reading and was thinking "this guys a C4 fairy that wants easier kills" but was pleasantly surprised you thought about how to keep a cloak from being OP. I dig it.

The Valkyrie is already a gunship... It may not be the most effective vehicle, but it's easily on par with a Harasser, even without rumble seat passengers.

With cloaking you could just ram or road kill ESFs and Infantry way too easily. And the Valkyrie is already stealthy light transport.

Honestly, the Valkyrie is already much better than most people here make it out to be. The problem is just that it requires teamplay, and the teamplay in this game is complete garbage. It's partly unplayable, because the gunners can't even manage to look to the front in it and constantly just shoot at whatever they want.

Oh, yeah, I agree that the Valkyrie is a really solid ship... I just want to see the Planetside 1 Phantasm make a return.

We should put the Dalton on the Valk.

Valks are nice for cross-lane transport of sqads. Cheaper and quieter than a Gal.

Too bad the other air units are so powerfull they perform most other tasks much much better.

I came to the same conclusion. Of course nothing personal against Wrel, the game has been changing a lot since he's taking care of pushing development.

Still one macroscopic problem with Planetside 2 game design remains: Redeploy and this resources system have been modeled to satisfy casual players, who want by definition be able to fight all the time without any downtime. Since the game has been launched things have been changed a lot and today we have cheap vehicles available everywhere, and the ability to teleport somewhere else (even if nerfed compared to what we had months ago).
This might sound cool, but it had a price: tactical relevance of vehicles in term of logistics has been reduced to zero. Players do not have to organize to use vehicles to move troops where needed. This point of view is completely missing in Planetside 2 battles because players and vehicles can be anywhere at a negligible cost in terms of time and nanites.

Which brings us back to the Valkyrie: in this scenario a transport vehicle is simply meaningless. Logistics is not a need in Planetside, only killing people matters. Surely Klabauter keeps claiming he scored amazing killstreaks with the Valkyrie and maybe it's true, but if he really did it with a Valkyrie then he could do even better with an ESF / Liberator / Galaxy.

• The Valkyrie as transport vehicle doesn't make sense in Planetside 2 until redeploy and this resources system exist.
• A Valkyrie as combat vehicle doesn't make sense as long as the other aircraft is better at everything.

Both sentences lead us to the same conclusion: we need a major overhaul to give the Valkyrie a place in Planetside 2, otherwise it will always remain the poor tiny ******** brother no one wants to talk about.

Or we can overhaul not the Valk, but the very redeploy mechanics of PS2 to give all transport and logistical vehicles some relevance.

That, in my opinion, is the far better answer. Because it doesn't result in transports fighting for the same role as combat vehicles.

I wouldn't call them amazing (never claimed this, but you seem to know better...). It merely was the best I could do. I don't really fly any other aircrafts, that's why I can't compare them to the Valk, but I drive Harasser too, and to me, Valkyries are better at killing than Harassers (and that's not even flying with rumble seat passengers).

Sure, they may be weaker than a Galaxy, idk, but that's also like comparing a Flash to an MBT. It's not really a fair comparison. I find Harassers are a much better comparison to Valks, than the other aircrafts. They are very similar vehicles.