Great fights routinely ruined. Yes, C4+Rocklet, now from Valks

I'd encourage the VS team from Connery to come on here and give their views about how they are using the C4+Rocklet from Valk tactic. They have great VS pilots protecting the Valk..and now with full rotation Valk weapon and repairs from within? Ya...they do a great job. They are using what DBG provided. Advantage is 90% on their side. The response is much more costly and difficult to muster.

DBG, you screwed up. No amount of Youtube videos, Reddit, Twitter can change that (didnt save EQN or Landmark either...)

Here's the thing...ya I can chase the Valk away in an AA mossie but usually die doing it. And someone will suggest...well get more people to come up....meanwhile, the Valk team has the fun and all the reward.

Sound like a great design to you? Anyone? Buehler? Buehler?

But guys...again here's the thing. What people log in for is big brawls. BIG FIGHTS. PS2 is supposed to be an MMOFPS.

And now, 3-4 guys can wreck ANY fight. ANY fight.

You get a big fight going, front lines, flanks....and then...Sundies all gone. Rinse, repeat.

1000 foot elevation Valk
Even 1 ESF as cover...usually 2
Respawns in Valk
Repairs in Valk
Full rotation funner in Valk
Drifter Jet drops
C4+Rocklet
Dead Sundies

It's cheese guys.

Now..I like flying up to meet the threat. I do. It's a challenge. I love that the battlefield is three dimensional. But Sunderer LIVES matter. Har har.

Seriously though. This cheese tactic is ruining fights. Not a lot of people get Sundies. Now they are 90% INDEFENSIBLE.

Bad design is bad design guys. Landmark. EQN. ...

Oh hey gais, let's make a Hive.

ps. Valk Nanite cost vs ESF...Design(tm) !
pss. and reference thread on impending nerf to AA turrets...design (tm) !
...

Fingers crossed for the rocklet being the catalyst for the nerf/removal of LA C4. A man can dream.

I don't know what you're talking about. Using the Valkyrie as a mobile c4 drop station gives it a great use. Don't nerf the rocklets,c4, or the Valkyrie. I really think you should just adopt the same tactics that temo uses with the Valkyrie.

Looks like someone finally met a decent Valk crew. It's not cheese, it's called being well organized.
Your team needs to organize too, send some AA ESFs, then they are also not a problem anymore.

I spent plenty of time arguing with some of my friends that fly with them. The big divide is that fun for me is challenging fight where either side could win. Fun for them is winning at any cost regardless of how cheesy the tactics are. I can tell you that there's absolutely no changing the way they have fun, and all the hate they get is making them troll even harder. In the end, they're not wrong and it's not their fault, they're just having fun and playing within the rules. The problem I see is that every pilot who wants to group up already flies VS, then all that's left are a few noobs who fly when they get Indar and a handfull of Skyknights scattered about. The people I mostly blame are the Skyknights who complain about gank squads but fly under their cover and won't group up against them and make a difference, and solo pilots who won't group up and spend time ******** about groups in a MMO. I spent my whole 4 months in this game trying to get more people flying for TR and NC with little to no luck, so I quit for Arma 3 and found what I was looking for. To beat them you have to group up, and if that's too cheesy then either find your little 1v1 strategy or find a game that better suits you.

Good Valk crews are FUN to fight. The VS guys on my server have been doing VALK runs for a long time. Even when they weren't as effective. It's good coordination. I love the idea of Valks and would like to see more of them. I enjoy the air game.

The issue is the very bad design decision that allows Light Assaults to destroy any sundy, any time.

Possible fixes:

1. Valks can't drop passengers above 500 feet (or whatever the lock on range is....) Make the Valks take a risk
2. Valk and Galaxy dropped passengers drop via pods, not self guided
3. LA's must choose between C4 OR Rocklets (buff Rocklets in this case)
4. Buff Sundies

Now..if DBG wants to FIX the problem not MASK it by starting a reactionary buff/nerf cycle with unknown impacts that require more of the same...the choice is #3 above.

Or we could all just get ANTS, mine cortium and build walls in out-of-the-way places for the LOL Lock Merry Go Round.




It took DBG 9 months to correct the screw up of OP ZOE MAXes and Harrassers. 9 months. I'd like to avoid that here.

So that everyone is a C4 LA valk crew? That makes no sense.

Uh oh. They made it so walkers can no longer kill LA! Omfg why DB why!

This tactic has existed since the introduction of the Valkyrie.
It is now slightly more cost-effective, granted, thanks to being able to pick off weakened targets with the Rocklet rifle.

You could always just get a Blockade sundy with two Kobalt gunners and drive near the LA's usual targets and shoot them out of the sky easily.

I generally don't see valks in groups so just run a walker on your sundy, hell even a basilisk works. Or if you're gifted with certs then purchase max level stealth. I usually only see valk C4 drops on large vehicle groups (mostly tanks) that are looking for easy infantry farm and I have a hard time feeling sorry for them.

Oh and for the record, I see far more mossy balls and lonewolves than I do scythes so I'm not really sure how much your "we're defenseless" statement holds water. It doesn't take many esf's to destroy a valk even if they all seem to be running banshees these days. That valk is still a sitting duck with only a belly gun to chase them off.

It's well organized cheese, it can be both. LA C4 spam out of Valks is about at cheesy as it gets.

Did they nerf the Walker, or are you just joking?

On Connery?... You're smoking crack.

Well if LA are killing sunderers with total impunity it must mean that the 75 rounds of 1000m/s 600rpm 130/50m-84/400m damage 0 vertical angle heavy machine gun can no longer hurt them.

I mean, come on now, surely SOMEONE would be able to use it (or a pair of them) to gun down floating LA dropping C4 and shooting rocklets at their sunderer!

It must no longer damage infantry at all. That must be it.

Ground will NEVER win against a determined Valk crew. It'll eventually miss one of the infinite C4 fairies and it's game over. At 250 Nanites you can't kill Valks fast enough to keep even a single pilot from pulling one, and endless C4 fairies are completely free. It's just a **** system all around.

It takes four magazines from a Rocklet and then 2 C4 to kill a deploy shield Sundy. Takes one guy about 15 seconds at least, which is an age (Demigan has tested this in VR). If you organise and get more than one player to attack the same Sundy (or it is not shielded) then it goes down faster.

This just sounds like good, co ordinated players to me. Especially as the Valk is, in fact, a light troop carrier so it sounds like it was being used for its intended purpose.

Good tactics are not bad design. Nor are they an exploit if being used as intended.

There's no arguing it's not coordinated, but I'm sure the Valk's intended purpose wasn't a faucet to spawn an endless stream of OHK C4 fairies over a target. Either way, the directions this game has taken have driven away paying players, as evidence by closed and downgraded servers, so the common argument that things should stay the same and players should just get good is nonsense.

I've run into the same thing, on Both Connery and Emerald. Only the issue is a little more severe than you may have outlined. I've been pretty public in the past with my open disdain for the current state of the air to ground relationship. This kind of thing is highly exploitable by a very small number of players if they're willing and able to make even semi-competent use of one of the most poorly balanced relationships in the game.

Just within the past week I saw this happen on Connery. I was playing my TR character and I was in my SkyGuard among a group of friendly tanks and sundys. We'd been holding a hillside south-west of Auraxis Firearms Corps on Amerish. We'd been fighting for maybe 5-10 minutes, slowly gaining ground on the VS when out of nowhere one sundy and one Prowler go up in smoke. I activate my thermals and do a quick 360 to try and find what I assume are infantry that have managed to sneak up on us, and I don't see any. I look straight up and swivel my turret to see if I can find any hornet Scythes but can't see any of those either. What I DO see however is a brick of C-4 Falling from the heavens and land close to one of our other tanks before detonating. I looked up at the sky again to see if I could spot the C4 Fairy and couldn't. I did however, continue to see more and more C-4 falling and detonating.

I kinda figured something was up so I Redeployed, pulled a mossy from as close as I could, and sped back over. What do I find? A Valkyrie hovering about 600 Meters above the ground with a steady stream of Light Assaults spawning and dropping out of it immediately and using drifter jets once they'd fallen close enough to see the TR vehicles render, but NOT close enough that ground armor could see them hovering in the air. They'd toss their C-4, Detonate, and redeploy before they ever even hit the ground. They'd then respawn in the Valk, and do it all again.

And to anyone that wants to quote the usual deflections of: "But C-4 costs Nanites!", or "It takes skill to hit targets from that range!", or "It's just a showcase of what excellent coordination can do!", all of those are weak excuses, and none of them really hold water in any meaningful context.

1) C-4 is dirt cheap. I've chain pulled it for more than an hour straight without the Amerish bonus or any boosts active and still never ran out the nanites to keep pulling it as fast as I could throw\detonate it and then run back to the spawn terminal to get more.

2) It's not hard to hit targets you're hovering right above and when you don't have to do any kind of significant aiming. Seriously, you can only throw C-4 so far and it doesn't have much in the way of horizontal momentum. You just have to get slightly off to the side of 'directly above' your target, toss, wait, boom. I've figured it out in only 3-5 minutes of practice with a few friends and I'm not exactly the best player in the world. There's no appreciable learning curve vs. reward to these scenarios, AT ALL.

3) You can pull this off with as little as 2 people. That's it. It doesn't take marshaling a full platoon or even a squad to make this effective, it takes literally two people. And it gets incredibly effective if you can get even two or three more in on the action. Add in the fact that it's less 'Uber synergistic ability complimentary' than it is 'We know where the games holes are and how to exploit them' (since it relies on the games inability to render vehicles at that range they're hiding above) and it's plainly NOT teamwork, it's group exploitation.

Oh dear mother of god, this is so sad.

Previously all the complaints were "them C4 fairies can drop C4 on me from extreme heights, there's no way I can defend myself! They just drop it from 50m so my radar doesn't work and Spitfires don't fire!"
Now the C4 fairies actually drop down on the ground right on top of you and fire in your rear, but you still complain? In fact you try to pass it off as if they are more lethal than ever, even though the kill method now takes longer than before and gives you more time to react. It also make the LA more vulnerable as things like radar and Spitfires are a sure-fire way to detect and murder them before they succeed.

Seriously stop complaining about this. Get smart, use one of the thousand-and-one anti-LA solutions that are already there. If you don't, then you are fair game and have no right to complain.

I'm sorry but I'm calling bullcrap.

Valkyries hovering at 600m and not rendering? Drifters falling until the vehicles render even though vehicles render at least up to 750m? Players dropping C4 from a great height and detonating it while it's on the ground even though C4 takes ages to actually get on the ground because the visual C4 drops faster than the C4 hitbox? You are talking about dropping C4 from 300m+ height. Hitting something from that height is a miracle, because the target has to remain stationary for a long time while the C4 falls and unless you are hovering pinpoint perfectly over your target and throw straight down it's pretty damn tough landing your C4. Oh but ofcourse your target also has to be spotted so you can actually know when you are perfectly above them.
From 300m+ height, combined with trying to position yourself above the target it easily takes more than 30 seconds to make sure your C4 detonates properly on-target. 30 seconds is the time it takes for a maxed Drifter to run out of fuel, so you would be redeploying while falling to the ground, not an ideal situation.


"C4 is dirt cheap!"
Well we can actually calculate that easily. Let's say you start with 2 C4 and 750 resources and go C4ring for one hour. Every 3 minutes you regenerate 2 C4. That means that in one hour you regenerate 60 C4, and you've got 7 C4 in reserve so that makes 67 C4 total.
However I've seen more people state they could chain-pull C4. One even claimed that he could spawn, walk up to a gravlift, drop 2 C4 over an edge, get a few kills and immediately return for an hour straight. However these methods take far less than 1 minute, meaning that you run out of C4 within 5 minutes (1 minute per 2 C4, so after 3 minutes you used 6 C4 and gain 2 more. Another 2 minutes and you have 1,25 C4. At the fifth minute you toss your newly regenerated last C4 and are stuck with 1 C4 after every 1 to 2 minutes, 1 C4 isn't enough to kill a vehicle so you are stuck with waiting for 3 minutes per run unless you use your Rocklet Rifle, which is impossible from 300m+).
Considering your C4 fairies did it even faster within 30 seconds they would have run out within 2 and a half minutes. And you know what? If you guys just moved a little on sporadic moments you would have been fine. The C4 fairies would have missed their C4 most of the time (the enormous time between dropping C4 and it actually hitting the target remember?) and lost out on resources quickly, forcing them to either quit or get close to you so you can spot and kill them (which you should have been able to do anyway).


Now I will say this: Yes it's too easy to eliminate tanks by dropping from aircraft. But don't go around making up bullcrap stories just to "prove" your point. I'm all for giving C4 a time-bomb rather than remote-detonated if it drops more than 50m, giving the targets a bit more time to react and potentially even disarm it. But that's the thing: You have to react. You can complain about Valkyries all you want, but since 90% of the tankers don't even try to protect themselves from C4 fairies in the first place there's no sense in complaining about Valkyries just yet, see OP for instance who's complaining about C4 fairies who now give the tanker an easier time to detect the C4 fairy and defend themselves by trying to use the Rocklet Rifle to finish off targets. Most of these targets will be approached by the ordinary way of "move closer from the spawn". And if you look at tank columns the problem is mega-obvious. Rather than seeing a few Spitfires line the edges of the road as sentries and C4 fairy killers you can find 10+ tanks without a single Spitfire in sight. They also won't have radar, or try to spot C4 fairies by determining which paths a C4 fairy has to take to approach you, or just move around a bit to make it tough for a C4 fairy to keep up with you and drop at the right moment, or stay away from buildings and cover that's currently in use by enemy infantry and then be surprised that C4 can drop on you etc etc.

Well it's actually a true story, but in fairness about the render distance thing: I had dialed down the Render Distance a bit to help performance. At the time I was using a video card that I've since found out to be partially defective, so that's a detail I neglected. Also, if you'd be so kind, you'd notice that I never said I died to the C4 monkeys. And I didn't die to them, even once in that fight. I saw a lot of others die to them. They weren't snipers with the stuff either. It's true they did score some direct hits on people but for the most part they were nearly always missing a direct hit on anything that wasn't a deployed sundy or lockdown prowler. Not that that was entirely a saving grace since even the splash damage of C4 packs enough punch to cause confusion in the ranks, and while they may have only wounded tanks, they would frequently be the death of the engis that would be nearby.

Also: I'm fully aware baddies are going to die to C-4, and for the record, I DID warn the others in my area that there were C4 Valk Droppers. Problem is, I play in the late late night and very early morning. The majority of players I see during those times are Asian outfits (Remember this is on Connery) , and likely couldn't understand my warnings (both typed and written). And they didn't have a hard time picking out targets since the ground forces that were fighting each other basically kept every vehicle on both sides spotted at all times.

As for the C4 upkeep, remember they were only doing this for about 10-15 minutes tops. I harassed them as much as possible in my mossy (It's completely potato and I'm not much of a pilot) so at best all I did was slow them down a bit until some more qualified pilots showed up to put an end to them. Likely though that my chasing them out of position did give them some time to recover supplies. Also, Members (which I don't feel it's an unrealistic assumption to say some of them likely were) regen 75 nanites per minute, not 50, so that helps considerably in maintaining C-4 spam.

EDIT: Also, one final detail, at the time the VS had the Amerish bonus. So they could have kept doing it for a LONG time.

Look that already changes a lot about your story. It's not some super-invisible Valkyrie droppers anymore that lay waste to entire tank columns, but it's a group of Valkyrie droppers that waste a ton of resources and time trying to destroy vehicles, and often missing their target.

And it doesn't matter if you were the one who died to them or it was others, the fact remains that despite a rain of C4 that often didn't kill it's target, these tanks mostly just stood there and didn't take any action to protect themselves. Even just irregular movements helps you.
Now like I said, we can try to find a solution to make it a bit harder to drop C4 from high altitudes, but with how the current infantry vs tank balance is there's nothing wrong with the status-quo of C4. There's enough ways to protect yourself, and if people do not use them at all that's their problem. Especially in tank columns that farm a base (you know, just about every one of them) you should be seeing two or three Spitfires being placed about to warn and shoot down the C4 fairies, you should be seeing one or two tanks with an AI top gun with heat vision (yes that's getting nerfed, but people didn't really use it before and they won't be using it after). Even without heat vision a Kobalt for instance can keep several tanks safe and annihilate any C4 fairy that tries to approach.

Seeking out targets and hitting them are two different things. It's tough that we don't have a deeper communications system so you could talk to your Asian players. They should really enhance the way spots are used in-game as well as allow players to place special markers on the battlefield, one of which would be a warning against C4 fairies or other air assaults.

That's true. So what would your solution be here? A complete removal of C4 isn't a good solution. You can decrease the effectiveness, or maybe we are thinking too difficult. What if we just added a COF to C4 throwing? The higher you are the less chance you have to hit your target. In 'normal' combat it makes next to no difference since you'll be almost on top of your target anyway.
Additionally I've proposed a ton of things such as giving HE and HEAT canons more elevation so they can perfect their anti-infantry role even against infantry on high positions and have the added bonus of anti-C4 fairy as well as being able to perform a skillful and relatively short-ranged anti-aircraft role, but without the OHK mechanic that AP shots have. Additionally the HE canon should have an auto-granted AI canon available, and the HEAT canon an auto-granted AA canon (small magazine, 0,5m flak detonation range at the maximum as opposed to the 8m flak detonation range we have now, high accuracy, something akin to Walker damage). Such changes help diversify the loadout choices for vehicles and help protect vehicles against C4 fairy strikes even when dropped from aircraft.

That's nasty. Sounds like the 10 to 15 minutes was about their limit then assuming all of them were members, they did 30 second runs and they had the Amerish bonus.