[Suggestion] My Take on the Heavy Assault Problem

You're really reaching there. They're only infantry in the sense that they can go most of the same places and spawn from loadout terminals. They really are unique in the game and can't be placed in either category.

First of all - your argumentation is completeley hollow. Ppl whine therefore there is an issue? If you consider ps2 a 1v1, tdm or arena shooter where the main metric is individual k/d - sure heavy is a problem. If you consider Planetside 2 a large scale, combined arms, strategical and tactical game with emphasis on teamwork and squad composition then HA is just fine. All sides have HA, and although they are strongest linear fighting class they can be flanked and ganked just fine. Their shield was nerfed allready. And good luck thinking maxes will tank instead of heavies. No charge, and thanx to self-repair no engineers helping them. Nah maxes will farm then redeploy.

You are clearaly in the 1v1 k/d camp. I'm in the Teamwork camp. I have no idea why you play planetside with your mindset. The game is horrible as a TDM. I have no idea what Wrel thinks because he isn't on the forums and I am not on reddit (I shouldn't have to be tbh we have official forums) but seeing what "balancing" have happened since he joined the dev team I'm not very hopeful of any new changes. At least now we have heavies that can cloak... Well if they have the 20-100k certs required to waste to get that implant. Last three large implant packs I bought were 100% duplicates. Awesome, and the reward for breaking down implants? MLG!

I think people only started to care once they finally realised it could apply to PS2. In the beginning relatively few player were HA only, I believe because no one knew how big of an advantage they gave in combat. It's too late now to try remove the cancerous tumor that is the "l33t MLG Pro" crowd that has embedded itself into PS2's playerbase.

There maybe be more LAs, but there are still a lot of HAs running around. (Fun fact: With max rank catlike it is possible to jump from the first level of the tower above the ground floor to the second, completely avoiding the staircase and full visibility of the spawn shield.)

The concept of PS2, in my opinion, is not as an arcade shooter or TMD, but as a large-scale combat game. That is to say, victory is not achieved by killing, only progressed. Objectives must be captured and held. One class just so happens to be the best at this without any additional skill or effort requirements, and is thus overpopulated.

PS2's balancing requirement is that one player cannot have too high of an impact on other players, and that one group of players cannot have too high of an impact on another group. MAXes killing several people then running away at high speeds with their tail between their legs makes them a very low risk, high rewards single player whom has great influence on a battle. Crippling their extreme sudden mobility shortens the lengthy shelf-life.

Ammo printer is extremely slow, at one resupply every 60s at max rank. There is absolutely a need for engineers and ammo sunndies. Regen, once again is very slow comparatively, and does not revive players. Minor Cloak is extremely slow to both enter and exit.

The "Combined Arms Initiative" saw almost universal decreases in infantry-based AV equipment as well. Infantry is worse off than ever before, but this time tanks are little weaker as well. Meanwhile air gets buffed, again.

I have to admit that this is the farthest I got. No incentive for teamwork. Ok, you mean like the premier anti-infantry class also being arguably the best anti-vehicle class as well as being able to heal themselves? That's a solo rambo list of qualities if I've ever heard it.

Then, limit tanky-ness on HAs to get more medics. Ok, but those medics are playing for guns, not to heal the HAs because of their reduced tanky-ness?

I could read further for entertainment, but so far you're killing your own argument.

My argument is fine, the fact that you neither bother to finish the read nor are able to make a counter-argument is kinda typical for forumside. Maybe if you read it all - but nah - effort - better to whine. You are the one killing your own argument. Sadly you don't even realize it. You have made yourself irrelevant and your effort to counterargue is just sad. Heavies is the least of issues this game has. That being said. Medkits should be completely removed - for all classes. Resto-kits are ok, but nothing should heal faster than a medic's heal tool. But 1v1 mlg-nonscope side says different so GG.

Well; yes and no. With the large scale battles and the cohesive squads we had in the beginning of this game. No one infantry player could affect a contested territory to such a degree. The pecking order in this game was and still is. Nubers(pop) > teamwork > individual MLG. Things should still be fairly balanced on the individual level I agree. Maxes are force multipliers and expensive ones too so I don't consider them a big issue. Problem nowadays is there's so little teamwork among randoms that force multipliers and tough classes like the HA has a lot of impact, maybe too much. The question is: Do we address this by nerfing tanking classes or by re-introducing teamwork to the game?

As someone who, these days, main vehicle I can tell you. Ammo printer is very good. Unless you camp a base or are in a stalemate (typical "Indar-T") or similar you will NOT run out of ammo on tanks, harassers or sunderers. Actually playing Walker harasser and being constantly focused by 3-4 air in mid/low pop. We managed just fine with lvl 1 Ammo Printer... It varies a little depending on the weapon as it really works as an "ammo tick" and not as the description says. Unless they have changed that now. I actually still just use ammo printer 1. For infantry it's another matter.

My main issue with CAI is that it doesn't really offer anything to improve gameplay for me, while introducing a ton of changes, potential bugs and re-balancing issues. It's a huge change for what I interpret to being nothing. I just feel they have spent a lot of time and energy on something that really doesn't improve the game, maybe will run some players off, and that the effort shoulda been spent differently.

That was my argument..... I'll draw a picture next time. You complain about no need for teamwork, but that HAs are fine. Then I pointed out a critical flaw with HAs making them solo units..... sigh. Oh well, typical forumside. GGclose

No, that's shortsighted. Is not the point of this whole discussion that isolation by difference should not be allowed as a justification for the numerical imbalance of player class contribution? The postulation that Heavy Assault is too strong in too many situations can not coexist within hypothetics such as having too many Medics not healing or not needing for the skills of another Infiltrator. The ideal for the collective organization of the schools of thought that feel we have too many of one class or too few of another class presumedly sits somewhere near 20% for all five Pure Infantry Classes, regardless of all considerations and requirements of the game.

And I'm entirely fine with working within the framework of that draconic absurdity.

Be that the case, however, we can not then cast the MAX creature out into the gutter because they are "unique" or "different." They occupy the same climates as PIC players and exert influence on those ecosystem and on its occupants' choices. They can not be an island that is neither Infantry nor Vehicles else any consideration of the other five classes within that much-vaunted interior domain will be flawed. That requires determining a justification within the framework of the original argument about why ~5% global MAXes is not a problem but ~30% global Heavy Assault is a problem and how ~16% for all PIC and for MAX across the board would be outside of the scope of this discussion.

Edit: at least six (classes) goes into twelve (people in a squad) evenly.

If teamwork was "reintroduced" into the game, if one could say it ever truly left, there would have to be ways to ensure it didn't just fade out into the background again like it is now. Who knows what that might entail, or how well it would be received. At least taking the tank out of the HA is fast and easy.

I can't say it's done the same for me. I mostly consider it a form of increasing the time between resupplies, especially as infantry. Ammo only becomes a problem in larger fights anyway, in my opinion, which is where it fails to catch up all the way.

I agree completely. Feels like they just shuffled the deck on what's useful and what isn't. I would be quite happy to see it reformed or improved somehow.

In my opinion simple solution would be to count MAXes as infantry in a vehicle and subtract them from the total infantry base. I.E. 50+% Engineers isn't an issue because most of them aren't really engineers, they're pilots and drives and co.

It's forumside, I'm sure there are at least a dozen points of this thread. I agree with OP that the game would change for the better with the removal of the HA shield, and his suggestion of granting them passive flak armor, so they could stack nanoweave, plus opening up all weapons but snipers seems like a pretty good sidegrade. He did use % of class played to back up his argument that the HA is too good, but I agree with you in that the HA is played the most because it's general infantry, same as we have fewer medics and snipers in real life than grunts. I just don't agree that maxes are in the same boat as infantry.

It's too late to change the tumor, but how it affects the rest of the body is up to you. Do you focus on it, pay attention to it and allow it to infect others, or do you leave it where it is and allow the rest of the body to grow healthy despite it? Even that tumor will grow old and die eventually.

Fun fact: almost none of those HA's have max catlike and are capable of doing that.
But the point is that the HA is the omniversally most useful unit currently, both for the metagame of capturing area's to progress and eventually hold the points/destroy enemy spawnpoints and for the KD meta that has evolved, no matter how completely twisted and wrong that is considering how easy it is to farm KD and fool people that you are "good" at the game.
Well we can change both those things: relaying the focus to other stats to shift the KD meta to general statistics and by creating alternative roles to play.
I've just given clear indicators that this does work: In a tower battle LA's become more useful and suddenly they are used more often. HA's are still used there because they still are the most omniversally useful unit. If we reduce that by adding even more usefulness to other classes there's less reason to pick HA's.
Then another indicator is the effect stats have on players. Changing the stats will have an effect. And even if I'm wrong and it's just a small effect... Isn't even that small effect a positive thing? We are talking about tracking and displaying just a few different stats on the TAB screen more promimently than KD, and perhaps removing the death counter to signal how unimportant it is to die in PS2 as long as you achieve your goal. It's a low effort change compared to anything that's being done right now, at the very least it's worth a try.

And the solution? Make HA's less universally the best at the objectives by adding new one's!
As for the large-scale combat game, the effects of the capture are too temporary for players to be truly enticed by it. That's why people will prefer to stick somewhere in the lattice even if they get cut off, surrounded and warpgated, as long as they get to keep fighting on that base they are happy as a clam. And many of the attackers will think the same and ignore the fact that the base they are attacking has practically no value anymore. The result: Players will seek a new meta to measure themselves and their fun value with. And the only one currently available is KD. Is it a wonder that everyone joins the tumor that KD is if it's the only other meta around you could follow?
So we need to have alternatives. New ways to achieve objectives, better metagame for example by adding new capture methods that can be rotated between bases etc.

PS2's balancing requirement is that fights are always going to be imbalanced. There's always going to be one more player on another faction, always going to be more vehicles available to another group. If you want to have the large-scale battles, you need to balance for the large-scale happenings. If one team zergs, then they should have disadvantages as well as advantages that even eachother out compared to simply dividing the players neatly over all bases. You could think about simply increasing the capture time of a base for example.

What are you talking about? I get the idea that you are trying to point out how solo players are somehow advantaged over the group, but you are pointin the wrong things out. Ammo printer? With 1 magazine per 60 seconds (at max rank!) it's almost useless for 90% of the infantry who will never run out of ammo in normal fights and are easier and faster resupplied by engineers in those cases they do run out. It's useful for vehicles to have something to pelt an enemy with and stay in combat for longer, but it's not capable of sustaining you forever easily, eventually you'll have to find an ammo sunderer unless you really have only very sporadic fights. Regen? The game is riddled with ways to regen, and Medics primary role has always been reviving people, their regen capabilities were a bonus. Minor cloak you only name it's disadvantages, so I have no idea what you are getting at there.

Yes, but what does that have to do with our discussion? The fact that they have bungled it up during this massive overhaul isn't a big surprise, a large portion of the players also admitted that it was impossible to properly know what was going to happen until we played (for most parts of the update, not the specific parts of G2A being nerfed to hell while ESF got buffed on every angle, which the pilots naturally still managed to turn into a "we got nerfed" thread somehow).

There is no heavy assault problem. People just fight the heavy assault in its domain, lose and think its OP. The heavy is simply the class thats built to kill head on. Medic and engineer are built for utility/support and light assault and infil are more ambush.

I have to disagree with your K/D point a bit. Mostly based on if someone is really focused on K/D heavy assault is honestly the third best class for it in my opinion. Using engineer and pulling vehicles if your decent with them will yield better results than running around as a heavy. The other one is infiltrator a good sniper will have a much better K/D than most heavy assaults.
Just from some rough math with the K/D of weapons from dasanfall on average i have roughly a 3K/D playing heavy asault an 8 K/D while sniping and a 12 K/D while rolling around in an MBT as engineer.

Sniper might get a bigger K/D than heavy assault, but heavy assault is the only infantry class that stays efficient considering all other relevant stats(like KPH). I don't think majority of players use HA for the K/D, but because of it's overall efficiency and lack of hard counters. That plus our tactical classes being in trouble as their flanking attempts are always known thanks to automatic motion spotting

Engineer might of course be more successful with a vehicle, but that has nothing to do with infantry balance

Got a link to where that statement is by chance? I want to have it on hand to shove into the face of every moron HA who whine about getting nerfed along with a "now shut up and learn to actually play instead of press F and spray".

The body may not outlive the tumor. Trying to redirect attention won't make it go away and in all likelihood won't even slow its growth. For such a relatively small game, there is already a surprisingly large amount of elitists running (flying) around

My "fun fact" is simply a semi-related side note that may be of use to someone here on the forums. Anyone with Catlike ought to figure out how to make the jumps up. --Especially as an infiltrator.

It will have an effect in the sense that virtually everything does in some small way, but the overall impact would not be very noticeable. Let me go out on a limb here and say I don't disagree with changing the stats, I think pushing players toward teamwork, however futile, is a good idea. I just don't believe this will have any noticeable impact on the current low of gameplay. I highly doubt this alone would solve the issues which plague this game.

The proposed solution is to make HAs universally the best at objectives by changing the reason why they are the best, not to shape the game around a simple issue.

By forming the HA into a versatile combat fighter without any special tools, abilities, or tricks of their sleeves they lose their massive competitive edge, and make room for more players to choose other classes for their abilities and tools to achieve objectives.

Players fight for fun. If they're having fun, why do they feel the need to quantify it? And what about directives and medals and SPM? Personally I try to maintain a KDR of at least 2.0, just to make sure I'm not wasting time or being an idiot. When it starts to drop too low, I have to put my work towards an aurax aside and pull out the big guns or change how I'm playing. For me, KDR is not an indicator of how much fun I'm having, and I'm sure this is true for a lot of other players as well.

KDR is not the only choice to look to.

The rest of my post you've quoted was in reply to PinkHurtsMyEyes, not a continuation of my reply to you.

It will slow it's growth because the only way for this tumor to grow is to get attention from the rest of the players. As long as the other players have other options, less people will pay attention and/or actively join the tumor.

And the reason there's a "surprising amount of elitists running around" is for two reasons. One: There's an obviously OP playstyle that is blatantly better than any other playstyle if you can do it and the people who can do it prefer to think of themselves as the elite rather than the people ruining the game for most others by using an OP platform with a niche skillset. Just think: How many elitist vehicle users are there? There's many many more vehicle users in the game but the vehicle elitist group is miniscule vs the pilot community.
Then there's the second reason for elitism: We's been having a KD oriented game for almost 5 years! Ofcourse the game starts gathering elitists who farm their KD if the entire game is set up to push you in that direction due to lack of alternative bragging rights/stories to tell and KD in the forefront to boast off, regardless of how broken a metric it truly is.

How couldn't this have a noticeable impact on the game? The addition of KD had a massively huge impact on the entire game and the metric is farmable as all hell. Imagine if we added actually useful, non-farmable statistics to measure our progress with... Someone who actively hunts down vehicles and MAX's won't have to have a 10 minute farming session "to compensate their KD again". They can just say "who the f cares about KD? I just got 8 vehicle kills in 7 lives, take that you Mother F's!"

That's not a solution. If you keep HA's universally the best, they will still be universally chosen. Only if the specializations springing from that universal best are truly good enough to go that way will they be picked. But currently the HA simply doesn't really fall behind on the other classes. You may temporarily need a few Medics, Engineers, Infiltrators or LA's, but the HA's firepower and total health are simply useful whatever you are doing and more of them is always better.

Without special tools, abilities or tricks, the HA would basically be an LA without it's jetpack. That's no solution either.
But why waste time rebalancing classes against each other, if you can change the statistics? And what about adding new things to the meta so that other classes get more reasons to be picked to accomplish those tasks? You hit two birds with one stone with that last option.

Because "fun" can be measured in many ways. Statistics is one of the things that it can be measured with, and there's nothing wrong with that. Someone being proud of reaching their first auraxium, or their first 10.000 kills, or managing to pull off a 0.5 KD after doing an entire day of hunting MAX's and vehicles on foot... Just something to show you that your playsession wasn't just fun to participate in, but something to show yourself and perhaps others what you accomplished.

And this is exacly why KD needs to be removed or supported by other stats, because you are actually letting your fun rely on KD.
If KD didn't matter for your fun value, you wouldn't mind how low it dropped. If you are auraxing a weapon and it's going badly because the weapon isn't what you are used to or could be one of those badly balanced weapons that can't compete but you've gotta auraxium it... Then it doesn't matter does it? Your KD perfectly reflects what you are doing, and auraxing a bad weapon or one you aren't used to and still reaching a 1.0 KD can be a sign that you are doing great. But you still feel that need to actually increase your KD to 2.0 with "the big guns" before calling it quits.

Really? You've mentioned medals which pull you to auraxing more weapons, so that's good but there isn't a lot of attention for those. SPM? You rarely hear anyone about it and there's not really a community surrounding totems with SPM on it and praying, while there are such communities for KD. There's people who won't even look at people with less than a 5.0 KD. And you yourself also want so desparately to keep a 2.0KD and are willing to sacrifice playtime to boost that number should things go badly. And do you really think that's a good system? One where you willingly pick the easiest and biggest guns and a adopt a playstyle just to boost your KD to a certain number you have in your mind? Which in turn is making other people's KD's lower and encourages them to start doing stuff like holding back from a chokepoint until other have passed through so they risk dying less etc etc etc...

It's always a balance between what you want to achieve, and still trying to have a fun playstyle for yourself. It's more frustrating and time-consuming to keep sniping somewhere and see dozens of enemies get away (or even be one of those snipers that thinks the only targets they can engage are non-moving targets), than it is to simply pick a class that has more health and more than enough firepower and go fight other classes with that.
As for engineers: Yes they are used a lot, if I recall correctly they are used almost as much as HA's but in vehicles.

But let's look at Campagne himself: He claims KD doesn't really affect him because he (or players) fight to have fun, but still whenever his KD drops as an indication of his playstyle, he feels the need to swap to some big guns and a playstyle to match to boost his KD again. Campagne might not be a constant KD *****, but he will change his play for the sake of it. Imagine if KD can do that to someone who thinks KD is "just to measure if I'm not wasting my time like an idiot". He doesn't even realize he's saying how important KD is to him. Now imagine what KD does to someone who does care...
And now imagine if we added more statistics that people like Campagne can say they actually care about... This will have a profound change on the game. It won't cut out the heavily KD-based gamers, but it will stop pulling just about everyone, including people like Campagne who claim it doesn't affect them much, into such playstyles.

"In a world where Death has no meaning ..." the only aggregated statistics is KDR

I never really had a issue with the HA but since a ton of player's do...

-Remove the shield ability
-Add 100-200 Health
-Give them access to assault rifle's
-Give them the ability to place a shield as cover

Boom some good idea's right there, you could also remove the launcher and add it to a new class called demolition. But i am just thinking and i am a horrible thinker..