How the new missiles help vehicles.

There's a major rework of anti-vehicle weapons coming. It's not the "badass" stuff one of the Developers wrote about on Twitter.

First of all, nothing beats a good surprise. Launching a dumbfire missile properly will inform the vehicle crew that they're under attack when they already get hit.
If the missile is fired from outside the crew's FoV, they'll never know someone just launched and missed, and is adjusting aim.

Secondly there's a Decimator coming, a slow missile.
Slow, which means it takes time for it to reach the target, and if the target notices it or just moves around regardless, the Decimetor is useless.

I've dodged dozens of AT missiles in my Vanguard, a tank that is very mobility handicapped.
Now with the Lightning or Prowler, which accelerate 2x quicker than the Vanny, this missile will just be a sign that it's time to relocate temporarily.
A Magrider... No comment. It strafes.

The lock on only launch mode means I don't have to worry about thousands of HA soldiers anymore. Sure they did small damage, but combined with other weapons they were the difference between reversing in a burning tank to fix it, or blowing up half way to cover.
Since it was impossible to tell an AA missile from the basic unguided rocket the HA gets stock, I had to quit firing and relocate regardless.

Now all these nightmares are a thing of the past.
Thanks, SOE.

Hovering planes will benefit even more from this than tanks, they can no longer get surprise-spammed by a bunch of missiles if the local HAs have guided AT rockets. The Decimator hitting a plane will only mean the pilot totally doesn't pay attention or has a truly bad day.
This gives the HA dudes a dilemma- attack a high speed plane with a lock on missile, or use the unguided one hoping to ambush a hovering one which in turn is useless against not hovering aircraft...

Then there's countermeasures- such as stealth or flares.
An ESF with a 3 second locking time increase will be able to move a good 250-300 meters if it becomes a target while hovering. Dropping a flare increases this time.
Even if the guided missiles lock on instantly, stealth will still give a giant advantage.

What exactly will you do against four or five simultaneous lockons?

Is the patch meant to handle vehicles at all? I must have missed something.

Anyhow, I assumed the decimator was meant as more of a close/medium range launcher, it seems like it'll reward you very heavily for positioning yourself well, I can only imagine how much damage it'll do to the rear of a tank. Probably not meant to be fired when your opponent knows where it's about to come from and is positioned to dodge it.

I like the G2A changes, I'll mourn the loss of the ability to fire my AA launcher at ground targets though. Anyhow, as the post said, G2A is meant to be a deterrent, not easy kills. The changes reflect exactly that.

Flair... /rollseyes

I wait.

Guided AT missiles aim for the center of a tank (or possibly worse- the center of its hull)*, which happens to be behind a hill when the tank is hull down. Recently I've gone from moving to a turret down position to just watching the missile hit whatever I'm hiding behind.

Usually the enemy HA figures out to dumbfire the next missile, forcing me to take evasive action or get hit, but now I guess I could just paint a big troll face decal on my Vanny's turret front.

*-Never tested the missiles on a shooting range so my opinion is only based on watching them fired at me.

EDIT: What the AT missile should have is reduced damage, but a top attack flight path so it ignores frontal armor and hull down, or even turret down positions completely- making it a sidegrade more than an upgrade with worse results dumbfired, but much better results when locked prior to launch.

Decimator is not for long range tank sniping its for taking out tanks that are mixing it up inside a base where the terrain makes it hard for a tank to escape. Kinda sad but I see myself running the default dumbfire as my primary build now for default usage. I can vaguely see the G2A missile losing dumbfire but the G2G lock on missile REALLY needs to have the dumbfire mode. Except for some rare fights you rarely have time for locking on on a ground vehicle. So its nice to have the capability to do it but not at the expense of snap firing.

Decimator will work just like it did in PS1 and it was never useless, there are plenty of times vehicles come in too close or an infantry manages to get up close from behind and this wear will tear apart any vehicle that does.

I do agree though that with no dumb fire on the lockon weapons is bad, tanks will be able to use their smoke to easily break any lockon you do get on them and carry right on shelling you.

What annoys me is that Lock-ons had a nerf (range) reverted at the cost of a nerf added (dumb fire)

I really hope Lock-ons won't be affected by the -20% damage anymore; you can't 2-shot a MBT from the back (it goes burning, slowly, slowly, slowly and eventually repaired).

Rocket spam VS tanks is very annoying. I roll up on a sundy and suddenly i have 10 rockets shoved up my........

Yeah, no chance to dodge, evade or nothing, and I'm not even close! There is just so much spam that it's a quick death.

Now, do I think that we need to remove dumb fire? No. Spamming is part of warfare.

It seems that guided rockets are an upgrade, though i'm not positive on this being an engie, and that's good IMO.
However, 1 or 2 rockets will own a magrider, even when upgraded.

Granted, Low armor = Maneuverability. But when suddenly I come on 5 guys with rockets, that doesn't mean crap. If I am lucky to surprise them, I can at least run them over now unlike PS1 where they took that out.

So, I can spend massive points to add .25 second to lock on time, and then even more points to increase that. Okay, that works great.

I've never been destroyed from a lock on missile though, only from spammed missiles in mass.


I think that possibly SOE is trying to reduce the amount of buy one weapon wreak havoc on all units sorta idea.
Which seems fair.
infantry weapons are useless against tanks and planes. (unless its a sundy shooting a magrider) and thats the way it should be.
So would air weapons be useless against a tank?
Well, an air weapon would be more flak than armor piercing if you think about it.
So, what about AV weapons vs air.
Well, you got a huge explosion to blow **** up. So yeah, it would be, but how easy is it to hit a plane flying around unless they hover or are on the ground?

Exactly.

I think they are going with the right idea here and we just need to let them finalize it.

lol figures. Wish they would travel up a little bit to get over the terrain. You can fire them straight up after the lock on to give them a bit more altitude but it doesn't help a lot unless you're rather close.

LOL isn't this the point of smoke??!
Currently smoke is useless since infantry will just dumbfire on the same location as, where the smoke is. Duh.

That's why they bring out the decimator. It's the alternative. If you wanna hit vehicles in smoke, fire a decimator rocket at it.
The vehicle will NOT see it coming, since it backed off behind its own smoke screen.

Please try to think in more than 1 angle, thank you.

Lol why are people so butt-hurt that Heavy Assault guys wont be jack of all trades anymore?

AA or G2G is how it should be. Not G2G plus AA because you spent 7 dollars.

This doesn't affect default AV rockets. Did people forget or something? You can still dumbfire with no warning if you're out of FoV.

This has nothing to do with any of the above. It has to do with SOE making money. Very few people bought the G2G av rockets, lock-on took to long in general and dumbfire G2A worked great. Not like the G2A were great against air craft with boost, flares. longer lock-on and a good pilot. We only killed the stupid ones or careless ones. I really doubt the forced lock-on to save the few whining snipers that got rocket sniped for standing still for 3+ seconds or the whiney tanks that didn't bother to move was a reason. Nope it was all about the SC. Now you have to buy 2 items not 1. Same reason you have to buy stuff for each character and for the most part each class.

No smoke is not useless because unless your a fool your not going to drive right up close to the enemy infantry, so some will dumb fire at you which you can avoid by moving, while the smoke can also be used at the same time to loss the lockon for the tracking missiles effectively turning them into dumb fire and means that moving also avoids being hit by those too. If you think smoke is useless as you said then its clearly you not looking at things properly.

I'm still pretty worried about the decimator. I already see people using the default rocket launcher as a one shot kill gun in cqc and an even more high powered weapon seems like it could cause some serious rocket spam problems. Not to mention that having a missile that does huge damage to tanks means that more and more vehicle drivers are going to be subject to Instant Unexpected Unreactable Death Syndrom or IUUDS for short.

Hate this new change. The ability to dumb fire G2A at ground targets is vital. They already do less damage than all other rockets, so you are taking a hit vs tanks going with those already. I understand them wanting to make specializing have a bonus, but there is no reason to not allow a weaker generalist approach if players value flexibility over raw power. All tanks can load anti ground main guns an anti air secondaries (ok Walker isn't amazing but it will be anything infantry have no if they don't take G2A missiles, and if they do they have no AT for ground).

Max suits can load up two different arms.

ESF's can rock air with nose cannons and ground with rockets.

Libs can rock air with nose and tail guns, and ground with Daltons.

All this change is, is a huge nerf to infantry groups... and they were already the most abused group. This change definitely disheartens me and makes me regret spending as much on this game as I have already if I will be forced as an infantryman to always have a nemesis, where as tanks and aircraft do not have to accept that.

I for one can't wait to test out the Decimator...on infantry.

I love the default dumbfire rocket. It's rare that I miss a tank with it, and it's always funny to smack someone in the face with it.

How does this make sense as an analogy?

If I want to swap something on my tank, I have to spend another 250 resources on it and resummon it after the timer is up. If you want a dumb-fire, you can run to a resupply point and grab one.

You chose to be an AA HA. I chose to be an AP tank. I cannot magically Ctrl-Z into an HE tank any more easily than you can change into an AG HA.

The only thing I cared about in the whole post was the addition of the Decimator. I was a surgeon with the Deci in PS1 and can't wait to snipe aircraft with it in PS2. Deci's ruin a Max's day fast as well.