[Suggestion] A detailed look at the death of Armor. (LONG)

If your a tanker you can always do what I do against air and try to shoot them down between killing armor, or if they are trying to rocket pod you. As seen here. Warning it's pretty long.

I made that video a while ago, and since the latest patches the tank parkinson's wobble is really giving me a tought time. I still manage but I really hope they fix it. And since the releases of the phoenix's I have to keep moving, so I can't just sit at a distance shelling like I used to. I have only been killed by it a couple times. I'm still trying to figure out how to adapt to it. I may have to invest in nano repair as I was using top armor mostly to protect me from air attacks. But since I have racer 3 now I can mostly quickly get out of the way of rocket pods and end up doing donuts while ramping up on near by hills to shoot up at ESF's. The TR rocket launcher doesn't effect me any more then the normal rocket launchers do. I rarely get killed by dumb fire or lock on rockets because I use IR smoke and the racer speed helps dash for cover. But with the phoenix's I'm thinking cert up nano repair and just never stop speeding around the bases. Only that may open me up to always hitting tank mines. I'm sure ill figure something out.

This game, like many others where infantry, land, and air were all involved, has a cycle of which is the most powerful. Started out with air, then moved to tanks, and now the cycle is moving to infantry. Next infantry will get nerfed/ air will get buffed, then air will be superior again, and the buff/nerf cycle will repeat.

Tanks in my view should have always had less range on there weapons and been more survivable up close to infantry.

Instead we have weak tanks playing as long range artillery instead of being used as tanks.

Think of tanks as medium range NC max's that can kill very rapidly anything within 100 yards, while taking 10-12 rockets to kill, but cant hit anything after 200 yards.

Pure BS, this is whiny, "My tank can't sit there and deal death to hoards of people anymore," thread.

Here is the problem.

A good solid fight is going, push back and forth at a base. Teams are having fun throwing themselves at each other, flanking and working towards getting themselves in the advantageous position to whipe out the enemy then one or two spammers spawn their vehicles of doom and whipe out 10 of their own guys to clear your 20 man team. Now if you are defender, hide in the shield and wait 10 minutes hoping one of the other team will be stupid enough to walk in front of the shield reverse capping or abandon and go off to another base.Good fight is killed, you people who think resources and vehicles give you the right to have a 10+ to 1 KDR are worthless individuals who only focus on gimicks in FPS games like vehicles to pump your stats. Resources are nothing, after BR50 you literally never have to wait to spawn a vehicle except if you are a moron, you will always be able to spam your favorite Infantry slaughter device and after 20 more levels you can literally never not be in a fully certed vehicle. reaver, lib, mbt, lighting and you are set, you never have to give another infantryman a fair fight in your life.

Most people want a good fight which for most is spawn and not have too long until you are aiming down sights at the enemy, in between lives, sending a tell or two to the enemy praising or engaging in friendly banter. All vehicles do when they are not focused on is farm up players and shout how their "KD makes them leets."

If you had the balls to load out armor penetrating rounds and go against other vehicles that would be great and decent of you, but 99 out of 100 of you focus on cert farming infantry with little risk to yourselves. There is a reason everyone is loading vehicle killing items on engi and light assault, not just on heavy, your vehicle spam screws up any good battles.

So in turn, like many others,I will do everything in my power to kill your vehicles as soon as they spawn, even spawning my own reaver just to get enough shots on your weak rear points, sacrificing a life, to take you off the field quick and get you back waiting to spawn your next insta-gip vehicle or loadout. C4, mines and rockets will rain down on you the second your rear your face since you provide no interesting content to your enemies and are only looking for the no-risk/mass reward scenario. They should make vehicles kills worth a few thousand more xp, base, so vehicles are number 1 target all the time.

Everyone should just load vehicle kill loadouts until vehicles get the idea to fight other vehicles, not infantry. And now that these vehicle spammers have their perfect little infantry gun in the Pump-Action Insta-gip loadout to farm on the ground with, we can't even get good fights in biolabs anymore.

This is Planetside 2, not world of tanks. Infantry fights shouldn't be limited to the inside of biolabs only.

Tanks should be glass-cannons, just like in real life.
They deal an immense amount of damage but a single well shot three-stage warhead will immobilize it.

It's fine,

Tanks are suppose to help and support an army. They are not suppose to roll into 100 inf and blow them all away by themselves.

The first post in this rests on an assumption that armour is weak in gameplay terms. I contest that and suggest it not weak. Extremely effective, infact.

I have already said things about this in this thread.
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/the-game-of-infantry.107510/page-2#post-1440197


Most tanks I see get demolished as a result of stubbornly refusing to even attempt flanking the enemy or being somewhere unexpected.

In ps2 its the other way around. Infantry breaks through so that tanks can camp doorways.

In ps2 tanks are vulnerable as hell to rocketspam if they go in the open. Once you get into the narrow areas the fight is almost over and its easier to control infantry as there are only a few spots they will appear. The long killstreaks with tanks you get at towers once the opposition is almost pushed back into the spawnroom and you can just shell the areas they come out.

If you are talking about tank-destroyers they died with ww2. Their main selling point was that they were cheaper to make, but that became less of an issue after ww2 and at the same time rockets and other vehicles like helicopters became more effective at killing tanks.

Actually its more like the exact opposite. Not that any game should be balanced on real life.

The effective range and firepower of the tank is usually less than a heavy with a rocket launcher, considering the lack of accuracy and lack of splash of tank shells.

C4 and aircraft i have no issues with. Its so easy to create a no fly zone with AA to protect armor and infantry, and if I let someone gets close enough to c4 my tank they deserve to kill me.

To be honest, the infantry balance came first, but we have signs that the developers will start paying more attention to armor and vehicles coming up on the roadmap. Currently the largest debate, and one that will likely benefit you, is reworking of the MBTs.

IMO, the main reason people are so upset about tanks is that you are giving 1 player a distinct advantage over another by letting one just hop into a tank. That is it. 1v1 a tank will always beat infantry, that is the way it should be, But we're not talking about a tank vs. 1 infantry, we're talking about 1 player vs. 1 player.

The entire arguement here is really about MBTs. No one cares about lightnings. To be frank, lightnings should be support vehicles and everyone is rather secure with their current role. But everyone is very worried about the MBTs. With the current system one person can spawn a MBT and suddenly have the ability to kill a platoon of pubbys (Before you stop reading, hear me out, I am going somewhere with this). That, as is, is unacceptable. MBTs are just lightnings with upgraded armaments.

What we need is for the MBTs to be reworked. In order for them to get back the survivability you are looking for, they need to have more skill. Yes, I am talking about multi-person vehicles. 1 driver in an MBT would require that they be boosted. Why? Because the formula is no longer: 1 person vs 1 person, it's a team of people (Up to 3) working in tandem to get their death machine rolling vs 1. That kind of equation, justifies more dangerous MBTs.

Where is that going? Well, I doubt it'll mean upgraded weapons. Let us be blunt, you admit freely that HE was unfair before, everyone agrees with this, there is no point in revisiting that. But, lets say for a moment you were to boost MBT health and resistance by a factor of 2 or 3. Currently I enjoy prowlers. I will spawn a prowler and run around with 10 kill streaks, maybe more, and I freely admit I am not the best driver. Make the prowler x3 resistant and the level of mayhem one of those things can cause increases exponentially. You aren't just a greater pool of health, your getting a greater chance of getting to cover, your getting more engineers that want to repair you, you are getting a larger window in which you experience your first salvo of hits and you react.

There is a good chance that MBTs will get this kind of boost too. You say no one cares, yet there are a TON of people who have been begging for multi-person MBTs since the beginning, and they have picked up more support from the community as time has gone on.

Let them continue to buff infantry, eventually they will have to buff vehicles, and when they do, it will be good.

I personally love killing tanks because they are worth so much experience. I find it enjoyable sneaking up behind a tank with a decimator and blasting it from behind. Its even better now that i don't get killed with 1 hit typically. I agree though the power of tanks has waned and they aren't fun to actually play. I find that when I do play a tanker I normally am fodder to infantry or aircraft with little to know experience gain.

The danger for me is losing that combined arms feeling I get when I play. If things go too far toward infantry power, I might as well be playing blacklight retribution.
Tanks need to be fearsome, and they are quickly becoming much less so, and much less relevant.
This is partly due to AV mines being used as anti-tank grenades, C4, engie AV, and the constant release of new launchers. Armor on the other hand, has only gotten cosmetic changes, and is falling behind in the power creep.
Hopefully it will be addressed soon.

My only gripe with the current balance is how lock-ons, AV turrets and now the phoenix and lancer allows infantry to engage tanks from absurd range. Tanks are such big targets, it becomes really easy to supresse them in any larger engagements.
Personal opinion, tanks should be:
1. Armor killers, taking out enemy armor, sunderers and base turrets
2. Supportive fire support that provides supressive fire, forcing enemy forces to stay in cover and punishing enemies moving over open terrain.
Tanks could move closer to provide cover over a larger area, but this would expose them to AV weaponary. The closer you move the more potent support but at the same increasing your vulnerability.

Instead we have tanks being forced into cover, playing peekabo behind trees and hills just to break lock-ons and dodge sniper rockets.

There is 2 problems. Infantry can engage tanka from too great range. There is too little cover in bases to protect from tank-shelling.

I love farming tanks, my fully upgraded MBT gathers dust occasionally getting pulled when my squad needs a big *** coffin to distract the enemy while they blow up an objective.

I agree with this, tanks in this game just feel extremely weak. I blame the fact that anyone can pull one and operate it solo the second they create a character, so it has to be fairly weak to counter the massive numbers of tanks that can be used in any single engagement.

I have an issue with this, because (whether you intended it or not) you're implying that a single tank (that only requires one player to operate) should be able to single-handedly take on a large group (or "more than a few") of infantry, and that's ridiculous. If you want to take on groups of infantry, you'll need to bring a buddy or two in their tanks as well, or have your own infantry support moving along with you. Sure, you should be able to decimate single infantry, or even small groups of infantry (3-4) easily with your tank (it is a tank after all), but anything more than that should present you with serious danger (especially up close).

In some cases this may be true because there is no death penalty in PS2 so infantry can die all day every day, while it takes more time to get a destroyed tank back and running. Talking about IRL - if soldiers were immortal they'd be main assault weapon aswell.

And even in PS2 if tank is used as said assult weapon it forces infantry to focus itself, so basically assaulting tank takes some attention off his infantry, and then it's infantry's duty to defend the tank from heavies and others. Tho heavies are the only ones who can harm a skilled tank driver, since c4 9 times out of 10 can be placed only on idiots.

Idd. Tho in PS2 everything is vulnerable to rocketspam.

Yes, was talking about them. The point is - hunting other tanks is not tanks' main duty, they got alot of other things to do.

Idk, seems pretty similar to me. And once again - I'm just trying to desctibe what tank actually is. Like, it shouldn't be an unkillable death machine by design, it must be vulnerable.

When (rarely) I jump on a mag it seems easy for me to actually hit people with it's default cannon. Lockons deal low damage and dumbfires are easy to dodge.

Yeah, but no fly zone would require lots of people you'll have to count on. One ESF can kill a tank pretty easily from what I remember.

Now I see a TANK running away from a SINGLE INFANTARY!

More: A tank shell can't kill a infantary, a missile can't kill infantary - this game is stupified.

I am affraid that they cross the line, now there is no turning back, soon the IRONY WILL BE there will be no more vehicles to be targeted by so many anti-vehicle weapons.

It requires 2-3 people on AA.
Its not a singleplayer game.
ESF's are only good against those that wander around alone.

Tanks work nothing like that. Tank combat is frequently planned in scales of kilometers (although admittedly there hasn't been an open-field armor clash for decades). Tanks are the masters of long-range combat precisely because they are mobile artillery pieces.

Nasty side effect of tanks being one-man powerups. See Ash's brilliant summary above of why multi-crew MBTs are good for the game for more info. Tank mines, C4 and launchers are the scapegoat for the nerfing of tank armor, but the problem is (and has always been) that MBTs are currently what BFRs were in the first game. Multi-crew MBTs has always been the best solution, but SOE are dedicated to the BF3 model (stupidly, because BF3 has fixed vehicle numbers, whereas PS2 does not).

Because shrill doomsaying is always better than a rational argument. You may have seen a tank withdrawing; good. Working as intended. The engagement will be decided by who plays smart. (Even though the tank still has the survivability advantage.) If you want tanks to stomp everything, think about how this will (negatively) affect other elements of the game before you cry foul. If you think about it, this scenario you describe makes sense given the current game decisions.