Why do medics have them? I want to be a front line soldier with a real weapon not some little crappy carbine without having everyone whining about the lack of revives i give.
I think everyone already agrees with you - except dedicated medics who don't want their favorite toy taken from them, of course.
ARs would be overpowered if you could have them along with the heavy shield or a jetpack. I guess you could add them to engineers but that doesn't really fit with their primary being more of a personal defense weapon.
If assault rifles were overpowered on Light Assaults, then things would be balanced so that they weren't. The point is that Medic has better weapons than Light Assault, and that's a problem because it leads to Light Assaults whining about having the worst weapons despite being an Assault class, and Medics playing Rambo with their assault rifles and getting cried at for not doing what medics should be doing.
The whine of the incompetent is but a window to issues not spoken in politics - ancient Chinese proverb
Medics should have worse guns so they'll revive me and jetpacks don't help you kill infantry - people who suck at Planetside 2
Indeed, that might be what people who suck at planetside 2 might say. But they misrepresent the issue at hand, which is that Medics, like Engineers, are a support class and as such, should have the same weapons available as Engineers do, and Light Assaults, which are an Assault class, should have access to Assault rifles. Whether carbines are in their current state sufficiently powerful for Light Assaults, and whether the jetpack negates the lower tier weaponry, are both irrelevant to the discussion, they are a simple matter of balancing. The discussion is not about balance, it's about the class weapons making sense with respect to the roles of each class.
Designating classes as support or not support is a terrible idea with no place in an FPS game and you can't suggest swapping out whole weapon classes without talking balance, especially since you haven't given up on a wholesale nerf to all medic weapons as part of the changes you want to see. Class equipment and design decides the roles of each class, not your excessive extrapolation based on their names and a misguided attempt to make the class system work like some kind of MOBA or fantasy RPG. Your entire argument boils down to the fact that the word "assault" is included in both the LA class name and the real world name for the barrel length and magazine size used in medic weapons. If you think that stands on its own without any kind of balance or FPS class design concerns then you're an idiot.
How exactly are ARs AWESOME? They feel like carbines that have higher velocity... Why would I use them over my Polaris or Flare?
Why? It's already in place in PS2. Medic and Engineer are support classes, whether you like it or not. The only balance question I'm interested in is Light Assaults versus Medics. In a straight up fight, LA should beat Medic; LA is an assault class, it should be better at assaulting, even if the class ability revolves around flanking and surprising. Swapping out the weapons would achieve that, but other changes and balance fixes could be made so that the result would not necessarily be an overall buff to LA nor an overall nerf to Medic, and I'm not interested in discussing those. That said, I have no illusions, SOE will never take AR's away from Medics in PS2. Perhaps in PlanetSide 3. Weaponry is part of class equipment. There is nothing excessive in it. Light Assault is already an assault class, and Medic is already a support class. Carbines are already assigned to Engineers which are a support class. Carbines are already not assigned to Heavy Assaults which are not a support class. In the light of the weaponry of other classes, it makes no sense for Light Assaults to have an support class weapon and for Medics to have a non support class weapon. You talk about extrapolation as though it were a bad thing, to me it is completely logical. No one's bringing any MOBA or RPG into this, no more than what already exists in the game. My argument concerns the roles of each class and the way the weapons fulfill those roles. Assault rifles could be called banana bazookas for all I care. If banana bazookas are more fitting for the role of assaulting than carbines, I'd take banana bazookas away from Medics and give them to Light assaults. Your were doing quite well up to now, but for resorting to an ad hominem, you have lost all credibility you may have had.
They have one tier less damage dropoff which makes them more competitive past about 40 meters. The best ranged carbines have velocity comparable to AR's, but still require one more bullet to kill, and will on average lose to assault rifles because of that. Why would I use Polaris or Flare over just nuking from orbit?
Compared to carbines ARs tend to have faster velocity, more controllable recoil, and slightly worse hipfire. They also drop one less damage tier at range across the board, losing one tier at under 800 RPM and two tiers at 800 or higher, compared to two and three with carbines. Once you hit 20-40 meters then no matter what AR you have you'll have an advantage over carbines in a straight up fight. Compared to LMGs ARs have substantially lower vertical recoil, tend to be directional (rather than side to side), and have lower COF stats across the board, in particular moving ADS COF which is your go-to for gun battles. Overall the combination of shooting faster, kicking a shorter distance from your target on the first shot, having lower base COF, and the predictable recoil makes it so that your bursts deal more damage in a shorter period of time. That is, you drop targets faster across all ranges and use less bullets to do it. The game would be hilariously broken if you could have all that along with the HA shield.
1. SO, ARs can kill at farther ranges? 2. Well, because one of them can cause massive destruction in an instant... I think
I see. Thanks for the info, man But really, I, as a person that mains HA, would never use a 30-round weapon over a Polaris or Flare. The latter are WAY too superior. And as for the carbines versus assault rifles, having better CoF isn't much... Are there are any other advantages that carbines enjoy over the rifles?
AR's have lower TTK at mid-long range. EDIT: There's little overall difference in recoil between Carbines and AR's, from what I can tell. E.g. for TR, the starter carbine and starter AR have the exact same horizontal recoil, and the AR has a bit more first shot kick but a bit less overall vertical recoil. However, at the cost of slightly larger hipfire COF, the AR has 80 m/s better velocity and min damage 125 instead of 112.
Your argument is hilariously backward. By who's authority are medics a support class? You're hopping between saying that they're designed to be support and then claiming that they've got the right kind of weapons to be a combat class. News flash: SOE deliberately gave medics powerful rifles so that they'd be a combat class and not just healing/revive caddies. Similarly, from who's butt are you pulling the "carbines are a support weapon" card? They're available to the engineer and the LA, so even if I agreed with your insistence on designating classes as support they'd be split evenly. If swapping carbines from LA to medic would make LA assault and medic support, doesn't that mean that right now, LA is support and medic is assault? Either way nothing you're saying about weapons has any grounding in what's actually in the game. Carbines are "short barrel" guns, they're specialized for close quarters and fighting on the move, so they sacrifice performance at range for great hipfire and moving COFs and sometimes stopping power. On the other hand ARs are "long barrel" guns which perform worse in extreme close quarters but gain a lot more from being able to stand still, move slowly, or ADS. Engineers get carbines as personal defense weapons because their ranged work is handled by the turret. LAs get carbines to solidify their role as the closeup flanking class, which helps keep jetpack use as part of the actual fighting rather than simply a better way of finding a spot to stand and shoot from. Combat medics, as a primary assault class, get ARs so that they can work at a wide variety of ranges and provide an effective point hold tool. Nothing that "already exists in the game" makes carbines a support gun or medics a support class. Medic/LA balance does not require LAs to win a straight up engagement at any range because their class feature is all about either getting the drop or choosing an engagement range where a carbine is just as good as an AR. lol
