Good Bad news everyone, as some of you might recall once upon a time we had a neat little topic made by CuteBeaver, to be specific : https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...ainstorm-stalker-vs-ha-shield-tactics.191300/ Why do I bring up said topic at this specific moment. Well.. Basically to prevent more casualties within already almost extinct race of dedicated infiltrators, not to mention even more extinct group of willing stalker infiltrators. Since sadly, ladies and gentlemen things have changed. I'm pretty sure to be honest, that most of interested should be already aware of it, however since I've been recently talkin with an fellow infil who utilises roughly same playstyle as I do with quite some emphasis on knife use despite not being stalkers, and change I'm about to mention did sneak around his attention, I figured I'll make a topic to prevent some painful experience, and maybe introduce some updates towards stalker tactics in spite of said change. And the change is long story short, mentioned even in patchnotes [6/17 to be exact]. To be specific I'm referring to this part : "Resist shield now resists melee damage" Now, apart of my opinion that probably in near future we will see another "bugfix" sounding like "heavy assault can't be killed by anything less than other heavy assault, it was never intended to die from anything else. All non-lmg, non-ha-used weapons don't deal damage to heavy assaults anymore" by apparently ongoing logic...Oh well. Putting sarcasm aside ; what does it mean. It means that currently you can't possibly perform a headshot from SAS-R for instance at pointblank range and followup with knife to kill overshielded resist heavy. Now SAS-R is a primary weapon which can OHSK any nonshielded infantry unit, I haven't done too much stalking recently, yet by simple analogy, since secondaries are weaker than primaries generally, I'm pretty sure it makes lifes of stalkerfolk definitely less pleasant when dealing with HA than it used to. I'm also having suspicion that this specific change made resist shield, slightly more wonky in terms of hit registration. I'd like to think that it's just regular bovine excremental quality of hit registration as it used to, but then again, I have too much experience with updates screwing things up while "fixing" something to be optimistic about it. And to be honest it made me feel uneasy to perform SAS-R hs pointblank on resistha, follow with knife, and 2 .357 headshots, and still see bloody heavy walking. True overshield messes up hitreg itself anyways but this is just plain annoying, hopefully in this regard my scepticism is wrong, and it's just marshmallow-server performance. So yeah, there you go infil awareness message of the day - knifing resist ha got nerfed, since after what, three years of game existence devs figured out it's a bug not a feature. Since knife is generally one of infils' best friends in cqc, especially for stalkers I thought I'll point out this fact just in case somebody didn't notice. Also I encourage all of you to contribute latest experience with said part of update, possible alternate tactics, and the like. Personally I might update on my end with some additional data later this week when I get enough time to play to actually test stuff, more than during short playthrough.
If a 1,470 damage shot to the head, plus a 500 damage knife didn't drop the target (and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't), they need to seriously fix the HA bullsh*t that's going on. HA shields shouldn't block headshots. Or at least, your shield should take extreme (+3x) damage from each headshot, and excess damage should transfer over to the HA's shields/health.
Technically speaking, they "don't" block headshots. They "merely" grant user enough effective hp to survive HS from any BASR at point blank range. So they "don't" but they do, pure semantic nonsense. Actual effect is the same - they survive OHSK with any shield on, unless heavily damaged/depleted. And while we're at it I agree with you completely, there should be some counter to it - make it hs vulnerable, same treatment as nanoweave did get, it would be much more reliable solution than "soonTM ramp-up shield time" which would only increase randomness and frustration for both parties, in my opinion On a side note though, I made this thread more to point out issue at hand. Theoretically speaking, raw damage of it all in both cases, point blank hs from SAS-R and knife/ or second more wonky case with 2x .357 hs should be more than enough. First case, I'm certain that didn't work numerous times since the update. Second one, I'm fairly certain but then again when I shadowplayed some sessions of mine few times I saw horrendous hitregs pre knife vs resist nerf. Like for instance 5m range, target practically afk[not moving], aimed on his head, saw bullet hit on head and flinch of said head. No hs. Minute later on same day I shot some vs fella in crotch and I got hs. So there's that. Currently though it seems to me like issue is more constant than random like in those mentioned failed hitregs. In theory it still should be possible, but since this update I managed to do this only once when said resist heavy got already shot from other SAS-R user, while I'm fairly sceptic to server/network performance, I just find odd that post this update I can't repeat something that I already had trained to point of doing it reliably. A while ago I posted bunch of cuts about using knife as cqc sniper infil to encourage more stabbings, so yeah it used to be possible : Suddenly it just doesn't happen, as I wrote in first post. In terms of additional data at end of week I'll try to record some testing footage in "perfect environment", possibly from both points of view in attempt to pinpoint exactly the issue. At the moment it seems to me like either, they messed up "knife resisting" to point of frequent ignoring knife hits [as I mentioned resist shield post update seems wonky to me in terms of hitregs]/screwed resistance values. Either way, despite lack of thorough enough data - statement made only based on my latest encounters in game which should've from my experience kill those HA - I thought I'll point it out, since if we count the values which you mentioned Khopesh, against "theoretical" effective hp of resist HA 1818-1970=-152, so it SHOULD still kill them. And as it became unreliable, at least so far from my experience, I figured I'll point it out since it'll be most certainly tragic for stalkers with just sidearms, if it's broader issue as it seems for me at the moment. Perhaps with controlled environment video it'll be possible to pinpoint exact problem with this issue, which seems bit more weird than used to.
Awesome, thanks. I've been messing around a bit with a CQC infiltrator and your gameplay looks crazy fun.
First of all promised update : I did some testing in controlled environment, got vid of it which I'll upload within 24hrs when my internet traffic switches to preferable state for uploading. Good news is that in controlled environment SAS-R hs + knife still "works". Issue at hand currently seems to be the fact for me at least that dmg in cqc applies to me before knife applies to them/ hs seem to more frequently register as bodyshots. Basically possible but unreliable, at least from my experience so far. Bad news though is that as I suspected it is basically a direct nerf towards Stalkers. Xbow+knife combo will leave overshielder with half of health bar sadly in current state. Closest alternatives are currently 2xhs with .44 and knife/2xmagscatter hs and knife/ 4 Desperado hs + knife. All at point blank range. You'll be able to see it for yourselves in test footage later on. I'm kinda sad about it, didn't really like the idea of Xbow until I've seen your vids Beaver, then I started using it. And now they nerfed knife vs overshield. I at least hope you didn't bump into this issue before you've seen this thread. @Chunkalish, Ximaster ; Aye as Campagne already stated it's SAS-R/Ghost[VS]/Tsar-42[TR] , it is fairly fun playstyle but also painful to learn to be honest. / Depends on the day really, these specific vid cuts were parts of my gameplay specifically focusing on use of knife when forced into CQC so no surprise here that you'd get that impression. Although to be completely fair I'm a lazyass so most of time can't be arsed to compensate my latency to play at most of this playstyle. If you want to see potential of it at maximum I'd point you out to elusive1 videos if you haven't seen them yet. Optionally if you want I could give you a hand with this type of play as long as yer on Cobalt. @Tanelorn. Oh? I thought it's completely obvious - infiltrators just adore heavy assaults, especially those glowing ones. We're frequently found trying to cut away those glowing shielded nanites which apparently don't prevent you from shooting while covered in them to patch malfunctioning cloak nanites. Plus obviously we like knifing so we gotta share our passion with those glowing beacons of hope which are frequently found teamkilling infiltrators by accident since it's sooo hard to have trigger control and IFF. Now, putting sarcasm aside. Simple - to kill them, since we're playing planetside 2 here, it is impossible to have absolute control over engagements, therefore better be prepared for everything. Hell if I could I would throw sand in face of HA on Indar just in case. To be completely fair however, apologies if I've been bit hostile towards you. I'm just bloody tired of buffs under disguise of "bugfixes" for class which was according to it's significant amount of userbase "fine" to begin with, while cloak for instance has ancient actual bugs upon which it's userbase basically agrees without doubt. But hey, "ha is fine so let's make it more FINE, ba! let's render with this fix 1/3 of infiltrator class helpless against ha in cqc - I mean they can use only their sidearm and knife. Clearly OP against ha!" Flawless logic, isn't it. Nevermind. As I said I'll upload video in these 24hrs later on.
Because previously you could 2 shot them with the regular knife, or 1 shot them with an activated knife.
I got sort of a question, figured not to create a separate thread for it. Which class do you consider to be preferable for getting lots of non-activatable knife kills quickly: LA, hunter infil or stalker infil? The LA can use a shotgun to quickly get shoot + stab combos. Any shotgun will work with a body shot + stab, even against nanoweave, and remains a decent CQC option if you can't get into knifing distance. The shotgun is also useful against HA with overshields, as then it just evolves from 1 shot + stab into 2 shots + stab. Alternatively, all of them can use Hunter Crossbow for these quick combos. The crossbow has pros of being "suppressed" and generally much quieter, and also works against full nanoweave, but it has to be cycled after each shot, and a bit harder to use as a standalone weapon in case of positioning fail. Also has less ammo than any shotgun. Not sure what's the point of using a non-stalker infil would be, as rifles and SMGs don't offer much over what crossbow can do. Infiltrators gain access to nice EMP grenades, while LA get access to self-blinding smoke grenades and useless flash grenades. Come to think of it, EMP alone enables lots of easy kills, as you can just run into a clump of players, EMP yourself with an EMP shield, and then just OHK quick knife left and right. In this case, survival isn't a priority (cheese tactics approved). Currently I'm trying this with combat medic with suppressed NS-11P. Needless to say it's going terribly slow, and I'm kinda realizing that trying to run to an enemy without the use of special ability like jet pack or cloak is a bad idea.
