Bad design strategy: If it's hard to do it should be extremely powerful

It's not that the weapons are outside of their intended role, it's that less than intelligent folks put themselves in situations where they're vulnerable enough to get killed by weapons that usually have very little to no chance of killing them at all.

If you still cannot comprehend what i'm trying to say I suggest that you promptly fetch a textbook wherein you can study the english language.

But having strict roles (at least to OP's seemingly desired level) means that there should be no dangerous situations for a target of the wrong weapon. ESF should be able to fly close to a liberators belly and still not expect to lose.

A better way to put that would be "if you are skilled enough bursters become as good if not better than AI than than the actual AI guns." and yes that would be a problem.

Lets say they decided to reward aiming even more by putting vulnerable points on vehicles. So if you say headshot the pilot in an ESF or send a bullet down the barrel of a tank it destroys it instantly. So if you come across lets say a super skilled infil (or an aimbotter) your tank or ESF instantly dies. Since they render further your only option to beat him is play an infil as well and be more skilled than him... good luck.

The thing is there is multiple types of skill. FPSs do require aiming to some degree but it isn't (or at least shouldn't) be THE skill. Even communication is a skill and plays a role in this game. You can be mute and illiterate and it wouldn't make you any less a chess player. In this game, a person just getting headshot after headshot but remaining completely silent can have a lesser impact on a battle than the guy without a single kill that calls out where the enemy AMS is.

High skill ceilings typically are in only a few types skill. Also if they far outmatch the skill ceiling in other things to the point to where they can beat their own counters then it starts to devalue other skills.



If someone uses communication to tell his team that they need AA and someone being the team player they are pulls AA but the air in question is a super skilled pilot who then beats the AA units and then proceeds to blow up the AMS and then farm the remaining infantry. That pilot single handled decided the outcome of that battle. However, lets say instead of pulling AA that person gets in a lib with a pro gunner and shoots down the ESF and then farms the enemy team the moment they come out of the spawn. He then single handled decided the fate of that battle.

So what we have is a game with thousands of players but the battles ultimately being decided by only a handful of players. It isn't fun, it isn't balanced, and it isn't healthy for the game.

Edit: text why you make yourself so tiny?

Am I the only one who thinks this whole idea is BS? And by this logic headshots should be removed, because they are hard to do and give a reward for accuracy?

Damn good post. Alot of players make this excuse.

I totally agree ,that hacker who killed your from across was SKILLED enough to code his own exploit. Since you do not have coding SKILLs you deserve to die.

No they should not, do you even know what Dalton is? Do you mean we should nerf all tank guns, as well as rocket launchers & the list goes on, simply because they do not have the "AA" description? Get real man.

I don't completely understand your english, but you're talking about hackers, not specific weaponry or game mechanics. A hacker can get 100-0 using the Beamer.

Strangely enough, if they were skilled enough to snipe you out of the air with a Dalton, you wouldn't have even come close if they had been using the Shredder.

Incorrect. At best it would be correct to not allow AV weapons to headshot. AI weapons are intended to shoot both the body and head of infNtry.

My english is better than your horrible logic.


Is this your first FPS game forum? You do know that it is often the high end players who discuss game balance? Go to any forum and the best conversations are from pros who ARGUE what is OP and UP. Go talk to high end street fighter players and they will tell you about hard to use characters that casuals ignore but are completely overpowered at high level ( SSF 2 turbo Balrog comes to mind)

It doesn't mean that if you can do something unbalancing at a high level that its balanced. This is basic game development ****.

Oh and my hacker analogy is probably above your head.

Now you make me sound like an awful gunner. ;_;

Yes I know the dalton weapon. Its the biggest fattest cannon in the game. If strict roles is the goal then yes your "suggestions" would follow. Its being done to halberd on pts as ypu might have hward of. Dalton is meant for shooting ground vehicles. Btw Im not arguing for this idea. I just try to c learify the OP since people seems to misundersgand it. "Get real man."

Here is a post from the phoenix headshot thread in this forum section that you might find interestkng.

Edit:
Sorry this post thing came on top of your quote and its too hard to fix on phone.

Issues with dalton that I can see OP has:
Dalton Vs. Lib/Gal (large easy to hit targets)
Daltons Vs. Infantry (large splash, 2 rounds to kill infantry with splash 1 round for DH)

It makes the zephr a moot pick because you kill with a slightly slower TTK in exchange for the ability to 1 shot ESF's, Do great damage vs. vehicles and have better velocity and less drop.

With OP's logic applied, making the Dalton AP (no splash 90% direct damage weapon system), while keeping zephr HE (possibly reducing direct damage so it's worse vs. vehicles specially gal/lib) and keeping shredder in the middle would be enough. The nature of the shredder still makes it the best A2A belly gun on the Lib. This would also make room for an A2A specific belly gun much like the A30 Walker.

As it is now, there's too much overlap and I agree with OP.

False.
false.
Especially false about the skyguard.

@OP great post. Dalton and AP-A Prowler are the biggest culprit of this in my mind.

Guys. Guys. I think we need to double the uselessness of liberators.

Just to clarify something for people who are saying what I'm asking for is for the game to completely disallow using a weapon outside of its intended purpose:

No, I do not. I'm perfectly fine with someone shooting a Liberator with a Tank or downing an ESF with a Dalton, I just have a problem with the fact that players who can do have no reason at all to actually use an AA weapon because those weapons are so much more powerful at doing it.

There is a huge difference between saying "Tank guns shouldn't be able to hit aircraft" and saying "Tank guns shouldn't be better against aircraft than Flak as long as you can hit them".

The benefit to using a cannon instead of flak isn't that your AA power should go up by orders of magnitude, it's the fact that you can kill tanks with it as well.

Using weapons outside of their intended purpose is fine, it just shouldn't be stronger than using the tools that are meant for that job.

using a Dalton or Tank maingun to take down say an ESF is never more effective or stronger than FLAK despite being more powerful because it's much more difficult... that makes it straight up weaker in the AA role because it simply isn't reliable... higher damage doesn't matter as much as ease of use here in what makes a weapon system effective or powerful

the fact it rewards you with better damage is fine because of how hard it is to pull off as it wasn't designed for that job the same as FLAK rewards moderate damage because it's easy as hell to hit with as it was specifically designed for that job... now if it was easy to effectively and consistently hit an ESF with a Dalton/tank AND it did more damage than dedicated AA weapons there would be a problem and balance issue

currently it's fine... if you get shot down by either a dalton or tank in your ESF than put ice on your hurt butt, suck it up, congratulate the person for their skill (or luck) in landing it and strive to get better (or stop doing whatever very dumb thing you were doing to get hit)

jesus it's like people are actively trying to get SOE to nerf player skill along with everything else... why not just take all the competitiveness out of the game... at that point we may as well just shoot paper targets instead of playing a PVP game against other actual people

If I'm a flak user with perfect accuracy, many ESFs will escape me because of how long it takes me to kill them. Only as a Skyguard catching someone out of position does a flak user win a straight-up fight (and actually score the kill). Otherwise it requires distractions or damage from other sources to score kills. (Or ESFs being much lower skill.)

If I'm a Dalton user with perfect accuracy, then due to the Lib's mobility and the Dalton's projectile speed and 1-shot-kill damage, I'm going to kill dramatically more ESFs.

I'm not suggesting flak is broken (I think it's in a pretty good place). I'm just disputing the idea that a Dalton can never be more effective than flak, since oftentimes a Dalton is superior to flak.

In terms of overall Lib balance, you can improve balance by changing the Lib itself (slower top speed, remove the cooldown-reduction aspect of higher ranks of Nanite), or to the Dalton (reduce projectile speed), or to ESF's A2A capabilities (secondary nosegun, or any other change that makes engaging Libs easier.) The ideal balance, since ESFs need to be a counter to Libs (because nothing else can,) is that even a lower-skilled ESF can reliably take down or zone out a Liberator.