Can you serious eff up the air game anymore?

Bellyguns wide angles got smaller, Afterburner max speed got drastically reduced (!), still noone uses racer, hyena = coyote (stupid), duster = finally MAYBE a bit useful, spur still useless.

And now weapon specialization.

It was for nothing because it wasnt needed in the first place.Thats why the majority of the players disagreed with it and it still got live because SOE......it still have the afterburners.
Anyway lib will still be good but not the anti everything as it was before and you still have the option of Zepher to do that do.As i said only the duo 2/3 team lib farmers are crying against it because now it will require teamwork to protect them from any threat,if using a duster then have an esf help you against other esf or if you have a Dalton you will have to have help from ground to stop the lock ons and any because basically they will still win against skyguards and AA turrets.

I agree that phase 2 is not needed though this is enough.

Don't know about you but I'd much rather have a smaller deadzone than a wider angle, so for me this remains an overall buff.
Also, the main perk of a speed boost isn't always the top speed it gives you but the acceleration (I'm a magrider driver, I should know). And that part was buffed in that it's gone from 1 to 3 seconds of strong acceleration.
"Noone uses racer" ... lol. You wish.
And you may call Hyenas as stupid as you want, they fill a role, even if you may find them to be cheese.

Duster and Spur.
Won't comment on the Spur, but I'd say the Duster has a bit of an undeservedly bad rep, mostly because when it was released it didn't compare favourably with the Zepher and Shredder. Not saying the Duster doesn't have it's problems, but we'll wait and see how it performs in this patch with regards to the other belly guns.

You 100% correct Air Hammer is meant to be air to ground so this buff / nerf makes no sense at all.

The vortex is meant to be ESF vs ESF, so from an NC stand point it really doesn't make sense to nerf it against infantry. 50m is pretty damn close

Regardless, we will see how it plays out. It may not actually be that bad.

SoE noticed that not enough people have bought the Duster so they decided to nerf everything else to give us an incentive to buy it
The default gun, the shredder, was actually useful too, so they had to remove it from the game so that people need to buy the other belly guns!
And they also had to make sure that the few people left still using the rocket pods finally buy a new ESF secondary.

But seriously, thats why more and more people quit the game. Nerfs based on moronic opinions from morons on the forum.
And instead of trying out small changes, they change everything at once after just a few days on the test server.
It's the Harasser all over again.

I'm not convinced it'll be that different against infantry. Due to the spread, it always felt like you killed people more with the splash damage of nearby pellets rather than the one or two miraculously on target. So *if* that's true, then there's pretty much no difference apart from the reduction in damage of the few direct hits. However we get 2 more pellets per mag, so AI-wise, it may be not that bad.

The nerf makes sense kinda against Libs/Gals, and the resist type change should be huge in that.

The range nerfs though You already had to get in dumbfire range to kill infantry with the bloody thing and it's supposed to be the AI weapon. Banshee and PPA function perfectly fine at their intended role.

In reality, all this does is encourage rocket pods for AI work.

Because what libs need is less predators?

Want to hunt libs? take default nosegun and tomcats.

You can single handily counter Libs now.

Or just 2-3 default/rotary ESF's can handle them just as easily, no matter their secondary.


AI nosegun should be good at AI. Banshee & AH are better at facing off against other ESF while the PPA is utterly helpless against ESF's but can deal good damage against Libs (though that velocity requires getting into danger range).

AH should be good at Infantry killing, not Lib hunting. That's not it's purpose.

I don't mind the Resist type nerf, I think it belongs. The range nerf seems to me like it will make it bloody well near useless at it's intended target though.

LOL wut?

Against armor, the AH was alrady already like shooting spitballs, so I definitely don't understand why they said it was doing too much against armor. Honestly, I never even bothered shooting tanks or sundy's that much because the DPS was terrible. Only for lulz.

The AH's roll has always been primarily anti infantry, while not giving too much up in A2A. AV wasn't much of an option because you couldn't do much damage. Sure you could take out an non-skyguard by plinking it outside of it's turret range, but it takes forever.

Now they nerfed the range. Max damage only lasts for 50m. Then 50 more meters at 100m, it hits it's minimum damage. That is an insanely short drop off considering the old drop off extended to 300m.

They're completely different nose guns. A PPA is actually effective for farming infantry, much like the banshee. The Airhammer is just asking for you to get dumb fired and simply less effective for AI work. For it to even be competitive at AI, the max magazine would need to be around 15 rounds and the damage drop off not so seriously nerfed.

SOE wants to turn this thing into the C85 Canister of the sky...what a joke.

Well, at least now NC doesn't have a multi-use nose gun. The Light PPA is good at farming infantry, but the second you ran into air, you were pretty much dead. The Airhammer could fight ESFs, Libs, and ambush armor and infantry. I don't know what the TR one is, but I can't believe its as good.

it wouldn't be nc if we didn't get something good nerfed, you know were supposed to be the "farmed" faction so when a pilot or tanker or infantry takes what we got and makes it work.. the opposite factions go into a berserker nerf crying rage cause how could they possible fall victim to nc anything unless it was OP. The biggest kicker of all is it isn't even OP at all.. they are nerfing its already small range, adding more resistance so it takes what 2 full mags to kill a liberator now ? I mean I am not even a pilot and I can see this is bad.

Ironic as it is the things that really need a major toned down like c4 for instance being instagib vs everything.. There are so much c4 in the game now almost everytime I pull a max a fairy comes flying over drops c4, boom, same against sunders and tanks and just infantry... Now that is something that needs a nerf.. The color purple could also use a nerf.. perhaps trim it in neon at night...(kidding) but seriously I quit trying to fight vs at night it gives me a headache the size of texas from eye strain.

Shows how much you know, doesn't it. It's called a Banshee and it can be used to dogfight and farm infantry with impunity. The Airhammer was a versatile weapon because it's a POS for its original intended role of AI work. Now it'll be slightly better for AI but still not on par with the other two. The fact that SOE is defining it as a 4th AA gun is freaking absurd.

4-5 shots to kill infantry at 100 meters. (You do realize that this is a shotgun? ... and that this SHOTGUN currently takes longer to kill targets at LESS range? Of course you don't. You are just here to make snide remarks and provide nothing of value to the conversation. Weapon's falloff is at 50 meter, which is practically *** to mouth. Do you even airhammer?

Airhammer requires you to be near-touching you opponent in all situations. Why shouldn't it have decent burst damage? Not line you can skybox with it like a nosegun, or even engage anything at range as it is anyways.

So If you have NVIDIA, you can get the Geforce Experience, and use the shadow play program, and it basically ghost records your game for 10 minutes, then if you dont save it, it restarts and records the next time minutes, so your not piling heaps of data, but at the press of a button you can save the last 10(or more if you wanted) minutes of vid, so you can cherish all your moments of awesomacity. Like when i drove my lightning inbetween a vangaurd/magrider duel and killed both. gooood times

Fraps can do that also, shadow play is not that special.
On a sidenote, if it can shoot more then 10m away, it is not NC

I think you give it too much credit of being slightly better at AI. The damage buff is nullified by the fact that you now need to get with in 50m of infantry to take advantage of that buff and the extra 2 round are pretty much nullified by the min damage range reduction to 100m. Honestly, if you are 50m away from infantry everything and its mother is going to be shooting at you, hell they may even start throwing grenades.

I'm sorry but at < 50m, even a phoenix would be able to hit an ESF that close and that's not even a mildly hard dumbfire shot, beside taking damage from every other weapon that is being carried by infantry in the area.

"The M14 Banshee is the Terran Republic's Anti-Infantry nosegun. It fires explosive rounds that deal a fair amount of damage to nearby enemies. It has a smaller ammo pool compared to other noseguns, as well as smaller clips and a lower rate of fire."
Seems like a Light PPA that might have the bullet velocity to hit anything moving faster than a Lib

As for having to get close to infantry, the key phrase is ambush+Hover Stability. The Reaver already has the vertical thrust of a Hover 3 Scythe, so using it with vehicle stealth is pretty potent.
This shows the big problem with the devs sense of "balance". Many of these weapons seem OP because their counterparts are incomparably bad or are one trick ponies (ex. Light PPA). Instead of making the worse weapons better, they just the better weapon down to their level.