[BUG] Complete Reaver-gun breakdown: It's worse than we thought

Bump.

Bump.

Wrong.

The scythe actually has the easiest time initiating and maintaining reverse flight. It also has the tightest control during hover mode which translates into better stability while adjusting its position. Flying backwards or sideways is no more difficult in a mosquito, either.

You realize in this game it's very likely you'll be jumped or attacked as a reaver from above, right? You can't always be the one jumping at high altitude. When the reaver is at a greatly lower elevation in head-to-head, the lower gun mount is a [total pain in the ***] to compensate for. In situations where you don't have the upper hand, the reaver's gun characteristics just make it harder.

bump

I haven't forgotten about the promised (crappy but clear) drawing, except that when I'm up at the college library I tend to have other stuff on my mind and forget to scan. My bad. I'll try to make a note and get it done tomorrow afternoon.

I don't work in ballistics or anything firearms related. I'm currently doing physics & biology (and definitely not art history). Nobodies credentials should really matter much though if what they're saying checks out, so again if anyone finds errors in the modeling: Go nuts. This is exclusively mathematical stuff that starts off simple and stays that way, which I've tried to keep as unpretentious and accessible as possible (while remaining factual & clear). For example, the actual target lead angle would be tan(pv/range) (but that's functionally identical to what I showed, so who cares?) and it wouldn't be that hard to graph lead angle versus pv with the correct piecewise function that accounts for the target's size and shows the approximate magnitude of the discontinuity in where the player has to aim.

But I've kept that sort of excessive rigor to a minimum because it seems a little bit overkill to point out something that makes intuitive sense. That's why the cheap WolframAlpha diagrams and all. I firmly believe, short of being willfully obtuse, most people can grasp the geometry at work here and how these angles are a big problem that playerskill can't surmount (since turning any aircraft and especially the Reaver is not instantaneous).

(And by not surmount I mean in the sense of scoring perfect hits. Fighting other players is not a terribly objective measuring stick of performance)

Ah, I see.

Have you tried to Tweet this to Higby? people seem allergic to trigonometry/precalc posts, this definitely could have gotten alot more light if it weren't for the math.

I hope someday, they take people like you more seriously on their endeavors to polish the flying turd.

I trust the man studying physics in college than an angry TR player.

Good stuff.

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I don't know why you're here either then. Do yourself, and others a favor and just don't post anymore with these "motivational speeches" to yourself via internet tough guy, belittling others, and using 200 cert point words, it's not clever. I don't mind Buzz btw at all, but TE is not in the best light with SOE and posts like this are certainly not going to make it any better.

Anyways, the devs admitted as much to the issue with the Reaver after proof they've seen and will act on it. Deal with it.

This is a great post though I'll admit most of the math goes right over my head. Though with the way bullet convergence works, and where the mounted location of the gun is.. it entirely describes why I have to lead targets so ridiculously far.

Its something I've grown accustom to as pretty much someone who pulls Liberators > Reavers > Vanguards.

Whenever I'm flying doing my solo thing in the off hours, dogfighting. Since I'm the atypical rotary/rocket pod Reaver I've noticed that I have always, always had to lead targets quite a lot. I never thought of the reason why and my experience in scythes/mossies is limited at best ( Beta )

Whats amusing is that some people have already mentioned you have to "aim by the feel of it" rather than by relying on the crosshairs entirely. I just tend to overcompensate my angle because I'm forced to, fire in bursts until I get hit markers then go from there and use that as my mental base of where I need to aim at.

Perhaps this is why the Reaver had a much tighter hitbox than the other ESFs at release, knowing it would be slightly off kilter for dogfighting. Though that mosquito issue is mostly resolved now.

Either way, without a remodeling of the Reaver to have the gun mounted closer - or some sort of band-aid fix of changing the location of where the bullets are coming we are just going to have to deal with compensating our aim and having some odd trajectory of our bullets. I don't even understand the talk about "momentum" fixes if anyone has any detail on that, that would be nice.

Lovely in-depth analysis. At a glance, I'd say that was a considerable amount of time you wasted there.

My Prowler has it's two barrels on the left hand side of my tank. Perhaps I should go create a thread crying about it, maybe include a video, graphs, science?

Or I could spend my time learning to use the tank as-is and stop coming up with more stuff to QQ about.

As soon as you need to hit an enemy tank that's right beside you by not having it visible on your screen, you might have a point.

Nice and informative post, sad that we still have to deal with this. Greatly appriciate the effort put into all of this!

And seriosuly what is up with some of the TR posts here? some of the most spitefull posts I have seen in a while.

Doesn't the Prowler have basically the same problem? In that case, if the Reaver would be fixed, also fix the Prowler.

Quite true. All OP needs is a simple diagram of a situation where there are no possible shots. Convergence only affects one axis and the relative velocities of the aircraft and projectiles can also be plotted in 2D.
Maybe one of you guys who "gets it" could post one since OP is busy...

Thank you for adressing this.

NC pilots have to buy the gatling or shotgun upgrade to be effective (250 or 100 certs) with the primary gun
Especially in messy dogfights its a real challenge to target an enemy by aiming always a bit higher than the crosshair

Not a call for nerfs of other factions ESFs, not the call for a buff of the Reaver. Just a call to fix the BUG

So after reading this thread and thinking about it for a while I decided to draw myself an illustration of the problem. I came back here and noticed people wanted one and the OP hadn't posted his yet, so I polished mine up a little. I hope it is correct; if it isn't, please correct me.



Yes, it is a bad drawing I made in paint.NET, but it should suffice, and I think the simplicity makes it easier to understand. I didn't draw one for the Mossie, but you should be able to imagine how much that zone shrinks when the crosshair is so much closer to the gun.

who cares .... reavers do more dmg than moss and if you cant adjust your aim due that small difference what makes factions unique from each other .... lol
'
edit : actually im going to test it does that effect that creat deal what you guys say . cya soon

okey .... bullets go exactly where the crosshair is . even in close range , so no difference on shooting whit moss or reaver or scythe (other than fire rate and reaver feeled a a bit slower ).
gun positioning is just visual and i think it looks better than moss one : ) .
This Reaver gun positioning "game breaking " thing is tjust in your head .

Yes, Rognik that is exactly how I understand OP's description of the "impossible zone" also.

The theory falls over where the mozzie cannot fly entirely into the zone, as the zone is at most 1/2 the size of an ESF. So it's impossible to hit one exact spot on the mozzie, but never impossible to hit the mozzie at all. Note the angle narrows as the mozzie is further away, so the zone scales (narrows) with distance, but always remains less than 1/2 the hitbox.

The benefit for the reaver (see my update with the "bonus" zone) is that the reaver can overshoot the ESF by the same margin (the width of the non converged paths) and still hit the mozzie.

The only time convergence would cause you to miss, would be if:
1. There was an object in the crosshairs, within the 5m range where convergence can't align yet, and the object is shorter than the distance between its start and the 5m point where convergence starts. In this case the bullets would angle up hilariously behind the close object (I have a video of this but it's of poor quality)
2. If your crosshairs pointed our to infinity (or far) but there was an object below the corsshairs blocking the projectile path. For this to happen you'd need to park tour reaver behind a small rock, then be trying to shoot a tank in the distance. (an unlikely scenario)

The point raised by the TR guys on the prowler is in fact a far more severe example of this issue in practice, as a tank is far more likely to be making use of close by cover than an esf ever would.