Discussion on the current state of the Valkyrie

Hey everyone,

I was wondering about the current state of the Valkyrie. I feel it is a vehicle with a lot of missed potential despite having some very nice flight characteristics. The only time I ever feel they are a threat is when they are dropping light assaults to C4 or maybe if they are full of Heavies on the rumble seats with launchers (i.e Striker). But the gunner's weapon I feel is kind of weak at least by testing it in the VR, but maybe I'm wrong. That's actually why I made this thread. I wanted to see how other people view the Valkyrie. Is it just a light assault dropping spawn point for you guys or something else?

I might as well make some personal suggestions for the Valkyrie while I'm at it:
-I think Daybreak should give us the option to replace the rumble seats with rocket pods or cannon pods for the pilot. This gives some added flexibility to the aircraft which creates a possibly high risk high reward gameplay style (since Valkyries can't escape like ESFs do). It turns the Valkyrie into a gunship whose job is CAS.
- Another option I had in mind is a pair of door guns similar to the MANA turrets the engineer has.
- My final suggestion is possibly tightening the COF of some of the gunner weapons a bit to make them more lethal.

Anyways I'd like to hear your side of the story so please tell me what your opinions are on the Valkyrie and what can be done with it.

Well the only weapons which are currently perfoming well are the cas 14 e and the standard wyvern, the rest is crap (helion is useful in somesituations)... a hyena rocket launcher style 2. weapon would be a nice a2a weapon or a drake/walker

I personally found the Pelter rocket pod pathetic. Also the guided missile is sooooooooo slow (can't remember its name). I also think that an Anti Air gunner weapon would be nice as a backup to a ground attack oriented Valkyrie, like one equipped with rocket pods. That way it can defend itself if need be.

Valkyries can be very good against low armored targets, even with just a gunner. You can very well and safely fish out infantry or Harassers with them, because the vehicle has very good handling and stability, can fly very low even while attacking, has decent armor (at least better than ESFs), and the gunner can point in all directions.

For heavy armored targets and ESFs they are not so good, though, that's true (except against single tanks of course since it can fly). You need people on the rumble seats for this who know what they are doing, then it also can be really good against heavy armored targets or ESF, but this is not easy to find in this game and costs player resources.

Valks also can be a nice spawn points of course, or for example stealthdrop people on top of tech plants to destroy the turrets there. Sadly, it mostly gets overlooked by players, and it's rather rare that they use it as a spawn point.

This is exactly what I suggestioned since quite a time too. I find the main problem with Valkyries is not that they are too weak, it's just that they require too much teamplay for most players. Trading the rumble seats for rocket pods would be the perfect solution, imo.

The VLG also can be very good, if you find a good point to camp and shoot from a distance, like for example hovering on the tip of a mountain. It's basically like an engie AV-turret mounted to your aircraft. Most people just try to use it while flying at full speed, that's why they never hit something with it.

They're crap, sadly. Their guns are AP, but look at the ranges..... 25m for the Hellion, 50m for the Writhen.... Most pathetically, 10 ******* meters for the CAS!!!! Really DBG? 10 goddamn meters for an aircraft weapon?!?!? What the flying ****? The laser-guided rocket is outpaced by the slow *** vehicle speed of the Valk, which is literally half the speed of an ESF, which by the way, gets twice the fire suppression. There's just no excuse for this vehicle. It's a light transport vehicle in a game that doesn't need transports. At the absolute minimum, put it's guns on par with ESF guns, any of them. As a 2-person vehicle, it shouldn't be such a joke. It's only saving grace shouldn't be that it spawns broken *** c4 fairies out of it's giant ****** which can be hit from a mile away. This aircraft is just a shame.

Valkyrie weapons don't need big ranges, since you are supposed to fly low with them anyway. They are not meant to be ESFs, they are meant to be ground support aircrafts. That's also why you don't need high speed for them, because you are supposed to closely support your ground troups anyway.

With an ESF you fly much higher, even when going for ground targets, that's also why they need more speed, but for Valkyries you don't need this stuff, because you fly very low anyway. If you fly low with an ESF you hardly can hit something. You need to do short dive attacks in order to hit something on the ground with them, while with a Valkyrie, you for example easily can just hover right above a tank and still kill it.

That's the only example where the Valk holds an edge, and hovering still over your target will get you killed in any size battle that matters. The Lib has the exact same problem, if it's going to get a kill on a tank then it needs to hover above it or stop right behind the tank to tankbust it. Either option is suicide in all but the smallest battles. An ESF on the other hand can launch it's Hornets right at 460m, and fire the second salvo for the kill on any tank before it has to pull up. And that's with racer. 3 second TTK. Stuff the Valk can only dream of. I do think the Valk is easier to fly, it's kind of like ESF training wheels, so I'm fine with it being weaker, but not as weak as it is. Just look at those ranges. 10m for the CAS.... 10m!!! There's no justifying shotgun ranges on an aircraft. And 50 for the stock gun, with half the dps of the weakest ESF nosegun. No excuse.

Oh, and the ESF carries enough missiles to kill 12 MBTs...... What can the Valk kill? 2? If it's spoon fed the shots?

First of all, it's not only big zerg battles which matter. Smaller battles can matter just as much. They also battle about taking bases, and you can find these smaller battles all the time on the map. And if you have rumble seat passengers with explosives, Valkyries also can be very very good in big battles.

And yes, before you mention it, you also could spawn 5 ESFs instead of this, but it takes much more certs to have these 5 ESFs certed enough, it takes much more skill to pilot these 5 ESFs, and there are enough infantry-only players in this game anyway, who really wouldn't miss anything if they would just do hotdrops from a Valk instead of getting gunned down on the ground.

And apart from this, you will also mostly find some lonely tanks or whatever on the edge of big battles, anyway, so even if you just have a gunner, there will always be some decent target for Valks with a bit of patience.

The Valkryie is fine as a transport. It was never meant to be a pure gunship to start with. I recall the Devs stating awhile back that it was supposed to be 75% transport and 25% fire support.

One problem in PS2 is for whatever reason people feel like all vehicles need to get kills. Even when those vehicles are not really combat vehicles. The Flash, ANT, Sunderer, Valkyrie, and Galaxy are not meant to be combat units and are supposed to be transports only armed for minimal self-defence. They are supposed to get their passengers from one base to the next, preferably with an armed escort (except the ANT, which has a different mission). But people in PS2 can't grasp complex ideas like logistics or escorting, so we wind up with the beefy transport units also getting highly effective weaponry.

The other issue is that with all the teleporting across the map, transports are mostly redundant. Why take a Valk when I can just redeploy to the next fight quickly? This combines with the above problem because if transports are not needed to transport, then they have to be bumped up to combat units to make them have value.

The solution is easy. Prevent people from easily redeploying by adding a nanite cost to redeploying. Give vehicles that act as spawners a fairly limited amount of respawns that need to be recharged by a friendly Ammo Tower or ANT. Decrease the durability of most transports.

In short, the Valkyrie is the only transport unit that actually functions similarly to a transport. There's nothing wrong with the Valk... it's that every other transport has been tortured into a beefy combat vehicle.

The Valkyrie has been improved but it's still a vehicle with one big flaw: anything you might want to do with aircraft, you will do it much better with the other vehicles.

It's a transport vehicle but as long as redeploy exist no one needs to be tranaported anywhere.

If Valkyries are merely for transport, why do I get more kills with them than with Harassers? In my opinion Valkyries are easily just as good at killing as Harassers, if not even better. I already play Harasser since a long time too, but I never had the success with them as with Valkyries, even though I also only played with a single gunner mostly.

A Hellion may not be as powerful as a Vulcan, but a Harasser also can't fly. I gladly sacrifice a bit of firepower for the ability to fly instead. From my experience, most Valkyrie pilots can't fly for sh*t, though, that's why everyone thinks the vehicle is only for transport.

The vehicle is only for transport because it was designed to be mainly for transport.

If it is too effective as a combat vehicle, then the Valk needs to be nerfed so that it only acts as a transport.

The flying cert piniata is exactly what it's name implies: a flying cert piniata.

It doesn't have a single defensive weapon through. Everything it has is built to facehug a tank or infantry, not provide cover fire in a retreat. Up until recently it couldn't even point it's "defensive" gun backwards, that's proof enough that the devs didn't put enough thought in to this vehicle.

I'd love something like this. Funny how it's the exact opposite of what Wrel thinks. He had a video a while back on the frustrations of the game and he thinks you should be able to teleport anywhere you want to go. I'd love for there to be a reason to fill up a Sundy and not have everyone in your zerg spawn one of their own.

That's because it never was meant to be transport-only anyway. No idea what you guys are talking about here... It's a "fast-attack transport vehicle" or something like this they called it.

It's mostly for stealthy sneaking up, and then quickly attacking out of nowhere. Attacking with your rumble seat passengers, as well as with the main gun. A Flash can transport too, but it's also meant for flanking.

I'm not saying it's a defensive transport, that's the other guys. It has offensive weapons that only point forward (up until just recently). Rumble seat fighting was nerfed to the ground. The way you can spawn from all over the place, you just don't need a troop transport. I think the devs need to either make troop transports a necessary part of the game or make the Valkyrie a fighting vehicle. Right now it's at a funny place in the middle. Maybe let composite armor protect the passengers. I like the idea of being able to mount turrets to the side, even if they're weak, maybe like Kobalts, that would make it defensive against ESFs without it being OP against armor. It just needs some work and it could be a really cool vehicle.

That's not true. You'd have to fly very risky or have really bad luck to lose a passenger.

Like I already said, the Valkyrie is already a fighting vehicle. Just like a Flash is also a fighting vehicle, despite having a rumble seat too. With only a gunner, Valks easily can be Harasser-tier, and with a full Valk you can be almost invincible and destroy whole tank columns in one strike.

If you had any experience with the vehicle, you'd know that a weapon like a Kobalt would be pretty useless on the rumble seats. It's extremely hard to hit something from the rumble seats with a machine gun like this, especially at full speed fighting against ESFs.

The only machine gun which is useful on the Valkyrie rumble seats is the Lasher, because it's easy to hit infantry with its splash damage from above. Having Engineers repairing from the rumble seats would be much more useful than people shooting at flies with Kobalts.

I think Kobalts would be perfect. If the nose guns had better range then the dps out of them is decent against armor, adding 20mm to the doors would make it OP against armor, that wouold be Galaxy firepower for half the nanites in a very small vehicle. Lashers would just be farm machines, especially with the Valks option of scout radar, and the last thing this game needs is more infantry farming. Kobalts would do work on infantry and ESFs if the pilot wasn't a crackhead. A crewed Valk could easily keep an ESF or two at bay without making it an air hunter. I really don't see them changing anything though, the valk was so OP in the past that they'll most likely shy away from buffing it more than the turret rotation we just got.

I disagree. Farming infantry is the best way to play this game.

Having people repairing would be still vastly superior. Valks are not Galaxies. They are stealthy and highly maneuverable. It's already hard enough to be stealthy with this kind of "teamplay" in this game. Having idiots with turrets on the rumble seats who shoot at everything in sight would make this only harder.

And because Valks are so maneuverable and can get almost one-shotted, you are constantly dodging with them, especially if your gunners shoot at something you can't see as a pilot (which would happen all the time with site turrets). It's really hard to hit from a rumble seat if you are dodging.