Epic striker nerf incoming

Just read the current situation with the striker on the PTS forums. I actually winced. That's a truly brutal nerf to a weapon that if anything could have done with some love.

I really hope that's not final: 15 rounds to drop an ESF, 19 to break a shield, 8 rounds to drop infantry. Removing the lock on is not worth the trade off.

Just you wait until a single platoon sized force starts spamming them, and everyone starts crying that "fire and forget mode too OP, pls nerf".

?

Implying TR are organised or disciplined enough to pull this off.

So...
How does this make it vastly different than the Lancer?
You know, the term "Lancer camp" exists for a reason, which is that single lancers are very lacklustre. And why should the Striker be any different?

lol, the TR zergfits will have a field day with this, no organization needed.

Well, everything in the game could be considered OP when used in great numbers. When new weapons are added or when old ones are reworked, they obviously have to balance it from the perspective of a single user, and as it looks now the Striker doesn't seem too appealing. There is one positive aspect of it though, and that is, I think it will be quite decent at scaring away people who come down low for ground farming but that's about it. Against anything further away than say, 100-125 meters though I think it will be pretty crap. We'll have to see though.

If you think about it, the direction with the changes are an attempt to make the weapon more enjoyable/interesting to use; but, it will never clear the gap of being as useful, even as a generalist weapon, compared the Phoenix or the Lancer within their appropriate niches.

It was unlikely to keep its current 1 mag DPS with the new mechanic, there would be loads of problems if it did.

Currently the Striker ties with the Phoenix on Vehicle KPU and is way ahead of it on Air KPU, with the new mechanic it is going to get much better AI KPU too.

I never said it will be good, I just said prepare for whining

But you know, even if everything was good en masse, some things will still be better than others at mass use. Imo striker would fit that well with new ease of use.

its not the spiker, loool xD

I'm a great fan of ES specific things but I know they are the hardest to be made, especially when you have to make a launcher that fills a niche, I would never want to see every TR HA running with a striker equipped.
the solution for that would be make every launcher really ES, but doubt it will be made

I loled so hard when I tried the revamped Striker on the PTS over a week ago... The initial Striker was OP against aircraft and definitively had to take a nerf, but that thing the TR is given now... I'll rather use an airsoft against vehicles, better DPS.

As much as the mechanics rework has the potential to make the currently useless striker be a valid choice - I do agree that the damage output that it has now on test renders it utterly useless. I don't see under what circumstance this would ever be preferable to using a standard anti-air launcher. The projectile speed and need to manually aim will make this a fairly short-ranged weapon - and having that low damage output on a weapon that you can only reasonably use at short range is kind of pointless.

Imagine a low-flying ESF over a spawnroom and then 3 coordinated players all using strikers to try and take it down... What are the chances that the ESF will stay still long enough to allow you to slowly empty your entire magazine (and hoping not to miss any shots in the process) in order to down it? Not very good. Any less than 3 using it in a coordinated fashion seems like it would be entirely ineffective. I don't see how standard lockons or even taking your luck at landing a dumfire rocket wouldn't always be preferable.

For non-air use or any air tougher than an ESF it seems even worse. Who would bother to even shoot this at a lib, galaxy, tank, max or infantry? The amount of hits (and reloads in-between) you would need to down targets seems entirely impractical.

We can only hope that the current iteration isn't close to done yet and will be tweaked heavily before it goes live. Otherwise the only silver lining to this is that they are only destroying a weapon that nobody bothered to use to begin with.

-Stigma

The AI KPU is going to be awful. It's not a weapon that you can effectively use against infantry, because:
it has no splash
it's pump action
it's slow (can't snipe)
rockets-to-kill exceeds the size of a magazine

Lancer projectiles move between 5x and 6.6x faster and have a ~700m range.

when i look at the striker on PTR and then i look at lancer...and then i pull out the pheonix and laugh....because to me the pheonix is the undisputed King of th ES launchers

If you think that is bad, try Pheonix. If you somehow manage to hit infantry with it, you still need two shots to kill.

Well it will be alot worse than Lancer against armor, tied in uselessnes at AI, and easier to use against air... (Lancer 1 full 2 second load, 3s reload 1 full 2 second load, 6s reload then a few quickshots to take down 1 ESF) and that is if you hit 100% wich is far from easy...

go try it on PTR...i laughed so hard using it...if you think the current Striker is bad...you have no idea what awaits you

Yea I fail to see how a "striker camp" given the current version would be able to do anything other than kill ESFs that happened to accidentally wander inside of a 100-meter radius (perhaps even significantly less given that even coyote mechanics do not make it trivial to hit fast moving targets traveling perpendicular to your line of fire).

Range and accuracy (as well as the ability to be effective against many types of targets) is key to any sort of "camp trap" like this. You can make more damage by just adding more people, but you can't make better range or ability to hit. That's why lancers work so well at this, and why lockon-camps and AV-turret camps are also effective - but you never see anything like "decimator camps" because the range is limited and you have long since lost the element of surprise by the time the enemy is in range.

A camp of annihilators or standard AA-launchers seems like it would do anything the new striker could much better - and with many times the range - so this does not seem viable.

To be clear - I'm not saying that the striker needs to fill this sort of role at all. I'm just saying that if it's going to be designed as a low-range weapon then it needs to be more effective in at least some useage situations than the longer range alternatives - which probably means that it needs more damage, the ability to empty its mag significantly faster, or likely some of both.

-Stigma

Yes, but on the other hand the striker missiles will home in on aircraft.
Anyway, the point was more that people who expect the Striker to be effective solo have their expectations misplaced. The Lancer sure isn't.