HESH spam

For all the vehicle players who have complained, and the specifics of the complaints, have basically pointed out that you should try and engage an enemy with superior range, superior firepower, superior speed, requires multiple hits at minimum and a skill requirement that's less than half of yours to operate with your vastly inferior weapons and come out on top... Somehow.

Also have you read anything of what I wrote? I specifically asked for defensive weapons for infantry that use nanites. Things like deployable shields, distortion generators that make it hard for people to hit you from range, weapons that nerf vehicles on a hit so their turret can't turn as fast or their speed won't be enough for an easy and quick getaway to reset the combat etc. But you can keep going with naming stuff you "could do" that make no sense.

Here's an example of what you do:
"They have a sniper rifle, what do I do?"

Fate: "You shoot them with your pistol"

"They are at long range!"

F: "Just hit them in the face"

"They need less hits even if they hit my legs and have a weapon designed for range while my pistol is not!"

F: "Score multiple hits on them first"

"With COF, recoil and COF growth it takes too long before I kill him, he's 90% more likely to kill me first!"

F: "Just be better at it!"

"Being better has nothing to do with it"

F: "You can always just go away, or stick to the spawnroom"

"That's not a solution"

F: "You should burn in hell for asking for another solution when these inferior solutions are already available".

Trust me Demigan this guy honestly doesn’t know what he is talking about. I’ve tried arguing with him to no avail.

Thing is, he used to have incredibly smart comments in the past. Now he's just having a smartmouth.

Yeah dude you keep talking about the cloaked flash... I’ve auraxed the flash and used cloak for 100s of hours. It’s really not a viable counter to an aware tanker, they hear you, see you and boom 1 direct hit and your dead. All the weapons are trash other than the fury and star fall. Only VS has starfall aswell.

I really can't fathom how you don't see the Flash as a very strong anti-tank option. Get the Fury, get a Decimator/Crossbow on the back, and insta-kill any tank in the game. It's really that simple. Of course there are some great players out there, but literally 99% of tankers don't stand a chance. Two 2/3 Harassers or two 2/2 MBTs can't out-dps a single invisible Flash. How can you possibly not see that as strong?

It’s strong, against bad players. However, the majority of HESH spammer are high BR players with good amounts of skill. They know when you are coming due to sound and they can also see you. Although, I do understand about it being powerful, this is only true with bad players from my experience.

You know what's crazy? It actually works. It's the application of well-thought-out tactics that utilize diverse equipment designed to poke holes through each of a perceived strengths of an enemy unit, including the transient opportune of "the right place at the right time." That's the sort of luster to which this game should aspire.

As aforementioned, I feel you write way too much for even small ideas and, whenever I do get time to read through a post of yours, it feels like I've already read what you wrote elsewhere. You've already explained why you write so much so we don't have to review the reasoning again. I browse, even then only comment on that with which I disagree or do not understand adequately, and only on that very specific aspect.

If you really do feel my advice is that obtuse, I wonder if you ever actually knew what kind of positions I held on any topic besides anti-Beta air.
Also, all of those suggestions are exceptionally terrible. I understand it's satire but I do feel you could have tried harder.

No, Demigan, neither my positions nor my argumentative style have changed. I've always had the same opinions and used the same sorts of arguments as I have now. The only difference is that our resolutions on certain topics where we regularly interacted ran parallel to each other so there was no real cause that made the abrasivness noticeable.

On one hand, the only part of which I am willing to self-implicate is that I don't write posts that drag on for as long as I sometimes did back in the day, unless it's (absolutely) the very first time I bring something up or if it's something that I do care enough about that I might prompt a drawn-out conversation. On the other hand, if you're willing to dive into my posting history to find and demonstrate a fundamental discrepancy in my rhetorical capacity, I will concede the point.

Yeah, take a vehicle to take out vehicles...and take a vehicle to take out infantry. And he does not even notice what might be unfair for infantry about that.

You know what's crazy? If it actually worked, people would be doing it. But it doesn't work, and despite that a few people are doing it and they still have little to no success as they are basically extra certs for whoever they attack. Because the application of well-thought-out tactics that utilize diverse equipment designed to absolutely obliterate tanks but is well capable of obliterating infantry makes it very easy for vehicle players to remain almost impervious to infantry.

You know, if you read through this thread you can see things that have been written down again and again. The tankers feel that they have been slighted, the infantry players feel they can't really do anything against tanks (and they are right), so why bother read anything at all here? And even then it's a crappy move to go "oh every single infantry guy simply wants to look at tanks and they'll evaporate".

No I haven't intentionally satired your logic, the pistol vs sniper idea is pretty much exactly the same as the infantry AV vs tank, except ofcourse with a pistol you have a much easier time when you do get close as a sniper will have reduced aim, won't be multiple times faster and won't have superior health.

You went from saying stuff that were actually insightful to "an infantryman going up against a foe with superior speed, firepower, health and lowered skill to operate is a fair battle because the infantryman can use tactics". Besides ignoring that the tank is equally capable of tactics and still has the lowered skill requirement, all the bonuses stacked upon vehicles makes the fight massively unbalanced and unfun.

Even if your current rethoric is the same as the old one, you should simply switch rethoric. If your current rethoric is indeed different from the past, then you should also switch rethoric. So regardless of the outcome, stop posting silly stuff.

My original post has gone beyond my ability to amend it after I step away from it so you'll excuse me to doing so in a second post.

Regardless of how many novel things you suggest, none of that is in the game right now and none of it may ever see the light of day. In the end, I will only raise complaint against the suggestions against which I believe would do disservice to the game and the rest you can consider either hold my indifference or my implicit agreement. For that matter, even if I agreed explicitly with any of your ideas, it wouldn't stop me from continuing to make the same points I do now.

For that reason, and to that ends, I always feel the better approach in threads like this is to focus on the core capabilities that you, as a player, already possess. I could talk all day about the benefits of new shield that does not exist in the game in its current incarnation but that doesn't actually help players like TheRateRule. The shield is not in the game right now. The HESH tanks are probably on the ridge right now. If the shield idea contained applicable strategies that could be extracted from the speculative idea and leveraged with other utilities, that would be good too; but, the shield itself is not something TheRatRule could use in the game today, tomorrow, or within a forseeable future. The what-you-could-do-now to help others and help yourself, or, at the very least, continue to perform constructive actions against the problem, if what I intend to convey.

I ask people not to get lost in the min-maxing calculations or the speculative what-ifs and, even if they want to continue pursuing their proposal to expand the number of solutions available, instead pursue workable even if imperfect solutions, no matter how tangential. For that reason, I will only suggest things I myself have found useful, tempering the repeat of untested other people's suggestions with an "I've seen" or an 'I've heard."

The shield for nanites idea sounds like a suitable arrangement. A HESH nerf might be an unfortunate but deserved outcome. What could TheRateRule do until one of those things come to pass?

Most posts in the thread are short and so are easy to digest. You have some like that too, such as #27.
Also, I've never advocated use of the Wraith Flash before. I've only just been wokring it recently. There's that.

Much to both of our regrets, I don't post here for the purposes of acquiescing to anyone's composition standards. That would make things easy.

If you say so. Skill is relative, so your mileage may vary.

plus the vast majority of bases have high walls that make it impossible for vehicles to farm you easily ignoring the occasional harasser that manages to sneak in somehow and cause chaos.

What if I told you... it's supposed to kill you.

It's a frickin' tank with a dedicated purpose built gun just for killing infantry as efficiently as possible.

I got killed 40 times last night. 2 were from lightning hesh. Same player both times... he was doing the camp.

So - fracking - what.

Everything is supposed to kill. But most things are also supposed to require skill and generally less effective than HE cannons.

What about all the frickin' rocket launchers and anti-tank weapons dedicated to the purpose of killing tanks which are terrible at killing said tanks? What about the frickin' AP cannons dedicated to the purpose of killing tanks which are marginally better than the exact opposite type of cannon? So much so that most will run HE for everything anyway!

Kills have to be earned, especially when they're at the expense of another player. HE spam is about as mindless and easy as it gets.

Ok, then go take a HESH lightning to an MBT fight. Go kill 'em all! Earn those kills. When you're done, take out some liberators with it.

Look, just because you bring a knife to a gunfight doesn't mean the gun is OP. What is the goal here? You don't want to get killed by HESH? Fine, remove it. Then what? What is the next thing you don't want to get killed by?

The HESH is doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

I think some of the other rounds like AP are NOT doing what they are supposed to do at the moment. HESH though seems fine.

Obviously you're not being fair. Lightning HE vs Lightning AP easily comes down to skill and starting positions over the base cannon. Don't see many HE Magriders or Vanguards out there anyway.

You're misinterpreting my argument. I'm not saying HE should be removed, just that it should not be universally effective against all realistic targets. Spam infantry all day every day and still more than capable of killing enemy vehicles. This is the issue with HE that much of the thread is focused on.

HE is doing more than what it's supposed to do on top of being way to effective at it's main purpose. If HE couldn't really kill enemy vehicles or was heavily limited in ways which required skill to over come it would be much more fair to have in game. It requires little to no skill for immense rewards. Currently there is no reason not to take HE every single time, unless for some reason ya' want a Skyguard.

Clearly I disagree. If anything AP is doing exactly what it was designed to do, nothing more, nothing less. Fastest shells with the lowest drop and the highest damage for the lowest TTK on vehicles.

The root issue seems to be that HESH is "good", or certainly capable at everything, making HEAT, "AP", etc. superfluous. Consequently, a swarm of tanks winning the vehicle fight, then immediately farming infantry is merely a symptom.

Could you not simply balance the ammunition types so that one does not stand out from the rest?

HESH is mostly obsolete in modern armored combat, so why not reduce its damage against other tanks and let it's effects be mainly anti-infantry and anti-PMB?

APFSDS is lethal against tanks, but becomes less effective as the distance increases, so let it be the fast projectile that is easy to hit with but suffers from damage degradation the further away the target is.

HEAT is slower than APFSDS but does the same damage at all ranges due to the way its warhead functions, so make it the alternative to "AP" that has greater damage potential at distance but is harder to hit with.

Tweak the velocities ~AP > HEAT >> HESH and see where that gets us.

On top of this as Uriel suggested a few pages ago, you could add sub-system "targets" that could be destroyed to cripple, but not outright kill tanks, "encouraging" them to fall back and repair.. The closer the tanks, the easier these are to hit for infantry. This would:

A. Make vehicles choose what their role is going to be (Anti-Vehicle vs Anti-Personnel)
B. Maybe add depth to Tank Combat (Someone with knowledge of this will need to chime in here) by giving them loadout choices and targetable subsystems?
C. Give infantry a way to shoo away tanks via sub-system damage, making it harder for single or small groups of tanks to effectively suppress a base.

except that won't help, they've 'tweaked' them before first equalizing them, then nerfing them hard to make tanks move closer to infantry, then making it so certain tank guns cannot OHK infantry with a direct hit (AP), no tanker worth their salt will use AP for mixed work anymore, think about it if i hit you with AP at +300m i deserve that kill just as much as a sniper (which has HIGHER velocity not less), except infantry have the special snowflake anti-combined arms mindset.

that's the problem, even before when AP could one shot infantry the key to surviving infantry attack is to stay at mid range where rockets are dodgable and it's easier to look out for C4 attacks. except the devs caved to infantryside slackers and compressed the range further

this is a war game, if a tank is shelling a base uncontested then it's the defender's fault, infantry seem to forget that 'base' does not mean 'arena match' it's not supposed to be functionally too different from real life.

if a general knows the enemy has low flying aircraft in the area and has APCs equipped with 30mm AA and doesn't deploy them it's the general's fault when his units get smoked by aircraft, infantryside seems to think that sort of thing shouldn't apply to them and they neglect the fact they are talking about ground vehicles, which are far easier to kill and chase then instant death air attacks.

literally any amount of time i spend in a tank, which has less objectives and role then infantry i could be earning more certs playing as infantry.

for all the infantry whine about being occasionally killed by HESH, grenades and c4 kill them more, they have MORE cover then tanks, tanks and vehicles in general are vulnerable to vehicle and infantry attack anywhere, at least infantry can hide in buildings against aircraft and vehicles, effective cover for tanks is very rare and even if you find one aircraft can still get you most of the time if they can pilot worth a damn to evade your fire.

infantry have the tools and vehicles to counter with, but if it's isn't convenient they don't want to react, they want to keep farming a meatgrinder rather then pull counters.

if the softer counters don't work, pull the harder counters. if you don't ever cert out a combat vehicle to fight enemy vehicles you are part of the problem.

tanks are not as unstoppable as people think or nearly as powerful as they believe, like anything if you have enough together they are powerful by weight of fire, but you can say the same of aircraft a far worse offender of base meatgrinding player's sensabilities.

after enemy vehicles are dead what choices do tanks have? kill the sunderer=kill the fight or pick off infantry that expose themselves.

the game would be better off if the developers just sat back and did nothing while the dumb players refused to use the tools available to them to kill the tanks.

rather then trying to get tanks nerfed at every turn, how about focusing on aircraft, consider how hard it is to get in it, how you get rekt by pros easy and how much slaughter they can engage in for their long term survivability, a good pilot can stay alive long enough that when you kill him he can just pull another, essentially you've only delayed him a minute before he's back and ground pounding.

infantryside mindset as usual 'i got killed rarely/ocassionally by X because i didn't use my brain or counter'.

you can choose to counter or not, but infantryside expects the devs to wall up the bases completely so it's cod match arena because it's 'too complicated' to team up, solo C4 or pull a vehicle to hard counter.

you guys think a vehicle user doesn't feel as helpless as an infantryman dying to hesh, when a liberator comes calling and kills them with a dalton or tankbuster?

the difference is we realize no matter what aspect we are fighting (vehicles, air, infantry) that we are never safe from ANY other aspect.

Why specifically does it not help? Past changes are irrelevant here, these are new suggestions.
The goal is for all three weapon types available to tankers to be uniquely useful and come with meaningful benefits and drawbacks. These are not nerfs.
We can debate how that balance between them would look exactly, but I mean as long as there isn't a one-size-fits-all choice it would be a nice start. If you have any suggestions I'm absolutely open to discussion. I would be fine, for example, with a return to Anti-Tank rounds being an OHK against Infantry on a Direct hit, but maybe range dependent on the faster "AP" vs at all ranges with the slower HEAT, simply to make choosing between the two something of a personal preference rather than one being simply better.

This thread inspired me to HESH farm last night. Hadn't really done it in months.

Nobody even tried to stop me. Didn't even try. Not a single rocket even fired in my direction.

You all get HESH farmed because you just assume nothing can be done about it. I see the same thing if I use a harasser against infantry. Some small arms focus fire would melt me, but not a shot ever gets fired. The number one defense against both it seems is to QQ on the forums and call for nerfs.

And to those saying it's the go-to for everything, it's not. My default "pull from load screen" happens to be a HEAT. It's my gun of choice for removing sunderers. It's also my gun of choice when I get in a "knife fight" with another lightning. I rarely pull AP on a lightning but frequently do on a MBT.