HESH spam

Oh, it seems you accidentally left out a vital piece of information regarding infantry surviving AP shells.

They need Flak armour to do it. And full health. I don't know the frequencies at which each suit slot is chosen, but it is common knowledge that Nanoweave is by far the most popular suit slot item. Therefore it is very reasonable to say Flak is in the strong minority of slots chosen. How often would yo say? One in ten? One in twenty? Who knows!

And of course sniper rifles have a higher projectile velocity, they fire tiny bullets at tiny targets from extreme range. Tanks fire large shells at large targets/large shells which explode on impact potentially dealing lethal damage without a direct hit. As I'm sure has been said to you many times, likely by me.

I think it is very clear only individuals don't want combined arms, not all tankers and not all infantry. You don't exactly seem like a shining beacon of balance though.

I'll not bother to even read the rest, just skimming it already tells me there's nothing new under the sun.

Nobody tried to stop you because it would have been entirely pointless. Firing rockets over the long distance between you and the enemy is not only difficult but easy to dodge and simply shows you exactly where the heavy is hiding. Even if he'd hit you, what little would it do? Have to hit you another 4-5 times to kill you, assuming you just sat there and took it on the chin. As I have said in the past, it's literally not worth the time to fight a vehicle as infantry than it is to fight other infantry.

The only way to practically kill a tanker as infantry is with C4, and given the time, effort, risk, and resource costs of a single attempt you really have to piss someone off enough to bother to take you out for two minutes of fighting.

Anecdotal. You may not always pull HE, but not everyone plays the same way. As it stands HE is best against everyone's favorite target while being really no worse against most everything else.

Shenanigans.

One rocket would not stop me. The second rocket though would make me move. Possibly not much, perhaps I would relocate. Point being it would disrupt what I was doing. But no. Nobody even tried.

The forces we were pummeling just laid there and took it. Nobody pulled aircraft. Nobody grabbed harassers from the next base on the lattice. Not a single pair of ambushers set out towards us. Nobody tried a boom drop (which would have ripped us up at the time... we did not own the skies)

It's not the HESH. There isn't anything wrong with it. The HESH is merely the method by which your punishment is meted out.

If it were not present, or were nerfed, or AP was buffed so astronomically high that nobody ran it, then something else would take it's place.

If infantry get themselves utterly submitted in a base and continue to stay there and get farmed then it's their choice.

Also, may I just suggest rephrasing the whole dang argument. Many of you have hinted at it.

"The HESH is too effective against armor"

That is an argument that I would agree with. It being tough against infantry and used to farm is not one I'm sympathetic to.

If there was a great deal of HE spammers there, one might not survive long enough to land two rockets. But even so, as you said you might not even move much, but if you did you wouldn't be at any risk of death. All the heavy would have done is disrupt you. All the other tanks there would just keep on shelling.

The problem with these tactics is that they all require multiple players and coordination. Not only are these thing in short supply much of the time (as one would expect if there was enough of a fight for a group of players to sit on a hill shelling without getting overrun), but in doing so these tactics take people away from the actual fight for the real objectives. And what would stop all the tanks from just coming right back, assuming the attack was decisively in favor of the defenders?

Way I see it, the problem will only be solved when either HE/all tank cannons get nerf'd in a way which makes each of them valid for their purpose but not universally/require a reasonable degree of skill to achieve the mindless slaughter they can now, or to provide infantry with a real means of self-dense and practical, lethal AV offensive capabilities. Make 'em cost as much as the tank to get a kill, doesn't matter.

We'd see the scrubs disappear overnight once the fish-in-a-barrel mechanics are gone. If skilled players can engage an enemy who can reasonably fight back and win with a weapon which requires a reasonably amount of skill to use there will be not be many legitimate complaints. As is now, nothing actually stops HE spammers outside of a massive zerg and certainly not for very long.

But wait a minute. All of what you are describing is one set of players have come to dominate another.

If you are in a position where you are getting shelled and can do nothing about it then you have lost. Either whip up some appropriate tactics for an asymmetrical fight, or ****.

Hell yes it will require some coordination. It took coordination by the enemy to get you into this pickle. It's going to take coordination to get you out of it.

Like I said when I played last night, nobody even tried. They could have disrupted me like you said but then there were other tanks near me. So guess what... someone is going to have to deal with those tanks too. I didn't mean to imply one single person responding to me was going to be sufficient to handle my teammates as well.

Sorry guys, but this just comes across as whining.

You are not getting beat by being HESHed.

You are being HESHed because you got beat.

No, I'm describing a circumstance in which a group of players are abusing an imbalance in power between infantry and vehicles. AKA farming easy kills at no risk.

It takes literally no coordination for a group of HE spammers to start shelling a base from a nearby hilltop. You think any of them are communicating with each other? No. They're all just going to the same place for the same reason and acting independently. Next you'll be telling me traffic is coordinating because they're all heading in the same direction.

Nobody tried because it would only waste their time. Vehicles cost nothing but the time it takes to drive them to the fight and die. Killing one of them would not only be dangerous, difficult, time-intensive, and unrewarding, he'd just pull another tank. Again, in the time it would take to even aim and fire a single shot an infantryman could actually kill another infantryman with a significantly higher likelihood of success. One might even call it an exponentially higher probability of success.

The HE spammers aren't "beating" anyone, they're not really a part of the fight. They're just getting easy rewards at the expense of other players. Something somewhere has to change to give a little bit of risk or effort into the equation.

So some vultures show up to pick over the corpse? Make the vultures go away and you'll still be dead.

Again, the reason you're getting HESHed is because you got beat. You're not getting beat because you're being HESHed.

Whip up some strategy and unF**k the situation. We can banty about hypotheticals but at the end of the day there ARE options. One of those is to admit defeat and relocate. For players and outfits with high kung-fu this will be the last option. For players and outfits that tend to zerg, it will be the first.

Where is the responsibility of the player *choosing* to be a victim here? All the griping about it ruining a good fight. What good fight? You're getting pwned.

I'm simply not in favor of nerfing the HESH because it's simply not over powered.

Folks I think your problem (not mine ) would be solved by reducing the vehicle damage of the HESH as others mentioned.

Make the HESH weak as kittens against other armor. If folks want to farm infantry they still can. They'll be at risk of getting rolled if some serious AP shows up to deal with them though.

Defenders can then apply that AP to fix the farm OR (more likely) they'll stay holed up, still getting farmed, and then complain on the forums.

It is both not fun and terrible for gameplay to just up and leave just because the enemy has a handful of spammers nearby. Players shouldn't be forced to slog though meat-grinders or find a different meat-grinder. It also shouldn't require an extremely one-sided amount of effort and coordination to deconstruct the point and click reaping. As you said in the following post, one potential solution would be to reduce the effectiveness of HE shells against armour, so that using HE cannons would be a minor risk of facing a significantly better armed opponent.

But regardless, nothing should require a substantially higher degree of skill, coordination, and/or effort to overcome. A team of highly organized players working closely together in any faucet of the game should be hard to beat. A cluster of HE spammers who just randomly drove to the same lookout point over a contested base should fall just as easily as they came together: By the opportunity of targets.

The idea that they ruin good fights requires there to have been a good fight. Thus, the presence of spammers has killed the enjoyment of it.

Are HE cannons overpowered? By themselves, perhaps not. But on the fast, strong, armoured platform they must be accompanied by to be used they are vastly superior to all infantry while being hardly any worse off against any other target than the tank would have been with just AP.

So, do you know when they are a team of highly organized players working closely together to blanket the base in which you're fighting in devastating splash damage and they're not just a series of random misfits conveniently positioning themselves alongside each other? Moreover, what if they're a part of that coordinated group that are fighting in the base, but in pursuit of a different tactic than their comrades to assert control of it?

You can find that sort of "good fight" in any fairly decent arena FPS that can host many players on teams. PlanetSide is one of the few franchise's where the actual fight is always a shade bigger than the illusion you think it is. It can and should announce that thunderously should one fail to be prepared. Strength held within and strength demonstrated without. The world is too large to become fixated on any single walled 100 sq.m section of it.

If you are correct that a "good fight" wouldn't be one where players are harassed under the constant threat of HESH, what you are describing was obviously never a good fight. In the single-minded enthusiasm, the pack-in defenders who don't fight back tooth and claw were just deluding themselves to the reality of their situation, their plight. That HESH spammer shouldn't have had any sort of easy time getting close enough to their base, let alone staying so close, if they were playing with all of the cards dealt to them.

... That HESH spammer shouldn't have had any sort of easy time getting close enough to their base, let alone staying so close, if the battle was in full swing. Perimeters and defenses should have been in place. A number of players coming and going from multiple bases, clashing with each other in the inbetween, building up to an eventual magnificent push through a battered force, or a contested frontline that warps and twists but rarely shifts enough to call winners or losers. Troops from either side attempting to sneak around and sabotage their enemies' efforts so that they can strike directly at the important targets in the hopes that either no one is paying attention or they can distract enough for their allies to get the upper hand in whatever affairs have the two sides clash. All sorts of units, meager and fearsome alike, scurrying around either absentmindedly or with intent, accomplishing their own smaller goals so that other teams can accomplish their goals too, fighting or fleeing or luring.

The whole effort would dwarf even any single tank regardless of its primary armament.

That is what I call a good fight for this game.

Because never in the history of PlanetSide 2 have I ever seen or heard of any organized squad say "let's take half our guys and sit them on a hill outside the base." If they wanted to spam cheese all over the place they'd be 8 MAXes two engineers and two medics, or some such composition. See that one fairly often, just gotta park them all on the point and the base caps itself. As it stands HE tanks on a hill don't do very much for their team and most often couldn't even if they wanted to. Even a bunch of random snipers in the same hills could provide recon or come down and hold points.

Many other games suffer their own flaws just as PS2 does. You won't get rid of me that easily. But moreso you assume by "good fight" I mean one without vehicles if I understand you correctly. This is entirely false, vehicles obviously serve many good purposes without just being detrimental to the other players. These good fights are killed when people come in with the sole intent to beat down the other players for their own selfish gain. Doesn't have to be tanks either, air, MAXes, small groups of ******* players, or just plain huge zergs. Doesn't matter, everything can make a fight good or bad.

I don't know about you, but I've had a great many good fights in the interior of biolabs. No HE there, attacking and defending can be great fun with just infantry in the whole hex. Or are you implying infantry can't fight tooth and nail?

Herein lies the problem. Attackers will almost always have the vehicle advantage, so the HE tanks can't really be repelled by the defending vehicles. Especially so because HE canons don't suffer much in the way of AV. The infantry in and around the base can't repel the HE tanks either, because infantry in general lacks the range and lethality to be anything other than targets outside of short range. And here I come full circle: Nerf HE in some way to either make it starkly inferior to AP in vehicle combat, nerf HE to require a realistic amount of skill, or provide infantry with the tools they need to actually defend themselves and to go on the offensive and kill the enemy.

Oh, and if one side has enough spare troops to patrol the perimeter it's probably not really a good fight.

I would hound them down and berate them. Demand of them that you are worth that little extra effort they could contribute up on the hill.

Do you have a proposal about how they can be beatened down, if they really are so easily capable of being beaten down, yet still benefit from their trouncing? I mean, using illicit means to win is completely wrong, but a self-imposed fair fight constricts progress.

As a unflappable support primary, my bread and butter is marching among allies. I enjoy the base battle myself from time to time, transient though it is. There's more to this game and no HESH tank scares me from it.

As long as there's a relatively even number of players on both sides, you can both field enough vehicles to balance against each other. If there's an even number of you (allies) as them (enemies) you should easily be able to establish enough vehicles in comparison to the number of enemies that have run into the base, at worest waiting a while for their numbers to disseminate throughout the compound and the area once it is overrun. We already have established in this thread that HESH is imbalanced against other vehicles right now, but that's a problem for your allies in the base who are getting fired down upon. What we're doing is trying to curb the enemy vehicles from firing into the base like that by re-establishing the defensive perimeter, knocking out or pushing out their tanks and mobile spawn points, to take the heat (and HE) off those allies so they can regain the base capture. If you don't believe your allies can divide their efforts in two - beat back enemy players and defend against enemy vehicles - your enemies will be in that same ship.

And, as said, unless your tanker drivers don't even have the aptitude for baby walkers, you'll distract your enemy's shelling against your pedestrian forces for a time where they will be capable of moving more freely. For that opening alone, the strategy should be worth pursuing.

I'm not sure that would ever go anywhere. At most an infantry in the base would be annoying the tanks and at worst he'd have died instantly and achieved nothing. Not a great plan, I'l be honest.

Well to quote Jamie Hyneman, "when in doubt, C4." But really, this is just a game we all play for fun, it ought to be fair. Let skill be what progresses, not how many free resources and questionable "tactics" each team brings.

I hope you're not implying because I enjoy a good biolab fight I don't fight anywhere else or in some way am limiting myself because of "HE." I do a little bit of almost everything. Don't like MAXes and can't fly for **** so I only try during aerial anomalies, don't drive a flash for combat, don't support the use of HE, don't ever waste time driving a Vanguard but gun for them fairly often. Everything else at the very least I dabble in, HE or not.

Not often the case though. If a huge line of vehicles rolls up the defenders would either have to pull from the easily watched terminal and spawn pad or waste time spawning from further back in the lattice. And the more allies who leave the points the easier the enemy can take the base while the defenders squalor about outside it. At that point, even if all the enemies were driven off from the outside those inside the base would have taken much of the time needed for the cap and would be well dug in to the point rooms and chokepoints.

The amount of misinformation and biased self-justification is absolutely horrendous here.

Nobody tried to stop you because the likelyhood of success is tiny. They would be fighting an uphill battle all the way, and if they would have drawn enough players to have any effect, they would likely not succeed anyway as now the enemy infantry will be killing you. And they wouldn't need half the infantry to overwhelm your rocket troops. That is assuming you were within the effective range ofcourse.

Small-arms is waaaaaay weaker than you make it out to be against Harassers. At 87% damage reduction against small-arms only 13% remains to deal damage against a 2500 damage target. The weapon with the most DPS per magazine and damage per bullet, the Gauss SAW, needs to fire it's entire magazine within 10m and can only miss +/-3 shots to kill a single Harasser. You need multiple reloads and half a dozen weapons to have any effect on a Harasser that is moving, which is why the whole "oh noes vulnerable to small-arms" is basically crap.

And your weapon preference doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of the discussion.

I have to agree with JibbaJabba here:

If you're getting pwned by HE spam, then find a way to counter it.

I have araxiumed my lightning, vanguard and Harasser. I have abused the **** out of HE (pre CAI), but I also did my AP and HEAT as well.

On the flip side, I have araxiumed my LA and my HA as well. Guess what I did for my LA araxium? I blew up A LOT of vehicles with C4 and I did all of this before the introduction of the rocklet rifle which makes taking out vehicles a LOT easier.

So, here is a trick if you hate being spammed by tanks:
-Get a valk and put at least a few certs into Stealth.
-Get your light assault and equip drifter jets and the sensor shield and safe fall implants on him / her.
-And, of course, make sure you have 2 x C4.

Then, next time some bi-atch is HE spamming you, redeploy into your new stealth Valk, go high elevation above said bi-atch, drop out and C4 that bi-atch!

Safe fall is in case the bi-atch has a spitfire turret set up (standard operating procedure for tank spammers) so that you can drop quickly if need be instead of getting shot to pieces by the spitfire.

I have probably 500+ vehicle kills, most of which were done this way. If I get farmed by a random tank at a base, I WILL REDEPLOY and GO HUNT HIM DOWN with my Valk + LA. I might even get killed a few times trying, but I will try and get that tanker!

Here is what I do not do: WHINE ONLINE...

BTW: listen to what you said in your post:
-you were HA
-you were on a 34 kill streak

Right away that tells me that you are either god's gift to infantryside play, or you were in a great location to farm the other team. Guess what - someone farmed you better! Maybe it was even the guy who put a bounty on you - you never know!

As I progressed through this game I tried many things to combat the tank, I've tried rocket launchers, I've tried c4, harrassers, ESF's then other tanks. Only to realize that the most effective thing was another tank and I never wanted to play a tank game. I like the "combined arms game", I think flying mechanics are interesting, but even then that required a bit more skill and had slightly more risks than a tank, the HP of a tank... requires 6 hits of rockets, I also have killed about 500 vehicles but have died to them maybe 3000 times, much of those from allied vehicles, seems everybody who uses vehicles are just menaces, even when you try to repair them with engineer, no regard for any of their surroundings, don't need to, when you can just drive behind a boulder and repair up.

So I finally bought some tank upgrades, if you can't beat them simply join them, though I do think almost every negative experience I've had in this game is from tanks shelling me from a fair distance away and not because it was skillful either, but because they'd been bombarding the same door/passageway for the past half hour, nor do I know if this is fun for them or they just like to piss people off. I'll never know. I also don't really enjoy maxes of any faction, don't play them, don't find them interesting, wonder if the game would be more enjoyable without the two, though I think the tanks maybe just need their damage halved or something, so its a 2 shell kill on infantry and ESF's instead of 1.

And what if you have multiple people working on it? I mean, it may only be 21 damage of the 200/167 500RPM weapon at 85m, but with three players firing on it, 30 bullets apiece, that becomes three-fourths of its health (1890 damage) stripped away in 4s. A TR 143/112 750RPM weapon would only deal 14 at 60m; but, three of them would empty the standard 40-mag in less than 4s and deal 1680 damage. For TR LMG's, that'd be 2100 damage in 4s. You can't even get a single player with a rocket launcher doing that much damage in the same amount of time.

The solution to all problems one person can't solve alone in this game is teamwork or, at least, concentrating firepower.

LOL. You are not a bit biased...not at all. I mean, yeah...rocklets make things easier. At the same time you forget that tank armor got buffed a lot and C4 got nerfed...so did several other AV tools(like Zoe-comets, AV-turret etc...not to mention the implants that make mines pretty useless). Overall it definitely didn't get easier to fight tanks.
Yes, you killed a lot of vehicles. Did you die more to them as infantry or killed more as infantry? We all know the answer.

I ain't a fan of the logic "to kill a vehicle you need a vehicle". How about the logic "to kill infantry you need infantry"? Or maybe we should build an elevated biodome over every single base out there and have the tanks just play their stupid sandbox game outside alone with each other...

So your answer to a lightning is: Buy a valk and 2 c4...fly over and jump down on top of them. Over and over again. Since tankers love the resource argument: How many resources are those for a not so safe kill(I mean, given the C4 nerf it's not unlikely that you will get killed before blowing them up)?

I'm not sure I could disagree more. Get yourself into a platoon that has some semblance of cohesion. One where the leader calls for small arms on harassers and/or ESFs. Harassers get caught by surprise and are lucky to make it away smoking. Rockets not even needed.

Anything that can be accomplished with a clip can be accomplished faster with ten tenths of a clip.