Higby: Return of the Tankside

That system doesn't seem to do much tbh.

And Klypto, can't forget the Alarxo/Klypto dynamic Vanguard duo.

Didn't mention Klypto because he's barely posting these days.

As a tank lover:

200 meters AV range is too low. I'd go for at least 300-350 meters

Armor increase sounds nice

MBT surviving 2 C4 is bad in my opinion.
C4 is supposed to be anti tank effective, when someone makes it to get 2 C4 on you, you are supposed to die.

Herds of tanks yes.

Herds of organized / dedicated players from the same outfit in tanks? There is a significant difference.

Use of nanites and nanite costs are the only measurements we have, and you can say it's a false hierarchy, but it is the only hierarchy that can be established at this point in time.

The facts are simple. Infantry can destroy tanks. I don't care if it is difficult, and most of the time highly dependent on the randomness of the battlefield to accomplish said task. The fact is they can. Either with drifter jets, AV mana turret on an obscure location, empire spesific launchers or straight up pulling a max.

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I have experience with combined arms since the release of planetside 2. I feel I have spent enough time in each vehicle asset in this game to give a good rundown of what vehicles are good to use and when they are good. My statements may be subjective, but it comes pretty close to anecdotal evidence given the time and effort I have invested in this game.

What I have taken away from my time in an MBT, in an outfit that has dabbled and kept trying to field an armor squad since this time, is that tanks as a whole are fragile, flimsy and unreliable assets, and since they require the same manpower as a lib without having neither the mobility, durability, or alpha strike potential they are also highly disposable assets.

I don't care how good these imaginary tankers of yours are. Some of them will die. Everyone dies - that is the nature of planetside 2.


In the current meta.
MBTs are not cost effective (a lib kills more in less time for less nanites).
They are not time effective (can't redeploy, have to drive everywhere).
They are not manpower effective (secondary weapons are horribly tuned and outside of pre nerf PPA cannot deal with infantry very well).
They are not cert effective (You can cert a MAX suit and be effective in multiple roles for the same cert amount it takes to kit a tank).
Empire spesific abilities and curiosities have not been properly implemented or thought out (anchor mode not affecting secondary thus making a secondary gunner even more useless).
Tanks are only used in a zerg to kill everything around a base and then discarded.


The only way you can get more interest in tanks is by reducing the amount of sudden deaths. In other words make them less fragile / unreliable, and encourage teamwork. This is accomplished by upping their HP and buffing the MBT secondaries, perhaps followed by upping the cost of the tank to reduce spam.

Alternatively. They can give us that 3 seater heavy tank with dedicated driver that they promoted with concept art, but the tank in it's current state is just a zerg vehicle for lone wolves, people that spent money on them trying to validate their own existence, and people that still have directives to achieve.

So when WASP runs a combined arms tank squad, you're telling me you guys aren't effective at all? I find that hard to believe!

Tanks are fragile and flimsy? You know what, you're just a liar. Or you guys are bad.

Also just because the Liberator is overpowered, that's no reason to go ahead and make tanks the same.

How is buffing tank armor and nerfing AV changing that? Lone wolf farmers will now be even MORE prevalent.

You really aren't making a very good case for why we should accept these buffs.

The only ground vehicle that's not fragile is a rear-facing blockade sunderer.
And maybe a deployed shield-sunderer. Everything else is indeed fragile.

As a side note, what do both of you put in to the "lone wolf" term here? Single tanks or 1/2 tanks?
If it's single tanks off to the side/behind enemy lines or what have you, then yes. But maybe that was the point.
If you mean 1/2 tanks, no not really. The biggest change that's coming is, to me, the buffs to the Enforcer ML (and Saron, depending on what they do with it) which places a lot more emphasis on going 2/2.

I think I'm not trying hard enough to make that list either... must kill more infantry to make the list

Tanks are already the most expensive thing in the game, and are still freely spammed all over the place. Asking people to survive 11 (or even 15) minutes between tanks rather than 9 isn't going to change much.

I'd love to see the existing tanks require dedicated drivers, but the flood of tears would be endless, so that's pretty much not happening. Getting a new super tank that requires a dedicated driver would be an acceptable alternative -- it requires teamwork to function, so it's perfectly fair that it requires teamwork to destroy. But until then? If you can 1/2 it, I don't think it's unreasonable for me to expect to kill it on my own -- C4 also costs resources, y'know?

Of course we're effective. Fighting randoms on open ground, and clearing out enemy vehicle assets is like taking candy from babies, but then according to you those 30-45 minutes or so where the tanks are really good is the norm whereas we see the 2 hours of an operation that it takes to set up those 30-45 mins, and as a result of said experience our armor squads had to become very adaptive.

Which means we ditch our tanks and repull assets when we think they might be effective enough to warrant use over infantry (which amounts to just about 45 mins during our 19:30 - 22:30 operation times).

AV isn't being nerfed. render range / 200 meter max distance is still good distance for AV nesting and it helps because it brings infantry closer to the tanks that are being buffed, and may make it more of a trade rather than the outright decimation that a proper nest can bring against zerg.

This will still happen.


Nobody I know cares that light assault c4 does not give you an instant kill on a tank or that an esf rocketpod volley / tankbuster ambush slightly less effective. Thus making it easier to maintain the armor squad, which may validate more overall tank usage for our organized players instead of pulling other assets.

Why not? It worked for Planetside 1. And last time I checked, you were the one demanding that an entire playstyle be either removed from the game or rendered an utter waste of time/manpower/resources (which is what making a tank 100% equal to a single infantry unit would do) just because you can't stand the idea of not everything being a 1v1 honor duel.

An economy would fix many of the issues Planetside 2 has. We would be able to quantify value in cost-efficiency, rather than relying on something as pointless and easily manipulated as K/D.

Zergs would lose a lot of their power, since instead of every player being a Tiberium refinery with legs, the zerg would have to divide scarce resources among its members. The vertical progression in Planetside 2 would be blunted by having more advanced loadouts cost more.

Redeployside would be blunted as well, if dumping three platoons on a base's spawnpoint rapidly depletes that base's nanites. We would have map movement, and a small amount of strategy would arise around efficient use of resources.

By removing zeroes and infinities from our equations, they become more meaningful and easier to balance.

I mean lone wolfing as it's properly meant. Single / two tanks off to the side / behind enemy lines or what have you. That's my point is that this is the only time tanks are generally in their element and slightly more effective than infantry / MAX is in low numbers and ambushing unsuspecting players.

When WASP wants to hold the line we bring infantry, and MAX suits with AV. There might be a tank there, but most of the time it takes too long to set up as you have to drive from facility and get to a proper location for AV work.

No no. KILL ALL THE VEHICLES!

Well those lone wolves will still get roflstomped by air most of the time, so hardly a big change.
However I do agree with your sentiment on tanks.

I am not asking people to survive 9-11 minutes. I am saying our organized armor squad will become significantly more durable because we have the proper support vehicles and assets (AA skyguard, and repair sunderer) alongside aware and relatively skilled operators.

This is about making the battlefield more stable and predictable, to award more intelligent play, and to give outfits an easier time maintaining our assets.

If they could only buff the secondary weapons too then we'd be talking about how SOE are catering just to the outfits. I couldn't care less that some joe dickbag spends 5 minutes drifter jetting of the techplant tower, and SOE tells him that he can't kill tanks like that anymore.

What I care about is that when I'm fighting the Vanu zerg, or the TR hivemind that we can make our numbers count, and currently tanks are a **** way of doing that. People actually spent money on tank stuff, and want to use them, but they're just not competitive as they are. Too fragile, expensive, and not even better than a MAX at holding the front line.

Sooo...still not seeing the problem with current tank balance then. What's the problem again? You use teamwork, you are effective, you shred all who appose you. Yeah clearly something needs to be done to make you guys stronger?

Boo hoo. Yeah it's so terrible there are times where you need to play infantry and you can't do EVERYTHING from the comfort of your tank. You realize capping bases involves fighting for control points right?

Pretty sure if tank weapons received a range reduction, YOU would view that as a nerf. So I'm sorry but AV is most certainly being nerfed. Also increasing tank armor IS a direct nerf to AV weapons.

This is an incredibly myopic statement. You only care about your tank usage, your armor squad, and your own personal KPD in a tank.

Everything you are saying revolves around tank and vehicle play. That's obviously the only part of the game that interests you. If you think these changes are going to make the meta of Planetside 2 any different, you are fooling yourself. The game doesn't revolve around you guys and your little "armor squad" nonsense. Nobody cares how "difficult" you find maintaining an armor squad is. There's only two possible reasons for this:

1. You are effective and attract a LOT of attention from enemies trying to kill you.
2. You are bad at tanks.

Increase c4 damage to 80% of an MBT.
Only allow people to carry one.
No MBT HP buff!

LOL!!!!! What an impossibly absurd statement.

I don't think there's enough tank armor buffs in the WORLD to make you happy if you honestly believe this nonsense.

I am pretty sure a raven MAX get's just about as much done as a tank at holding the front line. See I don't deal in individual assets. Everything I see is in squad therms. A squad of AV assets with MAX support will perform significantly better on the front lines than a squad of MBT's with repair sunderer. Not only do they have impeccable range, and have a significantly easier time aiming, but any vehicle going their way has a significantly harder task killing them than opposing tanks.

Depending on how effective the infantry squad is at maintaining their advantage, and explointing their mobility with sunderers / galaxies they can have a grand old time whereas the tank squad is in danger of loosing a member the moment anyone within 500 meters sets up an AV turret.

You are right ofcourse. I don't give two ***** that Joe the light assault doesn't get to kill a tank when he decides to be an ******* and drifterjets down from a techplant roof or a tower. Nor do i care that the sneaky infil hacking a base turret might not get to kill an MBT for it. There are still plenty of ways for the solo player to kill a tank. He could have pulled a vehicle himself for instance. an ESF with hornets or pods, an MBT, a lightning, or solo lib with tankbuster.

The endgame here is for SOE to validate using vehicles. They have put in them in the game and they need to be better than catch-all infantry or next gen vehicle lumifiber doesn't sell very well.

And I am not being unreasonable in demanding that anyone defending the status quo explain themselves, and so far I have yet to see a single argument outside of "That's not the reality i subscribe to," which only explains what sort of peasant you are.

Strictly speaking, in an organized environment tanks really aren't competitive in Planetside 2's current state. Redeployside is king, tanks can't redeploy and charge out of a spawn room the way MAXes can.

Which is why in the last server smash, the Vanguard had a grand total of 5 kills. Really farmin' it up there, eh?

Yea... PS2 has about "strategy" to it as musical chairs.

"Oh the enemy isn't over there? Let's redeploy there immediately!"

Just compare the "strategy" in PS2 to any other strategy game out there. Company of Heroes. World at War. Wargame. These are games with actual combined arms strategy that rather works. Unlike PS2, which is simply to go where the enemy is not or to drop on them with overwhelming force.