High Velocity Ammo sucks, what to do about it?

It is the general consensus by experienced players that High Velocity Ammo type is not a competitive choice for your discerning rifleman, you are literally better off without it. Conversely, the weapons with Soft Point Ammo option available should equip it at all times. The ammo types are not well balanced, but what should be done to HVA to make it be more viable? It should have traits which make it more usable in close-mid and midrange fighting, as that is the range where most engagements happen.

Increased vertical recoil is a very bad downside for something that is supposed to have ranged excellency, or anything really. Recoil on weapons is a well oiled machine that's been tweaked by a number here or a number there since launch over the course of over 2 years until perfection was met. Equipping HVA is a great way to throw all that away instantly and make a weapon markedly worse while paying 100 certs in doing so. It also completely logically negates the effect of putting a Compensator on a weapon, which is what you will be using on any weapon which has HVA available in the first place. What good is better velocity and range if the shot is poised above the enemy's head to begin with, or makes you work harder to land it? SPA has the downside of having lower velocity and worse range, of which both these are compensable through an adjusted playstyle. HVA should lose its recoil nerf first and foremost, I believe that should be said up front before any discussion is had about what downside should be given to it.

I've thought a bit about possible revamps of HVA, but I don't really think I have the be all solution to solve its problems, so I'm opening the forum to everyone to add their ideas as well as get feedback on my own. Perhaps HVA should increase muzzle flash, a nice simple downside which will increase likelihood of being spotted by enemies, or suggesting that the user equip a Flash Suppressor instead of a Compensator. Perhaps HVA should decrease hipfire accuracy, same as the Compensator, to further niche a weapon as one which excels at aimed combat while sacrificing all else. Maybe HVA should result in slightly longer reload times, which would offer a very logical downside if the weapon were used in CQC, which is not supposed to be the correct usage of said weapon anyway. This would make these weapons great in terms of midrange headshot playstyles, while increasing downtime, making the user think more about cover and engagement pacing.

What would you do to change HVA?
+25% muzzle flash?
+15% hipfire CoF?
+10% reload times?
???

High velocity ammo calls for higher recoil.
If it doesn't work on a finely tuned number machine why screw with the numbers again?
Just remove HVA if its useless.

My guess is they started with the guns then nerfed them to add "upgrades"
Then they tweaked with the numbers to try to balance them.

What do I know though. *shrugs*

Id like to see something to help the new NC to kill the enemy.

High velocity amo starts to shine with weapons that have several "tiers" of damage dropoff.
I think wrel did an excellent video on that matter ... look it up

Yeah, the old NC are kinda worthless, aren't they?

I couldn't find a video by Wrel on the subject. Weapons that drop more than one tier of damage don't normally have access to HVA in the first place... maybe ranged Carbines are the only ones that fit that description, but point stands, it's certainly not a valid generality.

IMO the main reason HVA sucks is that it doesn't offer a big enough increase to bullet speed to negate the trade offs for most weapons(NS-11C excluded) HVA only offeres around a 5% increase to velocity on most weapons if it was around a 15-20% increase in bullet velocity and increased the min-damage distance by 10 meters or so then it might be worth it.

Kek, it's the other way around for me, I use HVA everywhere I can and screw SPA. Dunno, worked perfectly for me so far.

Most of wrels reviews stress never ever using hva. In some he almost goes so far as to say its broken.

I once made a list to check where HVA even adds anything in the first place.
i deleted it because the result was: Carbines, nowhere else
and only the NS11C gets a noticable boost to bulletvelocity and also has low enough recoil to allow for it.
so of all the weapons in the game, there is a single one where HVA makes any sense... and that carbine also has access to SPA...
Good Job...


IMHO a good way to make HVA better is to make the standard ΔV +20% and reduce maximum damage range. so for example equiping HVA and a Suppressor would result in a Max damage range of ZERO.
this would make the HVA a direct tradeoff between long range accuracy and short range killing power

You might want to take a look at this
http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/2lwmc5/data_analysis_high_velocity_ammo/

Honestly, when I play NC I can't see any problems with killing people.

The weapons feel just fine, have good accuracy, damage and mag size and perform good for me.

I like your idea of increasing muzzle flash, as it provides a harmless, yet noticeable downside, which is more or less in line with SPA's... lack of downside

Another solution could be just decrease the penalty to vertical recoil. Make it 5% instead of 10%.

HVA is very powerful, almost mandatory on all carbines that have access to it, but other weapon types get next to nothing out of it.
Maybe for non-carbines, the penalty to HVA should be comparable with the bonus it provides. For example, make it a 1-3% recoil increase for 5% bonus velocity it gets.

I was only teasing JudegNu's comment.

It feels like the problem with HVA is that the weapons on which it is good are weapons that tend to become good because of the HVA and weapons that can be called good for something generally don't become much too much better because of the HVA. The T5 AMC, for example, wouldn't be anything to write home about amongst TR Carbines if not for the HVA; but, the T16 Rhino, considered good by some for its base recoil control, doesn't get much of a boost from HVA at all. Because the majority of our weapons are semi-automatic, and fire 10s of bullets per second, enough bullets to hit TTK within our latency periods, that one extra bulelt you managed to shave off tends to have already be in the air fired from the enemy's barrel.

Yep, I've been using pretty much all the weapons where it gives a significant increase.

Just wanna add here, that I win alot of corner shootouts with HVA, most likely because I can hit the guy who is using normal or softpoints before he can take cover again, but as his ammo is a bit slower than mine, he only does a little damage to my shields

If you wanna kill people without cover and trickery, and actually aren't playing a support class so you can run & gun without a care, use normal or softpoints.
If you're tight on time, have to run ammo to that bunch of heavies while a couple maxes are in need of repairgun loving, go with HVA so you save time and can drop enemies back into cover while you make your mad dashes through the firefight.

I generally use the damage tier rule when deciding on HVA for weapons. Cougar and T5 AMC drop two tiers between their min and max damage ranges, so both got it. Most of our assault rifles only seem to drop one, and things like the SABR-13 have good muzzle velocity anyway.

That being said it's a pain to have to equip a compensator every time I want to use HVA, and the muzzle velocity increase is in many cases negligible. I think a reduction of vertical recoil to 5%, or abolishing it completely in favour of a more noticeable muzzle flash are both good solutions.

I think the basic problem is that the benefit of HVA varies wildly, but the downside is always the same (except for battle rifles, oddly enough). Whether you get +15% velocity and +5m on your 3-headshot kill range (AC-X11), or +0% velocity and no meaningful damage boost (Gauss Rifle Burst), the extra recoil is the same. If certain guns get a crappy velocity boost, fine, but they should get a proportionally smaller recoil penalty.

It stills get the 10m increase. The 0% is just the muzzle velocity change.

I said no meaningful damage boost. Any gun with one tier of damage dropoff has the exact same number of shots to kill with HVA at all ranges as without.

The main problem with HVA ammo is that it's drawback (higher vertical recoil) goes against it's main purpose of making the weapon it's equipped on better at long range engagements. Soft point ammo's drawback of lower projectile velocity generally doesn't hurt any weapon it's equipped on for cqc and short range engagements.

If HVA was changed something like worse hip fire cone of fire or anything that didn't effect long range performance it would be immediately viable.