Infantry weapon changes - 12/12/2013

Oh really, we do? Because we have as effective hipfire weapons as you have? Because we have such an effective, versatile all-in-one ESRL like you? And let's not get started on the vehicles.

Cool, we had DF:LW before counterstrike, and counterstrike before PS2, and quake before all 3, and golden axe before any. How does your comparison bear relevance?

If someone who has no indication of where I am blows my head off through a wall that is good on them, and half my fault seeing as I could have been anywhere else. If someone blows my head off because there is no cover higher than one's waist, and using it prevents any attempts to fight back since my camera and shot source is in my scrotum, that is not good on them, that's bad on SoE.

You seem to forget how much harder sniping was, in spite of the higher power of the sniper rifle, in your archaic example. Go play DFLW or WWII online if you want those games.

The entire concept of sniping does not have to be based on a 1 hit kill any more than any other weapon, and based on current game mechanics, the ability to take any player from any range within render with impunity while they have no way to play the objective and choose a different approach which avoids the sniper, would be infuriatingly OP

You try to justify that kind of power, saying that it is balanced by the time sink. This is an incredibly stupid and biased view. This isn't an RPG from the 90's, there shouldn't be 1 ultimate class that you graduate to when you level up enough. All classes are currently capable of a lot at their skill ceiling, and all classes have a requisite level of skill needed to succeed on even a small level. This is known as a skill floor.

Some classes, like the heavy assault, have a floor that is very low, making the class feel more powerful than others to inexperienced players.
Some classes, like the light assault, have a floor that is higher, making getting into them harder.

For proper player dissemination among the classes, these floors need to be adjusted. for proper power levels amongst all players, the ceiling needs adjustment.

The changes being made will bring the ceiling up well above any other class, while doing nothing to the high floor. This will result in more experienced players choosing the class that allows them to leverage their skills, while newer players will be forced into either a vehicle to try to kill snipers in outdoor fights, or into a heavy to try to kill vehicles while having an ability to survive with a battalion of snipers looking in every direction.

I have hours of footage to go through and make videos from. when I get to it, I will post myself playing infil while we assault a tower full of non-idiots that I couldn't get into with LA (non idiots look up). I have less than 13 hours as infil on my main, I do ok, but there are times I hit the body, there are times when I take too long and someone else gets the kill or they run inside, and there is even a couple engineers running NW5. in this video I satirically vent over vent about how nanoweave stole my kill, or nanoweave put that building there, and in the end how nanoweave made me only get a 7.5 K/D... infiltrators are fine, not everyone in every battle runs nanoweave, and the unlucky occurrences you post vids about to complain about nanoweave (the ones where everyone has it maxed out) are less frequent than the times where I get unlucky and encounter a base where even one person is smart enough to look up.

You talk to Kodiak about ducking your points, stop ducking mine.

you have launchable and indestructible radars (plural)
you have cloaking
close range weapons take much longer to kill targets up close than in your precious land warrior
close range weapons become ineffective for killing targets at much closer ranges than in your precious land warrior
you are the only class to have a class exclusive vehicle attachment
there is hardly any bullet drop in this game
you get mines that sink into the floor and become totally invisible
there is little cover, most of what there is conceals your view of them, not the other way around due to your one eyed PoV

I have a serious nag about the BASR nerf. I don't play sniper that much, usually a lot more CQ infil, but there's something wrong with the idea of not getting OHK's for headshots. If you can get a headshot with a BASR, no matter the range and regardless of your opponent, you deserve the kill. Your opponents should be smart enough NOT TO SIT STILL out in the open where infiltrators can see you, and if you can get the headshot on a moving target while compensating for both bullet travel time and drop (And yes, even the Vanu snipers have to deal with drop for BASR's).

Lame freaking nonsense. Good job, SOE. Good job.

LMG DPS is to low. LMGs should hit harder per bullet han have higher rate of fire than most weapons. that is the whole point and purpose of the LMG. LMG drawbacks are the heaviness and recole cause slower movements and terrible hipfire. as is too many HAs prefere to use the overpowered SMGs instead of the LMGs that should define the class.

VS has the most "better hip fire" guns because almost all their LMGs have it.

Was sniping actually harder in DFLW? A quick search found a video, really looks to me like your scope just stays where you leave it and a hit to anywhere kills your target. Really looks like in that game anyone who stands still in the open in a free kill if you have even the foggiest idea what your hold over is at that range.

You assert that people running enough nano weave to actually impact a sniper is very low, why is removing such an ostensibly small percentage such a problem?

Why should new players be forced into a vehicle to counter snipers? Because different things are countered by different things. I don't know what to make of this point.

Sniping has such a high floor even though infiltrator is ostensibly your worst class you did so well. By the way, K/D for a sniper doesn't really mean the same thing it does for any other infantry guy unless all you care about is making your K/D number bigger. Your SPM is going to be the same. If all you care about is K/D, all you need to do is spawn in at a facility or outpost being spawn camped, shoot people from inside spawn, and then redeploy before the base flips. You'll get some kills and zero deaths.

With the way damage reporting and spotting work in PS2, sniping needs to be based around the one hit kill. That's why no one uses the semi auto snipers (Apart from the Impetus, which currently has a bug making it better than its other empire analogs by a huge margin). You shoot someone once, they hide, quickly figure out where you are, and then you're dead next thing.

Recon darts last a minute at most, they're seldom useful for sniping. Someone showing up on radar doesn't mean you'll have line of sight to them. The dart's duration tops out at one minute, not good for covering your back. Plant a dart near where you are and you're basically advertising your location to the enemy.
We need cloaking while sniping because people can just turn off plants.
Sniper rifles become ineffective at killing targets at a much closer range than in Delta whatever ground water. Dudes still render in that game well out of 500m and sight lines are much longer as well. Has me suspecting a meter in PS2 is not the same as a meter in DFLW.
Ok we have the wraith module it's the only way an infiltrator can actually move around any kind of distance without giving themself away. You have to flank to snipe well, ya know. You also need to redo the flank every time you spawn.
There's enough bullet drop in this game to need a hold over at 200m.
How are mines useful while sniping?
The low PoV is a problem that the infiltrator has to deal with as much as his opponents. Since you seem to be mostly building this around tower fights for some reason, keep in mind that you can run inside at any time, and even just Q spam out the spawn doors if you have a hard time finding snipers.

are they ever going to nerf any terran weapons. The terran max is op no matter what you put on it. The fracture is massively op, and can be a threat to heavy tanks. meanwhile the nc max gets the ****** shotguns. Also tr get amazing add ons for their vehicles likethe vulcan miniguns, and the mauler for the harasser

Personally my opinion on the sniper issue is. you can comfortably snipe using a 8x scope at render distance, with a suppressor you would need to go up to 10x to account for drop. not that big a deal but I would like to see the render distance change according to your scope. AND only other thing id like is c4

but no seriously the render distance/scope thing is a small thing that bugs me. even though we have better optics we get thrown into the lot with the rest of the infantry. even my eng can peg stuff at render most times...granted, not AS accurate..but still.

and the c4 thing was a joke, although it would be nice to have an AV option avail..its really not ness, and would most likely cause a rift in the game

You're going to have to quote me if you want a replay, otherwise I'm not necessarily going to see it. Anyway, I'll try to make this quick since you haven't brought anything up that I haven't already addressed in my own thread regarding long ranged sniping.

The development team used new gen games to explain their reasoning behind the proposed range cap, saying that it was the tiny maps and narrow lanes of fire which balanced the one hit kill. I use Delta Force: Land Warrior as an example against that point, it's a game that had long ranged sniping and every other facet...without the limitations of small map sizes and narrow lanes of fire limiting them. Instead, this game was far more akin to Planetisde 2 than your new gen games based upon the whole Counterstrike methodology. Essentially, Delta Force: Land Warrior stands as evidence against those points...and others have brought up one or two new gen games that also have huge maps and long ranged sniping.

They were basing their logic off games nothing like Planetside 2, small maps with narrow lanes of fire, rather than games that are much more akin to their own and have long ranged sniping. The lack of long ranged sniping in the Counterstrike style first person shooters wasn't a result of a need for balance...it didn't exist in these games because the maps were small and it couldn't exist.

This isn't an ultimate class, you're speaking from pure frustration based opinion derived by your inability to remain mobile on the battlefield. You have a method of avoiding death from a sniper that requires absolutely no certification points and only a minimal amount of brainpower...stay on the move and seek cover. That is all you have to do to avoid getting railed by a sniper. Hell, just today I stood still for a period of time, like an idiot, and got nailed in the body only to dance around and avoid several more shots while the sniper attempted to finish me off...and I'm pretty sure he was only at medium range.

You can't balance sniping without the one hit kill, it's the reward needed to justify the time sinks incorporated into the class. If you don't have that one hit kill...your prey escapes and your score per minute plummets into oblivion. You don't get a second chance to nail a target unless they are comatose or afk, as I just expressed above in that failed attempt on my life today. While we're re-chambering a round, the individual starts moving...making the following up shots extremely difficult and highly unlikely.

Again, you're basing your entire opinion off frustration. You are assuming that sniping is an easy task that can instantly be mastered the moment you pick up a sniper rifle, and it's not. It's as challenging as run and gun oriented gameplay in completely different ways. You need to have pinpoint precision, patience, and intelligence to know when to strike...you have to manage your time wisely and kill quickly without wasting shots and time within the process. This might sound easy to you, but many of run and gun oriented players have given up on sniping because "It's boring" and they couldn't make use of it because we have to wait for our targets to put themselves into positions that make them a lucrative target.

We have to wait for you to do something stupid.

Furthermore, sniping has been made more difficult by a hit box fix to the head shot where body shots were registering as head shots during some running sequences. The removal of the nanoweave issue didn't make sniping any easier...the skill to acquire a head shot was made more difficult, but now you will always be rewarded for nailing a perfect head shot just as anyone else is rewarded for dealing enough damage to take an enemy down. Having nanoweave defend against the OHK was the equivalent of a HA unloading an entire clip into someone's back and then have that individual turn around and kill them. To you, this doesn't make sense because you don't understand how valuable time is to us, and how much of a waste it is when a target escapes and we have wasted time and ammunition upon them.

Like I said, the only thing important in this game is time. When you die as a run and gun oriented player, you lose time...you don't lose ANYTHING ELSE but time. When we waste time by losing a shot, the time sinks in our profession ensure that the wasted time is far more significant. You are in the fray, if someone escapes you...there's going to be another one not too far off just waiting to be taken out. For us, we now have to wait until yet ANOTHER individual puts themselves into a position where they are a lucrative target.

Aggressive sniping, within medium to close range, is a hybridization of both these playing styles. You're going to be actively seeking out these targets, rather than waiting for them to come to you...meaning you'll come across far more. Furthermore, the closer range grants an easier time nailing that headshot...but you're also now at greater risk of death and have to possess far more adequate situational awareness. Due to the hybridized nature of this playing style, this is where you'll see the majority of boosted sniper population, because this is where your run and gun oriented players who choose to delve into sniping will go. As I said, most find long ranged sniping too boring because it's a waiting game. Long ranged snipers simply enjoy that waiting game and are a more patient bunch.

Lastly, and why your video will fall flat:

!!!Kill to Death is Meaningless!!!!

This is what you are not understanding. Your kill to death ratio is absolutely meaningless as a sniper, or ANY class for that matter. You lose absolutely nothing but time when you die, and snipers lose time through the many incorporated time sinks of the profession. We have to re-chamber a round after every shot, we have low ammunition, we have to establish a location, we have to wait for our targets to put themselves into a poor situation that makes them a lucrative target. All of this contributes to a progressive loss in time that will compile to equate the same amount of time YOU lose for death if we perform poorly.

!!!!Only Your Score Per Minute is Important!!!!

The only thing that matters in this game is what you do with your time, not how many times you died. If someone died far more than you but killed scores more people and accomplished more mission objectives...who's the better player? So you can survive a lot longer than most people........................but what do you do with the time you have? This is why death does not mean anything, it's just a method of administering a huge time sink to run and gun oriented players for poor performance on the field, if they slip up...they get a huge time sink.

The score per minute is what you need to look at, and the highlight of any video you make. You need to focus on how many points you're scoring within a specific amount of time and then compare this score to your run and gun oriented gameplay. If they are comparable to one another.........................that's balance. Both are performing on par with one another, scoring a moderately equivalent amount of points.

Your death ratio as a sniper is meaningless, of course it's going to be low...but that doesn't make you a good sniper. That's like saying a run and gun player who stands beside his Sunderer the entire time while afk is still a good player because he didn't die throughout the entire duration of taking a base...or only died once. Who cares if he only died once...he didn't do anything with the time he had, and that's the same case with a sniper. The death count doesn't matter, what matters is the score per minute and if you are on par with the run and gun oriented crowd.

• You lose time through death.
• We lose time through time sinks incorporated into the system.

We both lose time for poor performance, we both get punished in the same way...but it's administered differently. That punishment is a loss in time that could have been used to score points and complete objectives.

So, if you make that video and try to highlight the kill to death ratio rather than the score per minute, you're not going to show that you understand what you're talking about...you're going to pretty much highlight my points and show that you do not understand anything about what's being said. I am downright smitten that you are trying out sniping though, that's the first step towards understanding the entire system AND learning to avoid it when you're out in the field. You'll get a sense for just how easy it is to avoid getting shot in the head...and let me tell you, when you play as a sniper long enough those one hit kill headshots that actually happen will make you facepalm at how silly you were being.

1:

The Recon Darts are more geared towards medium to close range infiltration, not long ranged sniping...no idea why you're bringing that up. We might get a Recon Drone here soon, but that's to provide us with a more versatility while at long ranged and we don't yet know what that's going to do. It might get people to stop saying that long ranged snipers don't do anything for their team...even though we do, which you can learn by reading that thread I spoke of in my signature.

With that said...everyone gets tools geared towards their class. An Engineer gets a repair tool that can repair any destroyed object, damaged MAX, Vehicle, Aircraft, etc. Heavy Assaults get their Rocket Launchers to nail armor with, something we can't do a single thing to... Everyone has tools geared towards their class, I don't see your point here.

2:

Cloaking is comparable to prone in other games. You can argue that it's better, but when you're dealing with counter-snipers...it's about as effective as prone in other games.

3:

No, they do not... The time to kill in Planetside 2 is much shorter than DF:LW.

4:

What are you talking about? The shotgun kills in a single hit, and like I said...I'm pretty sure that the TTK in PS2 is much shorter than DF:LW. It's been a while, but I used to run and gun in DF:LW.

5:

• We have 0 ability to effect vehicles while everyone else does...
• The Engineer is the only class that can repair a Harasser on the move...
• The vehicle attachment you're talking about goes with a Flash...the most suicidal vehicle in the game.

WITH THAT SAID...

I wouldn't mind everyone getting a specific class attachment option for their flash, it's been talked about in the past and I have always supported it.

6:

While that's true, every bolt-action sniper rifle has bullet drop (including the VS) and the lack of bullet drop has actually made it more difficult for me to judge where to aim in Planetside 2. With that said, I don't snipe often and will adjust for this when I do...but once you learn bullet-drop, it's pretty much like riding a bike.

7:

A dedicated long ranged sniper has no use for mines...are we arguing long ranged sniping, or the Infiltrator as a whole? Again...you get a Rocket Launcher that can actually deal damage to vehicles, other classes get C4, Mines, etc... We all get tools.

8:

You're in a base.........................duck into a building, weave past an Ammunition Tower, duck behind a small wall, or just keep weaving and snicker at all the wasted time that the sniper trying to peg you has suffered. Like I said, when you snipe more...you'll start to understand these things and be capable of doing them yourself.

When I ran Engineer, I never feared snipers...I occasionally danced to make them waste ammunition.

























....okay, so that wasn't as quick as I thought it would be.

They didn't go through with the nurf.

Instead, the rifles have been more specialized and the Parallax can still kill from 300m.

For all you out there complaining about OHK in general think about this... f you get hit in the head by any object at 400 plus m/s you would not live under any circumstance even in this game that may not be all to realistic you are still getting hit in the head by a bullet tailored to cause destruction to whatever it hits at long range and high speed. OHK makes sense and im not even a sniper... if you get head shot learn that there are snipers around and you should be careful and not give them an open shot. if you still complain after reading this you have no business being here. It takes skill to even make the shot and most of the time stupidity to get hit by it.

If they did this then even more people will be sniping beyond the distance that their bodies will render, if that'll be the case then killcams should come in.

Really now? It takes stupidity to get hit by a guy who you don't even know is there....

Common sense ought to dictate that one should not make themselves an easy target on the field. All the hate tells I get while sniping are by people who are standing completely still shooting something else as I drop them from 12x range. And yea, it does take a bit of stupidity. You should know that you're only ever safe in your own warpgate, and that's it.

Vulcan= nerf
The shotgun max is the most effective thing period in CQC. This game is filled with towers etc that are easy for shotgun max to utilize.
I love how so much of this thread is VS and NC complaining about TR weapons being 'OP'. VS get near perfect accuracy on all their weapons, whereas we get 'spray & pray'. Spray and pray sucks. It does nothing except get you killed. Our tanks may be somewhat better when it comes to AI, but the real reason you get killed by them so much is because we actually utilize them. A magrider tank column is going to get a hell of a lot of kills and territory too.

I love the skill upgrade. but i do request that head shots be less likely to happen across the board too, so that way a true head shot can only be done by master snipers. Truly eliminating the platoon of infiltrators and go back to the 2-3 max infiltrators in a platoon that can actually snipe and not just sit and give other snipers their positions away.

P.S. i would love to have the ability to snipe from 900 meters plus, so i can TRULY feel as a lone range recon sniper. give me wind effect to change my bullet path. arc of the planet to take into account. gravitational pull. that way when i get a head shot and no one knows where it came from, people won't sit still on the point or anywhere again. give them the G.I. joe robot chicken sniper skit.

P.P.S. why are TR/VS weapons 3 shots to the body 2 to the head to kill, and the NC are 2 to the body and/or head ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Yes, I do a lot of kills at 300m+ precisely for the point I made before. = I have been killed many times by battle rifles firing on auto at those ranges. That is why I believe there has to be a strong separation in effective ranges between battle rifles and sniper rifles.