Is my salt justified?

To start, this is an anti-liberator rant. If you need to breathe a bit or whatever, go for it.

I had something happen today that was bad enough that I would call this an incident. Not a "he was cheating" type thing, the players were using tools which are legitimately available, but this demonstrates how terrible the balance is with these things.

I was driving an AP lightning and caught a liberator landed and repairing. "Sweet, free certs!" I thought. I fire, hit, as I'm reloading I lift my aim a bit anticipating him taking off. He doesn't and I have to re-drop my aim to hit a second time. Again, I lift, expecting him to lift off, he doesn't, I drop the aim and hit again. 3rd hit. Then he takes off and flies away and I missed my 4th shot at him. You want to ride me for missing the 4th shot? Go for it. But why should I have had to take the 4th shot?

Lets say we give this guy a free pass for failing at situational awareness so hard that an enemy lightning (no stealth chasis) can sneak up on him. I can't think of why anyone should get a pass for that, but for sake of argument let's give it to him and start clocking his reaction time when the first shell hits. The base reload speed of that weapon is 3 seconds, I have that certed out with the 10% reduction, so 2.7 seconds X 2 reloads is 5.4 seconds. Will someone please name for me the situation in this game where you can fail to react to an opponent trying to kill you for 5.4 seconds and be ok...other than using a liberator. With the situation reversed, I can hear him before I see him, position myself to be difficult to shoot, pre-aim, blast him when he comes into view, then maneuver to be difficult to hit, and I'm still dead in a lot less than 5.4 seconds.

I'm ok with units in the game being hard to hit, I'm ok with units in the game being durable, I'm ok with units hitting hard, I'm ok with them flying, but not all at once. I'll admit it, I'm salty. I'm salty because the liberator is IMBA. Is my salt justified?

If I am reading right the shots when like this:

1st shell: hit
2nd shell: miss
3rd shell: hit
4th shell: miss
5th shell: hit
-Lib takes starts taking off-
6th shell: miss
-Lib flies away-

If it was a fully loaded lib, 3 engineers could outrep that sequence of damage, with additonal healing from fire suppersion, rep nades/under-barrels making it even easier.

As for other vehicles that can do that sorta thing, ants, sunderers, mbts, colussus & galaxys can do that if they have enough manpower.

Not what he says.

First shot: hit
Second shot: anticipate a takeoff, notice he doesnt so lowers aim and fires for a hit.
Third shot: same as second.
Fourth shot: anticipate the lib not taking off, it does, missed shot.

That is why Rabid talks about 5.4 seconds reaction time. First shot is instant, second shot after 2.7 seconds and third shot after 5.4 seconds. (Actually Botji tested this and just like the Prowler there is a refire time before the reload begins, so there might be a +/-0.1 to 0 5 second refire time added).

Also most Libs are controlled by 2 players rather than 3. It is a rather tough sell that a Liberator which is out of AP angle most of the time can tank 3 shots when repaired by just 2 people. Getting hit by an AP should be heavily punished.

Ah yes I see my mistake.

In order to survive the 3rd AP lightning round, the crew would have had to repair 750 hp between them in the 5.4 seconds, which I believe is possible with 2 max repair kits & a repair grenade, it would be even easier if the crew size is 3. If the lib has composite armour, they would only need to repair 300hp to be able to survive and then fly away.

This is of course assuming it was at max health, which I don't think it was.

At lvl 5 a repair kit heals for ~165HP/sec,and a repair grenade heals for 50HP/sec. Assuming they were 2 Engineers using that setup, in the 2,7sec interval between shots they are able to repair up to 1025HP, while anAP Python shell would deal 1750 damage to a Lib. As long as the Lib was at least at half health when you started shooting, it is likely to happen.

As I've said many times.

Before the Lib buff I lived in a Skyguard. It was always a good fight with a Lib that came down to the detail of every single fight.

Since that buff the Lib just sits on the SG and waits for the gunner to land enough shots. The SG just delays the pop! ( Doesn't even really need the gunner! )

This is stupid....

Yes its fully possible to survive, and like you point out with composite armor its even relatively easy to survive if 2 players repair up even if you are not dodging or protecting yourself for more than 5 seconds.

The question is, is that fair? It takes a fraction of that time for a Liberator to kill any type of Lightning loadout even if the Lightning is resisting, but the Lib can just sit there and escape even if it responds way too late in a bad position (both landed and damaged enough for the crew to come out and repair)? And again it would not have mattered which weapon the Lightning would have taken, AP, HE, HESH, Skyguard or Viper would all have been inadequate.

Worse is that the Lib can get a massive amount of extra power through skill: attacking from better angles like the rear, selecting the right weapons, avoiding the firing angles and cooperating with a gunner can all make the fight increasingly hard for the Lightning (or any ground vehicle). The Lightning needs a massive amount of knowledge and skill to get in the right positions facing the lib on an elevation for the right angle and catching it during an attack on someone else to get anywhere near the ability to destroy the Liberator, and the Lib still has a higher chance of escaping.

You could say "ah but it is a multi-seat vehicle!", which many people respond to so I'll try to catch that now. Ok so if we made the Lightning a 3 or 4-person vehicle we could suddenly let it be close to the Lib in power? Even then the mismatch in individual weapons on the Lib are out if whack compared to the Lightning. It would be pretty OP if you could equip a Tankbuster, Dalton or even the Vector on the Lightning.

What would be a good situation for these vehicles to be in?

The question is, "is it fair for 1 player to be able to kill 2 easily?" and for the vehicle to vehicle game that's only somewhat true. If the OP had run across a wounded vanguard they could quite easily press F to win against them, which isn't really fair at all but people seem much more tolerant of that than libs. Really it's just that the feeling of being helpless is more visible when fighting aircraft than an vanguard shield or the DPS of a prowler.

All of this applies in the MBT vs Lightning dynamic too. MBTs routinely **** all over lightings cus having the extra bulk and firepower of a 2nd gun is more useful. Now add a 2nd lightning to the mix and things are getting much more interesting, the mbt has a very real chance of dying and will take a much larger skill gap to kill both lightnings and live.

I mean sure, but the same firepower problems that happen with the lib and galaxy will happen to the 4 man lightning 2.0. Is it really worth cramming 4 people inside this tank, when 2 mbts or 4 regular lightnings could kill anything far faster than the new lightning can.

A ground dalton kind of exists already, a MAD colossus has the same shots to kill on the MBTs as the dalton does, it's just all the subguns on the coloussus are total rubbish. They should have at least given it like, 2 halberds on the front or something.

The lib for all it's power does get killed rather easily if you match it's manpower in ESFs, and it will take a very large skill gap for the lib to win against 2 ESF, let alone 3. If we want to limit it to ground vehicles, 2 skyguards are an easy match to a single lib, so the lib must use speed, stealth and positioning to catch 1 of them unaware & balance the fight in their favour. 3 skyguards would have to be asleep at the wheel to let a single lib kill them all.

You mean the lib or the lightning? The lib is fine as it is, the lightning has always had a bit of a problem being kind of rubbish solo, compared to the other solo vehicle, the ESFs.

Before the buff a fully upgraded SG could kill a 2 man Lib in 2 clips.

-IF- and ONLY if the SG made the Lib gunner miss through manoeuvring. ( Reward for both parties in learning. )

-IF- the nose gun came into play night night and rightly so. ( Rewarding positioning for the pilot, awareness for the SG. )

So duelling was possible and was enjoyable. Using terrain knowledge, cover, movement while gunning, etc. The SG was rewarded for skill, the Lib still got it's cheese kills if it wasn't too Leroy J.... Nothing needed to change!

Hitreg... is an illusion... planetman.

I was wrong to put it as simple as "how many crewmen". A Flash can have 2 crew, should that be better than the Lightning? the Harasser has 3 crew, should that beat MBT's?

Vehicles should be balanced based on loadout and tactical capabilities. It is unfair if one vehicle always has a chance to escape even if it started in a bad situation to begin with, while the other could be in a great position and still have no chance to survive. Assuming somewhat capable vehicle designs and not a quad ofcourse.

The Liberator is a Gunship heavily geared for ground combat and should have a great capabilities, but it also has the ability to dictate when and where the attack takes place and to escape bad situations. That is way too much of a power difference especially since this counts against every single ground vehicle, even the ones that are geared to deal with it.
Worse is that the weapons on board of the Liberator outmatch anything on the ground, each. To add insult to injury the best G2A platform (shielded Sunderer) has only 2 secondaries and only 1 primary G2A weapon exists in the game in the form of the Skyguard. 1 in the entire game.

As for the Vanguard comment, the dumb myth of "press F to win" only works if you try to beat a Vanguard in a pure DPS race. If you lose to one who is already damaged (which kinda means its shield has been used) then the fault is yours. Especially Lightnings are great due to their combination of low frame, high firepower and a solid frame capabilities.

Actually no. While the MBT has more power the fight is never concluded automatically. The Lightning has ways to shift the battle in its favor. Neither the MBT nor Lightning have any real way to deal with a Liberator. Your best bet is to intercept a Liberator that is disengaging after taking damage rather than any semi-fair fight. Something the Liberator does not have to do as it can beat up almost any vehicle from full to zero without problems.

Ehm no. The Galaxy has only secondaries, the Lib packs 2 primary guns which outmatch every ground-based gun except the Prowler when it uses its steroids. A 2/3 Lib is probably the best bang for your buck you can get in the game.
There's also the fact that the Lib has more than pure firepower, it also has the ability to dictate the battle and the resistance and maneuverability to get out of sticky situations. If it werent for its lack of good AA capabilities except at high skill echelons its use would have been off the charts. Its pretty much the only disadvantage the vehicle has.

And what a comparison the Colossus and Liberator are! One can competely dictate when and where the fight takes place and has an exceptionally good chance to escape if things go wrong, the other is the Colossus. Not to mention that the Colossus has only one Dalton-like gun and misses the TankBuster like gun.

Which shows another great example of how completely broken aircraft are. Almost everything dies easily when outnumbered 3 to 1 against a weapon designed to kill it, only the aircraft require such outnumbering to get killed with any decent chance of success.


But lets put that into perspective:
Why does no attack aircraft require 3 of its type to get the same results?.

You can beat up any ground vehicle with a single ESF or Lib. Yet only aircraft get the luxury position to escape almost anything unless vastly outnumbered? And even then a Lib can kill 3 Skyguards, just not in one go. They would need to attack either 2 or 3 times, but if you use stealth you can defeat the Skyguards one by one and escape each time before destruction.

For both vehicles, in fact for all vehicles in the G2A and A2G debate.

It is not a good situation when one has much more chance to survive and destroy the opposition. The skillfloor for learning to operate the aircraft is not near high enough to warrant its power, and if you achieve a similar skill in a ground vehicle you are still at a huge disadvantage. Worse is that aircraft get preferential treatment. Again: only 1 primary G2A gun truly exists in the vehicle vs air game and its a deterrent. How is that fair? Imagine if Libs only sported deterrent weapons against ground units and ground had a way to always escape (say an ability to stealth against aircraft and become impervious to the deterrent weapon). Would that be fair? No?

Why should a Liberator, already in a bad position and responding with the skill of a couple of newbies to being attacked, be able to survive? Even in the worst position it still lives!
We need to take away the ridiculous preferential treatment that aircraft get. To start with if a Lib is in such a bad position it should die, rather than be able to survive any weapon loadout the Lightning could have brought. Then by adding more skillful weapons that can actually screw over aircraft as hard as the aircraft can screw them without having to become useless against ground.

I'm sorry, but did you miss the fact that the Lib was being repaired during that time? The crew wasn't idly sitting there looking at butterflies, they were repairing the Lib, and like many Engies tried to play the out-repair game. And like I demonstrated earlier, 2 fully kitted Engies can repair a good part of a Python AP round, ence why the Lib survived 3 shots. Op would have been more indpired to shoot at the Engies first.

Its always been a big mystery for me why the devs seem to never want to balance aircraft, are they mainly pilots themselves or are they afraid that the pilots having been coddled for so long would throw a fit and leave if things changed? Perhaps pilots are more likely to be whales and buy a lot of cosmetics and stuff for cash compared to every other playstyle?

Who knows, what we do know is that the devs will never balance aircraft because they have failed to do it since beta, so just about 10 years now.

A bunch of years ago I made up a word for people who fail to grasp the concept why aircraft are unbalanced, Pilotitis, its some sort of mental illness that makes people unable to understand why people think its unfair that aircraft have ALL the advantages and no drawback aside from flying(can be seen from far away.. as if the fact that they are flying doesnt counteract it completely).

For some reason they think it would be absurd if a Skyguard was near certain death to aircraft that it shoots at but ESF with A2G missiles or a Liberator being near certain death to any tank is just a given, even though a Skyguard is by far much more specialized and limited at what its task is than both the ESF and Liberator. Skyguards cant even move across the continent in a few seconds like aircraft can so its not like a Liberator that can fly around dunking different ground vehicles every 30 seconds, it would still require the aircraft to come to it.

Its a massive double standard where pilots think its ok that they can be untouchable and impossible to escape from and even a tiny hint of it being returned to them is met with outrage, how stupid would it be if they couldnt escape from a Skyguard? That would be unbalanced! etc etc.




And here is the required I also use aircraft so I actually do know what im talking about part:
I can fly a solo Liberator and kill most Skyguards(I have even killed quite a few with a ESF, all on my own by sneaking up behind), meaning I can kill most ground vehicles on my own in a Liberator. Its been a while though so perhaps not right at this moment. I am playing mainly on my NSO character now and I do sometimes use the flying pancake solo and have the AV turret on it, its fairly easy killing stuff like Vanguards etc just by swapping seats and flying a circle around them.

^ This being possible is kinda bad. This evening I got a crewed Magrider killed simply by hovering my almost completely stock Valkyrie above them and swapping seats back and forth between the gun and pilot seat. They couldnt do anything about me and ended up hiding under one of those portable skyshields.... Im sure they were loving life at that moment and enjoying the game because I know I do whenever stuff like that happens to me, having no way to fight back is such a great feeling that I think pilots should also enjoy it a few times each day they play the game.

It's one of two things:

A) Flyboys are whales and pay that sweet, sweaty cash

or

B) One of the big draws to new players is the aerial combat

Honestly I don't think A2G is something that can ever be balanced. Even in other games, air is either completely broken or its a suicide trap. I take a handful of deaths a day from A2G and call it my "not playing TR" tax.

I'm sorry but did you miss that I handled that fact every time, and that "stare at vehicle while repairing it" should not be a valid strategy for a vehicle not designed to handle AP rounds?

The Lib was in a bad situation, it should not have survived especially when the crew did not respond immediately. The fact that a faster, higher power vehicle that can ignore terrain also has the resiliance to just tank a Lightning like that is ridiculous.

1 Python AP round deals 1750 damage, which means 3 shots are enough to kill a Lib. If it wasn't for the crew repairing the Lib, it would have been destroyed. Chances are, the 4th shot might have destroyed it regardless of the repairs. So it did not "just tank" the Lightning.

I was going to respond to all this, but there's really no point in it when you want magic weapons that delete aircraft by simply filling in a red box with much less skill involved than a pilot.

That's not what you want? Actually design a weapon, muzzle velocitys, damage types and all for ******* once. I'm sure it will be fair and balanced once you actually see it compared to real weapons with actual stats.

How many times do I have to tell you? Lets just say it directly: a Liberator who tries to survive by self-repair is just tanking the shots, and should not survive.

Allright, so if 3 engineers repair a Lightning then a solo Lib should have a hard time destroying it right? Oh wait look at that 3700 damage it does per clip within 50m before we add side/top/rear armor. Or the fact that the Lib can get a second primary and the Lightning cannot reasonably escape.

If you look around I have designed several dozen weapons and posted them on these forums already, and they are not magic weapons that simply delete aircraft. In fact they are designed with the knowledge in mind that an AA weapon designed to hit ESF should not do meaningful damage against a Lib that cant really dodge that kind of fire. The weapons are designed to make sure aircraft can actually function in G2A heavy areas if they use tactics but without guarantees for coming out alive if their opponent simply has higher skill.

So rather than trying to claim what I supposedly want and then arguing against that, take your time to actually look at what I already proposed. I spend enough time on my previous reply, you can waste some time to make up for your insulting "argument".

Ofcourse even when you find the AA missiles and auto-canons I proposed I doubt you are willing to judge them fairly. But you can challenge yourself as well: why dont you come up with a balanced but worthwhile addition to the G2A game?

You have never ever actually designed the weapons, just giving vague concepts of what you want and asking everyone else to do it for you, be it anyone who disagrees or the devs themselves. There are never, ever, any stats or damage numbers in these posts for good reason: It's far easier to believe in magic than make an actual machine & it would draw unfavourable comparisons to weapons that already exist, which helps destroy the magic of your ideas.

Lots of stats in this post, oh wait there isn't, just more ******* Magic instead of an Actual Machine. How much muzzle velocity is enough for ESFs to avoid it but not enough for Lib? How much damage does it do to the lib who cannot dodge whatever this magical weapon is.

You still don't know what you want because, once again, there's a complete lack of stats and just lots of hopes and dreams.

Why do I have do you YOUR job for you? You want the magic machine, it's YOUR job to turn it into an actual one.
Post ******* stats.