Outfit orbitals get removed from the game. Citadel shields get removed from the game. I don't need to explain anything. The entire outfit armory system massively encourages zergfits, and playing a game of Zerg-Orbital-Citadel with 5 tactical nukes in a row and "we farm, you don't" shields isn't fun. No matter how many times you nerf these, completely breaking the flow of combat will always make me hate these two the moment they're placed down. Assimilate gets removed from the game Battle Hardened gets removed, and screen shake from explosives and bullets is reduced by 50% for all infantry. Survivalist gets removed from the game Berserker gets removed from the game Ransack and Salvage get removed from the game Mobility Mesh gives greater movespeed increase while overshield is active and increases OS regen, but reduces OS strength. Combat Surgeon gets a slight nerf. Sensor shield and EOD hud get slight nerfs. Implants in general are complete bananas as you either have something that's useless, something that's so overly situational it might as well not do anything, to a minor but useful effect to being absolutely OP in every situation. The main reason why I'm completely removing the implants instead of just tweaking them is because they're a bad idea, implants shouldn't grant direct combat buffs or healing mid-combat without some serious penalty, let alone +20% movement when you'll probably need it the most and 200 shields every time you HS kill someone, or insane health regen on MAX kills like Salvage. A prime example of this is Berserker, if you've had the misfortune of fighting a pre-nerf Berserker MAX you'll find out they just don't die. When it got nerfed it's still comparable to auto-repair while still being tankier to rockets and C-4 because you can equip Ordnance armor too. OP implants completely eliminate choice and build customization. Now, the problem with sensor shield is spotting tools in general. Motion spotters and especially recon darts can practically give you ESP over an entire base for at least a minute. Spotting tools should have smaller radii, while slightly nerfing Sensor Shield as well, where it should be useful, but not mandatory in some fights if you want to do any sort of stealth. In it's current state you're practically required to use Sensor Shield in infiltrator-flooded fights to have any semblance of stealth. All ASPs that grant the ability to equip a primary weapon in the secondary slot get removed and refunded. Vehicle discount ASPs won't discount vehicles if another vehicle discount is active. In my opinion, comparable situation to implants. You either have memey stuff like 2 sidearms and decoy grenades, to various access grants which are moderately useful. The "primary for secondary" ASPs allow you to make some seriously broken builds with virtually no downsides that are great both in CQC and at range, and it just breaks infantry design and balance, where in combination with implants you can either be specialized or just create walking killstreak, good at everything supermen. The vehicle cost ASPs aren't broke by themselves, but once you add the various discounts + increased nanite regen it breaks the balance since you can just spam even the most expensive vehicles, and it really edges on P2W in my opinion, especially in the air game where elite pilots can, besides their experience, leverage the nanite economy to their advantage and recoup their cost for half the time, not even factoring in construction vehicle spawns. While there are bigger issues in the vehicle meta, making losses matter in any circumstance would be a step in the right direction. I know that most every ASP player has invested into these perks, but they're simply bad design. Deployed Sunderers get increased durability, non-AA Sunderer guns get their old gun angles back, Kobalt, Fury and Bulldog get unnerfed. Sunderer and Galaxy Nanite Proximity repairs get massive nerfs, the maximum repair should be 50 health/second or even 30. Lock-on jamming field gets a massive nerf or outright removal. AA of all sorts gets buffed : Skyguard gets better velocity and accuracy so it can actually hit air, Base AA turrets get DPS increase, G2A lock-ons now have a maximum range of 500m, and all AA should be able to aim straight above them. Discouragement for A2G to simply hover above a fight and farm and actually require them to dive into combat to do any significant damage. A buff for Hornets and Tankbuster and a Liberator bellygun nerf. Cheaper cost of Valkyries and pure A2A ESFs, return the rumble seat repair for Valkyries of 20/25% Sunderers have really bad survivability, especially during low-pop hours where a single Liberator or any vehicle can completely kill fights. Battle buses could also be more viable as troop transport and a combat vehicle when manned, not just a mobile spawn. Nanite proxy repairs, in their current state, completely break the vehicle game and most vehicle-infantry interactions in my opinion. 150 repairs per second means that if you want any serious survivability in a big vehicle fight you need to stick to the zerg. Two air repair galaxies can currently tank 3+ AA sources for up to half a minute and still live. It should be a useful support tool and top-up and not a tool to triple TTK in a fight. It would also make departing from the zerg viable and encourage smart play instead of amassing unstoppable vehicle herds. There's also too much repairs in general, giving engineers repair grenades and an SMG that has repair grenades where a single engineer can repair ludicrous amounts of HP on top of fast repair times compared to how much DPS a single source can dish out. Vehicle combat should be a lot more decisive. I don't really need to talk about AA, if you're not TR your G2A gets hard countered by pilots pressing shift or just ignored outright, and there's currently too much incentive to A2G and not enough to A2A. Lower barrier of entry for A2A could potentially revive the air game. NS sidearms (Commissioner, Underboss, Pilot, Emissary) get HS multiplier reduction and worse hip-fire accuracy. Most ES sidearms get accuracy buffs and tighter cone of fire. NS and comparable weapons get a balance pass to make ES more viable. NS sidearms have a combination of accuracy, DPS and burst damage where you can compare them to primaries. In particular, Commissioner is the best general purpose pistol in the game : Insane headshot damage that oneshots non-Nano Armor infils, great pistol velocity, excellent accuracy, TTK that is unaffected by Nanoweave in CQC for only a longer reload time, that doesn't seem like a fair trade to me. The worst issue is that most ES sidearms are completely unviable because of their bad accuracy and nanoweave bodyshot TTK. A good comparison to prove NS power creep is Repeater vs Pilot : Pilot has the same bloom (200DMG per shot) compared to Repeater (112DMG per shot) with better accuracy, burst and recoil. It's also the only pistol that can one-burst to the head in 0.16 seconds, and can get ~0.32 sec TTK with bodyshots or a bodyshot-headshot combination. How is this balanced? Another good example is Punisher vs Eridani, there's no choice : Punisher has a great attachment, +19RPM. Vandal vs other scout rifles, 0.75 ADS and higher mag capacity in return of a longer reload on a weapon that you can simply enter cloak and reload. A non-NS example is Gen1 battle rifles compared to Gen2 battle rifles - Gen2 completely blow them out of the water in areas that matter, to the point where they're closer to semi-auto snipers than the original BRs. A more tricky example is CME vs NS-11A, Polaris/EM1/Rhino/Bull vs NS-15M and T5 AMC + Solstice SF vs NS-11C. Having same or comparable DPS with faster reloads and/or greater mag capacity + 0.75 ADS gives them a big edge at mid-long range where most of these weapons are specialized anyways, choosing NS over similar weps is a no-brainer. I'm thinking of a 1.5 HS multiplier for non-PDW, non-Vandal NS primaries to balance out the higher survivability and very low recoil. The point is, power creep is good for spiking sales and interest but progressively makes the game worse due to bad weapon balance. A lot of people say that NS sidearms being the best is a minor issue, it's not. Making pocket snipers and shotguns for the sidearm slot created such a power imbalance to the point where I'm only dying to Commissioners and Pilots, and where ES sidearm users are considered a non-threat. Not even the best players in the game use them, why would anyone put more effort to get a worse result?
"Sunderers have really bad survivability, especially during low-pop hours where a single Liberator or any vehicle can completely kill fights. Battle buses could also be more viable as troop transport and a combat vehicle when manned, not just a mobile spawn. Nanite proxy repairs, in their current state, completely break the vehicle game and most vehicle-infantry interactions in my opinion. 150 repairs per second means that if you want any serious survivability in a big vehicle fight you need to stick to the zerg. Two air repair galaxies can currently tank 3+ AA sources for up to half a minute and still live. It should be a useful support tool and top-up and not a tool to triple TTK in a fight. It would also make departing from the zerg viable and encourage smart play instead of amassing unstoppable vehicle herds. There's also too much repairs in general, giving engineers repair grenades and an SMG that has repair grenades where a single engineer can repair ludicrous amounts of HP on top of fast repair times compared to how much DPS a single source can dish out. Vehicle combat should be a lot more decisive." I agree with MOST your post with the exception of engineers being able to repair "too much." You started by identifying that sunderers lack survivability then complain that engineers repair too much... very contradicting statements. Furthermore, engineers having a repair grenade launcher on their main weapon is by far much less power than a heavy with a rapid kill destroy / annihilate everything must die button. *makes smashing noises* There's very little engineers get, especially early game -- if anything, their repair needs an increase due to the large amounts of burst/ spike damage. Engineers early game have a long curve to fully upgrade for utility so the changes you're talking about would discourage new players from repairing. That IS the balance.
I think the sunderer and other vehicles need their PS1 special faction guns. Especially the VS one that lobs large round orbs or energy. They need to be balanced better against infantry in lower end fights. So, more lethality against infantry and maybe neutrally against various targets(vs at least and maybe tr.) and then let infantry to it's thing. I think VS had the orbs with the arc and the original straight shooting stuff for mass infantry(and some damage against vehicles for versatility). NC had some sort of a short ranged shotgun. and I think TR had a gatling gun. Not sure if they had different armor types for dealing with vehicles. I think all but VS did. Or it had a mode for both. Actually I think the sunderer had fixed guns. But those guns exists. They might help with dealing with various targets better. Especially large infantry swarms. No, each faction had a special variant with special guns in the deliver. That might be nice to have those special guns on. Where did the thresher go in ps2? And give the sunderer 4 guns like it used to. Then make the deliverers and content with less guns and some new special unique abilities. Then redo the thresher and friends. The threshers/factions get 1 special faction gun, deliverers/faction get 2 of the better faction guns, and the sunderer gets 4 of it's current selection.
Won't comment on repairs in general, because I don't really play much vehicles anymore, but this isn't really a contradiction. They're talking about Sunderers that are deployed and usually alone except for infantry support, especially at late night/low pop times. Even in general, a very dedicated player can pop Sunderers pretty easily in a number of ways. Pretty sure they were just talking about increasing survivability of them through other means than repairs, like better deploy zones (shielded sundy garages?) or ways to reduce damage taken when deployed (beyond the extra health).
