Ok, I have to admit to you all - I minimized the nanoweave problem for far too long. It is a problem. I find it even more disruptive since GU09 although I can't find any objective evidence that it is indeed worse. Perhaps it is just cert bloat, but I felt the need to post this for you all and say that - YOU WERE RIGHT. http://aninfiltratorsblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/26/the-problem-with-nanoweave/
Welcome aboard. I was one of these people that was quite infuriated when learning this. Couldn't see the sense of it all. There main reason for me, as a sniper, to always aim for the head, is because dead men tell no tales. Currently however, the sound goes "Bing!" and no kill. The guy sees the direction where he was hit from, tells his mates, and now 10+ enemies are spamming "Q" in your direction. A logical punishment for you if you miss the shot. A not so logical punishment, if you land the shot perfectly.
Funny, watching this video and the only thing I found myself thinking is "How do you find so many targets standing still!?!?"
Seriously, in large fights these days the targets are like 40% Maxes, 40% NW5 users, and 20% running around like headless chickens until they can save up for NW5 too.. I'm starting to celebrate every time someone actually dies to a single headshot.
The game is around for awhile now, and it's maturing into a state where old counter-measures, become overpowered because people have the certs built up to make the counter-measures no longer needed. As the game evolves, so should the mechanics, and this is one mechanic I'd be happy to see updated soon. I know people use NW to increase their survivability, but at the moment it's just so good, there's no reason to pick another suit slot. NW5 saves you from a mine. Tanks have been nerfed to only kill on a direct hit. Flak Armor has become obsolete, so more people use NW, effectively screwing us over. So: either NW needs to be tuned down so the other suit slot certs become an option, or the Bolt-Action needs to have their multipliers- or base damage increased, so the people keep their survivabilty against everything else, but need to learn how to keep their heads down when there's snipers around.
They paid a hefty chunk of certs to keep me from one-shotting them from range at which they can't possibly retaliate. So I just kind of worm my way in closer and doing it anyway. Same guy that was surviving headshots form my Longshot started dropping to them around 90m, so even that's not too shabby range-wise. They even started sending me tells saying I was being reported for hacking because they had NW.5 and I shouldn't have been able to get the OHKs. Could have been BS for the sake of raging but he was a turret engi so I'm inclined to believe he had some higher level of it. But yeah, nano-weave stops long range OHKs, but I just kind of look at it as the price to pay for operating at long range. Less risk, less reward and all that. Personally, when I see a lot of engi turrets and HA's set up like in your video, I try to take position assuming they all have NW5, becasue a lot of them will. Of course when you gal-drop into the middle of a base like that and have to take what you can get, yeah, it can absolutely be frustrating.
Just a thought, but here's the description that comes up for the infiltrator via the Planetside Players thing hosted by SOE: Yeah, that part about Infiltrator being one of those few things soldiers are afraid of still? A complete crock of **** now. Much as it might be nice for some, it's turning the Infiltrator class into something useless other than if you take it out with an SMG or get lucky and find chunks of people not using Nanoweave. Oh, and not to mention that your proximity mines, (especially the TR's tactically useful, but in general useless, thanks to bugs, claymores) don't kill those who put up higher levels of Nanoweave, making your Infiltrator that much more useless.
That's why i started my Nanoweave suggestion (look at my Signature). Maybe Nanoweave has a place in this game, but the cert costs for Rank 1-4 are way to low. And you are right. A Headshot should kill every normal soldier. My suggestion here: Let Nanoweave only cover the chest/belly and maybe the legs.
same here. i was like 'how the fffff he got so many extreme menace guys standing like rtards waiting to be farmed in one place?' usually when i stumple upon such a camp, engineers man turret only for the shot and run around in the mean time and tubing heavies ADADAD all the time. Yes, the nanoweave problem is especially noticeable in the open when your sniping spot is at range above the rather low threshold (low given we are talking about long range sniping), happens usually when you have to snipe from one peak to another and your only other option is to actually go all the way to the other peak. That threshold doesn't hit nearly as often when farming towers or the crown slopes.
say 'AV turret' and then try to repeat the part about low risk - low reward playstyle without laughing. If this game is about remotely realistic war and a rock-paper-scissors dynamics then high value stationary targets should be owned by snipers no questions asked. When next time you hear someone complaining about av turrets owning mech you can partly blame pathetic OHK range of sniper rifles (which is 5-10x lower than effective AV turret range) for the state of affairs.
As if risk is the only consideration about what kind of reward a player should receive. How about difficulty? Long-range sniping may very well be the second hardest task in this game that players are expected to perform, next to dogfighting in an ESF. There's no risk to blowing up infantry by the hundreds from a tank on a hillside hundreds of meters away, yet it produces results at least as well as sniping as an Infiltrator, and that's assuming that the sniper is actually killing his targets with each successful shot. If players are standing still, they deserve to die to snipers. If a suit upgrade should provide them with a way to avoid this punishment, it should not be the best suit upgrade for a majority of the most common situations one could expect to encounter as an infantry unit.
Haha it's your faction, why don't you ask them? After having several particularly frustrating runs with similar experiences to the one I recorded, I decided to just farm the **** out of every vanu with my fury wraith. Trade one broken mechanic for another I guess. I logged out with #3 most kills on Mattherson today. It still bothers me just how many people were surviving my bolt action however. There are a couple of ways to technically deal with the problem, ones I suggest in my blog post and others posted in this thread and or ones on this forum. I really don't care which one, but I think the bottom line should be the same - headshot = kill. Between scope sway, the small target to hit, the erratic nature of moving targets... it is not easy to land a headshot in the first place. If you have the skill to do it, you should get the kill. Mattherson has a lot of strong players. The guy who PM'd me during the video is a well known BR97 on our server. After landing a nice headshot on him, he immediately takes cover and has time to taunt me before his buddy comes over and kills me! He was very good natured, but still, he should have been sending me those messages from the respawn screen. I hit everyone on that ridge in the head and only 3 of them died. Most people on Mattherson who take a sniper round quickly move to cover and proceed to hunt you down. I bet this is how it is elsewhere too. You don't get a second chance. Why use a BASR if it doesn't get you the kill? I may as well just bring a HA with the battle rifle if I can't get OHK's using the bolt action. Lastly, some of you may notice I was using a suppressor. Indeed, I was at a relatively close range. Using a suppressor is the only reason these targets were beyond falloff damage and survived. However, I was inside a base with multiple platoons on the ground that you couldn't see. My mission was to clear the towers of AV turrets and entrenched HA's with lancers. You do not bring an unsuppressed rifle on such a mission. Thanks for the feedback and quality discussion. I know this is old news for some of you. I've watched such threads on these boards with disinterest. Today I had enough. It is time to push the devs to address this and other outstanding issues facing infiltrators.
if you call this a relatively close range, you haven't seen anything yet. Bugzored nanoweave 5 reduces the min dmg rage by unintended ~25m and then you can slap suppressor penalty, whatever that might be, on top. You were shooting at 3px sized heads which means probably about 100m, so you haven't seen not OHKing someone when his head is a HUGE 4mildot big blob in the scope yet. in Hoki's video (3:25) SR7 with silencer ends up at a spitting distance, it looks like what, 30m? i whipped up a graph of BASRs against bugged and advertised NW5, plugged suppressor numbers for semi-autos (-10/-25, didn't have numbers for BASRs). 30m to ohk with shorter range rifles = FFFFFUUUUU-
Nope, still not a problem for me. But if i were you, i'd put my effort in trying to get acknowledgement from this by the Devs for GU10. Then we should be able to see if this is intentional or not. And to the rest of you, don't try to drown it in together with ridiculous suggestions that will just make them flip the bird to this forum.
Best part about nanoweave 5? It works for infiltrators as well. It's very rare that I die to other sniping infiltrators due to my nano 5 leaving me with a sliver of health left. For other classes it only takes nano 2 to block headshot kills which is partly why it's prevalent, that's 11 certs to block headshots. You get more than that for not playing for a day. =P And since flak armor has become less useful than it once was there's a lot more people using nanoweave so the problem is ever increasing at this point. If it gets much worse I think I will also start having a major issue with it whereas right now it's still just a moderate annoyance. Granted though, I'm on Connery and there's been a large number of new players recently so there are a lot more people without nanoweave... And it's not like we have anything really effective to fall back on if our bolt actions are rendered irrelevant. Semi-autos just don't cut it; landing three body shots with a semi takes the same amount of time as two bolt-action shots. And if you have to land four you're now slower than the bolt-actions. I still think SOE needs to adjust their semi-auto balance calculations, since they really don't perform a terribly useful role right now and this is the kind of thing where having a sniper designed to make body shots a little easier would help.
Here's an idea : why not introduce a suit slot cert that improves the armor of helmets and is aimed at lowering the headshot multiplier by a percentage each rank? Then tune down nanoweave so it doesn't save you from bolt actions anymore. Everyone wins.
Maybe if they made frags less terrible people would actually use flak and then you could headshot a lot of them. Seriously right now if you're not using nanoweave, you're out of your mind.
I think the folks in the vehicle forums would quite loudly disagree about your point on tanks considering how they complain about AA and AV saturation, especially recently with the new MAX weapons. But even beyond that, tanks have a hefty resource cost, acquisition timers, and a few other downsides including larger incentives for their destruction. Spawning as an infiltrator has no restriction or cost. The tank is more powerful accordingly, so given the obvious disparity it’s a bit too skewed for any real comparison there. As for ‘difficulty’ I wouldn’t really call sniping hard so much as it is meticulous. But the thing is you can afford to be so since you’re exposed to less direct threats due to the range, giving you the extra time that goes into aiming and leading. But that ‘difficulty’ is the tradeoff for letting you shoot at and potentially kill targets that have no realistic hope of returning the favor. Even if you don't get the OHK, they're sure as hell suppressed until they can get to cover and heal up. And it's not as though stationary targets standing slackjawed on a hill are the only shots to be made, there's a lot more gray area here. Engineers have no choice when it comes to their turrets, but then there's even the more common ADS movement penelty which will give you some of the easiest leads you can get at any range if you just follow the target near a firefight and wait for them to shoulder their gun, doubly so if it's a HA trying to get a lock-on since you'll pretty much have a whole breath cycle to line that one up. Even the ADADA dance doesn't do much to help when it's at a snail's pace. The first time a target survived a headshot I just shrugged it off. This just made sense to me as part of a game’s ruleset. Why shouldn’t a player have some form of defensive recourse against a player that can engage and OHK well beyond any kind of retaliation range? I can't rationalize it otherwise without sounding like I’m trying too hard to have my cake and eat it too. It's just simply never bothered me that much. Though after watching and understanding what's going in the videos posted thus far in this thread, if anything, I really think they need to do another pass on how a suppressor interacts with a bolt action if it impacts kill range that significantly. I've obviously been fortunate enough to not have fired at many NW users with mine.
