[Suggestion] Just make headshots ignore the heavy shield

The only suggestion ive seen that makes sense to balance the heavy is iridars. To make it a forward facing shield that can maybe shield allies and the heavy has to crouch behind it for full cover and so do allies. They'd have to shoot over the top of it.

That I can get behind as its a decent proposal and not some straight up bs nerf.

Would anyone like to expand on that solution instead whining ore posting very well put bias rubbish?.

Ill admit im probably biased, and i might have ulterior motives.

If you want my proposed solution that would make HA very good and viable at everything it does its this.

>Lower shields to 500. Extra HP bar, but still lower than 700. this amounts to one fewer headshots to kill or two fewer bodyshots. Still very strong
>Remove dumbfire rockets from HA, give them to the engy. Leave lockons and remove lockon dumbfire. Stil VERY good options at AV and AA, which is a heavies roll, and pronounces the engys AV roll. Make it replace either the tool, utility, or turret slot and put a resupply cap on its rounds like an underbarrel.
>Make maxes have less resistance to LMGs. This gives heavies still very good antimax, albeit not as strong, and the engies can still shoot the mans

That sounds good to me. That actually sounds really good.

So far its been iridars idea and yours then that strike me as any kind of actual alternative. The rest is all just bs or long winded bs.

I engi more than all the other classes so naturally I like that part of the idea and I like the way it doesn't completely strip the heavies av capability.

If they were to change them I'd still rather then basically PS1 them (as they worked pretty well in PS1) so something like:



1) Give them a base movement penalty (I dunno what it was for REXO in PS1, but I'd guess it was between 10-25% lower than Agile) - they could even reduce HA by ~10% and still give LA/Inf a base increase of 10% IMO.

2) Increase HA base toughness/hitpoints significantly (in PS2 HA/REXO had 2x the armour of Agile - although this wasn't 2x the effective hitpoints so I'd guess it would be the equiverlent of a few 100 base hitpoints). Alternatively they could increase certain HA resistances.

3) Either remove the Shield entirely or make it simply work against AOE damage and not any form of direct damage........ another possiblity here would be allowing HAs to take either Shields or Rocket Launchers too, but the Shield would have to not just be AOE for that, I think.

4) Just a possiblity, but I'm beginning to think LMG ADS time is a little quick, maybe that should be increased a touch.



This would remake the HA, retain its "Heavy Assault" role, but give it significant drawbacks and choices to be made, and in most cases remove any "I WIN" issues.

Use the Aegis Shield a lot, you'll see why it is a fairly flawed idea.

The best option IMO for cover has always been the idea of allowing Engis to place an item of static cover (which reduced latency issues) instead of their turrets, which has been asked for since Alpha, I believe (certainly since Beta), the Devs seem to worry about doorways though, and I can see their point, although I'm not entirely sure why as you can make a ghetto version of this with Engi AI turrets anyway.

When Aegis Shields came out everyone looked at them an imagined what is being described here, but the reality was if you stood out in the open with Aegis Shield (even in perfect shield formation) you were simply cut down because of the massive limitations of the Aegis Shield and AOE (as well as direct fire to feet or heads, latency issues and plain old bugs).... there's an old video somewhere of a really well organised platoon trying to advance under Aegis Shields and just being butchered.

If you have two Aegis Shield MAXs inside a doorway they do a decentish job of stopping incoming fire, but firing out is tricky and basically as soon as they step outside the door they tend to die (and, of course usually, they'll just be C4'd by a LA from above as C4 on the ground just directly hits the MAX through its feet in most cases).



Whilst the idea has some merit, basically I'd rather they not add more inherently flawed (and basically unfixable) things into the game, when they have other options instead.

C4, grenades and launchers negate that flaw and they are plentiful.

Problem solved.

If one side is in hard cover using grenades, launchers and C4 and the other side is behind Aegis Shields using grenades, launchers and C4 the Aegis Shield side is completely wiped out every single time.

I don't really play nc often but I think the aegis shield could be a bit wider.

Maybe the Aegis Shield could be fixed by being taller and a bit wider, I'm not sure, as the Devs have never really stated why it is how it is and why it's never been changed dispite the current flaws being specifically pointed out again and again.



The problem with it though is that say you're standing with it straight, in that case it doesn't cover the MAXs feet, so any ground base AOE effectively goes staight through the shield and hits the MAX, now if you angle it right down it covers the feet and tends (although not 100%) to block ground based AOE, but then angled like that it exposed the MAXs head to direct fire.
(and of course it block no AOE that hits the ground past the shield edge).

Then you have the latency issue where it doesn't matter where you think your shield is pointing, only what the other person sees on their screen (there's a good video demonstrating this somewhere). So you think you've turned your shield to block that rocket, and yet on their screen you didn't turn your shield quickly enough and so their rocket hits you and you're left thinking that the rocket just went straight through your shield.

When you add issue1 & issue 2 there you end up with something that is horribly unreliable in mitigating income damage, it is not that it won't mitigate some damage its that if you ran the same senario 100 times sometimes it would block 90% of incoming damage and others only 10%, depending on clientside/latency issues and exactly where any AOE hit.

So I'm not saying that such a HA shield would be useless, or wouldn't have some damage mitigating effect, but it would be just unreliable to the point where it couldn't be used for the senarios being described in a remotely dependable way.


Conversely 100% shields (HA and Vanguard and general shield) are very reliable in PS2 and aren't really affected by clientside hit detection issues or latency issue to anything like the same degree.

Whilst I like the idea of directional shields, they unfortunately just don't work very well at all in PS2, and seem to work best in with stationary positions and small turning angles like the Engi AI turret.

Fair point yeah.

So do you think this is a good idea (making headshots ignore shield)? Because while he phrased it awkwardly, Zaspacer was actually making the argument that it was not a good idea to make that change.

FWIW, I don't think the HA shield needs much changing. They took a rather large nerf from the NW changes - I forget the math but when you could stack resist on top of the 250+ health from NW, it was brutal. EMP grenades counter HA's quite nicely now as well. HA's rarely wear flak so grenades of all types, especially stickies will wreck them.

When you watch good players stream or post highlights on youtube, 90% of the kills they get as an HA are people running blindly into a lane of fire, not ready to return fire on the guy who is peeking from cover with the scope up, bursting headshots on the unwashed masses. Those player then come to the forums crying about how HA is overpowered when in reality, the handful of actually competent HA players in this game are just farming bad players all day and can do it with any class, shield or not. It's just easier with an LMG.

I've been working on an idea of my own and this post's idea with mine coupled would work in my opinion.
Check it out if you like, it makes heavy shield not slow the heavy but instead makes the heavies over all speed slower.

Its fun that all suggestions say: nerf heavy buff la, infil. Ehm ok?

Only thing that maybe gives YOU a and the HEAVY a better tim. Make the shield absorb 500 health while pressing f and reduce the time it regenerates 40% less time for NMG and adrenaline gets 30% while scoring a kill. This way YOU have more likely a chance to kill the heavy even when yourre awefull with your aim and gives heavies the pushing power we want for 2 years.

But ill say it again the heavy isnt OP and the shield isnt OP. And taking away rocket launcher and give it to the class that has unlimmitted rockets already i hope you were on drugs saying that.

If something is plain stupid in this game in their current state its: 1 medkits 2 av mana turret and 3 the revive grenade.

I wanna know, why my space age helmet won't stop a bullet more effectively than my infiltrator's spandex suit? Seriously the helmet should be the most effective part of the soldier's body armor yet in the game it's the least effective.

A headshot - a slug or projectile scrambling your melon by entering it at thousands of feet per second and either bouncing around or exiting the other side - should always be fatal. Balance be damned.

That's why non of the velocities are that fast.

Invalid.

Fair enough, It just seems a shame that we can have the technology to cross the cosmos, land veritable cities on another world, create teleportation technology, antigrav/levitation, and defeat death itself through nanites, and we're still heads-down working out how to get a bullet to go fast enough to kill someone when you shoot them directly in the head.

If you go down that route, we should have homing bullets, artillery, nukes etc lol.

You assume that in the future offensive capability (guns/bullets/lasers...whatever) surpasses that of defense (personal shields & body armor). How do you know it doesn't become the other way around?

Heavy Shields should only block light explosion damage from beyond 2m of the impact of the explosion. Nothing else. Small arms and other direct and near indirect hits should do full damage to the heavy using shields. There's no reason heavies should be able to go one on one with a medic using their AOE heal.

Lets turn the zerg into a regenerating zombie horde.