[Suggestion] Liberators Nerf, Nerf, Nerf!

People who know me know that I love to drive Magrider and I'm pretty good with it.
Also I now fly Scythe pretty often, I am not the best Pilot, not even a really good one, but I have collected some
experience.

Both, while driving Magrider and Scythe, Aircrafts are pi**ing me off.
Half of my deads with Magriders are either Liberators or things like collision damage when hitting a rock at low speed, perfectly landing on a bugged surface and slightly scretching a Map Object with the side rear of my Magrider which causes an instant explosion due to a clipping bug.

Anyway...

Liberators.

- can 1-clip nearly anything with the Tankbuster
- move as fast as an ESF (not a Racer 3 Afterburner ESF, but as fast as some loadouts...)
- can OHK snipe an ESF with the Dalton
- have a lot of health and armor
- can use 3 different and some of them unique weapons simultaneosly
- fill in other OP facts about it



How to solve it?

- Decrease it's (frontward) moving speed by roughly 20%.
It's a flying tank, not a flying Formula 1 Car on a killing spree.
- Massively increase the Bulletdrop, the "Gravity", of the Dalton
It's a weapon to attack vehicles vertically. There Bulletdrop plays pretty much no rule.
The NS Engineers surely didn't intend to create a 800mm Anti Air Sniper rifle...
- Maybe also slightly decrease it's speed (of the Dalton)

That would maybe be much enough.
However some other ideas:

- Increase the Damage Dropoff or the Gravity of the Tank Buster
this way, the other noseguns can get a role, too...

- decrease the effective health by ~10%
- decrease the Flak resistance



TLDR: Libertors OP, please nerf. Thanks.


If you find some mistkaes in my English, or typing mistkaes, you can keep them.

Currently the Liberator Dalton is one of the best AA weapons in the game.

Air Kills Per Hour
Dalton: 11.5-12.31
Skyguard: 5.86-6.15

In other words an air-to-ground weapon is 96-100% more effective at destroying aircraft than a dedicated anti-air weapon.

There's definitely something unbalanced about that... anyone can see it.

Oh nice, thanks a bunch! I was just looking for some mistkaes, never xpeked to dinf emht erhe. Pihcku saev me

The dalton seems to be too competent as an A2A weapon. I understand it takes skill and experience to do it well, but it ends up being a pretty reliable 1-shot kill against newer ESF pilots.

Erm, what exactly do you want the Liberator to do? You can't just blanket nerf everything it has. If you follow these suggestions you end up with airplane origami that wafts along pooping out tank shell spitballs at enemies. You wouldn't solve any problems, you'd just make ESFs even more overpowered.

The other noseguns suck because they're total garbage. Making everything suck equal amounts does not make any of them useful. It reduces the pilot's job to just 'fly to point A, don't die' because their 'nosegun' is actually a glorified garden hose. And as I've mentioned before, if the noseguns are made worse there's less reason to use them, meaning there's a greater reason to just hover over a target which means it's even harder for tanks to fight back than it used to be. Also, you completely missed the Shredder which is a Dalton sidegrade and would be the new dominant force in the sky if your Dalton suggestions were to come through.

Before late 2013 forumside thought the liberator as a weak niche vehicle, then that flipped to what we hear in this thread...

The complaints about liberators all seem to be from rare niche situations. Like killing tanks with tankbuster from behind. That is a rare situation for it too work. I dont hear complaints when tanks get killes by other tanks from behind which happens much more ofren. Two days ago I watched a vancuard shove its titan AP into the exhaust pipe of a deployed prowler. liberagor is big an noisy and perfecly visible in the sky from far away.

The belly guns is 90% noise 10% damage. You hear the well recognized sound often in battles but rare see it cause any damage.

shooting esf with dalton is onöly done by the elites. The average esf pilot kills libearots with ease as they ha e always done. Dalton has higher kill than skyguard because its 1 hit. Sky guard is deterance, it gives chanxe to escape. Burn away whwn you hear first blast and you will escape 95% of the time.

how often do you die to liberagors compared to everything else?

I only have an issue with it's speed if anything.

The only issue with libs is that a single skyguard (i.e. the most specialized unit in the game) doesn't crap all over them when they get close. That's more of an issue with skyguard.

I am 100% okay with tanks getting molested by air, but only if SG touches aircraft butts too.

I agree that the Liberator is a tad OP - but I believe that's simply because it wasn't designed right. I wrote up a fairly detailed post once on how I would tweak Planetside 2 given the chance, and these are my thoughts on the Lib:

The Liberator would primarily be a bomber. Designed to operate at high altitudes, it would have limited mobility and limited ground resists. It would also have fairly good air resists and the third gun should provide decent A2A damage, but not enough to kill multiple A2A ESF's before they've downed you. The days of dogfighting libs and daltoning non-braindead ESF's should (and certainly deserve) to be over.

With the right gear, the Lib could be retasked to a ground support role similar to the A-10 Warthog. You'd limit your A2A resists and defences and gain a lot of G2A resists. You'd lose the third gun seat (or have it limited to A2G-type weapons) and your second seat would be limited to something like the Shredder. You'd gain a fair bit of mobility, but not nearly enough to be dogfighting. As opposed to high-altitude bombardment, you'd now be making strafing runs.

The average ESF pilot definitely does not take out "elite" lib crews by themselves. But you get 3 of them together and it's possible.

I've never been in a liberator that's survived longer than two runs.

PS1 a Lib could kill a tank with one or two tank busters. Don't hold still.

Had my Vulture back in PS1 - a horrible attempt at a true tank busting air platform.

Math with no context. Everytime I see stuff like this, I think, "Ah...Fox News."

Regardless,

Dalton rounds are pretty badass. It looks like DBG tried to balance them based on height. ie. you can use them from super high and low orbital strike armor with little to no risk of ground retaliating (even skyguards, which might have a bit too wide of a cone of fire at long ranges) but are that much harder to hit (hitting moving ground vehicles at 800M up with a Dalton is very very hard, and your gunner will miss far more shots than, at say 300M)

I'm not sure that was what was intended. You can't give them gravity, as they will never hit anything. Slowing them down a tad would make them even harder to use. Lowering damage actually wouldn't change the effectiveness -- just the Dalton would stop stealing other tank's/RL's kills -- all that alpha damage is what inflates the KPH.

I don't know what you guys think about Libs, but they aren't THAT mobile. An esf can still fly circles around a lib out of the tail gun's fire arc if they are competent.

Personally, I think if DBG felt Libs were too powerful they should drop the total health pool, and buff the resistances so that they had similar effective HP. Then from there they could modify which guns hurt them more or less to get the counter play they want. If they want Skyguards doing more damage to libs but less to ESF they could just lower the resistance to the skyguard. If they wanted libs to have less resistance to ESF nose guns they could drop the resistance there. They could keep the resistance on the other guns (for example Basilisks) that really aren't designed for lib killing.

I'll tell you one thing that seems unfair to me as a lib pilot -- esfs barely scratch my paint job when they hit me. I mean, if ESFs could one or two kamikaze a lib then there would be no more libs ever. But, at the moment they barely take away 2% of a libs health when they hit me -- if that. It always seemed like it should be more...at LEAST as much as a rocket...

Agreed that Liberators should be nerfed. It's just a farmer's tool, nothing else.

I wonder if the cognitive dissonance actually physically hurts the heads of the people who defend the current state of Liberators.

its a flying MBT, ofcourse its OP.
the belly guns are incredibly powerful, all of them, even the default shredder used well is absolutely devastating.
and don't even get me started on Tankbuster, nothing comes close to the damage of that thing
(except maybe a fully certed AP anchor prowler)

Leave the Dalton alone. That's not the problem. It's a bomber and it's SUPPOSED to do massive damage with an AP weapon. The speed of Dalton rounds and their damage are fine.

However three things need to change to make the Lib balanced:

- lower it's top speed with racer chassis and afterburner
- lower it's resistance against Skyguard flak
- disable belly gun when roll is greater then 45 degrees (tweakable)

That's it.

It should be a glass cannon in the sky that should fear ground based AA, especially Skyguards. It's a freakin bomber and shouldn't be travelling at ESF speeds.
That's just nuts.
It also shouldn't have the ability to flip upsidedown on it's back, continue flying and start sniping aircraft with what's supposed to be a dedicated A/G weapon.

This forces the tail gunner to actually be used to take down aircraft, like it should be.

This would make sense... in early 2013. Now it's just old. Libs have been discussed over and over and, even though there is a certain amount of people who defend the "libs are OP" standpoint but it's mostly misused stats and arguments that have been debunked dozens of times... Come on, lib OP against ESFs? Is there even a serious ESF pilot who takes that seriously anymore? Tell me, what air unit kills you more on the ground, the ESFighter or the Liberator Bomber? I think I know the answer to that... and if you really are dying to Libs a lot during your magrider play I'd be happy to provide you with some help to greatly reduce your deaths against aircraft, if you're willing to listen.

I'm really glad some people aren't in charge of balance...

If anything, Liberator is a weak thing, that gets shot at by everybody in 1 km radius. Belly guns were nerfed several times, TB requires you to put it right in da face. Yea, still works for killing tanks from time to time and farm some stupid infantry (clever guys know what to do).

Usually, Lib gives me much less SPH then a tank.

Lib is a nightmare of a unit in terms of fitting with the game:
1) few people use it
2) when buffed and doing its role, it's OP in many Standard Game Meta
3) it is UP in the Server Smash/Hardcore Organized Game Meta
4) most players hate playing against it
5) very few units have access to Counters for it
6) starting players or Players on budget have weak answers to it

It seems they are doomed to cycling between buffs/nerfs and being OP or UP in the Standard Game.

This is actually a very simple fix. Just re-write the text description for Dalton so it doesn't specify it's an "A2G Weapon". A number of stuff in the game does not match what the description says (or said) it is used for. Titan-150 AP is great AA, Fire Suppression is great Health Regen (even when not On Fire), lots of Units have 1 best-at-everything Gun/Cert/etc.

Looking in game now, Dalton just says "inflicts massive damage in a single shot". It doesn't say it's not A2A. I'm not supporting the Dalton's balance vs. it's other options (or vs. its targets), but at least it doesn't have some completely incorrect (slap in the face) text descriptor too (unless it's written up somewhere else I'm not looking as A2G).

I think he just wants Libs to disappear from the game.

On a side note, can anyone explain to me why more people don't use the Lib? Is it just not fun to use? Does it take too much dexterity to perform well with it? Do you have to have a great team, or do the hard to do 1-person Lib thing? If I could figure this out, I could be a lot more helpful in helping balance the Libe: it's hard to balance a unit that is both OP and not played (nerf it and even less play it, buff it and it becomes even more OP).

Both MBTs and ESFs would be more powerful if Dalton was nerfed. If Dalton wasn't effective vs. ESFs, then ESFs would be both hunting and killing Libs a lot more often.

Shredder would get used if Dalton was nerfed enough, but it's not a sidegrade:

Average Daily Uniques: BR100
======================

TR AP30 Shredder.............15
TR C150 Dalton.................68

NC AP30 Shredder............18
NC C150 Dalton................72

VS AP30 Shredder............14
VS C150 Dalton................65

source: http://ps2oraclestats.com/monthlystats/ (sort by "Liberator", "All BR, Q4, BR100")

I don't know, the amount of times I've been killed by a Liberator ...Ah yes. Zero in recent weeks.