[Suggestion] Liberators, when will you balance them?

Dear Daybreak, I don't get how blind you can be to not see how OP a well-certed Liberator is.

As an AA vehicle - no matter which one - you can do even less against them. It will just fly away and you can't follow it.
There is NO reliable way to outpower AND attack them. This while the Lib outpowers EVERYTHING else in the game.
It's like playing Rock-Paper-Scissors-Liberator with the liberator winning against everything.

The only thing that can beat a Liberator is another Liberator.

Dalton


The Dalton is a Sniper Rifle that one-hit-kills ESFs and there is NOTHING just f-king NOTHING you can do against it in an ESF exept running away as fast as you can.

Attack from above: The Lib will fly on it's back giving the Dalton an Angle
Attack from left/right: The Liberator will easily roll by 90°, giving the Dalton an Angle
Attack the front: suicide
Attack from below: suicide
Attack from 400 Metres away: to high TTK, they will just fly away. Around the next hill or into the Warpgate
Gunner Skill: Matters, but he can shoot every 2 seconds, thus OHKs you sooner or later.

The Tankbuster

Outpowers everything else in the game:

1-Clips Lighntings
1-Clips Harrassers
1-Clips MBTS
1-Clips ESFs
1-Clips Vakyres(?)
1-Clips (Anti-Air) Maxes
Almost 1-Clips Liberators
Does huge Damage to Sunderers and Galaxies

And if the Tankbuster isn't enugh, there's still a Bellygun that can end what the Tankbuster began.

The Zepher/Duster

Guns for FARMING Infantry mass-wise and destroy some Vehicles.

Who'd put something like this in the game?

The Rear Gun

The Walker/Basilisk are a great way to damage hostile ESFs and other dangerous flying stuff over time.
Also it can do some additional damage to ground targets.

The Liberator itself

A highly armored monster that can escape anti-air easily e.g. around the next hill.
This while it has the speed of an ESF. It can hunt ESFs, scary.
Also great maneuverability, you have to get used to it, but it's giving you a lot of advantages.
In great danger you can just land and repair the Lib with three Engies. No single ESF can do the damage the Engies repair away. Maybe you manage to kill one of them while doing that, but they're not dump and know how to avoid that.


Skill

The greatest excuse for it's unquestioned OPness is that it requires a lot of skill to fly a Lib.
It doesn't.
It requires a lot of Certs, but not more skill than anything else in this game.
Everything needs some time to get used to. MBTs, ESFs, Valks, Maxes, Infantry and Libs.
Maybe the Lib punishes the lack of practise more than some of the mentioned.

But "Skill" doesn't excuse the high live expectancy and XP/min a good 2 or 3-manned can reach, that nothing else in this game realistically reaches.



Btw. my last thread got closed because "there are no changes planned to the Liberator at this time".
The point of Forum threads is to make you plan changes. Not only to help you with your existing plans.
Also the fact that the thread had 3 full sides(!) of answers proofs that there is something wrong about the Lib's balancing. Here you can see the whole thread:

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps2/index.php?threads/liberators-nerf-nerf-nerf.229235/page-4

Then just dodge it and fly on its back again. Contrary to your opinion, ESFs are much faster and maneuverable than Liberators.

It also has horrible range and very small aiming angle, on a very big and easy to notice vehicle. If you get surprised by tank busters, then it's mostly your own fault for not paying attention enough.

And Duster is pretty bad for farming infantry. Galaxies have much better anti-infantry weapons which also easily can destroy vehicles.

Libs can be annoying and you should never underestimate them, but I wouldn't call them really OP.

Its a good thing lib's don't use clips

I actually agree to some extent.

Just remove solo-libbing and the Afterburner from Liberators.

Nothing else required. Now you will need 3/3 Liberators to do something like solo-liberators are doing now, which takes a lot of co-ordination and work.

One man, ColonelChingles, said that 3/3 Liberators are a myth and almost don't exist. I am one of those. When my friends and I killed a solo-lib, he called us talentless scrubs because we ran in a 3/3 Liberator.

And a fun fact... Skyguard kills twice as less aircraft than the Liberator's Dalton. Yup, totally not suspicious and absolutely legit that a Anti-Tank belly-gun on a bomber kills twice as much as a dedicated gun that's supposed to kill aircraft... Yup, nothing suspicious.

They aren't more maneuverable than the belly gun though

Wrong. Any moving tanks' engine noise drowns out the lib. If you think aircraft can't sneak up on ground units, you're lying or mentally deficient.

Into the trash your opinion goes.

Skyguards are also very unpopular and you don't see them that often. Doesn't mean they are bad though. Infantry also kills more infantry than Liberators, doesn't mean you have better chances with them though. And the Dalton was never meant to be an anti-tank-only gun, but against all kinds of targets, just like it's also viable for infantry.

If he aims at you with the belly gun, just hit the afterburner and fly on its back again. It's really not rocket science. ESFs get really fast really quickly with afterburners and hitting moving targets is pretty damn difficult with Daltons, not to mention hitting ESFs at full speed.

I sneak up on ground targets all the time with the Valkyrie, but just because you are too ******** to notice such big and loud vehicles, doesn't mean they are OP. I can hear Libs already coming almost before they even render. And even if I couldn't hear them, I still can easily see them soon enough. When you get hit by tank busters, then you are either blind, can't hear, or have simply bad positioning.

It's the same with infantry... Daltons are actually also quite terrible against infantry, but most players are just too f*cking stupid to notice Libs and simply seek cover, although you can hear them and see them coming from miles away mostly.

lol

@OP

Try flying a lib and let me know how many kills you and your crew get in a night. I suspect it will be dramatically less than you think it might be.

Flying a Liberator is work. Everything that can see you within 400m is shooting at you. Before you can even line up a target in a decent sized fight you will have 2 or 3 ground locks, an ESF strafing you, and every basilisk and walker within 500+m plinking you. It's just not as easy as you think it is to be effective in a Liberator. Also Skyguards are way more effective than people make them out to be, it's just that a lot of skyguard pilots are junk and think they should win a DPS war with any aircraft no matter the circumstance.

The only thing that needs to be changed is dropping the Daltons damage by like 5 points so it no longer 1 hit kills ESFs.

Honestly I disagree. Yes, it is very powerful, but honestly how many times do you get killed by a Liberator in a normal fight? I usually only see at most 2 Liberators if it is a big fight on a tech lab or something. Also, the struggle to get a GOOD pilot and a GOOD gunner isn't exactly the best. Most Liberators probably fly around like scouts, picking kills where they can. Now, if you constantly fly an ESF, I can understand it, but still, there are not a ton of them just flying around all the time. After playing for 2 days on the weekend, almost 16+ hours, I only got killed by a very good Liberator pilot on Hossin, and maybe about 3 deaths before he left/died.

It doesn't make any sense that the bomber can have afterburners.

In January a guy posted his stats: he had a 570+ kilkstreak as liberator gunner. You can bring all the arguments and discuss as long as you want: a vehicle letting you make such a massacre is not balanced.

Want to know what "let" them get that many kills?

People not fighting back or making the effort to even when they could.

They simply bailed out every time they were on fire then restarted again. But they never died.

And???

The liberator died.

So why isn't everyone flying Liberators then? I remember people spammed Harassers, ZOE MAXes and other OP-flavor of-the-month weapons. Why less people fly Liberators than drive tanks?

Many people can't deal with the crappy air controls. Also, soloers. Driving a tank solo is also slightly different than flying a liberator solo. It doesn't take any amount of effort to pull a lightning or an MBT and maybe have a random jump in to man the secondary eventually. With the lib, you sometimes wait for ages at the WG before some random decides to jump in and then he sucks, and then you and your lib suck. And solo-libbing is just plain unpleasant with the delay between switching seats. Libs take more setup.

Then there's the effect that EVERYONE is sick and tired of the OPness of libs and will put their tank on a slope just to shoot down the thing ASAP. Because if they don't, the lib will murder everyone on the ground in a matter of seconds. How many times have I turned my Halberd harasser around to get an angle on the lib in the middle of a tank battle because this OP piece of **** needs to be taken out ASAP.

Harassers are still OP by the way. Same essential problem as the Lib, too much speed / initiative / firepower for the amount of fire it takes to destroy it. Not quite as big a discrepancy as with the lib though.

Is the Lib OP, only because its so damn fast and has Afterburner. And when flying upside down its nearly as fast a a Scythe.

I'll tell you what is OP though... Tank Buster.

That's pretty easy to explain. You have to spend at least 10k certs and don't always have reliable gunners you know.
It's also an advantage to communicate via Teamspeak, what a random Liberator crew doesn't use.



There are 2 things I'd like on the Liberator:

1. Make it better for casual players and when it's low certed.


2. Keep the A2G abilities, but give it only marginal self-defense against air. It's a bomber, bombers are used to bomb.
Fighters are made as Anti-Air Air. If you don't want to get killed by a Fighter, cooperate with a Fighter to Fight the hostile Fighter.
If you want to use something that's perfect for ground-farming, it shouldn't be also superior in A2A.
Give the Dalton!, Zepher, maybe Duster (never used it ingame, so dunno) a higher gravity vector, the Dalton maybe a noticable (but not on larger ground targets) COF. Also fix its ability to easily fly on its back/side.



Btw. all A2G is OP and needs a nerf (or G2A a serious buff).
It's pervent how this noob can get a KDR of >11 by farming Infantry and other ground targets with a Mossy:

https://www.planetside2.com/players/#!/8263461174212315777

Why are there more Lightning operators if they are inferior to MBTs?
Why are there more infantry than tanks if infantry are inferior to tanks?
Why (back when ZOE was OP) was there still more infantry than ZOE MAXes?

Because (most) people don't play PS2 based on what gets them the most KPH or best KDR... they play PS2 because they like playing in a particular role. They like flying or tanking or infantrying. Cram Iridar into a tank or force EEskimo to groundpound is going to get you a worse reaction that bathing a cat. On the other hand they (and most other players) quickly gravitate towards their preferred playstyle.