[Suggestion] Make smoke grenade not useless

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Parsa, Dec 29, 2020.

  1. Parsa

    What's the point in smoking they just keep spamming Q and spotting works anyways with smokes, also the visibility is joke you can see people if you pay good attention. The EMP nade is way better at doing the smoke's job, when you get EMPed it lasts like 10 seconds straight, its a death sentence that thing, you're blind the whole time.
  2. Demigan

    Smoke could do so much:

    It could remove any spots on your allies.
    It could light up around enemies, revealing them without the need of a spot.
    It could create false signatures on enemy minimaps.
    It could "stick" to enemies passing through, clouding their vision for a few seconds after they passed.
    It could start dealing damage to enemies. Even just 1 damage per second could be useful to block their shield regeneration.
    It could cause a choking effect on enemies, either damaging them if they stay in it for too long or causing things like blurry vision and slowed movement speed if they stay too long.
    It could work in tandem with other items. Like motion-spotters which could reveal not just their position but also their relative height, or allow players to see enemies passing through smoke through walls using wire-frames for example (like the one already in use for Night Vision).

    You can then mix-and-match several of these abilities and you have several different types of smoke to throw at your enemy.

    Yes most of these only affect enemies as it would be too easy to cause weapons lock on players if you could stand in any smoke thrown. It would also be too easy to troll your own team if you essentially throw an area-denial grenade in their path all the time.
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  3. InexoraVC

    Devs nerfed smoke grenades few months ago. Now they are useless (smoke grenades and devs)

    Should add smoke to ESFs. That would be fun
  4. Parsa


    Like the smoke/flair thing in battlefield you mean that disables lock-ons, its just that the fire diffuser is too damn good, its not worth replacing it with anything really
  5. UberNoob1337101

    Vaping is more useful than smoke grenades, change my mind.
  6. JustGotSuspended

    does vaping drastically reduce your framerate?
  7. brutes359

    It used to be amazing back when thermal optics where still a thing. after they removed that and replaced it with "Threat detection optics" the cheaper garbage version that only spots vehicles. it became useless. I used to spam the crap out of smoke grenadesback then. carbine with unslung smoke and thermal optics was a great room clearing tool.
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  8. Nikushimi


    Thermal is still a thing, just not on vehicles. DV scopes, Infravision implant and Infradine stims will all give the old thermal effect with a limited range. It can also see through smoke.
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  9. TheMercator

    The problem is, that:
    -It doesn't remove spotting
    -It doesn''t really work in close range because the games graphics aren''t good enough
    -It doesn't work in the open, because it hasn't enough range
  10. Obscura

    Smoke is useless? I have been finding a use for it for a long time with great results. Smoke grenades are there to lay down a smoke screen for advancing infantry/vehicles, and by obscuring the line of fire of the enemies shooting at you. Try using LA with grenade bandolier and smoke grenades and under barrel smoke grenade launcher and you can use it in a variety of situations.

    1. Infantry is bogged down attempting to breach a building to capture point: this works extremely well, throw 1-3 smoke grenades in and fire 1-2 smoke grenades from UBG before breaching building. Then rush in with team mates and overwhelm then while their line of fire is obscured.
    2. Tanks advancing or preventing you from advancing to destroy them: throw smoke and use LA with ambush jetpack and rush them in a cloud of smoke. 9/10 the tanks to reverse, and become less confident in the terrain and the targets in front of them, and then are destroyed.
    3. Getting spawn camped: sit in spawn and throw smoke grenades out and obscure the vision enemies that are camping your spawn, then run from your spawn and attempt to dispatch the area of said enemies. That one is hit and miss, depending on the ambition of your team mates sitting in the spawn room getting camped.
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  11. Demigan

    I can't say how it's on your server, but on my server that doesn't work. If you smoke the doorway your enemy just Q-spots the doorway and murders anyone who passes (helped by motion spotters to gauge when they need to spot). In the meantime you still have to randomly spot into the void and hope you spot a target to engage while you have already been spotted and are minced.
    Best case scenario is when you smoke the positions of your enemy instead and hope some of them lose sight of the doors through the smoke while they move around. Unfortunately it's a tiny advantage as the moment one person gets spotted near the doors everyone immediately knows where the door is and will shred anyone trying to pass.


    I've never seen an Ambush jetpack succeed somewhere where a normal jetpack wouldn't. Signalling your arrival with smoke seems to be the best-case scenario to reveal your presence and get killed, especially if you hit near their front and they spot where the grenade came from. If you want tanks to back up you can also just jetpack at them, the response of 9/10 drivers is to back up anyway regardless of what attacks them. Just watch what happens when you hit someone in the rear with a Lightning or Flash or whatever, their first impulse is to back up even though the threat is behind them.

    How does this even work? People will be spotting the spawn constantly and you'll be spotted just about every time you try it before you even leave the spawn only to get ripped apart. I'm wondering if people on your server can find the Q-spot button?



    These are just some of the reasons smoke currently doesn't work. Using lower graphics also greatly helps reduce the size and obscuring factor of smoke. This is why we need smoke to be better, it needs to do something. Obscure people from spots and motion spotters (it's gas could make motion spotters go wild and show nothing but spots!), make it light up enemies so you don't need special equipment to see unspotted enemies, let it do damage or dibiliate enemies, let it improve the information of spots on enemies etc etc.
  12. HexJei

    From my experience as a new player, the smokes aren't entirely useless. Smokes are simply a utility to remove an enemy's line of sight, at the expense of your own. Other than that trade off, you have the advantage of positioning the smoke to your preference, forcing the enemy to adapt to your actions (sort of like peakers advantage).

    Smoke grenades seem useless because they're not essential to any fight, they're just a utility that could either help your team or hurt your team. I do agree though that you should not be able to spot players through the smoke, but they do cover a large enough radius. Any larger and they would fully engulf most smaller to medium sized structures with a single grenade.

    What would be cool is if they had two types of smoke grenades with different coverages. One that's decently tall and wide for infantry coverage, and one that's short but extremely wide for vehicle coverage.
  13. Obscura

    I do this on Emerald, Connery, Cobalt, and Miller. 1 smoke grenade by itself isn't going to be effective, which is why you use grenade bandolier so you have 4 smoke grenades(if you have it maxed). So what you do is, say A point is within a building and the enemy have the entrances guarded and your team is unable to breach the building, if you throw 2-3 smokes and follow up with 1-2 UBGL smoke from your carbine your team has a short window to then rush in for close combat and overwhelm them on the point. I like to use ambush LA and then propel myself across the room with knife in hand and kill as many of the enemy until I die, close combat, or B. Use C4 and drop it as I fly over them to take out the huddled groups of enemy that are now disoriented.

    Now I die often doing A and B, I'm not going to lie. But playing aggressively is more rewarding than playing passively and trying to conserve your K/D. Nothing is better than running up on 5 unsuspecting enemy with knife in hand and killing all of them in a few seconds.

    what server/faction do you play on? I'd be glad to show you in game how this is done.
  14. Johannes Kaiser

    Experienced the same for Miller. Running a little tac team with some people from another outfits, and we occasionally employ smoke screens and infravision. It's not a winning recipe in itself, but it can markedly shift the odds when done right. But that requires the right location (putting smoke direcntly in a doorway helps little), right disposition of enemy troops (if they are too spread out many of them will simply be able to pass around) and at least a little bit of timing (So you get a good screen going fast and before the randoms all run in and get slaughtered).
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