[Suggestion] New NS-500 SAM for Sunderers

TL;DR: Pilots find another game to play?

I wouldn't play this game if I was a pilot and I had to deal with these things. I can barely stand invisible anti-vehicle nests against my tank, why the hell would I want to share that pain 10x over with the other half of the vehicle community?

Edit: Old post is old. Necromancers have an evil alignment for a reason.

Why would he not, young one? Aircraft are the bane of all infantry battles; they only serve to unleash their feared Banshee--I MEAN-- AI rounds at us

PLEASE YES. It would make us infantry and you vehicles fight a proper battle

You really ought to take a few minutes and reflect upon your post.

"Screw pilots LOLOL" is what I got from it. You're basically saying that your enjoyment > everyone elses, so screw them. Your stance should be that everyone has a right to enjoy the game, regardless of what classes/vehicles they like using, and we should strive to find a way to make that possible.

Why not? Pilots are the bane of both vehicles and soldiers.
And please, I hope you're joking when you say that my post was terrible and reflected upon me as a human being, because you're saying that I am a terrible person by stating that. So, easy on the "jokes", okay?

No, I'm being completely honest. I detest people that apply double standards to themselves and don't take any consideration into the perspective of others. You think pilots don't deserve to enjoy the game, but you think you do because you like to do other things.

pfffft

Not very effectively.

I'm twice as efficient flying my ESF solo than I am flying a Valk with a decent gunner.

Hell, a GREAT gunner even.

Valk is trash for pure combat. The only reason to take one is to provide cheap mobile squad spawn.

Oh, and flying it is actually fun as hell.

It needs a couple (small) buffs. Most important IMO is giving rumble passengers MASSIVE flak resistance. Gun stability is likewise incredibly required, due to how much, as a pilot, I have to move erratically to keep the darned thing alive.

I like that it's relatively weak and not as fast as ESF (it has nice VThrust Accel at least to help) since it is primarily a transport.

I think it could use more bullet resistance (I swear my ESF can take more bullets) and a touch more speed. also some slight tweaks to handling in general cause it has a couple buggy behaviors.

But yeah, using it as a gunship is lol-worthy.

It's just a cheap fun vehicle to use. w/o a squad to spawn on you it's totally a waste of manpower.

*Reads quote*
ALRIGHT THEN, where is that dislike button?

Remember when you asked me to join your group? This is why I didn't. I would be ashamed.

I'm all for cool stuff for the sundie but jesus christ air is already thrown out of the meta enough, and if you consider current AA "short-range" then what would be your long range? Warpgate to Warpgate cruiser missiles?

Sometimes the only way for either tanks or infantry to get past the enemies tanks/infantry is with air strikes

All 3 aspects of combat interplay with each other. Both Infantry and ground vehicles have potent AA options available to them.

The only downside I see actually is that tankers who pull AA pigeonhole themselves into a roll, whereas an ESF can more effectively split (Rotary + rocketpods may not be as ideal at any 1 target type, it is capable of attacking any target type). The closest tanks can do is take Walker on top their MBT (thank GOD so few do ) but since secondaries are an important part of their TvT gameplay, they are rarely RARELY ever employed.

Take a Skyguard and you have NOTHING else to do... so if you do your job well, and you chase off all enemy air, you now have nothing to do other than pull a new vehicle.

New resource system has made this a tad less onerous... but still, a loadout swapping mechanic would likely see a LOT more people swap to AA secondaries and skyguards if they see any significant air presence, since they'd know they could change back when the threat was cleared.

Well it certainly has many more downsides than Engineer AV turret nests or even a bunch of Heavy Assaults. These are namely high costs, high vulnerability, and of course one that gave pilots plenty of warning that there is one in the area.

Essentially it would be a really-expensive, ammunition-limited, slow-deploying, warning-giving, actually-rendering, large-sizing, auto-spotting Engineer AV MANA turret.

In other words, nothing at all like an Engineer AV MANA turret.

Glad you didn't. You would have made it worse

I just naturally hate aircraft. I'm all about the ground fights, but the only thing aircraft know how to do is RUIN ground fights.

What is annoying about an unrendering AV nest? It locks down an area and has no counterplay.

What does AA already do? It locks down an area and has little counterplay. It isn't as bad because aircraft have more ways around this than tanks and at least have some counterplay.

What does your suggestion do? It amplifies the area denial and lack of counterplay of AA many times over.

I don't care about what downsides there are, because from a pilot's perspective they don't matter. It doesn't matter how annoying it is to get that AA Sunderer into position or set up, because from the pilot's perspective it doesn't change anything. It is simply a massive area denial weapon that they have no hope of countering that punishes them for even trying to participate in the battle. The downsides discourage the use, but people will still pull them, and their effect is not diminished.

Edit: That post came off more... "strongly" than I intended. I meant every word, I just want to clarify that no hostility is intended.

Yea, that was my point. Actually I think the Valkyrie is in a terrific spot balance-wise... it's just that too many pilots are trying to use it outside its intended role. That's a problem with the pilots, not the aircraft.

Actually the other aircraft should be brought in-line with the Valk; that they have one job that they excel at, and secondary functions are truly secondary. Sure let ESFs keep their Hornets and rocketpods, but such weapons should extremely penalize ESF top speed, manuverbility, and flight ceiling. Liberators can still try to shoot at ESFs, but ESF anti-air weapons should do much more damage to other aircraft. Galaxies need to have their Bulldogs removed and their armor/HP cut down drastically... so that they are vulnerable to ESFs and require escorts to be effective.

The problem is that AA nests would best be countered by other ground units, but they get setup in such a way that that doesn't really happen. (Thinking of south-eastern Indar in particular.) This leaves air with having to attempt to remove it's own counter.

You have to destroy the sunderer, then kill all the infantry and spawn beacons.

I've been using the Valkyrie every day for hours with a squad since it came out, trying both the transport and mini-gunship roles.

The Valkyrie has so many problems both of its roles that need fixing. It is in a terrible place balance wise, in terms of weapon design/effectiveness, survivability, and broken/bugged mechanics. There are plenty of good things about it like the flight model and overall niche, but they are spoiled because of the other issues.

Why stop here? If we want to spice things up, why not have biological weapons for wiping out all the infantry that can be delivered via air?

You do know tanks have much longer life expectancies typically than aircraft right?

A2A ESF's DO wreck in the air. Why do you think so many people cry about Tomcats and Coyotes?

Sure, they don't lol instagib Galaxies, but short of Liberator Tank Burster, which is basically a heavy short-range AA gun, it's one of the best per soldier options outseide of maybe a skyguard with a wide open and clear LoS to the gal and any direction it can hope to go.

A2G ESF capabilites have been nerfed again and again and again. Rocket pods do a fraction of the AV damage they used to, and the splash has likewise been cut way down. Hornets require a partiuclar amount of vulnerability to use.

Liberators are only really good at AA against other libs and gals. Libs killing ESF's is just the ESF pilots messing up. I've solo'd tons of Lib's. The main reason I lose is that it takes so long that they'll get some ESF support before I finish the job. But avoiding death to a Lib in an ESF is stupid easy.

All things told, the air game is in a pretty good place.

The Valk is close, but not quite. It was intentionally released a little UP so to prevent mass abuse on launch, and because light buffing seems to work better than light nerfing. It has a couple of issues outside of balance that seriously affect it.

VThrust applies forward momentum. This can be countered by angling back, but it's really annoying.

Rumble seats are suicide. a SINGLE burster max will kill you before you even have a chance to drop out of the thing, let alone try and wait a few precious seconds for a slightly better drop point.

I think it's durability is too low to compensate for multi-repair. Cap repair rate from rumbles to 1 engineer. This will allow a small buff in resistances without allowing for a 4 engie Valk to become unreasonably durable.

The guns are laughably bad. They don't need big buffs, they don't need to be as good as the ESF versions it's duplicating despite taking 2 people to operate 1 weapon instead of 1 person to operate 2 weapons. They SHOULD at least be somewhat effective.

Part of the problem seems to be a design of sustained fire over burst fire. This doesn't make sense for the platform which can't hold any position, at all, for even a second, if it doesn't want to get instagibbed by basically any enemy that looks at it. Shrink mag sizes to compensate for the buffs required.

I fly, I run, I tank. I've seen this game from every angle and all factions.