Currently the Ranger completely ignores armor, and shreds all forms of air. 2 Ranger Harassers can kill a fully-laden Galaxy in literal seconds. Its nullifying the bulk of the air game because people are spamming Ranger Harrasers and thus rendering the air game basically worthless. This game is not combined arms when one overpowered weapon is nullifying a core element of the game.
Yep. I can't believe how long Daybreak has let this Harasserpocalypse go on. And the fact that such a low skill weapon is so powerful while the Walker just tickles with direct hits.... It's broken. I don't know who's making balance decisions over at DBG, but they need to start playing vehicles, aircraft in particular. I support most of CAI, but it needs some serious tweaking.
It's not just the ranger. A solo skyguard does about 80% damage to the bottom of a lib with one magazine.One week they buff the lib so it can actually do its job, and the next its back to empty skies.There is flak everywhere and flying is next to impossible.Honestly i think this is how they want it, because people dont like dying to air. You cant outright eliminate air because that would be a sticky situation with people taking legal action, but you can nerf it so much that no one who is good wants to do it anymore.Which is what it seems they have done.Fortunately there are other aspects of the game which are fun, like ranger harrassers!
The entire problem comes down to the ground having no real option aside from area effect weapons (flak), and Daybreak caving and giving those low-skill weapons the dps that high-skill direct hit weapons should have. Flak should be removed or toned down to initial CAI levels, and a medium-skill direct hit weapon should be the premier ground-based AA option. Then we could also have a proper damage model that degrades with range, which would finally give ground defensive killing power without giving them complete area denial ability.
AA is completely overspecialized so it needs to be OP to be even worth pulling. If you look at any AA option it is absolute and total garbage at anything but AA Skyguard: Shreds air, barely tickles tanks and even infantry Walker: tickles everything Ranger: shreds air, throws marsmellows at everything else AA lockons: easy to use against Air,no reason to ever equip itin normal gameplay because it doesn't have any splsh against infantry, tho decent against vehicles Burster: again, shreds air, throws marshmellows. AA in general needs to get an upgrade to utility and a downgrade to range. If you have a walker you should be immune to LA bombings simply because they get turned to swiss cheese when they try to fly over a walker. If you have a skyguard infantry that gets close to you get 40mm holes. Bursters should be comparable to gorgons in AI work, just without the AV component of them. If AA is something that is decent even without air around then AA doesn't need to be as powerful.
So how many Rangers should it take to destroy a Galaxy, fully-laden or not? It doesn't really matter what the delivery method is. The OP is complaining about a weapon doing considerable amount of damage to Galaxies (and other Air). The same complaints would manifest if the weapon required direct hits and the player were getting those direct hits.
Nothing should be OP, so AA should become less specialized. If AA is OP and overly specialized, like currently, they don't have any targets and nothing to do. That's a terrible situation in what should be a fast paced shooter. That's really the only logical way forward.
I too remember the days of farming without repercussion with lolpods and libs. Of course people are going to pull AA when there's a lot of air, who wants to get farmed helplessly? IMHO, AA needs a buff across the board.
