So, Phoenix now one-shots ESF as well as infantry. Why?

Sir. I am a man of leisure. I've earned it. I do what I want.

Yep. Their shields will provide them much needed cover while closing in firing range.
And TR lockdown mode will provide NC with much needed target practice for their new rockets.

Sweet.

Indeed. I think i should fully switch to my NC toon now. It's nice to be all-powerful.

http://www.reddit.com/user/las0m
Las0m = higby.

Redditside is OP (lagely because its not a den of venom and bile like forumside, but hey ho)
1. The real problem is the missile not rendering.

“Well, no, that's not exactly what I said... I said that if you have one guy constantly shooting phoenixes at you from a certain location it will be fairly easy to neutralize them. Right now it's just about impossible because you just can't see the things very often. That's a huge problem.
Shooting them down isn't supposed to be a 100% counter to the weapon 100% of the time, but it provides an active counter to the weapon. Combined with the idea of the camera effect making finding infantry while piloting the Phoenix difficult we should hopefully be making getting kills with it difficult, instead of very easy. You can get one shot killed by a sniper at a lot further range than the Phoenix with zero warning right now, the difference is the level of skill required to make that shot consistently. Getting lol ezpz infantry kills at <300m with the Phoenix is very easy right now, but when the Phoenix gives plenty of warning by being consistently visible and once operators are no longer able to easily see infantry while piloting it, it won't be as easy, and it hopefully won't be as widely abused. If it remains widely abused we will pull damage on it to make it not kill infantry. I get that this baby steps approach to getting these balanced is annoying, especially to VS players who unarguably have a lesser launcher right now in terms of overall utility.
The Striker and Phoenix were both designed to have active counters, flares / smoke / shooting down / dodging the slower moving phoenix missiles are all counters that foes of the Lancer don't have - there is no counter to the Lancer, period, you can't avoid it, pop flares, or anything - the ability for the Lancer to be very overpowered with no recourse is very high - thats why we're being cautious with how much we buff it and we're trying to watch the data very carefully to make sure we didn't tip it too far.”

2. Its going to be made harder to hit infantry in virtue of being able to see them a la NV/IR at range.

“There are two major balancing components of the Phoenix that are currently broken and leading it to be used as an extremely effective anti-infantry weapon.
1 - it is using the default camera view, when it's intended to be using a special tv camera that highlights enemy vehicles and partially obscures infantry.
2 - the projectiles are often "invisible" to others depending on how far away they are fired, and a major counter to the Phoenix is the ability to shoot it's missiles down. When you never see them, you can't shoot them.”

3. Balance is designed to be asymmetric and realistically this is hard.

“Balancing a game like this asymmetrically, and in more than just basic statistic variations, but in giving radically different CAPABILITY to different groups of players is very challenging. It requires actually putting things out there and seeing how they play, how players use them together in various sized groups, in various areas of the world, etc. Getting the balance "perfect" on paper first isn't really possible. We're continuing to look at the stats, play with these weapons ourselves, and listen to your feedback about them as we work to ensure that we're making unique weapons that fit in with the empire themes and provide fun differentiation. It's a lot of work, and i'm sorry it's not perfect out of the gate - but the alternative would be to just release nothing but common pool items, which makes the balancing a lot easier, but the game a lot more bland.”

This is what I was thinking. Let the phoenix kill with 1 shot but add a cost. If nubs want to kill infantry let them continue doing dumb things but at least make them to use resources, 50 would be ok.

Right now ESF can be instakilled with:
- phoenix
- striker (5 impacts is a kill)
- tanks
- libs
- unguided infantry missiles

This should change, SOE is killing the air combat. Most of my deaths flying with a scythe are from tanks and unguided infantry missiles. I rarely die in dogfightings ESF vs ESF. This is really sad.

Good this this hasn't happened then, isn't it. You can't scout with a field of view of 20 degrees. You also can't scout without using 1000 missiles because the FOV+turning circle means you can't see behind anything unless you specifically fly to that spot. The missile's range is 295m; combine this with the necessity of turning the full 90 degrees for any scouting and you've got a scouting range more like 150-200m and nothing either side of it that you can't see a lot better through a regular scope.

It's good that all factions have got a launcher that can do this then, isn't it. It's also even better that there is a balance patch coming to rectify this so you can stop whine-*****-moaning about it.

Just as easy to say FIXING it so it isn't a laggy piece of ****, and NERFING the projectile velocity, though in all honesty, the 2.7% change has barely any effect AT ALL; it's also still only able to turn up to 90 degrees in a full arc before fuel is gone. It travelling longer is definitely a nerf not a buff.

AND IT CANNOT BE DUMBFIRED. Thanks.

It can't one hit them. It can reduce them to fire health, exactly the same as the dumbfire (which is infinitely easier to hit ESFs with as it is not affected by lag or the ******** 5 degrees field of view that makes it physically impossible to lead onto an ESF.

Actually, the shortest lock in game. 2.5 seconds. The Phoenix will be in the air for 5 seconds to maximum range, paralyzing its user and leaving them in plain sight. The Striker can then be fired from cover. It can hit targets that it can lock at 500m, even if they then move away up to 800m, whilst the Phoenix will not hit a target that is at 275m if -any- turning is necessary at all. It does not need to one-salvo an ESF; it already does more than twice the damage of the noskill launcher that the other factions get.

There's no such thing as an ESF you catch up with, as they fly more than twice the speed than the projectile does, and you cannot hit them overhead even with substantial luck because, again, leading is impossible due to the scope. Once again, every faction can do just as well with their dumbfire launcher.

Additional uses like paralyzing the user in place, having the largest payload in game and thus being able to be shot down, being crippled against air and only situationally more useful against ground than the standard dumbfire (and less useful than the Decimator), whilst the Striker is a flat upgrade over its NS equivalent?...

Hilarious that you also think the NC MAX is OP, whilst accepting its only use is in a biolab.

You enjoy cowering from our Freedom Launchers. Whilst you attack VS, we'll warpgate you before finishing off the VS. Sounds absolutely perfect. I always knew extracting QQs with the Phoenix was going to net us a victory over time. Here it comes boys! 'MURICA!

It takes 7 striker hits to set ESF on fire and 8 hits to kill.
Also, Prowler need to hit ESF twice to kill.

wth are you talking about?... the phoenix they buffed it? wth were they thinking? when?

I do it like I did before I fired this shot.

How do you get hit in an ESF by a phoenix? That's some serious ... lack of velocity.

All it means is that the NC need to be dealt with from a distance. Its the opposite with the TR/VS, we need to take the fight to you! This is a part of the whole tactics aspect of the game.

If you remain at a distance, you won't have problems with our Scattermaxes, shotguns, max damage, etc. Only now we have a semi-reliable weapon to harass you at distance.

wrong, can

m1,m2,E, its so easy and quick to do

So, what you're saying is, you have no real counter to my argument so you're forced to resort to grammar ****?

Try the pheonix, and try to hit an esf or lib with it, you're only going to hit people hovering almost dead still. Then come back, and lie about your 40 esfs you took down in 10 minutes from a spawn room blindfolded.

The faster reload doesn't mean you're shooting faster, the missile speed was reduced, meaning you're in the missile view longer.

The pheonix being invisible is a problem, it's a tool meant to kill bad players, and by your whining, it's doing it's job.

That's entirely NOT what dumbfire means, but nice try. Also due to latency still locks you in place for a half second and is hideously unreliable due to the latency of creating the projectile.

Just wish all the NC would stop trying to defend this obviously OP weapon. Take advantage of it now guys because the gravy train is about to dry up once SOE pulls their craniums from their rectums.

NC HA with a Phoenix encounters an enemy Prowler. Fires Phoenix, hits. Gets blown up by Prowler while reloading.

TR HA with a Stryker encounters an enemy Vanguard. Locks on, unloads all missiles, Vanguard is left with 1/3 health. Vanguard fires, but TR HA used shields, so he survived. Vanguard tries to retreat, gets locked on again, and is destroyed.

The Stryker is far better in 1v1 situations. The Phoenix is pretty much garbage against the tougher vehicles. It deserves to one shot ESF's if they're dumb enough to hover around.

Chances are pretty good the phoenix didn't sell as many copies as they were expecting. I still insist that balance is changed in order to move weapon sales, and from my perspective, that is their only goal with these buffs to the phoenix.

People heard from the forum crowd that the phoenix was useless, so they didn't purchase it, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary. SOE buffs phoenix, phoenix will sell, SOE will make the money they expected to make from that weapon and then nerf the weapon down the road in the interest of "balance" after leaving it imba for long enough to generate some cash flow.

It's an obvious cycle at this point, one of the reasons they haven't and still don't have a test server is so they can continue to launch unbalanced weapons that they will change in the future after they've met their sales goal. With a test server, not only would people be aware of a weapon's capabilities before it released, but they'd no longer have an excuse for not thoroughly testing and balancing everything.

no, whos your ISP, Twocans & String Inc? I made a youtube on it the day it was released lol, half a second my backside