so when can we expect VS to be balanced?!

I'd rather AA with Lancer than crappy nerfed slow masthead. 2m flak is nothing, and not worth all of the masthead downsides.
Lancer is the superior AA.

Lancer is superior to Striker?

In the exact same thread, they had MUCH lower kills overall, speculated to be the high skill curve needed to use the mag.

Also, during Wrel's time the Prowler was buffed to match Harasser speed, and the Magrider had a large HP nerf, and had it's ability to roadkill without boosting taken away, it's been raised to such a high level that it's easy to ram under it and capitalize on the easy 2x damage, and so is the Chimera for some weird reason.

If you click on the little arrows to take you to that thread you can see that the speculation is a complete fantasy (in fact if you look at the damn stats in the quote you would already see that).

There's more stats there, and if you use the amount of MBT deaths to calculate the total kills/vehicle kills per MBT life you come to the stats in my quote: the Magrider scores better.

These stats arent because the VS is some magic superskilled team. That fable was born on day 1 of PS2 to justify everything. Even ZOE was just the VS players being superior in skill.
Why are there less total Magrider kills? Because there is less VS population overall to pull them, which means less kills made.
An example: if there's 100 Vanguards pulled and they score 100 total kills and 25 Magriders who score 50 kills, then the Magriders are twice as good rather than half as good (in fact the Magriders are better as they do this while outnumbered).

Why is the VS population lower? A variety of factors, but one of them is the chronic combination of victimcomplex with superiority complex. Even as they were running around with ZOE and deleting vehicles with Lancers and Sarons and their PPA was stopping entire platoons at a chokepoint the VS claimed it was just skill and their weapons were actually just worse but they made it work. The Betelgeuse is still a great example, said to be worse than the Orion yet massively outperforming it at any skill level. This constant "we are here for the challenge because we must be oh so good and OH NOES OP WEAPON X HAS BEEN NERFED AND NOW WE ARE USELESS" is one of the reasons VS pop is low. For example when the 0.75 ADS was removed from most LMG's the VS felt personally attacked and claimed the Betel and Orion were useless now. There was a big dip in population on the VS side (well, bigger than the NC and TR anyway) around the same moment because even with statistically the best weapon and saying they like challenges they dont like it if their weapons become more "challenging" (read: more balanced and less OP).

And if we look at copy-paste weapons across the factions the VS is in no way superior in skill. Overall they do not score better with such weapons compared to the NC and TR, in fact they lag behind with many of them (not surprising due to the underpop). But it does beg that question: why would VS only have this magical superskill only when touching their faction specific weapons?

No.
It is however more effective than Masthead.
Outside of Masthead NC has no infantry AA,
And masthead was already fairly weak AA, you ain't deterring or killing a groundpounder with a 15 second kill, but with flak range reduction it has become even more useless AA.

Lancer hits ESFs HARD and it's fairly easy to land the damage thanks to the rapid velocity.
Lancer never leaves my VSs launcher slot.

By yes Striker remains the best infantry AA in the game

Lol. Hyperbole.

The Lancer got supernerfed and then buffed against air in it's last update, it used to be a good anti-tank weapon, now it's good against air at close range if they stand still, or are a big target, there's no "hyper-velocity" there, it used be accurate but shot at bullet speed, now it's accurate but shoots at half a pellet of shotgun speed.

Not to mention, lancer lines were consistently mentioned for years, and never used, and then one outfit tried it out, and it became an instant "overpowered" thing.

Saron made sense, the PPA made sense, the ZOE made sense, the Lancer needed to be used as a group to be effective, now it takes more people to use it than it's worth against vehicles, and it's velocity has been nerfed hard.

Their best bet was to keep everything the same, but reduce the damage to 175-300-500 but keep it at all ranges, and kept the velocity the same, it would still make it effective as a team weapon, and it wouldn't make it tickle sniping prowler columns either.

How? You 2 shot ESFs and the velocity is 450m/s.
Where is the hyperbole?
If you can hit a target with masthead and it's heavy drop and 425m/s velocity and tiny 2m flak,
you can hit the target with lancer.
The only difference is that masthead tickles them, Lancer hurts them.

So we're arguing about who takes 2nd place in the G2A.

But the point being the #1 spot is TR, not VS and the assertion of the whole OP was that VS needs nerfed.

I think there are individual hot and cold spots in the game balance but overall it is VERY well balanced. About as good as you can get and still keep things asymetrical. It's kinda mathematically impossible to get it perfect though yes? So if I'm forced to stack rank them it would be like so:

1. NC
2. TR
3. VS
4. NSO

The overall delta from 1 to 3 is almost nonexistent though. NSO could use some love but that's it.

you posted asserting that besides NSO, VS were ther weakest faction at AA.
and i'm saying that is nonsense, because Lancer is far better than even pre-nerfed Masthead,
pre-nerfed Masthead atleast had an easier time landing damage, it just had weak@$$ damage.
now that masthead has miniscule flak range it is just as easy (if not easier) to land damage with lancer,
but the damage of lancer is vastly superior.
and then we have ZoE bursters which for AA offer a nice little DPS boost over what is available to NC.

FYI i'm not saying the entire faction needs nerfing, (i've actually been calling for a ZoE rework for years.)
but it wouldn't hurt to rein back the obviously overperforming stuff like beteldouche and Fa..*AHEM* 'Mag'-rider,
which are having a huge impact on battles.

I have to say that the Betelgeuse needs a massive nerf, it has such a low TTK that it can't be countered in direct combat and every VS player on Miller has one - it's absolutely no fun to play the game when you have to dump half a magazine into somebody but the enemy just needs a single mouseclick

Looking at Voidwell the Lancer is far less capable of G2A than the Striker.
Unfortunately neither PS2 alerts nor Voidwell have any useful data to display about the Masthead that I could find so far.

The NC first? How? We show you the Vanguard is about 10 to 14% behind the TR and VS MBT's and its not enough?

We show the VS has more alert wins than anyone else, the TR trailing behind the farthest, and it's not enough?

We show the VS Orion being the best starter LMG and the Betel the best aurax LMG by 10 miles and its not enough?

What does it take for you to put the VS first? In almost every important metric they are either first or second despite having an overpop and there existing evidence in copy-paste weapons that the VS has no superior skill to pull out of their azz.

If anything with the evidence should be this:

1: VS
2: VS
3: NC
4: TR (more alert losses and basic higher horizontal recoil outweigh NC's Vanguard)
5: NSO (the NSO had been a stupid nightmare fukup, wasting resources making another "faction" to combat population imbalances and then encouraging NSO's to stick to one faction. This could have been done faster, wity better results, with less dev time and no need to waste time and effort making a 4rth weapon and vehicle just to flesh out a faction that doesnt see half as much use and doesnt even perform its main function anymore).

ZOE has been reworked to only have a lightshow after 20 meters, that was nerfed to that extent about 4 years ago

It might be a console thing, but TR has had the lowest TTK on every weapon they own due to the fact that they do the same damage, have higher ROF, and higher clip size to make up for their mag dumping, as well as having the same accuracy and damage as VS weapons since the blanket buff, their tanks have the highest damage and take 1 less shot than a Vangard to kill (unless they activate shield, then it's 3), and can outrun Lightnings and Harassers. The Banshee can not only kill instantaneously, but can kill through vehicles you're trying to hide behind with the explosive damage. Their weapons are easy to use, have no skill curve, and can match VS weapons that are only good in certain situations.

The only weapon that can outplay the TR is the Aphelion vs the Vulcan, If you burst your shots at light targets, it'll kill faster than the Vulcan can, but against armored targets, Vulcan is king.

And the overpop on console is almost always 40% TR minimum as a result.

You're right about NSO and it's ridiculousness though. I loved the idea of it being a population balancer, and then they made it to where you could stay on a faction and completely voided the point. Honestly they should have made it to where new players started out as freelance NSO characters, and once they reached level 20, they could make a character on one of the 3 factions. The dervish would need to be changed heavily though, imagine using a dervish and thinking all ESFs are that bad.

The TR has shorter TTKs only on paper, in practice the TR has the worst weapons when it comes to infantry combat. To counter the ridiculous horizontal recoil you have to manually burst fire, reducing your effective RoF bellow the NC and VS guns. Mag dumping is no valid tactic in Planetside as the automatic weapons need quite a lot of shots to kill and you'll miss too many bullets to kill the enemy before you die to him.

VS can use precise automatic fire to kill you as TR and the NC can the same with some training (Pulling the mouse down to counter vertical recoil) and with higher damage per hit. TR's bonus are the bigger magazines, the massive downside is the heavy inaccuracy of their guns. (That's why the guns considered the best weapons are the ones that are copies of the other faction`s arsenal)

Idk, I reach top on the scoreboard every time spraying at up to 50m range, and sometimes I just hold down the R2 button for the chaingun at a doorway and catch bounties, I'll send you a few clips next week, I need to work on my editing skills anyway.

It'll be a montage of "tactical superiority"

Chaingun is just built different. It is actually borderline OP atm due to the buffs it received before NWA nerf, and the fact that it is literally designed to be a bodyshot weapon.

Borderline? You have to use the Jackhammer at close range, and the Lasher on elevated ground/doorways and hope they don't find you within the first 2 whole seconds of you shooting, or have flak armor. Chaingun is just "hold the button, hope people peak" or "Hold the button, strafe and corner them with no way out (unless they have a jump implant)"

Honestly, once the Chaingun starts firing, you have zero worries about anything within 75-ish meters of your shots, it's everyone who isn't in your range that's the problem.

It reloads faster than half the TR LMGs, has the second highest TTK in the game outside of shotguns, first place goes to the Banshee, and you can upgrade it to have 250 shots in a single mag.

I think the vanu is doing just fine, on the USA East server they dominate alongside the NC. TR is pretty much the big loser faction on USA East. Not only that but NC and Vanu weapons are superior to TR and NSO. The vanu don't really need a buff at least I don't think so because they are a great faction. If anything I think the NC guns need a bit less damage as in a flat damage decrease nerf across the board. Alongside potentially buffing a bit of bloom with TR weapons and... doing something i don't know what with NSO weapons in general.

I just remembered, console has aim assist, recoil is less harsh due to it.