Infiltrator Now have access to Battle Rifles. Dev Note: Giving Infiltrators access to Battle Rifles has a minimal impact on their overall playstyle, but allows them to equip the reward for the Scout Rifle Directive. About damn time. I'm not much of a scout/battle rifle myself but it always felt dumb that infils didn't get access to the battle rifle even when some scout rifles are just better. Claymore Now has an activation time of 320ms. Dev Note: Adding an activation time reduces the effectiveness (and frustration) caused by claymores placed where they cannot be countered or avoided. I'm willing to see how this really effects the claymore. I doubt it will be much, if anything it will promote more dangerous gameplay as people can run by claymores now and if fast enough survive without getting hit. It will just promote run and gun even more and continue to screw the people who prefer to be careful in their approach. The reason claymores do better than the others is VISIBILITY and VERSATILITY. We didn't have this kinda disparity between mines until you guys buffed claymores by making the green trip wires not be visible to enemy players. Most try and argue "use EOD hud" first off implants are cancers that shouldn't be "needed" and second it doesn't work through all surfaces. Well placed claymores will detonate the moment you can actually see them. Claymores can also be stuck to various surfaces, even ceilings, and yes they will still properly detonate while the others can only be placed on the ground making it obvious on what to watch for and where when facing VS/NC. Shotgun Balance adjustments I'm gonna wait and see before I really talk about this but i'll give the devs a word of caution. Remember back when shotguns nearly became the only weapon used in doors? I do and it was terrible. I understand wanting shotguns to be used more often but as you guys have shown, changing them is a slippery slope. Additional Infantry weapon adjustments Phaseshift VX-S All I can say to this is, why? Why was this change even needed? As someone who has auraxed the Phaseshift I can confidently say it was fine where it was. It was a difficult weapon to master but when you do master it you get the reward you deserve. A highly versatile niche sniper that can literally be the bane of an armor column. Seems like nothing more than pandering to a vocal minority. Vehicle changes Sunderer Deployment Shield maximum health from 2000 to 2500. Dev Note: This change aims to lengthen the time it takes for a single infantryman to destroy a Deploy Shield Sunderer while uncontested, allowing for more time for defenders to respond to the threat. Really? So you just made the best sunderer option even better now that one player has less of a chance of destroying it. When this first came out, to counter it I created a kit for heavy that was C4, Av grenade, and munition pouch. Basically all the explosives I'd need to kill a sunderer myself since most of my team couldn't be bothered to do it but that kit sucks if someone is actually defending the sunderer. Which is entirely the damn point. You guys are just promoting lazy gameplay now by allowing sunderer drivers more freedom to completely **** off instead of defending their ultra important mobile spawn. Look at AMSes from PS1 most drivers of those would not leave it unless we needed every person at the point. Your promoting lazy gameplay and I can tell this is a response to giving LA rocklets cause god forbid an LA actually destroy a vehicle on their own. Eventually its gonna get to a point where sunderers are just unkillable short of say and MBT+ and small engagement gameplay itself will decay. ESF Hornet Missiles Direct damage from 2000 to 1500 Indirect damage from 550 to 250 Indirect damage max range from 4m to 3m Dev Note: These changes keep Hornets as the ESF secondaries with the highest burst potential, but the lengthened time to kill helps discourage hovering above targets for prolonged periods, pushed them more toward hit and run gameplay, and reduces their effectiveness against infantry. I don't think you guys understand how Hornet missiles work. They did 2000 damage because you had to hover there and wait. Have you ever tried to do a pass over with hornets? it doesnt work. The ESF moves much much faster than the missiles and they are wire guided meaning you'll just most likely miss. I have a feeling you are trying to compare them to rocket pods but the thing is they function so differently you can't treat them as the same. "and reduces their effectiveness against infantry" How will lowering the damage to 1500 affect this? Pilots rely on direct hits with these to kill infantry. Unless you nerf it below 1000 this reason is complete BS. The weapon is wire guided that is why people use it to hit infantry. Make it dumbfire with the same velocity and I guarantee infantry kills will plummet. Watch out tankers you could be next cause apparently 1 shotting infantry with direct hits is bad!!! (OK tin foil hat is off) This change just feels like one persons pet peeve with the weapon system and not something that is actually constructive or positive to the gameplay. Overview: Many of these changes feel hollow or just not well thought out. All in all DBG don't be like Blizzard and start making changes just to make changes. "You don't fix what isn't broken."
My guess for the Sunderer Shield buff is that it was to counter the LA's Rocklet. I was finding it quite irritating seeing a fully shielded and repaired Sunderer get reduced to 50% from a single barrage of Typhoon Rocklets. Then destroyed in the next barrage or by C4. Note that in many cases I actually do sit in my Sunderer while everyone else goes off to have fun - and attack success has gone up significantly while doing that. Not sure how the buff is going to affect my own method of dealing with Sunderers - three AT mines and a few bullets. Almost all of the other changes I've seen are either pointless or mean nothing to me. The Hornet nerf is just plain stupid. The Claymore nerf is... interesting. I'm not a big Claymore user myself, but as far as I know there's always been a delay on NC/VS mines - not long enough to escape the blast, just long enough to tell you "you dun f'ed up". Since I've never actually played any other faction besides TR, I don't know what it's like for the poor sod on the receiving end.
Yup same, so while I am pleased to see this update, the original problem remains. Duct tape fixes everything, but that doesn't mean duct tape is the best fix. Duct tape over duct tape over duct tape eventually turns the thing you're trying to fix...into a gooey ball of duct tape. Then, years later, when you need to get back to that original thing you discover that there is no one left who remembers, let alone understands, that thing. All you have is a team of people holding more duct tape.
Reading this, I am not entirely certain you really played much PS1... AMS drivers hardly ever stuck around the AMS once it was deployed. There was no need to do such a thing, since in PS1 there was NO practical way to quickly kill an AMS as a lone infantryman. You would have had to load up your backpack with Decimators or a large quantity of your ESAV weapon, sacrificing your ability to fight infantry effectively and couldn't carry many if any medkits or grenades. Even then, it would take a very, very long period of time to down the AMS even if it was unguarded. HE Mines didn't detonate on stationary vehicles, and Boomers (PS1s "C4" equivalent) did pretty much nothing to vehicles. The only infantry capable "Weapon" that could instantly kill an AMS was the Orbital Strike, which, even if you were guarding the AMS, was going to nuke that vehicle and everything around it off the face of the planet. And the OS had to be earned and was on a 3 hour cooldown. Also, in PS1 AMS drivers could also lay Combat Engineering to defend the AMS and stall attackers. He could lay 10 Spitfires, 20 Mines, Motion Trackers and conceal the AMS with a Sensor Disruptor. Unlike in PS2 where you get 1 spitfire that does no damage, and like 3 mines. The only reliable way to "solo" an AMS was in a vehicle like a Reaver or a Lightning, BFR or maybe a Fury if you were lucky, as you could not Gun an MBT solo or seat swap. Typically if you found an AMS by yourself, you would just sit under the cloaking umbrella and kill spawning players still in their PJs until a tank or more infantry arrived to help destroy it. Unless you had the hacking certs to Hijack it, which also took a pretty long time and left you defenseless. I very much support making it impossible for single infantryman to rapidly destroy sunderers, or any vehicle aside from the Flash really.
The reason why Phaseshift got buffed: It was a Sniper you couldn't snipe with it. Charge mechanic had often revealed you (decloak) Velocity was pretty slow ... So you just could snipe ingees or people at vehicle Terminal...or afk people. Outside of 180m (with silencer) you could not oneshot headshot people anymore (except Infils) The Phaseshift deserved the buff.
I only lightly touched on the PS1 part because I didn't want to to make a wall of text any longer. I agree there really wasn't any way to infantry solo an AMS other than orbital strike or hacking to get it out of the way quickly. You mentioned AMS owners placing engineer deployables and this was the most common way people defended their AMS. It usually took a fair amount of time as most dedicated AMS owners had most if not all of the engineering line meaning they had a lot to place down. This meant that they stuck around their AMS for sometime. In many cases I'd seen during smaller engagements the owner would switch to a cloaking kit and watch the AMS from afar where they would either distract or kill anyone coming around to find it. In larger engagements they would either be actively repairing it, killing enemies encroaching on it or waiting to see if it needs to be moved to a better position. Even when they might not of had engineer i've seen a fair amount of owners using a Infiltration suite to watch their AMS from other infiltrators who might hack it. One thing you are slightly wrong on is that the VS can solo drive a Magrider to kill an AMS. Still though this is merely my observations from how others used the AMS over the years that I played PS1. It wasn't the best example to use but the only one that came close in terms of game play and battlefield importance. It was mainly directed as what happens in smaller engagements. Even still though there are some parallel factors to consider. First off is vehicle acquisition. Vehicles in PS2 are way more common as you don't need to cert in to them like in PS1, they essentially have much lower cooldowns and not to mention sunderers have one of the lowest costs for how much of a tactical advantage it can bring. Secondly, most things in PS2 grow exponentially with population. Now this can be taken either way seeing as it could be that more people means the sunderer dies faster but there is the flip side. More people means more sunderers and considering a sunderer costs less than half an MBT it is practically guaranteed there will be more sunderers than you can throw armor at it but exceptions exist obviously. Even still though there are many cases in PS2 where a sunderer could have simply survived if one guy was there to watch it. The devs claim this change was to prevent a single infantryman from soloing a shielded sunderer. Then why not increase its resistance to C4? or to rockets/rocklets? Instead they opted to make the shield itself better basically making it more difficult for anything to threaten it. Not to mention for years they have been trying to balance all loadout options with each other so why increase the effectiveness of arguably one of the best deployed sundy options even more and leave the others behind? A few side notes people tend to forget. -Vehicle shields take damage resistances into account. -Sunderer deployed shield does not carry over damage after its been taken down. So no matter how much C4 you put on top of the a shielded sunderer you'll never 1 shot it.
Well we are both talking from our experiences but after the 400-500 kills mark I didnt have much trouble with the phaseshift at all. It took awhile to change my play style slightly to adjust for the charge up time but other than that I was still able to headshot moving targets out 200-250m. I found the charge up isn't as long as many people believe it is, you can release the very microsecond it hits the third chevron. If you can't be exposed for the 1 second it takes then you were already noticed and doomed to begin with. The velocity is painfully slow but you eventually get used to it and integrate it into your shot prep. Thing is though the lower velocity is the price we pay for having no bullet drop in the first place. Not to mention when your at render distance and hitting some fokes in the head they tend to just stand there unsure as to what happened since they couldn't render the shot in most cases before the second rails them. That always gives me a laugh. I can't really comment on the merits of using silencers as I found unless you are firing near enemies that are 50m away it just isnt worth it. Still as a sniper you shouldn't be getting that close to enemies who if they even have half a brain should still recognize the unique silenced shot and know you are there. But i'll agree if your goal is to only use the semi auto mode then you would need to be closer but not that close. If anything the semi auto acted as a subpar scout rifle that gives you more options when you absolutely need it. I'm still not entirely convinced the phaseshift really "needed" the buff but i'm hoping more people who have used it extensively will weigh in on this subject with their experiences.
Claymore nerf is actually not as bad as I initially thought it to be. I don't know how long the delay is on Betties and Proxies but the Claymore delay felt a lot shorter. Like twice as short. Initially I had a few duds where the enemy sprinted past the blast radius before the detonation delay kicked in but then I figured out a way to counter that- place the Claymore at a more obtuse angle in relation to the wall instead of perpendicularly. Makes the Claymore more visible to enemies checking the doorway for traps but also helps guarantee a kill instead of a blank detonation. Like Akura said, the shield Sundy buff, I think, is a direct response to the rocklet rifle being released which made light assaults capable of soloing a deploy shielded Sundy. It doesn't change as much as you think though. You can still solo that Sundy with pre-buff Sundy busting loadouts, so engineer with 5 anti tank mines, HA geared for anti vehicle and even a LA can still solo a shielded Sundy, he will just need a couple of extra rocklet magazines (thus more time) to do so. The Hornet nerf against infantry was so that you couldn't 2 shot a guy with splash damage. Which I think is good and promotes skilled gameplay. If you hit me directly with a Hornet, by all means you deserve the kill, getting 2 shot by splash though felt like cheese.
I don't know about that. As an infiltrator that runs NAC/Nanoweave and exclusively uses scout rifles, the battle rifle feels exceptionally lethal due to it's rapid fire capabilities and attachment options at ranges I would never engage with the Vandal. Running right on the front lines going toe to toe with heavies as an infiltrator really draws the rage especially when I can carry a grenade launcher into hugging range unnoticed...
nurf this , nurf that, (give us back our thermal this was a realy bad idea to remove it) are you shure you want to cancel your subscription ? you bet i am !!!
In Planetside 1 you didnt mess with a ams on alone on foot(cept for cloaker games). You scouted for the attack force. Reavers Libs and tank blew em up or as mentioned an os. That extra HP doesn't mean much to an actual assault. The Jackhammer got a nerf. Because fo the way the gimped the cof they should have made it automatic you have to spam it now.
I abused thermal for many years along with just about every other farming tool. I have a feeling for every vet sub they lose they will gain two noobs. It's become a numbers game and they can't afford to keep things in the game that scares new blood away. They can't or won't provide us with enough new content to have veterans bother with certs or even bother playing. So they have no choice but to show us the door with cheap moves squeezed out of a spreadsheet. I never liked this F2P market based system...it comes with a best before date and video games don't need any help expiring.
