I have been thinking this for a while how does this work. How does this change the weapon's performance overall, and is it recommended?
I used this for a while on my Razer GD-23, it seemed to work fine as HVA balanced out the suppressor a bit so I could play as a midrange ninja.
Overall, the suppressor will have a much bigger effect on bullet velocity compared to HVA, the net effect will be much lower bullet velocity than without either. I suppose if you intend to use the carbine at medium range, HVA is a good idea to compensate for the lost velocity, and improve the damage falloff. Any carbine with access to HVA has pretty manageable recoil to begin with; the hard to manage guns are the high RPM ones with access only to SPA. Burst carbines are an exception, HVA is just going to mess up their accuracy too much because the upward recoil isn't continuous, so managing it is harder. With burst carbines, you want all the accuracy you can get in order to get the most out of them, so forward grip is recommended and no HVA.
I seem to recall that suppressors affect the velocity different types of weapons in different magnitudes - Rifles suffer ~40% round velocity reduction, while carbines / CQ weapons are effected to a lesser degree, although I can't find any 'official' info on this at the moment. HVA is a flat +m/s bonus, i believe, for me at least, HVA is never worth it.
I believe they buffed HVA a while back and the increased bullet velocity helps counteract the decreased velocity from the suppressor.
Bull****. Contrary to its name, the main argument for HVA is not really the velocity, but the increased damage at range. Carbines with access to HVA drop two damage tiers, the second tier ends 10 meters farther with HVA.
Correct, although you may actually be underselling it, as HVA was buffed a little while back to potentially provide even more range which might've stretched those dropoff tiers another 2-8m depending on the carbine (no numbers, so who knows which). Also, there isn't any carbine that only drops one damage tier; every carbine drops at least two. Because of this, I'd personally recommend HVA on every carbine that takes it just for the damage bonus, but I'd probably shy away from HVA on any AR or LMG or BR since the benefit is much less when there's only one damage tier drop. If SPA or nothing is your only choice then take those options, but on things that have SPA and HVA I'd definitely opt for HVA every time on a carbine.
When was HVA buffed? I arrived at the 10 meter difference testing with Razor GD-23 in VR just a couple of weeks ago Right, didn't think about that.
I think it was before implants came in (the current Game Updates forum doesn't have old enough posts), so your current Razor testing is probably accurate. But they said it varied somewhat and didn't quite specify.
On 03/21. This is from https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...heduled-server-maintenance-march-21st.178892/ Of course, they don't mention what the previous values were. IIRC the best guess seemed to be a 10m min damage range increase before, which means now it should be ~18m for carbines and ~14m for everything else. I'd suggest testing it out on a few different weapons to make sure the velocity increase is actually being applied on the weapon you're using.
Tree sniping as LA is ungodly if you know what you're doing. Fnd sniping spots where you have a limited, but good, view of the backs of your enemies but where enemies have limited visibility of you. Only shoot targets you know you can kill, only shoot 8-9 bullets at a time, keep an eye out for enemies looking for you, and don't stay in the same exact spot for too long. Of course, using a suppressor is not optional. You'd be amazed at what's possible as a high level Light Assault. If we're playing the brag game here is an 83-7 murder spree I went on with the AMC a few months back. Most of my deaths happened when I tried to go back for amo.
My highest kill streak was 34 with NS-11C just recently. And I wasn't tree sniping, which I don't do at all, it was a normal battle for a base against enemy outfit + randoms, though I wasn't using suppressor, just HVA, so I'm not sure if this counts in this discussion
One important thing to notice, is: HVA + suppressor on carbines _ONLY_ works if you use the T5 AMC and Razor since they have broken high velocity. If you are VS you are out of luck and you should never use HVA + suppressor.
If you can use the flash suppressor, use that instead. It doesn't kill your long range damage and, as far as I can tell, it completely hides you from radar, which is definitely a bug...it's supposed to be reduced range, but I've had enemies closer than 10m shooting me with a flash suppressor assault rifle who didn't show up on radar.
