[Suggestion] Thumpers? Thumpers.

The way I see it it's trading the ability to OSK for more sustained harassment/debuffs/general support, and of course a bit more strength against infantry as opposed to vehicles. The kicker is that regardless of what slot it uses it shouldn't be able to keep up with standard primary weapons like carbines, shotguns, lmgs, and the like.

Light Assaults could really, really use a Thumper tool! It would simply be a shoter range, less powerful, more mobility-oriented Rocket Launcher-style tool, fitting with the LA's theme of being a shorter range, less powerful, more mobile brother to the Heavy Assault. Maybe with this tool LA's would be a more obvious asset to a squad, instead of being the class leaders just tolerate or abuse for accurate C4 placement.

Aye, that makes sense.

I'm all for it, as long as it has no One hit kill.

Give it a great area of effect, give it good velocity, whatever. But no one shots!

Honestly I'd love to see a little more AOE support weapons in the game. The current launcher-grenades are trash, and it'd be nice to see them not be one-shots but be a solid source of AOE damage. The right balance for large-AOE infantry weapons is to deal pretty low damage, but it would still be nice to have as a support option.

A lot of that comes from the community, I think. New weapon is released, everybody uses said weapon, people cry about it, it gets nerfed to oblivion, only handful of weapons deemed "acceptable" end up being worth using. What's worse is that sometimes the weapon isn't even that unbalanced and there are other weapons that do it's job better. (those weapons often are the ones arbitrarily in the "acceptable" pile. I would imagine the thumper would be in the same boat, honestly. If it ever even comes out I'm sure after the forumstorm it would end up having a radius the size of a grapefruit. PS2 has a very whiny community at times.

You wouldn't believe how much I'd want to have some thump-thumping in the game.

Number one problem with making it a reality would be the over-simplified inventory in PS2. That nice and smooth ammo type switching from your backpack in PS1? This game doesn't have it.

Problem number two is the general push towards nerfing the hell out of UBGL and other weapons of that type as well as hand grenades into something almost family-friendly. Which is all kinds of sad and will probably get in the way of quality thump-thumping.

As for the classes, I'd argue it should belong to LA and Medic (maybe HA too).

I always felt it'd be a good LA/engineer weapon much like carbines. This would be if the thumper were to be a primary weapon system, of course.

Hate to necro the thread but i had another idea about a planetside 2 thumper. What if the rounds it fired were on a delayed impact fuse? Like a short time after it hit an object it would bounce and then detonate, so in certain engagements you have to "skip" the rounds to where you want. Kind of like the grenade launcher in halo reach, but multi shot instead of single shot. Just a thought.

Well last night I WISH I had the thumper, there were NC scat maxes holed up in a building and the one capture point [A] was upstairs. They all had shields and pocket engies repairing them. A group of i believe 4 o 5 of them held off a force of 60+ Vanu.

We had no way to push them away from the downstairs area aside from running in and getting instagibbed by the maxes or running in and throwing C4 everywhere in HOPES of removing them. Eventually after throwing wave after wave of our own men at the killbots, they reached their kill limit and we pushed in after about an hour of fighting.

Thats when the killbots rushed back in and it started all over. A thumper would have cleared this right up for us. Situational, yes. Effective, very.

Did someone say thumpers?


Come to think of it...Higby pls, we need sandworms on Indar
(I hope at least some of you know what i'm talking about...)

Has there been any more word of either this or the rocklet rifle? I hope whatever they do they keep it pretty true to the original planetside unlike some things they ended up "battlefielding"

As much as I miss the PS1 Thumper, I don't see it playing well in PS2, regardless of what it shoots. The biggest reason is that currently grenades cost nanites, so are (theoretically) limited; plus you can only carry a few. The Thumper would be a one time cert investment to get a LOT of grenades. IIRC the Thumper had a 6-round magazine with 48 in reserve. No matter what type of grenade it shoots, thats a lot of power. I'm just not sure how you would bslance it. It worked really well in PS1 because of the longer TTK, something we don't have in PS2.

If the PS thumper is a HA weapon if its not completely gutted by the PS2 team then it will be in virtually every way better then the splasher.

Guess what HA weapon my VS won't use...

Well, for one, whether the thumper was a primary or not, you would certainly not have 48 reserve grenades. For this type of fps I'd say 12 reserve grenades tops would be appropriate. Also, each individual launched grenade would not have the killing power of a throwable. The grenades would have solid damage if one is precise with them, but spamming it would pretty much require a magazine's worth to do any notable damage. My original post on this thread gives some balance suggestions. However I'm still not sure if it should be a primary weapon or a tool for another class like light assault or engineer.

My vote is that if higby ever does give us a thumper, it shouldn't be for heavy assaults. HAs already have a lot of options for weapons and tools and it'd be nice to see some other guys get some cool toys in the near future. Plus I feel that Light assaults in particular would be able to better utilize the features of it for their playstyle.

I think that Underbarrel grenades don't cost nanites (they can resupply like regular bullets from ammo packs too) so I don't see why a grenade launcher would cost you nanites any more than a rocket launcher would.

As someone tried to point out with their racecar analogy, massive scale can easily break something like this. Unless you give it something pitiful, like .2 meter explosive radius, a .5 explosive radius would be enough for 2-3 guys to lock down a doorway for long periods of time. In larger battles, you'll have whole squads spamming these into doorways. Hell, we currently have frag/sticky/AV nade spam into doorways in large battles and these are already limited by resource costs. I dread to think of what it'd be like with a grenade launcher that can be loaded up by ammo packs.

I think it would almost have to be a primary - I can't see giving any class a bullet weapon plus a grenade launcher as a tool. Toning down the damage per grenade and severely restricting the reserve ammo would help, but I'm still not sold on the idea of a Thumper for a few reasons. There are a lot of spammy explosive area-denial weapons in the game already for one thing... do we really want/need another? I mean, it would essentially be one Pounder arm available for non-max infantry. What do you do with underbarrel launchers if you add the Thumper? It would share a similar purpose with both the UBGL and thrown grenades, how would you valuate the Thumper vs the other two? How would you resupply it - from ammo packs, or would you require the user to go to a terminal?

I dunno. I loved the Thumper in PS1, it was one of my go-to weapons during a base defense. As much as I miss that thing, I really am not convinced it has a place in PS2 given the current state of the game.

Ikr? Everyone and thier cats would equip thumpers and biolabs would be really ugly as 200 people are endlessly standing over engi boxes spamming thumpers at the door....

Why does it automatically have to be OP because its a grenade launcher?I dont care if its a 20 shot kill weapon. I want the thumper too.
Make it a HA RL slot weapon. If anything, it cant be as annoying as OHK RL primary dudes.