Upcoming Tank and Liberator Changes

So her comes the view of a professional player and not forumside...

Most of this patch is total crap and again Im thinking that SOE isn't playing there own game.
You break this game and hit everyone who but time into thier vehicle. In most cases BR80+. This game become easier and easier for every idiot playing ps2... Her your changes in short:
- Magride OP with new reverse speed
+ Anti-C4
+ Turret stabilization
- Range nerf
- Lib changes at all ( high risk reward?! are you kidding ) I have no problems with Lib as Infantry... How about making a turorial how to use AA -.-
- ESF changes ( really?! ) Im not a breaker user but if you dont have aa with you as tank or so its your own fault...

Again its just another patch to make soloing easier and to break the high rewarded airsuperiority... This is the same in real war (im a soilder) airsuperiority is most important!!!
If someone wants to play tank I help him with a skyguard - so air is no problem...

Make more tutorials for these forumside QQ and low skill players but dont punish your bread abd butter because we are the majority that pay for this game. If you keep this way - you will lose many of us...

it made for more fun to use it, no one wanted to be 3rd gunner, but now you can kill infantry as belly gunner.
Reducing Lib range is good idea, i think need to fix max height flying for libs below ESFs, so it will make them fly away, as soon, as enemy ESF will be appear

Half of the changes are plain silly and stupid, the other half is reasonable. As it seems SOE devs need to play the game a bit to understand it, because they show scrub level of understanding of the game.
The changes are like they are made by some new player not by seasoned Dev team, this changes reduce the skill factor of the game hitting the good players. the same players that pay you more money.

Tanks:
Stabilizations:
Stabilized guns for Prowlers and Vanguards would kill Magrider. This would create move imbalance and problems and it would require even more changes.6 months later you would wonder why Magriders are not used and VS is even more underpoped. Unless you come up with some major buff that would compensate Magrider FIXED turret you better does not BUFF ONLY THE OTHER 2 MBTs.
Reverse:
Reverse change is bad as well. Suddenly 6-8 months ago you at SOE would wonder why racer chassis have 90+% equipment rate like the TB and would nerf racer using your lack of game understanding and logic.
Such reverse would be good only for farming infantry, one cannot reverse run from tank.
If you want to give tanks more easy time vs instant c4 deaths make the tank to be in red zone burning when hit by 2 C4 bricks.


Project Velocity Reduction:
This is plain wrong and bad. Tanks proved to be bad HEAT/HE farmers at CQC range breaking infantry fights. Now you FORCE AV tanks to do the same? Meanwhile Prowler ES ability gets severe hit making it meaningless. Don't break what works perfectly.
If this changes are too badly made then Blokade Sundie would be better with basiliks then MBT.



Top Armour Cert line/ Mine Guard changes
So we tankers could choice to sacrifice our defence slot in order not to be hard countered by Liberators and ESFs.The cert line should give up to 40-50% resistance to air guns at max rank. Update the useless mineguard slot to give protection to C4 as well. This would make the tanker to actually choice his set-up and adapt to the current fight going on. Now 80% of the tanks use NAR, 20% use stealth. Mineguard is not used.



Liberators:
Ammo Reserve nerf, Resistance vs Tank Shells
Great news, you finally got it.

Belly Gun changes:
Totally wrong call. Keep all Belly guns as they are. Zepher is not effective enough to kill Armour right now in bigger fight before Lib Dies. Shredder is slower then Dalton in killing armour. Dalton is useless as AI gun.
The only thing that you should do is to make Duster napalm gun- something that sprays flaming napalm with huge AOE effect damaging severely infantry and lightly armour.
If you nerf the velocities you would make the liberators kinda useless. Liberators are good against ground only when they are not shot by ESFs and not shot by a lot of Flak so they tend to keep range while attacking.
If you have still free budget hours fix the Spur by allowing 4th gunner to use it even if it is weak as stats.
After all would $$ big time from that change instead of nerfing stuff and throwing liberator crews away from the game.


BUFF FLAK. Make Flak range shorter, add gravity, add 2-3 levels of damage drop off so Skyguards/Busters can oneclip liberators up close but cannot peashot stuff at render range.


Bulldog:
It is worthless vs good ESFs and OP vs bad ESFs. Just nerf its AA damage. It is AG gun and it works well as such- does not ruin it.
I tend to run with walker because of the good ESFs, bad ESFs die to belly gun anyway so no need of special treatment for them.

Tankbuster:
90+% equip rate happens only when from 3 guns 1 is useful and other 2 are pure nanites. Ye nerf TB vs air ONLY via resistance nerfs. However buff Vector to be useful vs air and bad vs ground. Then magically you would see that the numbers would balance by itself.
Your solution keeps 2 nanites guns and nerfs 1 useful gun accomplishing nothing in the process. It is plain idiotic to await any changes to the 90+% equip rate if you implement it.

ESF Changes
Finally. Finally something useful and balanced. While you are on it does not forget to buff hornet speed.

Nice, so liberators wont be able to get involved in big fights again? will just be flying around the map looking for stragglers. You are going int eh wrong direction SOE. You need to make them tankier, but less agile.

I'm going to tell you this, and this is entirely true, not a word of lie.

I had a dream where I was driving a magrider with PPA, and I drove around blowing up prowlers (using the PPA). Then I saw a Vanguard, and my PPA turned into a Canister.

I woke up seconds later in a cold sweat.

What the Higby!? I'm against these changes, they take away the few traits the magrider has left! It has downsides for the Magrider too, which the other tanks won't suffer from, and those ofc we can keep!?

What the Higby is wrong with the designers. :/

WTF

YES! Air nerf at last! Thank you SOE, maybe I will start dying in my tanks from other tanks not always to air

I just want to say that main Cannons range reduction is bad idea and I will tell you why:
1. Shots after 300 meters are already skill-shots for average player or lucky ones.
2. Shots after 400-500 meters are skills-shots for experienced tank crews.
3. All tank now have their range and will have stabilizator and so range nerf is useless.
4. Please remember that in hills-obstacles-terrain tanks will HAVE TO GO close and get into fights so new stabilizator and speed will help
5. BUT in open ares like Indar excervation site tanks WILL STILL NEED to fight at range becasue getting close is a suicide.
6. Tanks, in this game and RL are long-range armor and tactical targets destroyers, not amored-racer-cars.
7. Points above are for you SOE to not further reduce cannons range becasue range is already awful and bad.

Everything else in this update except for above- THANK YOU! Good that you started maybe to play game and learn on mistakes. I see a light in the tunnel

Thank for nerfing air at long last! THANK YOU!

Another nail in the coffin with Magrider on it.

Slower projectiles on the Mag? That will increase the gravity even more making shooting 5m problematical.

Ok so the other tanks need the turret stabilisation, but the mag doesn't so it gets shafted (lowest damage output, same armour as prowler, same speed as vanguard, none of their advantages), but then this was a consequence of lets make empire specific lightnings but with the option of a second gunner.

If SOE had made the main guns dedicated gunner weapons (and given the driver the secondary) then there would be less mobile artillery and more mobile combat (see the harasser, how many times do they park and the driver swaps to gun?).

They def. didn't think things through here. I cant see the logic behind lowering velocity to improve Tank v Tank fights. What it actually does is force tanks to get closer to bases aka infantry and make it more difficult to survive the wave of maxes and heavies and engineers that are going to rain down on you.

So if there plans are secretly to just nerf tanks vs infantry. This is a grand way to go about it.

Improving vehicle reverse speed = rival chassis. So either they are going to have to buff the other aspects of rival chassis (aka magrider strafe) or thats going to be one useless option to have. Also since they seem to think just going forward is bad, I wonder if they are going to fix Magburn....Nope.

As for mag nerfs, if they actually have the balls to lower the magriders bullet velocity I will laugh. hard.

Also, turret stabilization for all is obviously an indirect nerf to the magrider. Cant wait to see what they give magriders.

You think I'm joking.

The cold sweat didn't happen, but the dream actually happened. I'm not lying or being sarcastic here. The Canister is (apparently) nightmare fuel.

tank nerf - check
liberator nerf - check
dwindling player numbers so waterson/mattherson merge - check


this game is done for looks like i'ma head back to BF4

I knew it was coming.. I ******* knew it..
And honestly, if all the lib changes go live, SOE has finally come to a point on me where I simply quit flying at all.
Tankround resistance enrf, decimator nerf etc to the lib is okay and needed, but ******* balancing the weapons it has by nerfing them to hell is a BAD idea.

The tankbuster is ONLY useful, if you have maxed it out and learned to use it over many many many flight hours.
You need to get to freaking decimator range to kill a tank, then you mostly will blow up if there are ANY half competent tankers around watching you.
This is the same proccedure like the autor repair nerf.. Nerf it so much until the other most useless utilitys will become at least "better".
The Vektor & Spure won't become ANY better with this change.. Well Vektor has a fast velocity, thats it.. I can tickle things 1000m away with a walker too, but what do I get from it?
The tankbuster can at least deal some damage...

The bellyguns are **** aswell, only "overperforming" weapon could have been the shredder...
What you did not realize is that the elevation in which the bellys can look got nerfed with the lib update aswell, which means its effectiveness got reduced at air-to-air.
The dalton rounds ARE slow.. Even slower? Go back and use Shredder.. Thats the consequence...
Hitting targets FAR away are more luck than skill, because the target has some seconds to move.. If it does not move and far distances... Not your fault.
If I am in a tank and a lib tries to dalton us 1000m away.. It will most likely never hit.. Sometimes the nonexistent splash damage hits, nothing more.

Oh and dalton effective against Infantrie? Not nearly, the walker kills infantrie better, my experience :>

And if you nerf the ammo cap. on belly guns, I want my certs back, because I did not put thousands of certs for it to have only as much ammo to live for 1 little overflight.
Nerf tankers ammo capacity too, they can also just spam it.. AP, HE, HEAT.. Got enough ammo, also Secondarys & AA weapons..
Seriously if you think ammo cap. is a problem or will solve anything.. That is just wrong.

I fly the lib with nearly 10m scores & 270h.. I am experienced and this will not solve the core problem..
Buff Dumbifres against libs, buff FLAK @ close range & nerf it at longer ranges, buff AP rounds & Secondaries against libs, but don't nerf the lib itself to uselessness... Please..

Forumside & Redditside.. I ******* THANK YOU for the stupid daily nerf threads made by nobrainers, you finally did it again.
You won't see any libs in the future if this comes live.. Not because it takes more skill to use it, but because it is useless.

And do not start arguing that the lib is easy to use and OP.. I know from my other factions on Ceres how annoying they can be, but only because the TR on Ceres always have air superiority and starts rocket podding & liberating the ground.. This can easily be countered by pulling your own libs & ESFs, but many people won't do it.. They just run out of the camped spawn, die to belly guns & rocketpods & tankers, pull more tanks and die to air and complain on the forum that they need to be nerfed.. Rather than countering them...

Rocketpods too good?
I can stare at the explosions and laugh at rocketpodders trying to kill me when I have FLAK 5 and overshield and just shoot a deci at them.. Or standart RL for other ppl.. Rocketpods can't kill infantrie.. You are better off using your nosegun... Killing infantrie only works on lonely ones who have nothing to do there or if there is litteraly NO AA in the other hexes.. While rocketpodding even AP rounds can hit you.
And you can nerf them agaisnt vehicles, but it would need a buff in damage for rear damage, that would increase the highrisk-reward factor rather than just floating above the tank and rocketpod him to death.

I nearly lost all my hope that they won't nerf the lib to uselessness...
The only nerf/buff it needs is:
Tankrounds/Decimator resistance nerf, Shredder nerf, Vektor/Spure buff and maybe a LITTLE louder engine. Nothing more.

These patch notes in short for all newcomers:

Global nerfs to vehicle weaponry, previously VS-exclusive turret stabilisation applied to all turreted vehicles (so now the VS are gonna be the only ones suffering with aiming on the move, dat tasty hull-mounted gun), one of Rival chassis' main benefits now made redundant.

Killing vehicles as infantry now harder, killing infantry as AV vehicles now harder, killing infantry as AI vehicles indirectly made easier, killing vehicles as vehicles now harder, vehicles now forced to operate within infantry-rendering ranges. This is apparently an anti-farmer update, almost all the changes I see encourage farming.

The previously-AV intended rocketpods now intended as AI (despite all those countless AI nerfs in the past), nerfed further at AV. AV intended Tank buster is the only viable Lib primary, getting nerfed so all options equally unviable. Zephyr is now an intended AV-role weapon??? Duster is supposed to replace Zephyr in AI-role (will probably get a velocity nerf, everything else is so why not???). Liberator update mostly reverted, with additional nerfs. But at least we still have the tailgun. For now.

All vehicles now forced to play in the same ballpit as infantry, even if they bully the infantry and the infantry don't want them there.

Willingness to be reasonable with SOE, dwindling.

Maybe the range finder implant will have a use now.. rofl

My feedback on the whole changes is still a huge

WTF

Eh let me give you my experience of Indar Ridge last night as VS (owning territory) vs. TR. I spent over an hour defending it in a 48+ / 48+ (and when we pushed the enemy tower we had a 48+/48+ with 24-48 left at the base as reference for population. We had no ground support (TR tanks on both north and south entrances) and no to limited air support (15 min nothing, then 2 Scythes, then 3 scythes and a Lib, then back to nothing, back to a few scythes). I spent the whole hour in my Burster MAX without dying getting about 35k exp and 8 kills while getting 5 or so Air defence patches, 2 Galaxies, 3 Libs and about 15 Mosqs. as kill credits (along with countless assists) defending from the South ridge close to the south spawn room (so limited knowledge on the north side).

Any attempt by the TR to push in tanks got shut down hard by rockets, C4 and mines. They would push in only to be pushed out with in a minute or be blown up. Multiple attempts, multiple tanks in every push and always the same result. Now keep in mind we had ZERO ground vehicles supporting us. Air on the other hand was constantly coming in, doing rocket pod runs and going out again. The libs would come in, do a fly over or two and go out the other side to repair and rinse repeat. This is with friendly Air on our side; some of their Libs even chased our Lib over the base with multiple AA sources (I saw 2 to 5 AA MAXes in my area and multiple AA rockets being sent after them as well). This is in one of the most AA friendly bases possible (the ridge allows excellent viewing range all around to approach vectors and quick cover for dodging incoming fire).

So lets recap; no friendly ground vehicles in a 48+/48+ and enemy tanks can't approach into the base at all. Some friendly Air and multiple Bursters (because there was no way to pull a Skyguard with the TR tanks outside the base pushing in every so often) and enemy Air (Libs and ESF) have a field day attacking smack into the middle of the base on one of the most AA friendly bases in the game...

1. Dalton: I get that you want it to be purely anti-armor, but if you get a direct hit on infantry on it, it should be one hit kill. Lower the splash damage and splash range even more to force a higher level of skill. Reward those who are skilled at aiming a lowered blast radius Dalton with a kill when direct hitting infantry. If you want to slow the rate of direct hit infantry kills then lower the rate of fire.
2. Duster: everyone knows this DRASTICALLY needs a buff. Anyone who has used it knows it's useless when compared to the Zepher.
3. Bulldog: want it to be a "supplemental anti-ground weapon"? Lower the overall damage, BUT increase splash damage range and allow it to finish off weakened targets or to soften targets for the belly. Make it 3 hits to kill an ESF, 2 to set it on fire. As a Lib pilot it would suck, but hey I understand the need to balance this to make the anti-air options for viable.
4. Tank Buster: C'mon, everyone knows this beast of a gun needs a nerf. But don't kill all of its strengths and nerf it so beyond recognition that a Lib can barely finish off a Sundy. IMHO, lower the overall damage about 25% and increase the shot spread making it even more inaccurate.
5. Ammo capacity reduction, okay... I get the reasoning cutting it by 10-15% seems right

On the general idea of needing to better balance the risk/reward of the Liberator. You have to understand that certain situations suit the Liberator well. Most of the time a Lib will fly into 12-24 fights and not 48+ just because of the risk factor. Are there times you see Liberators in those huge 48+ fights? Absolutely, but that's usually an exception to a general rule, and in those exceptions you have to have almost ideal circumstances with no ESF danger overhead. My point is, how much is this feeling of needing to nerf the risk/reward of the Liberator stems from the fact that Liberator pilots generally go to fights with the least resistance in the first place? I play small ball and middle ball. Big ball? Unless there's some perfect conditions for my flying, no way. With that much infantry lock ons are a given and flak can come up on you at anytime from any spawned max, not to mention the ESFs around.

Overall, the tank changes SEEM fair, when in armor I would like more engagements at closer ranges rather than sitting on a road trying to snipe enemy armor that just reverses over a hill to repair or to a repair Sundy... But thing is, the MAPS have to SUPPORT that MOVEMENT!!! I get that the lattice is going to funnel players in certain directions, but at least allow the versatility to be able to flank if needed and not have to just resort to sniping armor constantly.

SO:

- LIBS: not balanced, just ******.
- Magriders: Any reason to use one again? with a worse main gun, and closer tank combat strafing means ****, and DPS means ****
- Vanguards. Going backwards? turret stabilization. no penalty for being risky.
- Prowlers. Possibly more vulcan use? going backwards at 90 will be hillarious and farming infantry will be even safer. and now due to closer range hitting both shots will be easy!
- Lightnings: offical new VS MBT: more range, simmilar damage, move manuverability.
- AH: rip

i have NOTHING against stabilized turrets for the Lightning/Prowler/Vanguard, really nothing

but since a 'stabilized' turret was the Magrider's primary strength, that is, being able to fire on the move, it will now be pointless since EVERYONE ELSE gets it. the Magrider will now be inferior in almost every aspect in comparison to the other MBTs!

it's like giving the Vanguard shield to every other faction and then calling it a day! this is nonsense!

what the hell is WRONG with the SOE balance team? don't they think stuff like this through? why nerf the Magrider even more if it's already the MBT with the lowest damage per second output?

and what's next, another ZOE nerf? PPA nerf? Lasher nerf? Lancer nerf? hey, why don't you throw the Vanu into the trashcan and go with TRvsNC only? since you cannot manage to balance the VS faction traits anyway!