When I plant a vehicle somewhere (mostly tanks and sunderers) there is a tendency for incoming damage to have no indicator other than lowering health. No animation, no sound, no tracers/smoke trails, nothing... except my vehicle dying. I'm not saying it's taking damage for no reason, I'm saying there's no feedback to react to. This tends to happen more so in large battles, and usually with a sunderer or tank. When I'm inside a vehicle I can at least see the direction of the damage, or if I die, then I can see the causes. But often when I deploy a sunderer and leave to join the battle, only to immediately notice that my sunderer is taking damage, I will look back and see nothing at all, only that my vehicle health indicator is going down. Again, there is no sound, no graphic, no trails to follow, etc.. Is this just on a certain graphic setting? Either way it is incredibly annoying. I spend thousands of certs on my vanguard but eventually stopped using it altogether simply because I would take damage in the middle of a fight without any indicator as to why. Taking damage is one thing, but losing health without any in-game indication why is another, and it's why I rarely use vehicles. Just 10 minutes ago I deployed a sunderer behind a mountain range near a control point and ran towards the battle, only to see my sunderer was taking damage. I had no idea where or what it was coming from until I got in my vehicle and finally got faint directional indicators as if I was barely getting hit, but I was losing big chunks of health almost every second. There was no sound, no trail of smoke, no shell graphic, nothing. I could have possibly reacted to the probable elevation of the source of the damage, had I been able to see where the projectiles were coming from, and relocated appropriately. As it is I rarely ever spawn vehicles for this exact purpose. Again, it's not getting hit by enemies that's the problem. It's getting hit by enemies that you can't see or hear.
It was probably a Lancer or Vortex squad. They are getting their ranges reduced so that they will actually be able to render when you shoot at them.
I've seen this happen many times. In my opinion, it seems like a bug. There have been times where the Sundee was not in line of sight where anything could hit it, unless they walked up directly to it from behind. Yet, another engineer and I were working our butts off to repair through the phantom damage.
This was on amerish. I died in the vehicle and thus discovered it was nothing but AP rounds from a prowler. I'm pretty sure it's the distance from the source of the damage to the target that makes the difference, but I'm not sure.
I've noticed that since getting a new processor and upping all of graphics to high I no longer have this problem. I think either the Lighting Graphics Setting and the Particles Graphic settings play a role in whether or not you can see projectiles/tracers incoming from long distances. It's like a whole new game and light show with the graphics increased. I have a feeling this is what is going on here. I can even see Lancers from extreme distances since increasing my graphics settings.
I've actually noticed this happening to other people a few times. For example, one time a tank with about half its HP rolled into the tower north of Paris Amp Station in for repairs. Naturally I take the opportunity to harvest certs help my teammate, and start repairing his tank. The tower was fairly secure, our armor was fighting enemy armor a few hundred meters ahead and we had been using the tower as a repair/resupply point. Thanks to the rocks/buildings that surround that tower, there aren't really any long LoS lines into that garage. So I finish repairing the tank, he gets back in to drive off, and then suddenly I see his health just start plummeting. It didn't look like RL or shell hits, it was constantly draining as if he was in a really strong pain field. He jumps out, I start repairing again, both repair tools together manage to stall it, but as soon as our repair tools overheat the remaining health just drains out in about a second or two and the tank explodes. I was getting EXP for it, so whatever it was the game considered it enemy damage. I'm about 95% certain it's a bug, but I have no idea what causes it.
