What's with all the annihilators? Tons of them out there

it is becoming stupid, can't even get a tank out to anywhere near enemies without getting shot up by them with no chance of doing anything about it because they are freaking invisible to me and have insane range.

Well - is it just you who we are shooting? We are more than 10 HA:s and some engies and Well - life expectancy is very short for a tank. poke out a nose and it will be shooted off .... even some competition who shoots it first off.

*well - just teasing*

Its because before annihilators, infantry to tank balance was a JOKE.

Now, they can atleast fight back. While its questionable wether thats ok or not, i think how things were pre-annihilators was slightly, MORE questionable (/utterly absurd).

Tanks have to fear infantry now. Get used to it and adapt.

Best threat ever. It's now my sig.

Guilty as charged.

I was sick of being shot down by annihlators all the time so I joined in and now rocket spam at the crown for an hour or so each day. Might not get many kills but plenty of assists.

Or somedays I'll be in a magrider between crossroads & crown, getting locked on from everywhere, no idea where the heavies are. Only way to sort-of figure out where its coming from is to move around until you get locked on again. You don't even see the rocket coming in, just hits you, so theres no way of knowing where it came from, unless they are right in front of you.

LoL

sure, give me invisible tank with guided shells

1 tank - reistance is futile
2 tanks - some of infantry is mopped
5 tanks all together AND same time diversifies fire so much that infantry is mopped.

One thing I noticed. flare/ir smoke also? jams ALL missiles nearby so make a hunt packs - not lone wulf. Decide who first shoots flares and so on. I have seen this done and sucesfully.

Annihilator are too effective for how they work
And the new bugs only made them even stronger...

It's a side effect of SOE not anticipating the game's maturation with a large playerbase. People have started unlocking those launchers, and it's only going to get worse until it reaches some sort of critical size where no vehicles will be able to move around anymore.

At that point, lock-on will either be nerfed, or SOE will give us counters. One thing I'd like to see is an ECM module for sunderers for instances, which would turn all lock-on weapons into dumbfire ones.

I think it's how the game is setup. Not only is there rocket spam, but respawn spam. While the continents are large, it's no ARMA 2 island. Tanks would be far more useful if the continents weren't so tiny.

I almost never use a tank unless I know there are very, very few people around.

The problem isn't annihilator, it's that broken game mechanics and rendering distances make them impervious to most attacks. That needs to be fixed (and I'm dedicated infantry, not a big vehicle guy).

Last night NC was trying to cap Indar on Jaeger, and TR decided to hole up and throw an annihilator party on Skydock. It's supremely difficult to break this with the current game mechanic. The answer would be to shell the landing pads from afar, since thats where 30-40 of them are milling about, but since they won't render, no damage is done.

Best launcher for Area Denial

Still every freaking infantry gets owned by a tank with just one shot. And it requires 3 shots with annihilator to smoke a tank.

You do realize that for the Annihilator to work, it requires a lockon to fire in general. It can't be dumbfired, it can be blinded by Flare/Smoke and, from my own experience using it, can also wig out on targeting so lockons in large groups of vehicles can actually slow down acquisition.

It also still takes 3 hits for ESFs, 3-4 hits for Lightnings, 4-5 hits for Libs and Tanks, and about 5-6 for Sunderers. It still takes about 2.5 seconds to reload and requires about 2+ seconds to do a lockon.

Currently, it is the only versatile RANGED AV weapon infantry has. But at close range for Vehicles, which is medium to short range for infantry, it is not the best weapon to use.

I've been saving up certs to get an Annihilator (currently have about 650), but I'm afraid of wasting 1000 certs on the thing just to have all of the whiners end up getting it nerfed. I rarely see Annihilators in the field, but when I actually do, they're almost always being used by organized squads/platoons/outfits. I see nothing wrong with that, as it rewards coordinated strikes (any of my fellow TR who have done the whole "Space Australia" thing on Jaeger should know how it goes).

Still, I see a nasty nerf coming, and it's kind of sad.

Honestly, at this rate I really don't even care about the Annihilator anymore. The Annihilator is just one of the symptoms of a problem, and the problem is the render. If the Annihilator was nerfed to non-existence, we still have invisible, invincible engineers repairing tanks and turrets in long range tank engagements.

Infantry need to be seen from 1000m away, minimum. I don't care how they make it happen, only that it needs to happen. This 'see no evil, hurt no evil' really needs to stop soon if we're going to take this game with any kind of seriousness.

Render distance is a painful nerf to combined arms because you can't really call for air support without air support having to rub up against the entrenched positions it's assigned to clear out. Fire for effect missions? What are those?

It's a nerf to situational awareness because you can't even trust your eyes. The skydock looks clear from a distance? Well, guess I'll just pop up there and...oh no, wait, there are 40 people on the landing pad. Cute, I assume the PS2 soldiers are born with near-sightedness. Don't even get me started on the annoying pop-in and pop-out of infantry. Oh hey, we're having a huge battle at the crossroads, looks like everyone's shooting at nothing. Oh wait, they're not, they're shooting at the invisible demons in their heads that only they can see, lol.

It's a nerf to recon because you can't even deliever an accurate recon report unless you have sex with each and every enemy troop so you can ask them where they'll be farming later inbetween smoking your cigarette, because your eyes and the game certainly aren't going to indulge you. And that information isn't even helpful because unless you're within 30m in an intense fight they effectively don't exist. Honestly it's a surprise this game isn't already shotgunside 2 given that by the time you actually see anyone, you're 1.5 seconds from being in effective shotgun killing range. At least, you are in any real combat situation the engine was designed to accommodate.

So yeah, The Annihilator is unbalanced, because it's main killing feature is exploiting a game design flaw; Vehicles render, you don't. And no matter what happens to the damage, the reload, or whatever, it's going to remain that way until liberators are able to zepyhr the **** out of your annihilator camping parties from 1000m up, visible or not, or tanks are able to perch on mountains and ******* rain HEAT/HE death upon the invisible tea parties that go on in this game.

So yeah, fix the render. Hell, if they don't want to fix the render, at least put the infantry in memory at the location so they can be damaged when I'm sitting around shelling a turret with HEAT and there's an engineer rubbing himself up over the steel of the turret because he finds repairing turrets under fire to be hot and sexy and 100% safe. Oh baby indeed.

5 tanks sat on magrider hill pointless shelling The Crown and doing little to help the battle - 5 dead tanks and moans about lock on range.

Don't worry it took BoG twice our numbers and us running dry of infantry resources to evict the Space Australia Defense Force. Even then they were still bloody terrified of us.
Still though even with TKers from ******** vanu or NC up there trying to weapons lock us we still held you off, remember there is a no immigration policy in Space Australia. We're full.

Last I checked...you had an ability that could be certed where every 15 seconds, you have 6 seconds of lock-on immunity.