As long as u have the choice, why not? Sadly our MAX have no choice than hope enemy inf are braindead & come to that pathetic 8m killzone without devastator ready to insta-gib us. Then those ppl come here crying scatter MAX = OP. & Jackhammer should cost 250 certs as it does nothing better than regular shotgun, but is for 1 class only so u get 1/4 of the price.
Worse they won't even give the NC shotguns with choked modes (al la PS1). Although they will give the NC a shogun with a shotgun on it because it is........... hilarious.
Define cheese please. Combined arms means infantry, ground vehicles, and air vehicles. To an extent, it means the inclusion of everything possible for war. Let us just take a tank for example. They are meant to be powerful and to be able to kill infantry with ease. If the tank can't OHK infantry, it is underpowered in just about every sense. If it can, cheese? Invisible snipers are not a problem because, if you remove the cloak from the equation, your battle rifle needs 2 headshots and another shot (only if they have Nanoweave, but 99% of snipers should be either using it or Ammo Belt) to kill when they can just plink you easily. Yeah, there are plenty of times when you can catch them off guard or their aim is off and you can counter-snipe. Not just with a battle rifle, but with scout rifles, sniper rifles, and even long distance assault rifles and LMGs. But guess what, Planetside 2 is Sci-Fi. Other games have used cloaks. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter too much. If I get sniped and the sniper wasn't in my immediate vision, it doesn't matter if he was cloaked or not. I'd complain more of the cloak's effects in CQC than at long ranges. A lot of people would say that map and base design hurt the game. I would say that if that has even an inkling of unbiased, objective fact, which I will not discuss in this post, then those poor designs are what make force multipliers dull and cheesy to you. Twenty meters is not a lot of distance. Even so, the fact that MAXes can only essentially hipfire means every meter they are getting disadvantaged more and more. I can't judge twenty meters right now, but I guarantee your ability to survive will more than double when at thirty meters. As far as counters, would you rather every infantry weapon be able to effectively counter a MAX? Because that would defeat the purpose of MAXes being heavily armoured. The rock-paper-scissors thing that you hate is essential for combined arms warfare. Everything should not be able to take out everything. You need to specialize. Take your G2A lock-on, but you get a lot less splash against infantry. Take your Corvus inside, but don't expect to beat even the starter carbines in CQC.
cloaking snipers: If they didn't have cloak, they would basically be useless, in order to get an effective shot with the sniper rifles you have to be standing still, holding your breath shooting at an ideal target (not moving / running in a straight line). If they were visible, which is PS2 players are Very easy to spot out to render range, sniping would be impossible, and they would start getting shot the moment they were spotted. As an HA I routinely trade shots with infils I see at any range. In PS2 if you are visible and standing still, you're basically already dead, Snipers must stand still, and if they didn't have cloak they would just instantly die every time they tried to take a shot. The alternative is CS / COD style 1 hit body shot, hitscan snipers that can quickly peek and score a kill, which I don't think anyone wants in PS2. The fact is, shotguns have an awkward place in ps2. IMO the pumps should have been more like the jackhammer, where you exchange ROF for a more accurate, longer ranged shot, much like the Nova in Counter strike. Making the pumps a all or nothing weapon is slightly anti fun. I've gotten lucky and mowed down 1/2 a squad with my pump, because they all ran in one after another , but I've on many occasion, shot point blank, and not killed someone, only to have them obliterate me with their carbine before I can cycle the shotgun.