Will wpn. skill increase as my character levels up?

Will my character's damage done with a wpn. increase as the experience is gained, or will the amount of damage a particular wpn. does remain the same no matter what my character's level is?

Currently, as a Medic, with the starter wpn. I unload an entire clip on an enemy when I come around a corner face-to-face with them and don't seem to do any damage, and within less than a second I am dead.

I'm using Pulsar VS1, and have Flak Armor 4...but after upgrading the armor there seemed to be absolutely no change in how fast others seem to be able to 'one-shot' me...when I downloaded the game and started into battle and was killed by enemies just farting in my direction I figured it was due to low-level armor, etc. -- now with armor upgraded a bit I hoped I'd be able to take a cpl shots before going down, but it seems as though there has been no change at all.

I accept that as a brand new player my skills are lacking, but at point blank range I'd think I'd do at least a little damage -- is there a setting I've overlooked that will show me enemy player's health, so I can at least see a reference whether I even hit them?

My game time is only measured in hours so far, so I know I have a huge amount to learn...but just wanted to know if the character's proficiency with the wpn. increases with levels, or if it will only get better through my own skills at controlling the character/wpns?

Thank you for your time and assistance.

No, your weapon damage is its damage. You are either missing shots or need to aim for the head more often. Try using Nanoweave armor to help with your feeling on "one shot". However if the enemy is landing head shots they can one shot depending on the weapon IE sniper rifles and a few others. This is not a mmo where you progress in that manner. You get side grades, with a few being direct upgrades but mainly side grades or swap of play style.

Being that you are new.... Imma warn you. You are gonna die a LOT. It is gonna happen. The most powerful tool you will have is awareness, and it takes time to get that in this game, it did for me at least. Most of your deaths will be due to some one flanking you or you rushing a spot you shouldn't have. Watch your team mates and watch how they flow, watch the enemy as well. you will learn the flanking fast enough.

Thank you for the reply and information. 100% correct being new means I die a lot (at least for me so far, lol)...I have 3 kills, and have died approx. 245 times. Thank you for the information about the wpn. skill -- was not sure how that sort of thing (skill and experience) worked in this game. Will work on trying for more head-shots...I had been purposely going for "center-mass" as it is bigger target and I mistakenly thought my aiming skill would increase as my character's level went up. Thanks for clearing up a cpl. misconceptions.

So definitely watch the others in the series, but this video most directly answers your question:

Also, recommend watching this and then chasing off and watching all the stuff it links to.

Level crosshairs at head level and pre-aiming alone are going to improve your skills immensely.

Skraggz answer is missing something important: The latency system. Imagine every enemy you've killed, there's plenty of them that thought the exact same about you! They wondered why you killed them in a splitsecond while they pumped you full of bullets!

PS2 is unique in how many players can play at once. It actually holds the world record for most players playing on the same server in the same area at once. This cannot be accomplished with the "normal" way information is spread around the players in the game. There is a reason why games almost always have a certain player limit, such as 16, 32 or 64, and that's because that's what the in-game code can handle. It's an exponential information problem with each player added causing the information send and received to go up exponentially just to keep track of all the players and what they are doing.

PS2 has solved this problem through the latency system. It allows 300 players to duke it out in one small area with infantry, tanks and vehicles while you can seamlessly move across a massive continent to another fight of 300+ players while a third fight of 300 players is happening there as well that you can visit no problem.

The price of this latency system is that not everything is buttery smooth, everything you see happens actually at tiny intervals, in between those intervals your PC makes an educated guess where enemies and friendlies will be moving and looking based on the latest inputs, then when the next interval arrives and you get information of what happened this is applied and it corrects any mistaken guesses by your PC. This means that you are always looking at what an enemy or friendly already did a fraction of a second ago, rather than what he's doing right now.
In most cases the time between intervals is so small that the guesses are rarely wrong and what your opponent has done will be more or less the same as what he actually did, except for firing. This means that if your enemy starts firing at you, it takes a fraction of a second before you see them fire, and this makes it seem like the moment you die happens far quicker than expected. In the meantime it looks on your screen as if you are pumping him full of lead and nothing seems to happen.
In reality it took your enemy just as long to kill you as it would have taken you to kill him, but you don't see everything your enemy did! So it only looks like he killed you in a splitsecond.


If you want to improve you should first learn the basics of PS2 gunplay. With some exceptions most weapons will not win you the fight if you just aim well and fast like in other FPS's, you need to control their recoil, their COF, their COF growth, know the damage degradation that will occur across a distance, know the ROF of the weapon, know the muzzle velocity and the gravity the bullets will experience just to be good at the game. It takes getting used to, but it's a wonderful experience as there's more skills to excell at than the fast aim and high accuracy skills promoted in so many of the other games.
Learn to burst fire, learn when to use ADS and when to hipfire. Read the item descriptions, you put on flak armor which is specifically against explosions and does not protect against bullets so reading up on the weapons will help you improve. You can also test out equipment on Koltyr and the VR room where (almost) all weapons and attachments can be equipped for free (do not unlock them, just select them and the highest level version will be equipped). It's not perfect, but you can get a feel of the weapons and what the attachments will do for you. If you can find someone like a friend you can test out weapons on Koltyr against each other (try to be different factions when you do, so you can train in a safe space where your kills and deaths do not matter (but you wont be earning XP and certs either).

welcome to my world,

empty 15 rounds into their back with a 143 damage weapon...
they (after about 2 years before they react) turnaround and *PLINK* *PLONK* 2 shots of their 143 damage weapon and i'm dead.
they have nearly full health...ofcourse.

PLANETSIDE 2!

Also: do NOT look at your killers health on the death screen. There are only limited circumstances where that display will be accurate. Just don't even look at it.

Didn't want to overwhelm him, did think about mentioning it as I see far to many people cry cheater when it's more or less what you touched on. But I omitted on purpose. That and im terrible at explaining that while I understand what I mean.... words, I fail terribly at them.

You're coming into this facing pretty much ONLY people who've been playing for Years and have a massive Muscle-Memory advantage over you when it comes to leading the target (b/c "Bullet-Time" matters, it's not hitscan, it's simulated physics) and Aiming Down Sight in every situation that allows time for it

You're there in a super bad position.
You miss like the half of your shots, makes 7. 5*143*0.8=858. The heavies overshield broke down, and the normal didn't. Mh dunno. But really get a better suited gun for your camping,
Better position, move, but not sit like a duck there, use your class ability, in this case cloaking. Why are you not cloaked at all? Isn't that a stalker load out? Why you don't use the smg, when hunter cloak? Use ads.

Welcome to Auraxis! You will get better with some of the tips people have already given you in this thread.

I'll just add one thing - auto weapons recoil with prolonged firing and aiming for the head can mean that your bullets will creep up and go over the top of your target.

Aiming at the top of the chest/neck is not a bad tactic as recoil will carry the bullet stream up into the head. Alternatively, start firing at the head and gently pull the mouse down a bit to compensate for recoil.

The Pulsar VS1 is a lethally accurate AR which I use myself and should place the majority of shots into where you are aiming. But the price of accuracy for ARs is smaller magazines, so the advice about burst firing is good (quite apart from the fact it resets recoil etc.)

Quick question - what sight do you use? the 2x reflex is a pretty good helper for close to medium range.

i missed maybe 2-3 shots out of 16, the guys turns around and kills me almost instantly with what appears to be 2 shots.
(from an orion which has the same damage profile as the gun that i'm using, except it has even more drop off.)

it is so hilarious that he can stand there gormlessly facing the wrong way eating rounds for well over half a second
and the moment he turns around i'm dead in 0.1 sec to 2 shots.
and then when i saw that he had over half health left...freaking ridiculous.
its one of those situations were i just laugh out loud at how onesided this game can seem sometimes.

it isn't always like this, if i was to do that normally most people would die,
some people just appear to be blessed by DBG/latency/hit detection or whatever.
half of the damage you do to them simply doesn't register, i notice a lot of "pro" youtubers have this divine status,
they can stand out in the open with enemies shooting at them and only take a small amount of damage,
if one of us stands out in the open we're instantly dead.

Looks to me like the HA already had his shield activated and you didn't hit him in the head. Also it appears you're running the Emissary which is 125 damage. I tested it on a stock HA in the VR and it takes 7-10 body shots to kill and that's w/o an active shield or nanoweave 5. It takes 3 headshots... This game gives way too much HS bonus.

As an aside, a couple times I have hit HAs in the head with bolt action sniper rifles and somehow they survive?

Also, when you play VR training, you will find that weapons seem to do more damage, are more accurate, and your controls respond smoother. This is because of what Demigan explained about the latency system.

The firing part of the system is called clientside hit detection and means that your computer logs hits you make and sends them to the game server, which means that other players are getting that information at a slight delay and if you lag then that delay increases (some people do exploit it, but I'm not going into how). In VR training there is no lag.

The shotgun is your friend at close range.

Problem is, that you can upgrade to shotguns that are one-hit-kills ... at least I'm pretty sure they are in there. I don't use shotguns.

If you don't want to use a shotgun, then I suggest going for one of the faction specific SMGs.
They seem to treat me pretty good from close to medium range.

Don't stand still.
It's quicker to draw your side arm than to reload.

Watch which way your weapon tracks when you continuous fire so the path goes up the body and across the head

Maybe you should work on 5 things,did training in dust514 for about a year to help me catch up on fast paced combat,helped me get better at beast mode on ps4 and ps3:
1.your hand-eye coordination(if pc this doesnt matter as much for a mouse than as for a keyboard,will help you have a quicker reaction time when you come up against opponents by making better movements between your hand and the controls)
2.use cover,judgement as best you can( in combat,this can literally mean life or death for your character) and pay close attention to your surroundings on the battlefield,i like to watch for the slightest indication when going up against someone when their going to raise their iron sight to me,or hip fire,if im out match ill retreat and try to come back around by either flanking them where they least expect it, or come back around from behind. e.g. outwit my opponent
3.use burst fire on fully automated weapons(this cannot be stressed enough considering im a close quarter to medium range combatant)

4.prioritize your targets(time your shots right and finish them off quickly,you dont want more opponents than you can handle decending upon you in a frenzy because you just killed thier best player or someones friend and they want to get back at you by zerging you, retreat if necessary and have your squad mates or factionmates provide coverfire if your outgunned and have become a high threat or extreme menace)
5.carry health stims(especially if going up against opponents trying to take back the point e.g point defense)

Planetside 2 is sometimes a fast paced game,especially with medium to big battles,other than a few bugs involving damage not registering, tking,and the fact that in game reporting on ps4 is non functional,its fun to play,whether solo or with friends.
I generally run heavy assault as my default,but everybodys right,depends on your play style,for me i like going head to head against opponents and play point defense as well,currently trying to work on getting a 50+ kill streak as an extreme menace.

oh, and reload as often as you can,but again,and i can't stress this enough,use your judgement,use cover,and pay close attention to the battlefield and opponents,ive died more times than i can count because i didn't do this.

its inquisitor, it has a respectable 143 damage profile along with, low damage dropoff,
a fast fire rate and good ADS accuracy,. along with a huge magazine,
its pretty much like a burst primary for stalkers!

Thank you to everyone for advice, information, links to tutorial-type videos...much appreciated.

In one of the videos the narrator made mention of ammo (can't find it now)...anyway my question is: as Combat Medic when I click the "ammo" tab for my wpn. (currently Pulsar VS1) the button is grayed out and I've no options for other ammo types. Switched to Hvy Assault and looked at primary beginner wpn. for that class and the ammo button there is grayed out as well. Is that something I gain at higher levels, or an option I'd buy (I am just free-to-play for now while checking out the game)?