Would you be happy or upset if they removed AV Mana Turrets from game and refunded certs/sc?

If you remove it, you'll be ruining my immersion of being Zeus throwing down lightning bolts at everything I see. Deus ex machina.

AV turrets don't promote combined arms, all it does is make infantry players pull their engineers with their infinite ammo guided decimaters to shoot tanks outside of render range, lol. Promoting combined arms would be removing such weapons forcing them to pull their own vehicles/aircraft to deal with enemy vehicles.

Also AA Flak killing aircraft isn't cheesy, every source of flak is visible at vehicle render ranges, and i have no idea how you expect scissors to get into the action when a AV turret squad sets up in a base adjacent to the base you're attacking but is close enough to shell tanks with AV turrets, lol.

Sure, remove AV turrets, but remove tanks as well. I'm tired of getting OHK'd by armor, it's BS. I should be able to kill tanks with my bullets, like in the old Metal Slug arcade games.

How to fix AV Mana turrets:

1) Return starting projectile speed to 100 m/s.

2) Set projectile control timer to 6 seconds. After those 6 seconds, the guidance system of the rocket shuts off and it starts to be affected by gravity like a regular rocket launcher round. It also can no longer be course-corrected. This way, it has an effective guided range of 600m. It can be fired farther with planning, practice, and oblivious / non-moving targets, but it's no longer "LoL800mEZMODEAVsniper".

3) Make the projectile bigger. I'm talking, like, PPA sized: between 150-180mm. Maybe even give them a faction colored glow effect like Phoenix rockets to make them easy to see. Combine with.....

4) Make the rockets able to be shot down by very astute gunners. Will it happen often? Probably not, as the projectile speed is still quite high. But the ability should be there for highly coordinated, skilled crews to have a gunner in a machine gun be able to shoot the rockets as they fly in. This also creates more incentive for vehicles to consider taking guns like the Kobalt (or the Vulcan for TR) on their tanks for defensive fire purposes.

Well put, sir.

I agree with everything you've said. In too many games, strategy is shunned in place of catering to those that choose not to work as a team or communicate. Reminds me of playing Battlefield 3, where people would fly solo their chopper into enemy territory, then complain about Anti-Air (infantry) weapons when they got shot down. It's always the most vulnerable/squishy characters (Infantry) that get attacked for ruining Aircraft/Armor killstreak opportunities. I tend the be the type that will hold the chopper back at spawn, and wait for the Infantry to keep the Anti-Air infantry busy with stuff on the ground, before bringing in air support. Survivability drastically increases

There are things that will always require tweaking for fair gameplay purposes, but threads like this one tend to pull those who are heavily opposed but want tweaking, rather than removal, over to being fully against and demanding it's removal altogether.

You are absolutely correct about the AV turrets bringing fear to Armor drivers (obviously not real fear, but fear of losing their vehicle). I mainly play Infantry, and would be pissed if someday the community whined enough to have tanks removed. As you said, this is a combined arms game, and all of the assets represented in this game are what make it feel like a war game. Removing things like AV turrets would be a detriment to the Infantry side of the game, but obviously a boost to the Armor side. It's not like the tank elements are actually using any armor strategy, rather than sitting in the back taking hopeful shots (waiting for anti-tank to take them out. Hell, people still refer to a Tank Column as though it is an attack formation, rather than a traveling formation for speed of getting the element from one place to another. I would love to see a tank battle where parts of the element actually coordinate a flank, rather than WAIT for Anti-Vehicle assets to kill them from range.

I'm all for reducing the range of the AV turrets, but increasing the single-rocket damage output upon a hit. There has to be a tradeoff. Infantry are susceptible to death at range from other Infantry (especially snipers), and from tanks at medium and close range. If not that, maybe a critical hit system, similar to World of Tanks, where upon taking a hit it may not damage the overall vehicle, but may temporarily lose all mobility (if tracks or hover device are hit), have an occupant killed/injured by the armor piercing round, have the gun damaged (reducing accuracy/range), etc.

If they removed AV turrets and left lancer in then it would be unbalancing. Lancer it kinda fair right now because in many situations the AV turret is better although Lancer also has advantages like infantry render range being much shorter and being able to fire at better angles.

So your definition of 'combined arms' requires everyone to be in a tank?

The only thing wrong with the AV turret at the moment is that it doesn't always render, meaning people have no idea where they're being shot from. As soon as a tank spots where you are, you get pelted with a billion shells. Fix the rendering issue and everything would be fine.

The thing needs to have its range limited to infantry render distance, and the rendering bugs need to be fixed. Period. Do that and we can see how it performs.

It's really mind boggling that something so obviously broken has been left in the game for so long, but that's what I expect with an SOE game (SWG:NGE, PS1 BFRs, etc.) Could you imagine something broken like the AV MANA turret in a game with a competent development team, like WoW or Eve online? It would be hotfixed in a week. Sadly, not here.

I play Engineer, I use these turrets to great effect.
Remove them from the game - until they are reworked!
I don't want to see them gone forever, simply removed until they are corrected.

I would be really angry. I like to use my AV turret to help destroy incoming armor but I do agree that it is cheesy and needs a change.

Honestly they just need to make it accelerate faster and have even less fuel. This would make it harder to hit things that are moving at distance. Also the controller should only be able to guide the missle for 3 or 4 seconds then it should just go straight. This would still make it good for taking out armor at medium to close range and still allow hits at long range(but not if the tank is moving) without the current cheese of taking takes out at ridiculous ranges.

The most dangerous thing in hot tank on tank action should not be some lone derp on a hill outside of rendering distance.

Get rid of it.

You make a lot of statements I disagree with because I think your premises are way off-base. I'll take the time to explain.

You're saying that it can be as overpowered, frustrating, and cheesy as it could possibly be simply because it has a counter, regardless of how that counter is to be applied. In which case, almost infinite buffs in terms of power and no nerfs can be justified for everything in the game simply because there is a way to counter them.

Once again, you can take your argument and apply it to anything to justify it regardless of the specifics of what it is.

The relationship between flak and an aircraft is not a 1:1 ratio between AV turrets and tanks. The only similarity is that it is a counter, and once again you're ignoring all specifics of that relationship.

If the same fallacious argument is presented 100 times, you only need to negate it once.

And again, you're using another argument that can be applied to almost anything to justify its balance regardless of the specifics of it:
- It is balanced because doing X took "foresight"
- He used X resources
- He's not somewhere else

It is far more cheesy than AA. You can flee very quickly from AA and avoid it. Flak locks down an area, but aircraft can go pretty much anywhere they want to at any point due to their speed and the fact that they fly. If you're facing an AV turret 500m away in a tank, that potentially locks down the entire battle for you, and you can't easily get to the next one or even move from your position. A MAX, Skyguard, and AA turret are all very restricted in terms of movement by comparison. An Engineer can be pretty much anywhere. A MAX and Skyguard take resources and have cooldown timers while an AV turret and the Engineer can be spammed infinitely.

Again, just because something has a counter it doesn't make it balanced.

Meaning, AV turrets quite often turn vehicle battles in the open field, those rare things that every dedicated vehicle user looks forward to and loves, those times that vehicles are supposed to shine and are designed to control, into infantry focused fights.

My problem with this is that it's been the "go to" fix for over 8 months now. "Just fix the rendering and it'll be fine", they've been trying to do that for almost a year! It just doesn't work. The only acceptable solution now is to "fix" it so that it works with the current render limitations, and if at some point in the future they manage to get the engine to play nice they can change it back to what it is now.

Still too long, both because that makes it nearly impossible to counter and because they stop rendering as short as 300m.

Shoot down the rockets as they fly in, in accordance with point #4 of my post.

We could also add
5) Impacts against vehicles auto-spot the attacker to all members of the crew's vehicle.

Also, give a more accurate spot icon to turrets. Perhaps raise the little turret graphic and then place the old "dorito" arrow underneath it to clearly identify, even at extreme range, the location of the offender.

Considering they are the most effective counter to Magriders in long range tank fights, due to the Magrider's ability to randomly strafe back and forth while still keeping its crosshairs and strong front armor toward its enemy, I would like to keep the Eng AV turret. It's not possible to "lead" a Magrider, simply because it can change direction instantly on any terrain. Toss an Eng AV turret into your Prowler/Vanguard column and all of a sudden the Magriders aren't as cocky/EZmode.

In that instance, the AV turret is pretty much essential kit for the NC and the TR. However, much like most other powerful units, the AV turret is over powered when fielded in great numbers. As general solution to the "Greater Numbers + Focus Fire = Guaranteed Win" issue, the game engine could limit damage sources per second, such that every vehicle only counts the first 2 damage hits per second, regardless of how many rounds hit per second. This would help balance the weapons while also reducing server load.

On Mattherson it happens constantly, and as a Tanker its extremely annoying and at times completely game breaking. Unless the developers plan to do server specific balances, lol I shouldn't give them ideas of such things, then they need to do a range decrease now for all servers. This is also particular annoying when a highly coordinated armor task force like BWC's is constantly getting annoyed by these turrets from beyond Render distance.

I'd be a terrible idea unless they fix the rockets for infantry-carried launchers.

AV turrets should have reduced their range. They don't often render so it's impossible to attack them.
I was destroyed by one shooting from the top of the Crossroads to the Crown so I changed to infiltrator to shoot the engie: I could see the rockets but not the turret, they appeared from the air.

There's a player on Ceres whose half kills are just obtained with this cheesy tool and with cheesy tactic.

They need to properly render so we can destroy it. I don't mind to be C4ed, but being destroyed while at Crater firing range, by someone at Arroyo is not fun (It's a hyperbole )

The rendering issue won't be fixed without reducing the range, they had over 8 months to fix it and have consistently failed. Time to reduce the range to Max infantry render distance so the game doesn't have such a hard time rendering it in the first place.

You have the desire to play Devil's advocate on an OP clearly broken weapon which is easily exploitable at range?


1. It's stationary, however it can be fired from so far away a tank must aim at a single black pixel while the pixel consistently hits the tank again and again and again. Or it just straight up doesn't render and you're screwed.

2. The "it can only fired on flat ground" argument can easily be countered by giving a crap to long enough, a minute or so, to find a spot on a hill or mountain which turns green. This is not a proper drawback when I see these things all over mountains, hills, and mesas.

3. Engineers are NOT a hard counter to tanks. The AV turret is the only thing that truly makes the engineer a hard counter to tanks. Even the AV turret shouldn't be a hard counter considering it costs nothing to spawn, respawns in under a minute, and has unlimited laser guided rockets which are very powerful.

4. Don't you try to use combined arms to defend the AV turret lol.... The AV turret's existence in its current form is spitting in the face of combined arms. Infantry by themselves are not supposed to be the hard counter to tanks unless considerable risk and the right circumstance is involved on the part of infantry (C4), large amounts of infantry are used is unison, AP tanks are used to counter HE/HEAT tanks, or aircraft equipped for an AV role are used. The AV turret is a low risk, high reward weapon which gives incredible AV power and insane range to a single infantry person for 0 resources. The AV turret is the opposite of combined arms, because it gives you the option as a single infantryman to not rely on AP armor or air support to help you deal with ground vehicles.

5.The whole "it only takes one person to counter the AV turret" is such a worn out broken argument. You should not have to waste time, risk resources, and go outside the field of battle behind enemy lines to continuously fight against an invisible enemy which can be back in the exact same spot you killed them at in roughly a minute. It's a high risk/ low reward task to hunt AV engineers, and the engineer can also snipe you on your way to flanking it.

6. You don't give a dam about tanks if you are even attempting to defend the AV turret, and after your post don't even try to pretend like you do. It's easily the most game breaking thing which effects tanks since rockets pods killed in MBT's in roughly a second. Btw, Flak also isn't balanced if the source of the Flak isn't rendering for the aircraft either. There is nothing balanced about your enemy being in an invisible and invincible state at the same time. AV turrets absolutely ruin open field battles, and a single infantryman is not supposed to be the go to counter for an entire squad of tanks.

7. This game tries to encourage combined arms? Are you serious!?! This game encourages you to spam Heavy Assaults for every problem you ever come across. When people see a tank column on my server the most common response is not to pull AP tanks, and not to get some Liberatos/ESFs to attack them.. No it's to go run to some isolated spot with AV turrets (Lancers are an additional bonus if you're VS) and blow up armor when they have no chance of firing back. In the open field a platoon of Heavy Assaults zerging from base to base represents a bigger threat than a platoon of tanks doing so.

8. "When an engi gets a turret up and stops a tank column singlehandedly, well thats because he was a badass engineer who had the foresight to get to and set up in the right place in a timely manner" Was this sarcasm? How hard is it to see an approaching armor column, drive a flash or just run after spawning to an isolated spot far enough away the tanks can see you and shoot them. At this point I'm starting to think you're not playing devil's advocate and are an AV turret fan that doesn't want to lose their OP easily exploitable toy.


9."AV turrets help to stall the flow of vehicle combat, and quite often open up the field for infantry skirmishes." Infantry aren't supposed to rule the open field! Infantry already have biolabs, have amp stations, and have walled off bases where vehicles have little influence at all . Your entire post wasn't playing a devil's advocate so much as it was a post filled with false statements, infantryside 2 opinions, and the thoughts of a guy who doesn't have a clue about what combined arms really is.

How ridiculous.....