The only things that damn ZOE are it's armor debuff and the radioactive lobster glow. In big infantry fights, ZOE is the last thing I want to equip. I ran with charge and ZOE 5 in a big bio lab fight today and aside from charge bugging out once (snail pace charge, yay) I did a whole lot better than with ZOE. Small infantry fights ZOE > charge. Large infantry fights charge > ZOE. AA and AV duty ZOE > charge, since the Vortex nerf you really need that damage boost to make the Vortex feel like pre-nerf.
i did not read the whole threat so i will surley repeat stuff thats already been said, but just to tell you from my own experience: when i started playing planetside in december the vanu max was really not that great so i gave up playing it. and i think this somehow was true for a lot of other vanu players. so it became sort common knowledge believing that the vanu max is weak. i think the true turningpoint must have been, when the new max weapons came out and the old ones were tweaked. But the damage was already dealt, still only a hand full vanu sticked to the max. now zoe managed a lot of players to reconsider playing the max, me included. and i must say it definitly feels a lot better than half a year ago. the overhauled weapons and the vortex just feel right. and i use the zoe modul only as a more comfortable way to travel distances or to flee from an encounter i'm about to loose. in cqc i turn it off. maybe introducing a OP vanu max and nerfing it immediatly afterwards was a plan of SOE to balance the numbers. who knows ^^
Very well stated. The fact that the VS have no real downside to the MAX since they can A/D spam faster then most projectiles can travel means they will rarely loose, particularly if there is a competent engineer around or more than one VS MAX. I witnessed the effect of the Max abilities by rolling a VS to see if they really were as disgustingly out of balance as I thought, or if it was just me from my NC perspective, hating the **** out of them. I was surprised to find that, even WITHOUT ZOE, enemies freaked out when they saw me coming. As an NC max, particularly with my shield on and no way to do any damage, I'm engaged by everyone who can lay eyes on me and from every direction. I'm a bullet magnet. My special ability doesn't allow me to do a shred of damage unless someone fires a rocket at my shield point-blank and reduces themselves to a fine red mist. The VS max not only had the ability to engage at significantly longer ranges and had more ammo, but every enemy I encountered lost their **** and ran when I started to approach, assuming that I was going to go all ZOE and turn into a spastic dancing pink and purple taffeta death machine at any second. I do have some suggestions that might balance things out if any one of them were to be used.: - I agree with the quoted poster: get rid of the speed increase. - Alternatively, allow the NC maxes to fire their left arm gun with the shield up, or allow a shield-bash attack. Also, make the lockdown take less time for the TR and make their turning less restricted while locked.. This would at least make them both comparable to the ZOE as it is. - Have there be a greater time limit and cool down for the ZOE so it can't just keep being flipped on and off like a switch. - Disallow repairs on th ZOE's while they are in hyper-freakout mode. - Upon deactivation, the MAX might move slower/fire slower or have some sort of actual short negative period. That way players are thinkning about when to activate the ability, as opposed to, oh I dunno...ALWAYS. They're just suggestions, but maybe one of them could help put things back in balance.
Getting rid of the speed increase is a non argument. It's like saying getting rid of zoe altogether. zoe = movement speed, you can remove the damage buff and I doubt anyone will notice. It would be cool if NC maxes could do something like that, but on the other hand you'll have maxes that with a single hand have the same DPS the other maxes have with dual hands in close quarters, also being invulnerable. How do you balance that? I agree that the ability shouldn't work as an on/off switch. I could live with no repairs for my max in zoe mode. Most VS up to now (due to placebo effect) did not support their maxes anyway, so the old timers have learned to compensate for that long ago. I could also live with that either. If you get caught in an "oh ****" situation, where dash might have saved you, zoe won't. So putting a further debuff to deactivation won't have much of an effect of the outcome anyway.
