The battles in Planetside 2 are wonderfully balanced and really fun–when everyone does what the designers hope they will do, which is nearly never. With everyone taking on the “proper” tactical roles, and with intelligent leadership, you can have some really cool air and land tussles where no one weapon is dominant. This happens about, oh, 1% of the time :).
Yeah, I do that. It just means the base is lost once the spawn room is camped, not when the epic battle for the generator or whatever is done. In the big bases this is usually the same thing, but in the smaller bases it seems a little off.
I like your nanite and orbital building drop explanation for the base designs though. :)
Teiman
1703
The are demoing this change just now online:
its a future build and my first impression is that is a huge buff to defenders, I don’t know if will make the game better, …looks pretty and interesting.
Thanks! I think I missed it, I’ll look later and see if they archive the stream so I can skip through it and look for the changes.
I’m strongly in favor of buffing defenses and giving commensurate XP for defending vs attacking in order to make base defense actually fun instead of it always becoming musical chairs with the bases.
Teiman
1705
Some great battles in that video. Reminds me why i play planetside 2.
You don’t really see any of the effects of the change in the video though because the camera is mostly high level over large, out door battles. Being streaming, it is possible i just missed those scenes though.
Still, i only have eyes for the SMGs at the end of the month (i think that was when they said). I will likely be disappointed though as they probably won’t change my play style much. I do still have a bunch of station cash from that X3 sale a while back…
I think someone went the wrong way off the flight deck.
Joel
1708
I was just in a tech base and saw someone jump an ATV up the side of a mountain and onto one of the outside towers. And while I stood silently in awe, his buddy killed me.
Octagus
1709
Significant nerf to libs last night. Missiles are now much more effective against them, including reducing the lock lock on time by half andmaking it more difficult to evade locked missiles
Interesting. I haven’t had much time to play lately but I’m interested in seeing how this works. I like using my Annihilator or whatever the dual-purpose homing launcher is, and have gotten some kills, but Libs are a PITA.
My favorite ground to air kill though was a Reaver I nailed with a grenade launcher from the dome of a biolab…
KevinC
1711
I would have preferred they further buff the Skyguard, increasing it’s top armor and making the projectiles faster or something (damage seems good now [i]if/[i] it can hit). I just don’t like lock-on weapons in principle in a FPS game.
I pulled my Skyguard last night, and for once I was actually pleased with something they did—the turret can depress below exactly horizontal now! Now it’s mediocre against planes and has the capability to be mediocre against infantry, and that’s progress.
I don’t know what it is with the Skyguard and me, though. With the AA MAX I can shoot at a Mosquito at long range flying directly across my view and guess the lead exactly right the first time. With the Skyguard I kind of spew fire in its general direction and occasionally score some hits. Practice, maybe.
I can understand that but without lock-on every weapon has to be a very high velocity short time to target dart, really. It’s pretty much impossible to hit any airborne, flying target with the unguided default RPG, and to make an unguided AA rocket work it’d have to be faster in flight by a factor of at least three I’d think. And if you don’t have missiles for the HA, then only MAX and vehicles have any AA ability.
What I’d rather see is maybe tweaking the stats of the SAMs and letting you invest certs in making them better, so that at fully upgraded launcher would have better abilities than what they have now, but the default would be worse.
KevinC
1714
It has a slower projectile, much wider cone of fire, and doesn’t proximity detonate like Burster flak does.
KevinC
1715
Per last week’s FNO, they’re adding attachments for Rocket Launchers (as well as Bursters). Don’t know what the ETA on that is, if it’s the January patch or sometime down the road.
The problem I have with lock-on weapons is they’re uninteresting in both directions. They’re boring to use and they’re boring to have used against you. It would be nice if you had to keep your target in the reticle during missile flight or something at least (you’d need to increase their velocity at that point and do some other balance tweaks most likely).
Well, that’s a solid idea–like a TOW anti-tank missile or a Sagger, having to keep the dot on the target would be interesting. But I disagree about it being uninteresting. I find standing exposed long enough to get a lock (and because of the crossing speed, you can’t really target aircraft from cover very well) exciting under fire, and when I’m flying, getting that lock on notice is scary as crap.
In Planetside 1 you had to maintain the lock manually for lock on missiles.
It made them basically useless.
Ground to air missiles do so little damage that it doesn’t much matter that they lock on. The homing rocket that can target both ground/air does even less damage.
They are only really a threat to smaller aircraft (ie not liberators and galaxies) and you couldn’t even reliably hit a (non moron) liberator pilot with an unguided rocket that was 5 times the current speed. These aircraft could also dodge them A LOT of the time (before this patch, don’t know what it affected).
Even if they did increase the lockon speed against liberators, they still do low damage, have low ammo and have high reload times. They are basically ants. On their own, or even in small numbers, they are nothing. In large numbers, they can take down even a liberator given enough time. This is mostly balanced because they are a secondary weapon for heavy assault, but to complain about them being too powerful is kind of funny.
If you’re expecting a heavy assault to stay out in the open and keep a dot on some speeding reaver, the damned missile better one hit them.
KevinC
1719
As I’ve tried to explain before in various ways, Planetside 2 is not about 1v1 combat in isolation, which is the lens you seem to view everything through. Do you see what I mean? (PSA: Mute the volume, because BuzzcutPsycho is an obnoxious asshole and really unpleasant to listen to).
It’s an extreme example but the point remains, especially because they were severely over-killing their targets. You have to stop viewing everything in regards to how one stands up to another in isolation. One MAX vs a Liberator, one lock-on missile versus an aircraft, etc. That’s not how the game plays. The reason one lock-on missile doesn’t do more damage is because you’re rarely being shot at by only one missile.
And it’s not like the scenario is hard to pull off, we’ve done it dozens of times. Here’s another example of a handful of [TE] heavies nuking an entire armor column. Heavy Assaults are free to replace and if you just get a handful of them together with lock-ons, you can lock down an area.
A valid point. Of course, you’re rarely being shot at by one Liberator, either. Or one of anything else.
FWIW, light SAMs tend to be fired in clumps as well, in reality, as their chance of hit/kill 1v1 usually isn’t that great.
I’m fairly happy with the balance of MANPADs vs. air right now. The SAMs are a nuisance, and occasionally kill things, and air has to sometimes abort because a bunch of HAs are spamming the skies. An HA with an Annihilator or a Nemesis (or equivalent) though has zero dumb fire ability, and very little utility against MAXes for example, and every HA that is locking on to an aircraft is an HA not blasting people with a LMG.
