The Central Thread for Revamping (Not OPing) NC as a Faction

[Blynd]

Originally Posted by Canaris

you wot? NC burster isn't as good as TR or VS burster... is this some kind of joke?

He is 7 months early

[SolLeks]

Originally Posted by PredatorFour

Thing about the reaver is that experienced pilots take advantage of the extra afterburner and can nearly constantly pull off maneuvers when you attack them. Large hit box or not this is a good advantage in the hands of skilled players.

This, aircraft are fairly balanced atm.

I would love the hitbox to be reduced a bit though, but its not that big of a deal.

[Artalion]

I don't think NC will need that many drastic changes. Some of the other posters commented that most of the balance issues are currently with the TR and that is where some changes need to be made. That, however, is another issue entirely.

There are some suggestions which I found to be interesting though.

1. Reaver Shields. We've got shields for Maxes, for Vanguards, granting shields to Reavers would seem to be the next logical step. I hope devs play around with this idea.

2. Phoenix: Speed/Range increase makes sense. It would make it more competitive against harassers. Raven mode sounds interesting as well.

3. Enforcer (AI) issues. This particular weapon needs some serious TLC from the devs. It looks like the developer of this weapon took the Enforcer frame, added a shotgun effect, then went home. It seems so lazy and poor quality.

The entire concept of a shotgun weapon isn't really a good one for an anti-infantry vehicle. If you look at the world's armies, they have vehicles with grenade launchers, missile launchers, and machine guns. None have shotguns, and for good reason. The entire point of anti-infantry work is to keep the infantry away from the vehicle. Shotguns require you to be at point blank range for them to be effective; which is well within the range of infantry. If they are close enough to fire a shotgun at, they are close enough to drop C4 or mines, and they're definitely close enough to fire a rocket.

Machine guns are common because they have excellent suppression ability. They can fire for extended duration, keeping the enemy hiding behind a rock. If he pokes his head out at the wrong time, you can nail him then. Otherwise, you wait for friendly infantry to wax him.

Grenade launchers are common because of their area effect. If a bad guy is hiding behind a rock, you simply lob shells in the area of the rock.

The Enforcer AI edition fails in both roles. It has a small clip (six rounds) making it impossible for it to sustain fire. It is a projectile weapon, with no AOE, and therefore can't take out targets behind rocks.

You'd expect that, all this being the case, that when this weapon does fire, it is pretty spectacular and does impressive damage. This just isn't the case. It fires like a shotgun and does damage like a shotgun. To test the effectiveness of the weapon, I mounted it on a Harasser in VR, drove up to a target, hopped in the turret, and fired.

The VR targets don't move, neither did I. At about ten meters, I opened fire, and on the third hit, the VR infantry target died. This means that you can only kill two infantry with a single clip, under ideal circumstances. It is equivalent to an auto-shotgun, perhaps with some minor range tweaks.

Under combat situations, it would not perform nearly as well. Aboard a moving vehicle, against a moving target, chances are it would probably take four or five rounds to guarantee a kill.

Now compare the Enforce AI against the competition. You have the fury, which is explosive oriented. You have the Halbred, which is able to take out tanks and OHK infantry (and if it misses, you can still damage them with AOE.) Even the default basilisk is more useful, as the large magazine can lay down some pretty good suppressive fire.

Having now established this weapon as both fundamentally flawed; how do we improve it, short of scrapping it and starting over?

My advice would be to increase the pellet count, perhaps double or maybe even triple what it is now. This would allow the Modified Enforcer to increase it's chance of hitting a target, increase the damage done to the target, and getting anyone it doesn't hit to find cover quickly. In short, turn it into an honest to god boomstick.

[DashRendar]

Originally Posted by PredatorFour

Thing about the reaver is that experienced pilots take advantage of the extra afterburner and can nearly constantly pull off maneuvers when you attack them. Large hit box or not this is a good advantage in the hands of skilled players.

Originally Posted by SolLeks

This, aircraft are fairly balanced atm.

I would love the hitbox to be reduced a bit though, but its not that big of a deal.

"Extra Afterburner?" What is this? Is this some exploit that I don't know about? All ESF have the same burn time and the same hover displacement although the Reaver bottoms out first while the other two keep accelerating.

https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/.../#post-1990385

Seriously, is there something I don't know about? As far as I know, the Reaver doesn't ACTUALLY get the advantages it's supposed to get, because everything is normalized now save for spacebar displacement.

[DashRendar]

Originally Posted by Canaris

you wot? NC burster isn't as good as TR or VS burster... is this some kind of joke?

Yes it's a joke... if this were GU08 or before... Now, sadly it's just the truth. Another place in the metagame where NC is 3rd best without any justification of why, and for an NS weapon for godssakes?

[DashRendar]

Originally Posted by SolLeks

This, aircraft are fairly balanced atm.

This may be more or less true, but AA and G2A support potentials are not balanced. It doesn't look like the other factions AA will be toned down at all as this is functioning as intended, the only thing we can ask for is a stronger ESF to counterbalance it. Having balanced ESFs while having a cascade in AA power potential works out to be in the favor of the ESF who has the strongest AA support while the ESF with the weakest AA will be the weakest. Currently this is the Reaver.

It's a simple power check and balances system that's been used to create asymmetrical balance in games such as Starcraft which is hailed as the most perfectly balanced 3 faction game ever. In Planetside 2, according to the AA balance, the Reaver should be the obviously strongest ESF (because the other factions get obviously stronger AA, can I say it any differently?) while in actuality it is balanced if a bit wanting.

[DashRendar]

How about for the Vanguard revamp we address its lack of an NC trait in its secondaries and deal with its loadout versatility issues (it doesn't have it). We revamp the secondaries and make them both single shot missiles like the Halberd. NC can be the missiles on every vehicle faction instead of shotguns that A. have no practical viability and B. even if you make them OP, nobody likes them in concept and they are boring for the user. These concepts will be based on the Halberd, treating the Halberd as though it is an MBT main gun, and these two guns are the HE and AP variants.



ML85 Enforcer: as I said before, this will be an extremely high damage single shot missile that travels at 325m/s and does 2000 damage per impact but has AP splash (nonexistent in reality, only there to add more damage to direct hits to ensure death of infantry and add more damage to MAX direct hits). The refire time on this weapon will be 4.25 seconds and with certs you can lower this to 3.75s.

C85 will be Revamped to the ML45 Sentry: The ML45 will fire high explosive missiles that travel at 225m/s with lower direct impact damage, but a huge and deadly splash radius. Direct hit damage is 1000 and splash damage is 1000 with a 2m internal radius and falls to 1 damage at 6m. This missile will have a refire time of 2.75s and with certs this could be lowered to 2.25s. This will be an infantry specializing weapon obviously.



These will obviously transfer to the Harasser as well, so we'd be giving NC weapons that actually function for their intended role, lol. Considering the Halberd is likely the most used Harasser secondary as it is now, and these are role specializing sidegrades of it, we might actually have a Har that's competitive with both of the TR Har variants, without having to nerf anybody. Oh man I think it'll be so much fun driving around in a Harasser wielding that ML45. That sounds like good times.

Boom, we've addressed two issues with NC design that cause players to A. feel like they don't have any sort of competent AI weapon which degrades the quality of an NC frontline, and B. feel like we were given a TR weapon instead. These weapons sound very much hard hitting NC styled, fun to use, and they aren't freaking shotguns.

[KesTro]

Can this not die. Please. :>