Planetside 2

[Dog Pants]

Those damn dirty rebs.

[Dog Pants]

Took this video of a large night time attack on an NC tower on Indar the other night. It's a good example of a standoff between two big horses across open ground. Earlier I had been providing AA cover, but their aircraft thinned out and stopped coming. Later I started hosing the top level of their tower with MG fire, which coincided with a push from us. Whether that's coincidence or because they were keeping their heads down a bit more, I don't know.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzuFRD83XJY[/media]

[buzzmong]

Nice little vid there Pantsu. I like your desperate dodging at the end

[buzzmong]

You know Harrassers with armour are OP as hell when they just sit there taking shots from an anti armour base turret and can kill you with the halberd with no fear at all.

[Anery]

You know Harrassers with armour are OPas hell when they just sit there taking shots from an anti armour base turret and can kill you with the halberd with no fear at all.

Fix'd

Nice vid pants, can't beleive you bought a sight for your sperm gun though, I just tend to shoot from the hip/wrist because it's just not accurate at range.

[Dog Pants]

Lashers used to have a lot less recoil so were pretty effective at long range suppression, but you could only use iron sight so it was difficult to see what you were shooting at. When they opened up a couple of attachment rails for it I bought the scope, but I didn't realise that at the same time they upped the recoil of it (and the damage). It's more useful now, but I would probably have been better off with holo sights.

I charged the tower at the end of the video because I was aware of how long it was getting, but sometimes drawing defenders out to come and dislodge you is enought to take the pressure off your main horse so they can advance. I was fighting on the exact same battlefield last night too - we look to have dislodged the BC a few times yesterday, but they have a well covered and short approach from the south, while we have long and open ones, so we struggle to keep it even if we do take it. Fortunately they have the same problem attacking out of there, and web drove them back to it after a fairly desperate stand at Coramed Lab.

And yes, Harassers have some serious balance issues.

[Dog Pants]

I was having a look over the Roadmap this morning, originally to see if there was a balance update to Harassers (making them more vulnerable to small arms fire guys?). There's a balance update coming, but they don't specify what will happen. However, it did demonstrate to me just how fucking useless the Roadmap is. Huge threads of people complaining about how what they like is shit and how everything else is overpowered. Nothing constructive, lots of trash, lots of complaining.

[Dog Pants]

New patch has reduced the armour of the Harrasser, the range of its weapons, and the effectiveness of a rumble seat repairer. Thank fuck. The ZOE has been nerfed, but not so much as to make it ineffective. It still does the same damage but can't be turned on and off at will, it has a set time on (can't be turned off) and a cooldown. Seems fair enough. Of more interest is this change to the Orion LMG:

Tweaked the code that unlocks the secrets of Vanu. It is now 593-754-8133

Apparently there were a few codes scattered about in there and they each yielded 2500SC. Nice touch.

[Anery]

I was fannying about in VR earlier (shortly before I shot my wad of refunded certs back on a full set of nanoweave for my medic) and noticed that C4 are are now christmas wrapped with bows.
Look out for sales, some things are going crazy cheap. Camo for 1SC and stuff like that.

[Dog Pants]

Ooh, I have 15SC that I wouldn't be able to spend otherwise. Sounds good.

[Dog Pants]

Cheapest I've seen is 99SC, but I'll keep an eye on it. They've also refunded points for Nanoweave, ZOE, and for some reason prox radar.

[buzzmong]

Hmm, patch notes are very interesting. Quite a large number of things changing.

Sundies should now murder harrassers, tanks might have a slightly easier time but not by much. Also, buy AP turrets for your tanks. HE and AP got buffed while HEAT got nerfed a bit.

Large number of gun changes, big ones are LMG's, although Vanu seem to have gained some vertical recoil by exchanging it for less horizontal, so not to sure if anything is really going to change on that front.

Nanoweave and Bolt Action sniper changes are good. Expect to die from snipers more.

[Anery]

Deep breath.
Aaaaand...

As a Magrider pilot I'm pretty pissed about some of the stats that are being shown here, not too arsed about the HEAT nerf - I'll get to that later - but the figures that are being show for the other tanks just shows how we in our tin toy tanks are never going to be able to take enemy armour on head to head, or even get the jump on them.

Magriders
Supernova PC (HEAT) Direct hit damage reduced from 1550 to 1410
Supernova Volatile PC (HE) - Direct hit damage remains unchanged at 1175
Supernova Focused PC (AP) - Direct hit damage increased from 1785 to 1865

Prowlers
P2-120 HEAT - Direct hit damage reduced from 1100 to 1000
P2-120 HE - Direct hit damage increased from 650 to 725
P2-120 AP - Direct hit damage reduced from 1200 to 1250

Vanguards
Titan-150 HEAT - Direct hit damage reduced from 1750 to 1600
Titan-150 HE - Direct hit damage remains unchanged at 1300
Titan-150 AP - Direct hit damage increased from 2000 to 2075

Apart from the error regarding the P2-120 AP (is it a buff that was worded wrong or a nerf that was numbered wrong?) these numbers show us just how much damage our puny tin cans are doing against the other MBTs.
You might look at the TR and see that ALL their shells do less damage than ours, but they carry more and have a magazine of two - used correctly they can land two of those bad boys on you pretty quickly - and lets not forget they can anchor to reduce reload speed and increase projectile velocity. However that works both ways, a nimble maggie could dodge one of those shells if not taken unaware and anchor mode makes them a stationary target. The Prowler DOES have very similar armour stats to us as well -though I can't find source, it was in another set of patch notes somewhere.
The CUNTwagon on the other hand does more damage per shot for everything, can fire 15RPM for HEAT & AP which is only 1 rpm less than the maggie can pull. In a one on one fight the maggie would lose every time based on those stats:


Maggie vs Van HEAT - 3.75sec per round, 6 rounds to kill = 22.5 TTK
Van vs Maggie HEAT - 4 sec per round, 5 rounds to kill = 20 TTK

Maggie vs Van AP - 3.75sec per round, 5 rounds to kill = 18.75 TTK
Van vs Maggie AP - 4 sec per round, 4 rounds to kill = 16 TTK

But did they stop there? No, the armour values of the Vanguard are also higher and they get a fucking energy shield to deploy too!


But really this changes nothing, only the brave were packing AP rounds anyway and I won't be changing my loadout. I'll remain an anti-infantry tank with HEAT in case I really need it, IR vision - even though I can no longer see mines - and a birdscarer up top. If I'm in a pack of maggies like a 5punky road trip I might consider swapping out for AP so long as the sundy has bulldogs.

[Dog Pants]

I never did use Maggies in an AT role, they just don't have the survivability and their so called superior manoeuvrability is useless when they can't outrun the enemy's turret traverse even at close range. I hear plenty of people complaining about them being overpowered, but I've never actually heard a reason why. So I'll be sticking with my HEAT and Walker combo too and leave tank killing for the flyboys.

[buzzmong]

Due to patch deployment issues earlier on in the week, it's Double XP weekend again.

Also if you're bumming around on Esamir, watch out for Snowmen. They give well over 1k XP each when killed, kill 10 to get a custom title of "Snowblower". If you see a golden one, apparently you get a new hood ornament.

If you played during the Domination thingie about 6 weeks ago, you've got a shiny new vehicle decal to use as well.

[Anery]

Unsure how to resize for browser, but this just happened

[Dog Pants]

Last night was some good Planetsiding. It was a good example of how choosing your battles can make or break your game - at the start we were in a zerg vs zerg push against superior numbers and it was just a grind. People weren't really enjoying it. Then after we moved to Amerish and started ninja capping to cut off the NC lines we changed the shape of battle the entire continent, ultimately leading to the capture of the NC's closest Amp Station. Props to the unknown Scythe pilot who appeared out of nowhere when an enemy tank was threatening Fab's Sunderer, killed it, gave us a wing-waggle, then flew away again. Anyway, after last night's Dota Anery and I came up with something new to do in PS2:

Warpgate Sumo

The principle is simple. Grab a vehicle at the warpgate and try to push each other out of the arena. Different vehicles need to be handled a little differently, and some don't really work, so there's a few easy rules:

Ground Vehicles
For the Flash, Sunderer and probably Lightning (we didn't try the latter) the arena is the platform in the middle of the warpgate, and the objective is to push your opponents out of the cyan ring on top. All wheels (or tracks I suppose) need to be out of the arena to score a point, first to score five wins. Each of the three players starts on one of the platform spurs which poke out and the match carries on if a player is pushed out, with them just returning to the fray. I'd suggest a Light Assault referee to be able to allocate points, and in the case of two pushing the third out they each get a point. If that leads to a draw at five points it goes to sudden death.



Like so. There's really needs to be three with Sunderers because otherwise you just end up with stalemates. Flashes you could probably have more or less because they're more agile. Lightnings should work, Magriders will just climb over each other, Harassers should work too. We only tried Flash and Sundie though

Air Vehicles
The rules are slightly different with air vehicles. Due to their speed and size we use the dome of the warpgate, because the arena would be much too small (we did try). Pushing isn't as easy either, but what is easy is to flip your bird, so the objective is to turn your opponent(s) upside down. Last man standing wins. Galaxies work fine, as do Liberators. We didn't try Scythes, but I don't expect they would work very well. This happened last night when we played it.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JatDzxRzbyc[/media]

[Anery]

I really enjoyed Sat night, as soon as you take yourself away from the grinder and find an even fight you start to see the game differently.
As I said more than twice on the night (bottle of wine to myself, fuck off) one thing we seem to be particularly good at is fucking things up and running interferance for our main assault horses and we did rather well despite my navigation and fabs driving.

As for WarpGate Sumo, fucking awesome.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

We've found that in the past, 5punkers working as a team seem to be able to effect enough deduction to distract a disproportionate amount of bad guys.

[fabyak]

I blame the driving on being imperial directions. As we all know, imperial left is the same as metric right