Underbarrel smoke launcher is great, especially for medic. Basically, unless they have one of the night vision scopes, it applys a wall they technically can shoot through, but not accurately. Smoke launcher and revive grenades will allow you to revive a whole corpse pile. Instead of having maybe 1/3 reach safety without dieing again you will see a much greater percentage of the corpsepile find a position to recharge shields and become almost fully combat effective again, while your revive grenades allow you to cower behind cover like the good medic you are. In addition there are many times when your team has to go across open territory while trading shots from enemy in a base. While it may limit your return fire, being able to reach the base itself is the first step in taking it and smoke grenades will help you do it, especially if you find an ammo kit to resupply from. This might make the carbine-S a good choice as well, as the Engineer could use it most effectively to allow an advance. I've seen stalemates broken by smoke clouds before.
I've been using the Gauss-S AR since the patch due to saving 500 certs prior, mostly from the double exp weekend, in the hope SMGs would be something other than 1000 certs. I've found I like it's performance better than I did the Reaper AR pre-patch. Due to having bullets that are seemingly much faster travellers with less recoil, I've found I can land more shots in both single shot and full auto. In addition, the S model has two round burst in addition to the other firing modes. I find two round burst to be extremely effective at medium ranges between where I would use single shot, and where I would use full auto as it puts more rounds out than single shot yet the recoil resets after bullet 2. I'm unsure if the recoil on the Reaper has changed, as I have solely used the Gauss-S with it's speedy bullets since the patch. In addition, the Reaper was absolutely terrible at hipfire, while the Gauss-S seems more along the lines of average, which is still much better than the Reaper.
Finally the AC-111 or what-not NC carbine seems to perform much better than pre-patch, though I might be imagining it. It seems to spray less wildly upon full auto at a distance, which makes it more viable than pre-patch compared to the GD-7F close range carbine in my opinion, since previously it seemed the GD-7F performed roughly as well at long range due to better rate of fire, larger clip, and less recoil per shot than the AC-111 while having very superior close range ability.
EDIT: Obligatory whining/advice to the devs since my absolute favorite ability in the game was negatively affected in the last patch: Also I'm not sure if someone mentioned it or not, but Flash Turbo received a stealth nerf. You can't drive up vertical walls anymore
Flash turbo is probably the one thing they could have picked to change that would make me become temporarily possessed by the userspirit of the PS2 boards and begin pitifully whining for changes and/or requesting a nerf to something else I don't like[bunny hopping infantry] which may cause someone who uses it to defend it as being something harmless due to all teams can do it... like flash jumps.
Also you can't enter the warpgate spawn room anymore with vehicles.
However you can still drive up steep hills if you have previous momentum. If you try to turbo up a very steep incline from a standstill the tires will spin and depending on the incline you might inch forward at very low speed. It will grant much less acceleration up inclines from a stop, so try to hit hills with momentum and don't wait for the flash to stall out like you could do previously for added distance.
My advice to the devs: no one will cert beyond turbo rank 1 at the current cert prices, because they wouldn't do it previously when turbo was better. If the price was changed without me noticing, my apologies for complaining. However, I would at least consider investing certs into additional ranks if either turbo was significantly less costly than it was pre-patch, or as a better solution, if in addition to the added recharge time, the turbo ranks changed turbo mode to be increasingly similar to how it was pre-patch with each rank while maintaning the cost, with the last and exceptionally expensive rank being the exact same as it was pre-patch with the ability to zoom up walls and soar through the air for what must have been an overpowered one second, or else why change one of the funnest and most amusing crowd-pleasing abilities in the game that I used most effectively to make crowds of people laugh? The main reasons I can guess are because it was deemed silly (which was most of the appeal in the first place I might add) or that it made the flash too maneuvorable when the change was made to make it not explode like a turtle on it's back. I'm not sure about that; when I landed without exploding pre-patch the best landing place besides on directly top of a TR infantryperson would have been near an enemy sunderer actively spawning infantry for my Flash M40 grenade launcher to get a few kills before anyone holding a weapon returns fire.
M40 grenade launcher is mostly for close range anti infantry when mounted on the flash despite the description as it would have to be an unguarded empty vehicle for a single Flash M40 to kill it; not that a single Flash should be more than an annoyance against a sunderer. The M40 is the most useful of the three weapons to use while actually moving, as they all share limited traverse but the M40 does splash damage against infantry and quckly dumps out it's magazine allowing evasive turns sooner, as well as requiring less direct hits to kill an infantry by a substantial amount. As such it is th best close range anti-infantry weapon for the flash. I had basilisk in beta on my flash; that would be able to kill a sunderer a bit more quickly at close and and much accurately at extreme long ranges but with the same caveats and would be much less effective vs infantry at all ranges; the kobalt can't damage vehicles the bullet shooters cannot but is the best long range anti infantry weapon as long as no one is shooting at you as it requires you to be stationary or driving almost directly at the target due to very limited traverse on the gun. I recommend parking the flash with a Kobalt somewhere a distance away from an enemy spawn point that friendly infantry are camping and using it for suppression and support. It is a heavy machine gun with accuracy and 100 rounds.
If I was unlucky there would be someone that can aim and fire effectively any caliber of weaponry, looking in the direction I had landed with no turbo remaining.
Some things involving my primary vehicle regarding usage time according to stats, the flash, that somewhat makes up for the loss of awesome turbo: The flash grenade launcher was buffed so that the grenades' arc is much less steep. In effect it greatly increases the range.
More importantly: The flash will not explode immediately upon flipping. Instead it will drop the flash to very low health, but enough that an engineer can jump off and repair it quickly. Once it burst into flames and almost had time to explode before my repair beam 'stuck' to it. My K/d ratio will thank the devs for this change, especially as it doesn't seem to track the number of suicides as it's own statistic, yet my k/d ratio is so low I'd like to assume it counts them for the ratio though.
However, with the current change to turbo in place I think I will most likely stick to pulling Vanguards and Lightnings and leave the Flash as a last resort for when I'm exploded well before the timer is up on either of those vehicles as they are just a much more effective investment of my player time for the team. I might even consider certing into Flash radar to turn it into a stationary radar for capping points. Turbo isn't absolutely terrible after the change and still adds a way to quickly accelerate from someone's aim point, and can even go over most hills at a high speed as long as you had previous momentum, but I would say that losing the ability to be airborne for roughly 1 second with the correct angle really takes away a lot of the maneuvorabilty that I initially chose turbo for in the first place. It still has the short duration and the extremely high cert costs on upgrades versus their effect that I could put towards an AP or HE turret for the Vanguard to sit at the Crown and spot and destroy whole swarms of infantry or snipe tanks. From a tank in the Crown you can hit any of the various surrounding territories even. Why did I get turbo in the first place at 150 certs instead of saving for something better? Simply because I enjoyed driving up a wall right before a base capture, exploding above the point a hundred Goons and other friendly assorted creatures of their ilk are milling about, having my corpse land exactly upon the point while flaming wreckage harmlessly showers the starry-eyed Goons below. Also I enjoyed doing backflips in the warpgate, but if that has to be impassible to vehicles to prevent my doing the fabled Double Backflip with one turbo this is acceptable for the following reason: I understand that being able to bless +1 all the NC troops on the server upon successfully completing this masterful technique and being personally responsible for all our victories ever as a result was perhaps overpowered and thus the devs removed access to the warpgate spawn room to vehicles. I get that, as there I could keep trying the maneuvour endlessly and safely to myself and bystanders due to damage being off in the warpgate. It makes sense I would have to first find a similar bit of geometry in the unsafe world, try not to explode by landing upside down possibly though dozens of attempts, and kill any friendly infantry unfortunate to be landed upon by my spinning flash and rider hurtling groundward through the aether. This would have made sense as it had such great effect upon game balance. Surely it should not be easy to bless all NC troops on the server at once, and should require a great deal of difficulty, wasted time, and accidental yet possibly avoidable team killing; of these three previously the last was noticeably lacking inside the warpgate. Unfortunately in addition to not being able to backflip in the warpgate safely, which would have been most logical to myself and possibly grudgingly accepted by the legions of adoring people amused by my antics at one time or another, for some reason it was deemed in addition a good idea to modify the flash's ability to drive up walls. While pre-patch driving up a vertical wall with no ceiling, I.E. outside, resulted in an explosive death or pre-landing bail out and appropriate loss of life or shielding depending on distance fallen and inertia; post patch, perhaps in testing, it was noticed that flashes could drive up ceilingless walls in exchange for most of it's vehicle health in landing due to not exploding immediately upon not landing on it's wheels (or landing on some types of rock with the wheels.) Perhaps this was too much escape ability for even the flash. However I think this could easily be rectified by rewarding players who skillfully manage to land upon their wheels, and penalizing those who don't by 1: forcing an exit from the flash upon landing upside down 2:retaining current post patch damage to the flash which is not enough to cause it to explode immediately and 3: smite the rider's shields and possibly health as if they took falling damage as they were thrown from the flash. While (3:) will result in deaths the same as the days of the exploding flash, I was quite willing at that time to trade any hope of a positive k/d ratio in exchange for how flash turbo was at that time. If you made these changes and also changed Turbo's certification ranks as I listed previously in this long post, I think it would allow you to meet whatever goals you had in mind for the change by having players spend an enormous amount of certs to do what they did before with only Turbo 1 at 150 certs, which would still be useful, while still allowing those enamoured with pre-patch Flash turbo to one day re-obtain the legendary ability to raise morale of their team with timely death defying flash jumps over a bigger tank zerg than Eval Knieval probably did at some point to turn the tide of whatever foreign war America was involved in at the appropriate time of his life.
{1: difficult fix} As for bunny hopping infantry: if technically possible and effective I recommend having the client check to see if the (non-LA) player is trying to vault a piece of terrain by checking for a collision before allowing them to jump their height, especially if they are classed as the heavy assault wearing it's bulky armor and carrying rockets, launcher, LMG, pistol, and possibly hundreds of rounds. In effect a bunny hopper would have to stand and jump directly against terrain in order to bunny hop, colliding and falling if it is not of a height currently possible to vault. Perhaps make light assault exempt as they are expected to be able to be airborne at will.
A time tested, standalone, and fairly simple final fix to this absurdity is to make leg shots have a viable effect, possibly in the form a temporary 'snare' effect and definately as a jump debuff, in that being shot once in the legs halves jump height, twice you can't jump until 5 seconds or something like that has gone by. This fix is actually an idea from my first first person shooter, Legends of Might and Magic, and it was indeed quite useful to shoot someone in the legs first in order to hinder movement. It also limited the effectiveness of bunny hopping significantly, and was I believe an addition in a patch to deal with the plague of people abusing this ability in large numbers.
An even simpler change instead of or in addition to the previous ideas, would be to make jump much less effective for some seconds (3? possibly less if necessary) after the previous jump, perhaps with decreasing vertical height with each jump before cooldown. Perhaps make the second jump 1/2, the third 1/3, or so on with viable numbers as I simply made those fractions up. As a sideffect it would take longer to negotiate places that require a series of jumps, like some of the rocky terrain or hillsides. Personally I'd be willing to accept this if it made the silly looking bunny hoppers find a new route to slight but noticeable superiority. Perhaps noticeable to me mostly for how appallingly effective over a period of time of bunny hopping can make an infantry character over another versus the lack of style points accrued.
In defense of defensive jumping itself, I occasionally find myself jumping away from the letal bullets and towards cover from them out of reflex when I am being shot by someone I can't see, but unless I am LA and am jumping between terrains in close proximity to one another I try not to jump excessively and instead focus only on seeking cover and hiding places if they are present, perhaps with an old school crouch dodge thrown in if convenient. I think people shooting my legs to prevent an escape leap would be fair enough in addition. If we could lay down I'd probably do that a lot too. It's not really the same as bunny hopping, as the idea isn't to make someone shoot sadly less vulnerable legs which continue to function to propel a person the same vertical distance while they shoot multiple enemys in the head using HA armor with a night vision scoped shotgun or LMG while they hop in a carefully chosen one room outbuilding while defending a certain tech station which I can't recall the name of, hopefully near an enemy sunderer. This spot allows you to effectively hide from vehicles with limited line of fire out the door to force infantry seeking your attractive red halo through your chokepoint to get to you. The attackers would take time to react and suffer non-proportionate casualties, then would have to devote effort away from the main assault and would either have to overwhelm with a horde of bodies, have someone with initiative pull an appropriate max, or to throw grenades into the room after the two unfortunate teammates that hopefully distract the target long enough in the process of merging with the corpsepile for the target to explode or be damaged by not hopping directly out of the room the one of two directions the grenade could have come from and around the corner where you are cowering with your tiny pistol because you brought the long range rifle that time.
Crouching (and prone if that is ever added which I hope will be as it makes infantry a bit better) can be used to duck away from a sniper trying to headshot you, or to get fully behind cover like a hilltop or crates high enough to shoot over when standing, or to crawl away to recharge shields after an enemy squad has spotted you and are probably closing in. It's more about avoidance entirely and using cover, rather than trying to make someone shoot a part of your character that is less damageable due to game mechanics, especially since crouching often gets me headshotted as my head is now where my body was which was likely what an automatic weapon user in this game would start aiming at to let the barrel climb towards the head voluntarily or not.
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Topic: Planetside 2: Free-to-Play MMOFPS. 2000 players/server. (Read 1134777 times)