Liberators too strong?

[SpunkyKuma]

Originally Posted by Dragonskin

Sorry, maybe I just picked the right server because it's fairly rare that air is overpowering ground on Mattherson. I see clusters of maxs all the time. Ground totally helps to push the air out.. it's not just a deterant.

Hell last night we actually did a lib event on Esamir. We got a lot of kills sure, but we were far from OP devastating. Eventually we were pushed back to the warpgate by ground forces working with their air. We were pushed back mostly because we didn't have ground forces to help protect our air like NC had. Of course on my server we have The Enclave and Goons so you have 2 massive forces always assaulting you all the time. Maybe if the servers were more balanced like Mattherson you guys would see better fights.

Have you fought TR at all? TR on Matherson are doing nothing but swarming air over and over and it got extremely annoying to fight them.

I don't play the game anymore, I uninstalled it the other day, I'm through with the crippled balance. I can't believe I lasted only a month with PS2 whereas I went 5 some odd years with PS1 before quitting.

[NewSith]

Originally Posted by Assist

As of the state of the game today, Liberators are indeed only Daltons and Zephyrs. Their main function is a bomber, and those two weapons are their bomber weapons. The speed disagreement is purely opinion.

So that basically means they should nerf Liberator vehicle characteristics?

Tell, you what I'll stay negative to Liberator nerf until they implement a vehicle that can be a new helicopter for me.

[Bocheezu]

The PS2 lib is way too manueverable and this crap where you can nose up and bomb sideways is idiotic. I don't understand why it has a bomb turret that rotates around and allows you to shoot at whatever you want. Make it like the PS1 lib; you can only bomb when the plane is horizontal and you can only adjust the forward angle that the bomb takes. You can't bomb sideways and you can't bomb backwards.

[Dragonskin]

Originally Posted by SpunkyKuma

Have you fought TR at all? TR on Matherson are doing nothing but swarming air over and over and it got extremely annoying to fight them.

I don't play the game anymore, I uninstalled it the other day, I'm through with the crippled balance. I can't believe I lasted only a month with PS2 whereas I went 5 some odd years with PS1 before quitting.

Yea, I play against The Enclave all the time. I'm in GOTR and we have no issues with switching to all AA to take out their air. The Goons on NC actually put out more of an air threat than TE, just because there are more Goons.. and lets face it.. for the most part TE IS the TR for Mattherson.. yea the Rival outfit is there, but they are usually off doing smaller battles.

Of course we do our share of air battles too. Just last Sunday we did a lib event with like 20 or so libs bombing Esamir until NC pushed us back with their AA. Tons of AA on mattherson.. tons. Hard to fly anywhere for any length of time without getting shot down.

[NoXousX]

Originally Posted by Ghoest9

If 3 libs are flying together they are only going to get shot down if they are attacked by a swarm of ESF or if they do something totally reckless.
Mostly Libs die when the players are done farming carefully and decide to get crazy risky because they are ready do something different.

If three libs are flying all it takes is myself and hitback to smoke all three in our ESFs (assuming we aren't being deterred by AA).

Libs are far from unstoppable in numbers and I routinely engage and destroy them, even in the midst of enemy ESFs.

The problem I see is players don't know how to counter libs much like they don't know how to counter ESFs. Much like the first PS, good pilots rarely get farmed by enemy air while on the ground because they have experience in the shoes of the enemies firing at them and know how to counter and avoid it. If players learn to fly a lib they'll understand lib vulnerabilities and be able to counter them.

For example one of there best things you can do is just harass them. Take 500m+ shots at them, and learn to recognize what an over extended lib looks like. In my mosquito I routinely take shots at libs so far that maybe 1 in 5 shots will land (if I'm lucky). I do it to scourgeoftheserver and he hates it because it forces him to go defensive and try to locate the threat.

A lot can be done; players just don't know what to do.

[NoXousX]

Originally Posted by Bocheezu

The PS2 lib is way too manueverable and this crap where you can nose up and bomb sideways is idiotic. I don't understand why it has a bomb turret that rotates around and allows you to shoot at whatever you want. Make it like the PS1 lib; you can only bomb when the plane is horizontal and you can only adjust the forward angle that the bomb takes. You can't bomb sideways and you can't bomb backwards.

No, Libs in PS2 aren't maneuverable enough. That is precisely why they are flying prot warriors. If they were more agile, responsive, and faster, they wouldn't need to do as much damage as they do now or have as much health.

One thing PS1 did better was have liberator success determined by the skill of the pilot. While that is still the case, its not nearly as important as it was. There is a whole lot of rock/paper/scissors going on right now, and I believe kills should come due to skillful flying and skillful gunning; not broken mechanics.

[Assist]

Originally Posted by Bocheezu

The PS2 lib is way too manueverable and this crap where you can nose up and bomb sideways is idiotic. I don't understand why it has a bomb turret that rotates around and allows you to shoot at whatever you want. Make it like the PS1 lib; you can only bomb when the plane is horizontal and you can only adjust the forward angle that the bomb takes. You can't bomb sideways and you can't bomb backwards.

I actually like this idea a lot. Will get all the no-skill AE junkies out of the libs and force them to get back to playing the game. I've no issues with the maneuverability of the liberator, but combined with the way the turrets work on it, it's proven to be too strong. Although I would also nerf the AE radius on the Dalton and Zephyr. I understand being strong against armor, but not against infantry. Bombers should target structures, vehicles, fortification, not infantry.
Liberators are meant to be strategic, part of the rock/paper/scissors aspect of the game. Right now they're just a farm tool since they're the best anti-ground in the game(better than MBT's wtf!) and have a fighting chance against other air.

[RykerStruvian]

I don't know why you guys say AA turrets are bad considering the last patch buffed them and made destroying them a bit more difficult. AA turrets chew through air more so than burster MAXs do, the only problem is that being in an AA gun screams "SHOOT ME, HOLY SHIT LOOK AT ME SHOOT ME!!!" since you can't move. At least the last patch gives you -some- chance to react and run away if someone tries to surprise rocketpod you. Also, AA MAXs have the bug where they will not do any damage at all and resupplying isn't a fix which works all the time for that.

[Dragonskin]

Originally Posted by Assist

I actually like this idea a lot. Will get all the no-skill AE junkies out of the libs and force them to get back to playing the game. I've no issues with the maneuverability of the liberator, but combined with the way the turrets work on it, it's proven to be too strong. Although I would also nerf the AE radius on the Dalton and Zephyr. I understand being strong against armor, but not against infantry. Bombers should target structures, vehicles, fortification, not infantry.
Liberators are meant to be strategic, part of the rock/paper/scissors aspect of the game. Right now they're just a farm tool since they're the best anti-ground in the game(better than MBT's wtf!) and have a fighting chance against other air.

You would have to take away the zypher completely.. it is a anti-infantry weapon. And you can't destroy buildings... what do you think this is BF3? No reason to target buildings unless you are hitting windows to kill infantry. Also what fortifications are you talking about? Turrets? Which are used by infantry?

The Dalton does what it says. It kills vehicles.. which is what the lib seems designed to do. I'm not sure why they gave the lib a zypher and a dalton, but now that the zypher was given to the lib.. they aren't going to take it away because people bought it already.

[StumpyTheOzzie]

Originally Posted by GreatMazinkaise

How are they getting kills at the flight ceiling? Infantry don't render that far up in my experience (unless maybe you're in really sparsely populated fights).

Libs are only strong when they've got air superiority and ground AA is sparse. Skyguards are still fairly bad, but those invisible surprise MAX nests remain incredibly nasty.

Yeah.

True story: I'm bombing with the Zephyr. We know there's a sundy at [someplace] and we know there's a swarm of zerglings pouring through [chokepoint]

So I'll get my pilot to fly around so I can shoot into the chokepoint and then we'll fly over the sundy but since nothing renders after about 400m, no kills. Even though I'm firing. So we go lower. Then we start getting torn up by the Maxes but still can't see anything, so we go lower. THEN my machine starts rendering the infantry. My Zephyr rounds already in flight suddenly start massacring zerglings and my new rounds can actually get aimed better and then we're dead before we know what's going on. 20 minute timer and 300 green resources gone for maybe 12 kills (4kxp with boosts, alpha squad and double XP bonus, so 1kxp "normally") in 23 minutes. I can do WAY better xp/h than that doing pretty much anything else.

Are liberators too strong?

In lightly contested areas, yes. For camping external spawn rooms while the bases are being capped, yes. For bombing runs over large zergs? no way.

Metagame effects of liberators? It makes the small groups get upset and stop trying to do anything useful, because one lib can pretty much take out a squad so "lets just go to the crown" and make the zerg bigger. Depriving liberators of targets, making them useless.

[Dragonskin]

Originally Posted by StumpyTheOzzie

Yeah.

True story: I'm bombing with the Zephyr. We know there's a sundy at [someplace] and we know there's a swarm of zerglings pouring through [chokepoint]

So I'll get my pilot to fly around so I can shoot into the chokepoint and then we'll fly over the sundy but since nothing renders after about 400m, no kills. Even though I'm firing. So we go lower. Then we start getting torn up by the Maxes but still can't see anything, so we go lower. THEN my machine starts rendering the infantry. My Zephyr rounds already in flight suddenly start massacring zerglings and my new rounds can actually get aimed better and then we're dead before we know what's going on. 20 minute timer and 300 green resources gone for maybe 12 kills (4kxp with boosts, alpha squad and double XP bonus, so 1kxp "normally") in 23 minutes. I can do WAY better xp/h than that doing pretty much anything else.

Are liberators too strong?

In lightly contested areas, yes. For camping external spawn rooms while the bases are being capped, yes. For bombing runs over large zergs? no way.

Metagame effects of liberators? It makes the small groups get upset and stop trying to do anything useful, because one lib can pretty much take out a squad so "lets just go to the crown" and make the zerg bigger. Depriving liberators of targets, making them useless.

Well said and this can be said for most balance threads in this forum. People complain from a small scale perspective, but from a large scale perspective things appear a lot more balanced to me. Playing a high pop server during peak time you don't see large kill streaks.. because plenty of people will switch roles to kill you regardless of what vehicle you are in.

Small scale vehicles > infantry. Large scale infantry < vehicles.

I can't count how many times we have switched to all AV or AA as an outfit and ripped through colums of armor or skies full of air.

[Sunrock]

Originally Posted by phungus

YOu must be a very newbie liberator pilot. I hunt ESFs with my liberator, and so does anyone with any skill. Just because you're a shit player doesn't mean squat. Also you must not have any experience with taking down libs with an ESF, since you state an AA ESF is effective against libs, which isn't true, you need a nosegun and rocket pods to actually go after libs. Without ammo capacity upgrades an A2A ESF (with the A2A gun and A2A missiles) litterally doesn't have enough ammo to down a lib.

Sorry for the late reply. X-mas an all.

You can not be more wrong. Of course I shoot down ESF with my libs. It's not that hard as long as they are some what unaware of me or engaged in a fight with some one else already. But if you say you can dogfight a ESF easily with a lib without any support your dilutional.

And of course I have experience taking down libs 1vs1 with my ESF. It's not that hard if you know what you do. Sure I don't do it in 3 seconds, might need 20 seconds but as long as you fly so you attack the lib from the side and above/under as mush as possible its like shooting fish in a barrel. And as the ESF is so mush more agile then a lib it's way too easy to avoid taking damage from it.

Re: Rocket pods. Only works if you're VS as your dual photon have allot better accuracy then TR's Hellfire Rockets. Or you need to fire your Hellfire rockets at blank point range. Besides who is stupid enough not to have and use a nosegun do you really have to mention that you switch between those no matter what your secondary weapons are?

But usually I only use the M18 Rotary when killing Libs with my Mossy and then finish off with a missile or two.

And max upgrade your A2A amo to 9 does not cost many certs to start with so way QQ over that? Not like upgrading your reload timer on the rocket pods. That has to be one of the most costly thing you can get in certs....

But the main thing here is not to kill the liberator. It is to prevent it to bomb anything. So if you can deny him moving over any of your factions units you have succeeded. What ever you use to do it with, Burster MAX or ESF.

[Sunrock]

Originally Posted by KaskaMatej

An outfit mate has a way to take down Liberators: Drifter Jet C4 Lib Mid Air Success /w Sujieun - YouTube

Nice really cool kill there.

Would have been easier if you just had flown over it and your gunner had killed it with the zepher though.

[boogy]

Well said and this can be said for most balance threads in this forum. People complain from a small scale perspective, but from a large scale perspective things appear a lot more balanced to me. Playing a high pop server during peak time you don't see large kill streaks.. because plenty of people will switch roles to kill you regardless of what vehicle you are in.

Small scale vehicles > infantry. Large scale infantry < vehicles.

I can't count how many times we have switched to all AV or AA as an outfit and ripped through colums of armor or skies full of air.

I'm the most critical of liberator balance and I'm always bringing up the peak hour thing. Problem is, peak hours are the minority of this game. The rest of the 22 hours of the day we have imbalance. Air to ground balance is a problem. You can't just have a game based around full servers, large outfits, and peak hours. The people who put time into this game, playing all hours of the day, experience how the game actually is.

[Sunrock]

Originally Posted by boogy

I'm the most critical of liberator balance and I'm always bringing up the peak hour thing. Problem is, peak hours are the minority of this game. The rest of the 22 hours of the day we have imbalance. Air to ground balance is a problem. You can't just have a game based around full servers, large outfits, and peak hours. The people who put time into this game, playing all hours of the day, experience how the game actually is.

What wait a sec? 2 hours if the peek hours? MMO prime time is usually from 7PM to 1am. That's 6 hours. TBH the server are usually only have a way to low server pop during 3 am to 10 am. And if you can't live with that roll on a different time zone server.

But I still don't think the liberator is unbalanced even when playing at 5 am. All you need is to run into two ESF planes that gang up on you and your history, if they are not n00b pilots that is. Yes that is fair as you need minimum two players to man one lib.