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Hey all!
First of all, since I think this is my first official post since the game has been live, a quick introduction. My name is Matt Higby and I'm the Creative Director for PlanetSide 2, my job is to work with all of our game designers as well as the other team directors to help build the game. I'm also supposed to post on the forums and make funny movies on youtube.
I wanted to post today to talk about some changes to vehicle balance and especially air-to-ground gameplay. Air-to-ground interactions (and i'm talking about ground-to-air interactions with this too) are one of the most challenging balance touch points in the game. It's very easy with minor changes to make people on either end of this equation feel like they're getting hosed.
Goal for ground based anti-air:
We've talked before a bit about wanting ground to be an effective deterrent to air, and a very dangerous threat against pilots who are being risky (strafing, bombing low, hover spamming rockets, etc), but not necessarily be a hard counter to air. Ultimately friendly air power should be the best counter to enemy air power. I think that statement has been interpreted by some as us saying that the current balance is what we want, I want to be clear: that is not the case. Currently the air-to-ground balance is favoring air a bit too much, and aircraft have an imbalanced influence on the battlefield compared to ground.
In next week's update we're making some adjustments to the air-to-ground gameplay, some of these will affect ground vehicles and some even affect infantry vs infantry, but the main purpose is to bring air and ground into balance a bit more. None of these are enormous changes, but the cumulative effect should be closer to our goal of allowing ground to be an effective deterrent to air and a dangerous threat against pilots who are being risky.
Lock on Rocket Launchers (AV and AA):
- Range Increase
- Faster reload time (to compensate for lock on time)
- Now require lock on to fire
Flak:
- Minor damage increase
- Projectile speed increase
A30 Walker:
- Buffed Damage
- Faster Projectile
Rocket Pods:
- Decrease to the inner explosion radius: 3m to 1.5m. This is the center of the rocket explosion where the maximum damage occurs, so this will not affect direct hits. Effectively this makes the damage falloff at the center of the rocket pod explosion start closer to the center.
Flak Armor:
- Increase maximum explosion resistance for certed Flak armor from 25% to 50%. This makes Flak armor a more viable choice over Nanoweave for soldiers being attacked with explosives.
Decimator:
- New Heavy Assault common pool rocket launcher. High-damage anti-vehicle weapon, has a slow projectile speed and no lock on, but does massive damage to vehicles and other armored targets.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a very complex balance touch point, and we expect that balance changes will continue to occur to this area of the game until it feels great. We think these changes should help a lot to keep infantry and ground vehicles feeling competitive with their colleagues and enemies in the sky and will be a good first step in the journey of balance.
As always, we are eager to hear your feedback, questions and concerns.
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2012-12-05, 09:47 PM
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