The LA and Infiltrator Classes Need to be Merged

[BlaxicanX]

A lot of people assign arbitrary value to the Light Assault and the Infiltrator. They point out the flanking abilities of the LA, the hacking ability and the sniping of the Infiltrator, and make anecdotes about how useful these tools are in the game, etc etc. That's cool, but objectively, neither class possesses abilities that allow them to have any truly meaningful impact on the battlefield, at least compared to the other classes.

That's what happens when you take a game that has hundreds of infantry fighting in the same area at any one time, respawning infinitely, and adding in classes who are only efficient at killing infantry. The value of a life in this game is not high enough to make classes that are only efficient at killing infantry viable.

What would help the classes would be side-accesories- which is what makes all the other classes so useful. Heavy Assault is fantastic at killing infantry, but it's also got access to every rocket launcher in the game, which makes it a must-have for anti-vehicle and anti-max. The engineer's assault rifle is good for killing infantry, but the real strength of the class lies in its repair tool and mana turret, again fulfilling a vital and exclusive role. The medic has the healgun, obviously, which is extremely important for supporting any push.

Infiltrator has the sensor dart, which is entirely useless in the grand scheme of things, and the hacking ability, which is very niche. Hacking vehicle terminals to pull sundy's is the only consistent use you'll ever get out of an infilitrator, and, well, there's only so many vehicle terminals and turrets on any base...

Light Assault gets nothing by default. They have a jetpack which lets them get into cool positions, but zero decent long-range weaponry to take advantage of said position. So instead they use their jetpacks to flank, basically. Approach enemies from odd angles for easy kills. That isn't useful because A) There is no "front" to flank. Large infantry battles basically descend into arena-shooter matches with everyone running around a base in circles looking for enemies until the defenders get pushed back to their spawns. B)There's simply too many targets and not enough ammunition or killing ability with our little carbines. While carbines are quick-killers when you're in range, the class only has enough ammo to kill three or four people before you find yourself dry behind enemy lines, meaning you either die or need to run away to find more ammo. Killing three or four people out of literally dozens to hundreds, all of whom respawn in seconds anyway, is simply not helpful toward winning a battle. Even with a dozen light-assaults doing this simultaneously, that isn't really putting a dent in anything.


Then there's C4. The funnest part of being a Light Assault, imo. Nothing beats stealthing over rooftops to reach a tank or sundy and lighting it up with some C4. It's awesome. But it isn't practical, nor efficient. Double C4 won't even kill a Sunderer, and there's almost always an engineer or two hanging out around the vehicle to repair it anyway. Plus, that's not even counting how the entire tactic can be shut down simply by the sundy's turrets being manned.

Popping tanks is cool, but it simply isn't efficient at all to spend 30 seconds huffing it over to the tank just to blow it up- not when there's dozens of heavy assaults and mana turret engineers hanging around waiting to pop a tank from 300 meters away.

So, the classes need some more accessories to expand their roles (or at least make them better at doing what they're supposed to be doing). The problem is that the two classes have the same damn role. Let's not sit here and pretend that sniping has any real value in this game. It doesn't. Takes too long to kill with snipers, and there aren't enough high value targets to make it worth while. The most important targets to snipe in this game are medics and engineers, but for every medic and engy you kill a dozen will take its place. Sniping is fun for farming but that's it.

So minus sniping, they both have the same role, which is basically to go behind enemy lines and fuck shit up. To that end, neither class really has any gear that allows them to perform the role admirably. I've had some ideas for accessories, such as plantable EMP devices to disable lock-on weapons in a certain radius, or hud scramblers that disable the mini-map and fuzz up the hud of anyone near it, abilities that allow them to cap/decap points faster- things like that. The issue though is that both classes need things like that to function, but if you give them either or, the other class loses its identity. With that being the case, I think the Light Assault and Infiltrator should be merged. Call it the Infiltrator, and allow it to take carbines, SMG's, sniper rifles and battle-rifles. Put the cloaking ability and the jetpack in the same utility category, so that you have to choose between the two, and add a shit ton of accessories that allow the infiltrator to maximize the damage it can do behind enemy lines. Boom, class fixed. Infiltrator is now actually relevant, and has a specific role that it can fulfill.

TL;DR: Infiltrator and Light Assault both suffer from only being efficient at killing infantry(with the infiltrator being not even all that great at that without an SMG), which is not an important skill in this game since all classes can kill infantry decently well and there's simply too many troops around at any time to make death meaningful. The only way to make LA/Infil viable is to give them accessories that expand their roles and allow them to actually be good at them, but in order to do that, the classes need to be merged.