@Raymac: It was not an insult, you simply "grew up" in PlanetSide as a living example of what I'm talking about will probably happen with these units: you prefer a single man, jack of all trades, superior advantages (flight firepower etc) vehicle with complete personal control, which can ALSO be used in teams, rather than HAVING to be used in teams.
However, I was wrong to say you couldn't understand, because you should have been thoroughly aware of why you picked that over a two seater, beyond the flight advantages. You are not a Liberator pilot, as you well know you can single handedly take those down and three Reaver pilots are far more effective than one Liberator crew and can do the same things and then some with less risk to yourself as they may target someone else first. Unfortunately though, you are not very aware of the reasoning behind the choices you made. I certainly hope you realise you had more reason to cert Reaver specificaly than "I wanted to be a fighter pilot because it was cool" in comparison to both the Mosquito and Liberator.
And yes, AA on such a tank as secondary GUNNER is pointless if you could have brought a seperate AA dedicated vehicle. I never said the driver handled anything but the primary gun in this new system, I did say I'd prefer it if it handled a tertiary limited use front mounted gun, rather than either the primary or secondary gun INSTEAD. The driver should stay away from the turret completely IMO. So please read more careful.
@Cutterjohn: The Sunderer (old one) was a really under appreciated vehicle. It had a much lower profile than Galaxies, had mine sweeping capacity (we used suicide Sunderers to clear a path for a second Sunderer full of troops or used it as a mobile shield when crossing bridges - which of course became a fastly superior and more commonly employed tactic with the EMP blast). With the old Sunderer, you could already kill a MBT mathematically (killed 6 Magriders, 4 Prowlers and one stolen Vanguard in such direct confrontations, simply through superior driving and making them think they could exploit the 75 mms dead angle, while I knew how to keep those trained on them: drive sideways on hills). Especially when you had no tech, a Sunderer was a decent alternative to a Thunderer and Deliverer when both were on a timer.
Post-buff, we took out aircraft such as Reavers with its new 20mm guns, used it as mobile turrets, hunted BFRs, blew up minefields, gen drops and took on and out a lot more tanks and enemy positions than before.
In fact, you probably don't know that a Sunderer at full speed (especially after movin down hill) can move half a grid under water before it comes to a full stop? Meaning you can actualy get to the other side of certain rivers without taking damage due to the water shield. So yeah, we employed it as submarine transports too at times.
So let me ask you why you never considered using the Sunderer with 10 men including just two gunners? Prefered to use five to ten vehicles instead per chance?
You say it's better than two solo tanks fleeing. I disagree: If you split up and circle back you can create an encirclement situation where the hunter becomes the hunted and gets pounded from two directions while - assuming it is the same vehicle for train of thought - that unit only has half health. So when his single unit dies, both guns stop firing. If one of you dies, the other lives on to either continue the fight or to get back to safety. Two single man tanks using the same equipment as one two crew tank will take approximately 2/3s damage at most due to DoT + Endurance.
I'm going to disagree again because of the added effect of endurance, two units with each a half of the firepower will always be superior to one unit. Perhaps we have to agree to disagree, but I would recommend you to look up calculations regarding the Raider (5 crew) vs two Delivers (2 + 3 crew) discussion on the old forums and why it makes Raiders have no niche of its own at all.
Picking up randoms as gunners made them about 15% as effective as gunners you play with on a daily basis. They don't communicate effectively, they give away your position early, they have bad targeting priorities, they don't understand your goals and they brought the wrong equipment and thus can't help with repairs. These randoms are usualy lower ranked troops, often beginners too, since most every veteran has his own unit and own group of players to work with on a daily basis. I would never recommend picking up token gunners because too often it doesn't work out and they're far more effective when playing in their own vehicles. Still often underperforming, but at least they work according to a plan within their own vehicle. I'm however talking about appropriate and efficient use of manpower in this discussion and regarding regular (daily basis) teams. Those teams will soon realise they're better of specialising in their own units than to gun for others.
The time to max out a tree is not very interesting as it will happen for multiple trees over time and people will always have an optimum vehicle and weapon for themselves (likely a better choice over gunning). As such it is a temporary limit at best.
Although this is another discussion enirely, jack of all trades is about what you can use at any one point in time, particularly when you change gear. A lot of people often argument that you can't use everything in one lifetime, but that is a shortsighted argument since people respawn. It'd be great and they might have a point if there wasn't such a thing as respawning and that a fight
does not end after a single engagement. These people think in single encounters. Think of it as thinking in a single battle instead of a war, as such it is terribly shortsighted. Being always able to bring the rock to the scissor fight yourself after you realise paper is not going to work, is not going to make you be as dependent on others as a lot of players would want (BR20 situation). For instance, you can bring paper and string to the fight or the fight aftermath
after you beat scissors with rock.
You don't use all options on a suiss knife at once either, do you? That'd be silly. Still doesn't mean a suiss army knife is not far superior in long term survival than each of its options being available separately!
I'm sure though that since classes can't use all certs at once in PS2 (iirc) then you'll at least not get people who have the option to at all times have inherent skills such as expert/data corruption hacker, or other combinations such as advanced medic + assault/fort engineer + HA + uniMAX + CE + Mossie/Reaver + tanks immediately, but IMO they should not always have access to anything else 2 minutes later either just because they could switch to any class without limitations. The people who argue that you only have one thing at all times forget that you can optimize your weaponry for the coming fight and aftermath at all times and thus never need to be in a dependent position for long.
A very good example in PS1 of why it was bad was that if you have expert hacking as an inherent skill because you could always afford it or got it free. You used to be unlikely to have full assault force and needed to work with some others to take a CC during BR20 - people needed YOU low powered, fast hacking, to secure the facility while they covered you because you reseced faster than them. If they could open a term and get adv. hack there and then, they'd not need you, they'd do it themselves: teamwork requirement reduced severely. You are now better off doing full assault as well and see about who is first to grab a REK later. Very different from protecting your specific guy with that skill to get to that CC in time. The new situation is rather "we could care less who does it or dies, because we pretty much all can fix the situation".
If you died, it meant a hack or resecure would take a minute and the enemy could respawn once or twice to try and prevent it from happening. Now? You can't kill just the advanced hacker user to get that time, since everyone is expert hacker (even faster) and they resecure or hack so fast that you can't even spawn before the hack has gone through and they moved from CC to spawn area. The flow and duration of gameplay changed completely through one single thing people coud now do as well. On top of that, you got to face radar virals every base, instead say every 1 in 50 battles because others could not afford it. Such situations shoud be avoided in PS2, because one of the main gameplay elements is holding a control point and fighting over it back and forth till there is a winner - not just one push and it's over.
I honestly can't believe certain people still wouldn't get that. :/
Linear Mode
