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Originally Posted by UncleDynamite
I've browsed through this thread, and I particularly liked how Kaymon mentioned that Prowler gunners should not stop firing the 10mm cannons in battle. This is an excellent point; many gunners have the natural instinct to stop shooting while aiming. But since there is no real downside to maintaining a steady stream of shells while adjusting aim, it's best just to keep the left mouse button pressed in hopes that at least one of your shots land on an enemy.
Whether or not the Prowler is a good tank or not, it is a good spam weapon. When I play with the NC, I find that a Prowler shelling the ground floor of a tower is actually much worse than when a Vanguard is doing the same, because it's very difficult to survive the Prowler's near-continuous flow of shells. The Prowler's ROF is awesome, especially when you consider that the 100mm cannons still do considerable damage. This is not to say that the tank could use a few buffs to bring it more in-line with the other MBTs, but the current version of the Prowler still has a lot going for it.
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The Prowler is a functional unit, but is it as competitive as it should be? Yes, it can spam the hell out of everything and pray for something to blow up (and in the case of infantry, it's fairly effective at this) but when you throw in every aspect of PlanetSide, is it competitive or is it a specialized weapon only good in certain circumstances.
Yes, it owns towers, so can any tank expect the Magrider, and even it can make life unpleasant. It can beat the snot out of an infantry formation with that RoF (the 12mms are somewhat useless with over half the shots missing on infantry at range...dual guns = poorly done...again, across the board, not just TR). What happens when a Prowler convoy encounters an equal amount of armor plus infantry and air support? Does it still compete or has it suddenly become a matter of how long before the Prowlers are wiped out. Most armor battles I've seen between roughly equal numbers of tanks and other support have not gone well for the old Prowler.
I think this is due to a variety of factors:
1) The 100mm cannons are dual guns, and hence suffer from the same problem as the 12mms in that if firing at range, it requires a slight adjustment after each shot to hit the same spot.
2) The guns are probably the most elevated in the game, making it hard for anyone who's gunned another vehicle to make a quick transition (and the Prowler doesn't give you much time to learn either)
3) The tank is huge. Big tank = easy target. The Vanguard can land more direct hits on the Prowler simply by virtue of the fact that as long as you're aiming roughly at the middle, you'll probably land that 150 into them. Prowlers cannot claim the same ease of firing.
4) I know the TR are all about RoF and such compensating for power...but does it make sense to anyone to have a tank that cannot be aimed and be effective at the same time? Keep in mind, you need 15 direct hits on a Vanguard to destroy it, that's 30 seconds. They need to hit you 9 times, that's 38 seconds. Miss with more than four of your shots and you almost might as well just bail then and there.
5) The armor is mediocre for a tank of its size. When you're bigger, you get hit more often, but the Prowler for whatever reason doesn't have the armor to really take that much punishment.
6) It's the slowest tank in the game. Being slow in PlanetSide means you get the handling of a stuck pig.
Slow + So-So Armor + Big Target + Hard to Aim Guns = Dead tank. That's what more and more TR have noticed and why the Prowler has become more and more of a rarity on the battlefield. I see jacked Magriders and Vanguards all the time (Nothing funnier than an NC Magrider platoon)...nobody jacks the Prowler (can't remember the last time I saw one that had been jacked...fairly sure it was on Searhus), except to deconstruct it and deny it's use to the enemy. Ever wondered why that is?
Again, the Prowler is a functional weapons system, I'm not saying it is an inherently broken weapon. The best comparison I can think of is the old Lasher (prior to the 5m "oops" situation with the 20 round clip). The weapon could compete in the battlefield, but when its performance was closely examined and compared to the other weapons in its class, they found it really wasn't performing as it should. The Lasher dealt a fairly large amount of damage and could put out a lot of shots...problem was that the weapon was designed to miss sometimes, which skewed the numbers a bit. With the dual guns working the way they do, the Prowler may have been intended to miss, and so the damage on the battlefield may not be what it is in the lab. The other attritbutes of the Prowler (how easy it is to hit, how slow it is, the crew thing that we didn't even get into) seems to add up to enough to warrant a second look at it. Not saying anything NEEDS to be done, but most certainly the possibility that something needs adjustment exists.
2004-03-21, 06:24 AM
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