Gameplay suggestion: Pistols, rifles, shotguns can't harm tanks and such

[Senyu]

Knives no

Pistol AP:Only able to slightly damage or extreme luck break a specific part of tank

Rifle AP:Better chance than pistol and a couple infantry focus firing should be able to bring down a specific part

Shotgun:Higher damage than Rifle AP on specific parts but of course must be close and slower reload time. Shotgun should have more luck on crippling parts

And all should do little damage to the vehicle as a whole compared to AV weapons. Though I can imagine running up to a parked buggy and sticking your shotgun right on the engine very much crippling it. Just hope you can actually find one parked long enough for you to do this.

[2coolforu]

Only rockets/AV weaponry should damage tanks, buggies etc should be damaged by light arms at certain points.

[Raymac]

I voted AV rounds (i.e. gold AP) for tanks, but perhaps there could be a trainable skill that allows you to use a knife to slash tires. If you do enough, you can get the "Before He Cheats - Achievement"

[LZachariah]

If it's a light vehicle, like a Jeep or a Buggy, assault-level weapons (shotguns, rifles) could maybe hurt them (ie, medium TTK for an assault weapon and almost instant TTK for an anti-armor weapon). For light and heavy tanks, they should be basically impervious to a weapon that isn't anti-armor.

~Zachariah

[Malorn]

Makes sense to me. People shooting tanks with normal rounds was also rather ridiculous and annoying.

One thing to consider in the discussion is the damage indicators that a vehicle driver sees. If anything can damage a vehicle then you get a lot of noise (which was the case in PS1) from random insignificant damage like a spitfire or some idiot with a suppressor shooting your tank. As a tank driver I want to be able to discern damage that I should care about frivolous crap. Not allowing the frivolous crap to actually damage armored vehicles makes it easy. And lets be serious here, it doesn't matter how many magazines of a 5.56 you shoot at a M1 Abrams, you ain't gonna do dick to that armor. I would expect tanks of Planetside to be no different in that respect from modern tanks.

Also the Battlefield games have had this as a proof-of-concept for a long time now. Small arms don't damage tanks. Its a good system. It allows armored vehicles to actually be armor and shield friendlies and drivers can focus on the real threats.

[Graywolves]

One of the first things Higby said was that nothing will mitigate damage.

[kaffis]

Driver-gunned tanks. You can't set the bar high against that. If you're going to have MBTs be solo-able equipment, they need to have paper thin armor. Which means, sure, I want a knife to be able to scratch it, too.

To say otherwise is as silly to me as saying "MAXes: What should be able to damage them?"

If you want to make vehicles glorified armor with a fancy model, then they better not be harder to kill than glorified armor with a fancy model.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Graywolves

One of the first things Higby said was that nothing will mitigate damage.

Context?

[BorisBlade]

PS1 did it perfectly. Every weapon hurts vehicles, but shooting your pea shooter 9mm doesnt do squat, using ap rounds is still fairly weak but does double damage so you can put some serious damage into a max or light armored vehicle like a buggy with an AP round filled MCG, but you wont hurt a tank. As long as they do vehicles right, aka PS1, and dont make em like BF (my money is on crap BF style), then it will be fine. Every armor type just needs to have its classification just like in PS1. And weapons do different damage to each armor type. And by types i mean, land vehicles, air craft, maxes, infantry. And of course water craft etc as things are introduced. And of course vehicles need to have a good lifespan, not the short lived infantry buffs of BF.

[Malorn]

Well in PS1 even normal rounds would do 1 damage to a tank. It wasn't significant but it created a bunch of annoying red for the driver and made it harder to see where the real damage was coming from. That's why I' prefer they remove that. It isn't impactful from a balance perspective, doesn't make sense to allow small caliber arms to do anything, and you can improve the driving experience in doing so. Its all upside to prevent it.

[cellinaire]

I think knives should also be able to inflict damage on tanks....

(Well, when it comes to attacking oil-barrels and electronic circuits lol)

Joking aside, I'd choose the second option myself. Reasons? Some of the people here already said it rather well I guess.

[CutterJohn]

I see nothing wrong with small arms doing a bit of damage. For tanks, yeah, shouldn't be much. Should be much more worrisome for aircav.

I also see no need for AP rounds. Why bother adding a special ammo you have to carry around that turns your damage from fantastically crap to merely pitiful? Just make regular bullets do the pitiful damage. All bullets should be AP anyway, since all the infantry is wearing armor and ANY bullet inside the meatbag is extremely bad.

[Captain1nsaneo]

AI sweeper rounds didn't do any damage to MAXs for a while there. I miss those days.

As for what should do damage to vehicles: Wasn't it a magical moment when you killed that BFR with a sniper rifle?

Knifes and AI shotguns shouldn't do damage to vehicles. Everything else? Fair game.

[Captain B]

I think high powered sniper rifles (bolt driver, OSOK-vs-infantry with headshot equivalent) should do some damage to vehicles for sure. I mean, a few rounds probably wouldn't be noticeable, but if you had 10 snipers shooting a tank every few seconds, it should cause the driver to think about continuing forward without any support. I think this would be even more important if there were weak points on the vehicle, like engines or soft armor slots that could be shot for additional damage; nothing fantastic, just a little more than before (so 50ish shots instead of 70 with a high powered, armor piercing rifle, single shot rifle).

Personally, it'd be against cockpits in vehicles that are lightly armored, like buses and aircraft, that you could shoot the pilot inside a few times (2-3 headshots, 3-4 otherwise) and kill them with a sniper rifle or even more with an automatic weapon. I imagine if you're letting a rifleman line up their sights on you at such a range as to be killed by small arms fire, either you deserve to die or they deserve the kill. Either way, it'd be earned.

[Talek Krell]

I don't like the headshotting pilots idea. Especially not with automatic weapons. Presumably aircraft still have to get pretty up close and personal in order to ground pound, and with as many players as we're expecting it's not that unreasonable to expect that at any given moment someone somewhere in the base is aiming a machine gun at you.