Should SOE remove the Annihilator and refund it's SC cost?

[Rothnang]

Originally Posted by Baneblade

When the game stops recording death statistics, you will have a point. Until then, you don't.

Dude, that makes so little sense it's not even funny. You're saying having some little number logged somewhere that says you died once is what makes infantries infinite zero-cost respawning shenanigans balanced, but if they removed that number from the tracker then suddenly it would be a concern?

Yeaa, no, just no.

The fact that you care too much about your KDR doesn't in any way alter the fact that infinite respawn infantry has all the advantages in the game ever since they are able to keep their Sunderers alive without friendly vehicles to help out.

[Mordelicius]

Voted no.

Air units are still overpowered on account of a combination of 3 things:

Kills everything easily + Requires few resources + Accessible to everyone.

If they can make Air unit specializations:

- A2A - High flight ceilling, fast speed/acceleration, more health, less armor, very weak against ground units (including turrets), strong against air units
- A2G - Low flight ceiling, slow speed/acceleration, less health, more armor, strong against ground units, very weak against air units

As it is Air units are an all-killing machine. If you include its very high ambush rating, they are even more deadlier. Lastly, since the spotting nerf, they are even harder to spot moving at quick velocity.

[Baneblade]

Originally Posted by Rothnang

Dude, that makes so little sense it's not even funny.

It's always funny.

You're saying having some little number logged somewhere that says you died once is what makes infantries infinite zero-cost respawning shenanigans balanced, but if they removed that number from the tracker then suddenly it would be a concern?

I'm saying your stance of 'infantry should just die, that's what they are there for' is fallacious when it will bend the statistics in your favor. You may not care about those numbers, but they do matter and saying yours must be improved while infantry's must be worsened simply because you are in a helicopter and they are on two feet? That's ridiculous. Should an infantry grunt win 1v1 against an ESF? No, but then I don't think the ESF should even be engaging the grunt.

The fact that you care too much about your KDR doesn't in any way alter the fact that infinite respawn infantry has all the advantages in the game ever since they are able to keep their Sunderers alive without friendly vehicles to help out.

What I care or do not care about is irrelevant. Actually, I spend most of my time in an MBT (which by your logic should win vs an ESF because it costs more) and regularly embarrass the shit out of pilots. As for the Sunderer being kept alive against your rocket spam? That's called teamwork, learn some.

[psijaka]

No.

The weapon may need balancing but this does not justify removing it from the game altogether.

[Mastachief]

I voted no. Whingeing pilots need to learn to fly and accept they cannot hover spam any more. Armour needs to learn better approaches and learn that they can no longer just steam in and click the iwin button.

In PS1 near every TR carried a lock on striker and the moment you neared any infantry you got lock on.

What happened?
1. Pilots in ps1 could fly and would hug the ground and evade the lock using the terrain to break line of sight
2. The Mini map showed the incoming missile
3. Pilots learned the different avenues of approach to get a run in on infantry and would nose gun them with 12mm pretty effectively, that's right kids they had to aim to get their kills. (of course i'm ignoring the reaver right now as most people had mossy only)

In this description i've only used the striker as an example. Take a look at the starfire or skyguard or base aa turrets or wasp all of them were massively powerful AA much more so than anything in ps2.

[NewSith]

Originally Posted by Eduard Khil

If in fact the results haven't been tampered with, it is quite a bit obvious people are not looking for a challenging game with some form of complexity in it, a weapon like the annihilator is really bad for diversity in the game, people seem more focused on effortless gain than seeing balance, it is not as if we were asking for lock on removals, just adding a bit more complexity and situational armament.

I don't want to do any complex actions to kill a player that can kill me without any complexity. Remove the Annihilator and there are two options against MBTs and hoverspam - go get an MBT/ESF or be farmed.


So I vote "no" unless in return MBTs are made driver+gunner and Rocketpods get their splash removed completely.




PS Poll results only prove that vehicle to infantry ratio is 1:1, which is wrong on so many levels...

[bpostal]

Just wait till the striker to gets added.

[Rothnang]

Originally Posted by Baneblade

I'm saying your stance of 'infantry should just die, that's what they are there for' is fallacious when it will bend the statistics in your favor. You may not care about those numbers, but they do matter and saying yours must be improved while infantry's must be worsened simply because you are in a helicopter and they are on two feet? That's ridiculous. Should an infantry grunt win 1v1 against an ESF? No, but then I don't think the ESF should even be engaging the grunt.

I'm not saying in any way that I need more kills and infantry needs to die more to give them to me, I'm saying that I'm annoyed that vehicles are increasingly becoming irrelevant to the overall game.

Base capture is the primary objective in the game, and that can only be done by Infantry. It's impossible for vehicles to dislodge infantry inside a base, so any kind of defense also has to boil down to infantry.
The one place where vehicles rule is in the open spaces between bases, but those are pretty much irrelevant, because people can just grab an AMS clowncar and drive it right up to the enemy base so they spawn inside the base. Vehicles are also not the best way to kill a deployed Sunderer, a few blocks of C4 or some mines work wonders, and can't be repaired through.

Sure, you can still pull vehicles and you can get kills with them and participate in the fight to some extent, but there is absolutely nothing you're really needed for.

Outfits that run nothing but Infantry, Galaxies and Sunderers are very successful in this game right now, but I dare you to find me a single outfit that does well by running nothing but Tanks or Aircraft. We have a "combined arms" game where vehicles simply aren't important in any way. As unpopular as that may be, if vehicles wreck infantry and you need more vehicles to stop them then they have a place in the game that really matters, and aren't just a curiosity on the battlefield.

[Hawgg]

I believe you guys misunderstand the usefullness of the Annihilator.

I play heavy assault more than anything else and have ALL the launchers, and will tell you right now, flat out, the Annihilator is one of the worst weapons in the game. When I saw this thread I actually thought you meant it should be refunded because it is so useless.

See, the damage on it is just SO LOW. It takes 4+ of these to take down a single ESF, and when are you EVER going to be able to get 4+ locks in on an ESF before it flies away?

Killing MBT's and Lightnings is impossible without other people assisting you, and even then you only get assists.

And you can't kill ANY infantry with it...so...



The only scenario I can see that you guys would think it is overpowered is if there is a group of 5+ coordinated heavies all using it at the same time to "one-off" vehicles. This argument is invalid for 2 reasons.

1) Other launchers can do this too.

2) It is not the Annihilator doing this, it is the teamwork and coordination. Why don't you just prevent players from coordinating? :P

[Rothnang]

How good an Annihilator is on its own is unfortunately completely irrelevant to what players in a vehicle get to deal with whenever they go anywhere near a battle that's large enough to have a whole bunch of Annihilators shooting at you.

The Annihilator makes mass infantry spam overpowered, not the individual soldier. (All infantry based lockon weapons do that really, the annihilator didn't bring anything new to the game, it just made the the bullshit more accessible)

[Baneblade]

Lock on weapons can be removed once ESFs can't rocket spam infantry. It's a fair trade off, you want to be left alone and so do they.

[zulu]

Originally Posted by Baneblade

Lock on weapons can be removed once ESFs can't rocket spam infantry. It's a fair trade off, you want to be left alone and so do they.

Quite the opposite. As someone who likes to play as infantry, armor, and air, I can say that the main thing is that I'd like vehicles to be able to play a bigger role in large battles. Right now, once a zerg hits a certain level and there are enough rockets (lock-on or no) zooming around, vehicles (especially armor) often can't do much, and because of the timer (and to a much lesser extent the resource cost), pilots and tankers would rather sit back and play long-range artillery than get up front and support the infantry.

It's a complicated problem, since there are a lot of aspects to it and there are multiple conflicting goals.

This attitude of "oh well I just play A2A so I shouldn't be affected by desired buffs/nerfs to affect air-to-ground or AA stuff" seems to be kind of common, and I think it wildly misses the point of flying A2A in the first place. The various aspects of the game should be interconnected -- ultimately everything you do should have some larger consequence when it comes to taking and holding territory.

Originally Posted by Hawgg

The only scenario I can see that you guys would think it is overpowered is if there is a group of 5+ coordinated heavies all using it at the same time to "one-off" vehicles. This argument is invalid for 2 reasons.

1) Other launchers can do this too.

2) It is not the Annihilator doing this, it is the teamwork and coordination. Why don't you just prevent players from coordinating? :P

Well, I think the problem is that it's fairly easy to reach a sort of critical mass where any zerg of sufficient size is likely to have enough Annihilators to deny enemy air from coming in, as well as to harass enemy armor from pretty far away.

And the Annihilator, by its nature, is significantly easier to "coordinate" (here used pretty loosely, since it would include two heavies on opposite ends of the battlefield just happening to point their Annihilators in the same direction... but to be fair that should count here as much as anywhere else) than it is to coordinate an attack using more difficult-to-use weapons. Attacking a tank with infantry in the open field (rather than, say, just popping in and out of a spawn room) requires exposing your squad, not bunching up, and hopefully attacking the tank's rear. Locking on from a few hills away and pushing the right button isn't quite as difficult.

And there's nothing wrong with that, but it creates a certain environment, and right now I think that environment just sorta sucks.

Infantry-on-infantry battles are fun, yes, but especially in larger battles I'd hope tanks and fighters and gunships would play a large role, perhaps a deciding factor.

[Rothnang]

Originally Posted by Baneblade

Lock on weapons can be removed once ESFs can't rocket spam infantry. It's a fair trade off, you want to be left alone and so do they.

What ever happened to "rock paper scissors" huh? When people complain about Papers scissor repelling rocket launcher suddenly it's no longer "Well, get a rock to help out" but "It's scissors own fault for wanting to cut paper"...


In all seriousness, any "X is too good at killing infantry" argument is going to fall on deaf ears with me as long as infantry has a thousand ways of getting infinite free respawns. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather see a game where vehicles are important to infantry because they rely on their own vehicles in some way, than because the enemy vehicles can sweep them off the field easily, but what you're advocating there is a game where vehicles and infantry don't really interact at all anymore.

[Baneblade]

ESFs are not anti infantry units. At least they weren't really intended to be, that is just a side effect of the way rockets work.

[zulu]

Originally Posted by Baneblade

ESFs are not anti infantry units. At least they weren't really intended to be, that is just a side effect of the way rockets work.

I think that's an extraordinarily weak argument, given the availability of anti-infantry guns (they might be terrible, but they're there) for all of the ESFs and the fact that a "side effect" here (fragmentary damage) could easily be removed (just make the rockets have no splash radius and thus only good for anti-armor work) if the devs wanted to.

Moreover, why shouldn't ESFs threaten infantry? Every other vehicle in the game (with the possible exception of Galaxies) can threaten infantry, there's certainly historical precedence for single-seat Close Air Support fighters (from the IL-2 Sturmovik to modern strike fighters and attack helicopters), and their role is still limited when attacking infantry (they're very good at taking out one or two guys or a very-tightly-packed group, but they don't have much longevity because of light armor and the weapons' relative weakness), and other units (namely Libs) do the job better (or would, if ground attack right now didn't require a great deal of speed just to survive, which is purely a product of an overreaction against ESFs being too strong early in the game's development).