Planetside 2 Catch-All

Tamren wrote:

I'm really not liking this patch much. I was *just* about to subscribe for one month and then the patch hit. Some of the changes I really hate.

1. They totally killed Scarred Mesa Skydock. It used to be the only base (afaik) that you couldn't assault by ground unless you were a light assault. This forced people to actually use tactics to take it over like galaxy drops and squad beacons. But now they got rid of two of the landing pads and put in a fricken JUMP PAD that leads to the ground. BORING.

2. They gave flak a blanket 5% damage increase and buffed the projectile speed of phalanx turrets. Now phalanx flak can hit stuff accurately out to maximum view range because the projectiles no longer arc. This makes the turrets RATHER POWERFUL, to say nothing of burster MAXes who we STILL can't see half the time.

3. They nerfed fighter rocket damage against phalanx turrets by about 40%. This change on it's own was long due, but when you combine it with the flak buffs it makes life too difficult for fighters. If you start getting hit by just ONE turret you are pretty much dead unless you are already in the process of running away.

4. The changes to the tech plant make it far too easy to invade them. If an enemy force shows up at the gate, unless there is an equally sized defending force already in the plant with sunderer deployed the whole base folds like a wet rag. It's like trying to defend an amp station that doesn't have any walls. If they had kept the teleporter this would have been a cool change, but it just sucks as it is. The spawn room is just too far away from everything.

The change to Scarred Mesa Skydock makes me sad but it makes sense to me. It's basically impossible to take that base without absolute overwhelming air superiority. Even then the defenders have a chance. That is of course what made it so damn fun to defend. It felt like manning the walls in a castle. The few times we tried to attack it though were damn futile and not great. I'll miss it because it made a great story but I understand the change.

I think the whole air vs anti air thing is going to go back and forth for a long time. Part of the problem is eh whats the quote He we controls the sky controls the battlefield. Air supremacy can render everything else moot. Not to mention no game I can think of had liberator like bombardment in multiplayer. That's going to be tough to balance. So yeah I think this is only the beginning as it swings back and forth. Personally I'm betting the edge will eventually side with anti air over air, just cause more people play that.

It's very funny what a small difference makes in a battle sometime. I was trying to take a tech plant and we were all being repulsed for hard. Now this was the kind where the best entrance were those two doors. We had three sunderer but none of them close enough to the door as they mostly blocked it out. Fortunately one was mine. Since their was no more armor, I picked it up and deployed it another hundred or so feet closer. In five minutes everyone was spawning on my sunderer (lovely xp) and we overran the place. Felt great.

Made me realize this game can really be about strategy. Your goal is not to take point a, b, c. Rather it's to limit the defense capability of the enemy to defend said points, while maximizing your own sides. Thinking like that makes the game much more interesting.

OMGNOVAWITHSLUGAMMO

*drools*

SuperDave wrote:

OMGNOVAWITHSLUGAMMO

I know that feeling. PKOOM PKOOM!

Personally I'm betting the edge will eventually side with anti air over air, just cause more people play that.

Ironically the problem is now Liberator spam. You see very few fighters on the attack just because flak is so much more dangerous now. Without anything to chase them off Liberators just hover endlessly and any base without flak turrets is basically defenceless.

I'll miss it because it made a great story but I understand the change.

What annoys me the most is that they took out the two landing pads. The place doesn't look cool anymore! It used to be the only place in the game with four landing pads that wasn't a tower.

Itsatrap wrote:

Try opening up UserOptions.ini and reducing the RenderDistance manually. Right now it's set to 99999 by default, but realistically you should only need about 4000.

Try turning off "desktop composition" when running PlanetSide2.exe (right click->properties->compatibility->disable desktop composition).

Those two changes helped a lot for me. Note that the RenderDistance may be set to 1.000000, changing it to 9999 meant things were popping into existence for me, resetting it to 50000 helped with that, experiment to see what works for you.

On 12/21 SOE is doing a triple Station Cash event when you redeem prepaid cards. You can pick up the card at any time, just wait to redeem it until the 21st.

Wal Mart's $15 cards come with an automatic 500 SC bonus (2,000 SC for $15) and last time SOE did the triple redemption event it also tripled the 500 bonus for me (multiplier usually doesn't affect the bonus so YMMV.)

I was waiting for this. At the next double-cash event I was going to chip in another 10$, but since this is triple and not double I'm going to sink in another 20$.

Note that this includes ALL methods of getting SC, not just cards. You can buy SC on the main SOE website or in-game. We don't have any Wal-Marts where I live. We do have Gamestop (or EBgames) but I have long since transitioned to digital for all of my gaming needs.

The in-game SC store uses your Steam Wallet if you run the game through Steam. That will probably be the most convenient method for most people.

Tamren wrote:

We do have Gamestop

Gamestop's $15 cards come with a free unlock of the NS-11 Platinum. It does have to be their Planetside 2 labeled card for that unlock, but they should all have that one in stock.

Elycion wrote:
Tamren wrote:

We do have Gamestop

Gamestop's $15 cards come with a free unlock of the NS-11 Platinum. It does have to be their Planetside 2 labeled card for that unlock, but they should all have that one in stock.

Filthy enablers...

Elycion wrote:
Tamren wrote:

We do have Gamestop

Gamestop's $15 cards come with a free unlock of the NS-11 Platinum. It does have to be their Planetside 2 labeled card for that unlock, but they should all have that one in stock.

We don't have Wal-Marts here, let alone Gamestops. I don't suppose you could but those online, could you?

Tamron wrote:
Elycion wrote:
Tamren wrote:

We do have Gamestop

Gamestop's $15 cards come with a free unlock of the NS-11 Platinum. It does have to be their Planetside 2 labeled card for that unlock, but they should all have that one in stock.

We don't have Wal-Marts here, let alone Gamestops. I don't suppose you could but those online, could you?

Wal-Mart will sell the codes online, with delivery through email. Gamestop is in-store only to the best of my knowledge.

Edit: Just saw confirmation that the online Wal-Mart codes do NOT give you the +500 bonus, which renders that option useless.

Is the NS-11 any good? It doesn't seem to be very specialized.

EDIT: I looked up the weapon stats. It's nearly identical to the Vanu Equinox AR. The only real difference is that you can carry an extra 25 rounds because of the bigger magazine and it has a unique firing sound.

That reminded me. Do any of you know of a place where I could do a side by side weapon comparison for each class? (besides in-game) So I know what to buy and what not to buy.

EDIT: Nevermind, found one. http://planetside.wikia.com/wiki/Lig...

maverickz wrote:

That reminded me. Do any of you know of a place where I could do a side by side weapon comparison for each class? (besides in-game) So I know what to buy and what not to buy.

The Planetside 2 Wikia page has some weapon stats (click on the weapon type you want to examine). The numbers are mostly from beta, but I don't think things have changed much.

You should trial any weapon you want to buy before you shell out for it. On the purchasing screen, there should be a "try now" button. Note that there's a cooldown on weapon trials, because otherwise people would just continually trial stuff and never buy anything.

I did some research using the spreadsheet someone posted and I learned a few things.

- Every soldier has 500 shields and 500 health, with the exception of infiltrators who only get 400 shields.

- The maximum damage of most guns scales to fractions of 1000. Almost all guns fit into the 5-7 shot brackets at 200-167-143 damage. 200 damage is from the bigger NC guns like the gauss saw. 167 is for the lower damage NC weapons and high damage weapons from the other factions. The vast majority of weapons do 143. There are only a couple of exceptions. Bolt action snipers do 750, semi auto snipers do 400, and battle rifles do 250. Shotguns do about 850 spread over 6 pellets.

- Because of how nano-armour works, having it will allow you to survive with a tiny bit of health in situations where you would otherwise die. Even at rank 5 however you will never survive more than a single extra shot at close range from most weapons

- Rate of fire and damage vary slightly between weapons but the time-to-kill is always within .5-1 second. The maximum difference between two weapons is only around 20% in various statistics. So when selecting a weapon do not obsess about stats and just pick whatever feels comfortable and has the attachments you desire.

- Guns do maximum damage out to 10m after which damage scales down to a lesser minimum at 65m. Vanu weapons are a little different because they have a lesser minimum damage but scale down across twice the distance.

- Every gun reloads faster when not completely empty. This is especially important for LMGs.

- Rockets are stated to do 1700 damage and 1000 splash. This may not be entirely accurate because if I fire a rocket point blank into a wall it will flatline my shields (500 damage). Direct rocket hits are always fatal to infantry and damage MAX units by 50%. If these stats are correct MAX units would have 3400 health.

Whenever I have spare time and some volunteers I do weapon testing in-game. So far I have figured out a couple things:

- Heavy assault shields absorb approximately 700 damage when fully charged. However they drain rapidly when activated so the total will tend to be somewhat less if the damage doesn't occur immediately.

- Frag grenades deal 1200 damage to infantry. Anti-vehicle grenades deal 750 damage to infantry and comparable damage to rockets when used against vehicles. Anti-vech grenades do respect armour facing but have lesser side and rear armour damage bonuses when compared to rockets.

- A Comet MAX weapon deals 600 damage to infantry. Quasar's deal 167 damage at about 300rpm, incredibly this makes them a worse weapon per-shot than the Beamer which fires faster and more accurately!

If you're running Windows 8, and start the game with a joystic or 360 controller plugged in, it will cause the .exe to crash. You can work around this by dropping a DINPUT8.DLL file from a Windows 7 machine into the Planetside 2 folder that contains the main game's executable.

(Double post!)

That's really useful stuff Tamren, thanks! That part about "don't worry about gun statistics" is really interesting. I went through a whole slew of weapons comparisons just now, and what really shakes out is that the default weapons are surprisingly decent for most classes. Infiltrators could probably benefit from a better sniper rifle it seems. I was planning to save my certs to upgrade to a better weapon for HAssault and Engineer classes, but I think it's a better use to upgrade the default weapons with proper attachments.

The default sniper rifle isn't that great. It's much better than the bolt action at shorter ranges but for long ranges you will benefit more from the single-headshot damage.

All of the weapons are essentially sidegrades with different downsides. The Orion is the default LMG that shoots very fast but hold few rounds. The Pulsar holds 75 rounds and has a slightly slower fire and reload speed. And so on. The Solstice SF is objectively worse than the regular Solstice but it can mount underbarrel weapons and the Solstice can't. At the end of the day the effectiveness in battle is more or less the same. So it's more important to find your preference and stick with it.

If you are not sure which weapon you like most then don't invest heavily into your starting weapon. However you should at least buy a reflex sight since they are far superior to the default iron sights.

Question. As far as sniping goes, does the view wobble get reduced through upgrades or experience? Or is that permanent? I know you're supposed to hold your breath, but it's not enough for me. Is there anything to fix this?

And another question. Are weapon upgrades interchangeable between compatible weapons? Or are things like the reflex sight and forward grip bound to the weapon?

maverickz wrote:

Question. As far as sniping goes, does the view wobble get reduced through upgrades or experience? Or is that permanent? I know you're supposed to hold your breath, but it's not enough for me. Is there anything to fix this?

And another question. Are weapon upgrades interchangeable between compatible weapons? Or are things like the reflex sight and forward grip bound to the weapon?

As far as I know, their bound to the specific weapon.

Tamren wrote:

If you are not sure which weapon you like most then don't invest heavily into your starting weapon. However you should at least buy a reflex sight since they are far superior to the default iron sights.

Reflex 1x, or 2x? I'm just about to upgrade all of my starter weapons with this, and I'm still not sure which way to go.

Triple SC sale coming on the 21st.
http://www.cheapassgamer.com/forums/...

Archangel wrote:
Tamren wrote:

If you are not sure which weapon you like most then don't invest heavily into your starting weapon. However you should at least buy a reflex sight since they are far superior to the default iron sights.

Reflex 1x, or 2x? I'm just about to upgrade all of my starter weapons with this, and I'm still not sure which way to go.

I'm NV all the way.

Archangel wrote:

Reflex 1x, or 2x?

The 1x is slightly better than the 2x at point-blank range. However, in those cases I'm probably just going to hip-fire, and the 2x helps me a lot at mid-range.

groan wrote:

Triple SC sale coming on the 21st

Feelthy feelthy skimmer!

For penance say ten Hail Certis and five Our Rabbit.

I picked up 3 cards from Walmart for $45 which will be worth $180 in SC when I redeem them on the 21st. Oh baby!

Elycion wrote:
groan wrote:

Triple SC sale coming on the 21st

Feelthy feelthy skimmer!

For penance say ten Hail Certis and five Our Rabbit.

And done!

s/League of Legends/Planetside 2/

Although what's worse is that as GWJ's resident stingy scoungy scrooge, I'm actually considering the triple point sale thing.

IMAGE(http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-CV2d9W4/0/L/i-CV2d9W4-L.jpg)

SuperDave wrote:
Archangel wrote:
Tamren wrote:

If you are not sure which weapon you like most then don't invest heavily into your starting weapon. However you should at least buy a reflex sight since they are far superior to the default iron sights.

Reflex 1x, or 2x? I'm just about to upgrade all of my starter weapons with this, and I'm still not sure which way to go.

I'm NV all the way.

The NV stuff is great. I just wish they A) had a 2x version and B) had colored crosshairs.

The black NV crosshair makes me want to kick a puppy. Same with the sky-blue Vanu cockpit heads up display.