Planetside 2 Catch-All

BadMojo wrote:

Those tunnels are fun ... until someone parks a sunderer over the hole.

omg I can't wait to see that.

Awesome work! Look at all DEM CERTS! :O

I only have < 250 at most times, although I spend them on my Reaver a lot.

Although I'm not sure how much I like you killing all those brave NC soldiers! FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOM!

1,250 certs

BNice wrote:

1,250 certs :shock:

It was 1337 when I logged off last night

I've been saving them up for weeks now. I spend most of my time flying a scythe as an engineer and both of those have been upgraded to 75-80% already. Any further upgrades are very expensive being 500 or 1000 certs each for not that big of an improvement, so I don't spend much of them these days.

Played about an hour before lunch. I was on Amerish and the NC were 80% of the population and overrunning the continent one base at a time. It was also pretty low population to begin with, I would be surprised if there were more than 10 vanu on the entire continent and I was one of em.

So I decided to get my asymmetric warfare hat out and make them suffer as much as I could. A fully certed engineer like yours truly can cause a lot of havoc. I started small by going to contested zones and defending them with my shotgun. Shotguns do 143 damage per pellet and fire 6 pellets per shot. 7 times 143 damage adds up to 1000 which is the average health for infantry. If you fire at point blank range and hit with every pellet the enemy is going to be so weak a stiff breeze could knock them over. But shotguns also have TERRIBLE range, beyond a couple meters you will lose out to anyone with any kind of gun, especially SMGs.

One great thing about shotguns is how much damage they do to MAX units. MAXs are vulnerable to shotguns because they are hard to miss even at medium range. And if you get right up to them even a scattermax will start flailing about trying to hit you. 5 shotgun shells are equal in damage to an entire magazine of assault rifle ammo, and I have 12 shots. If you don't miss you can basically take one out all by yourself.

Oh and on a side note, sticky grenades stick to people now. I discovered this when I tried to throw one out a window and it got stuck to elbow of the medic beside me, whoops!

Initially I had a couple of other vanu there to give me a hand but all I could do was delay the inevitable. So I fell back to bases that were not under attack and broke out the mines. Mines are awesome! They take a lot of effort to use properly but you can hide them around corners and people will stumble into them all the time. Antitank mines are also handy, it only takes two of them to destroy a ground vehicle unless it has a mine guard. One engineer can run up to a deployed sunderer and turn it into confetti in a snap. I spent an hour doing this until they finally started to wise up. One guy brought a sundy with a mine guard. So I came back with C4!

I eventually got pushed back to a base called Auraxis Firearms. It's on amerish and it's basically a plateau connected to the road network by a bridge. So I spawned there and put down some mines. Didn't take long for the enemy to show up. First a reaver landed and the pilot went inside to cap the point, BOOM, walked right into my proximity mine. Got a free reaver kill too! Then a sunderer showed up with 4 people in it and ran right into the mines I put on the bridge. POP, 4 high profile threats + 1 group kill bonus + sunderer + kill streak * 70%xp bonus = a lot of damn certs. They were just the advanced party however, because two sunderers and some tanks soon arrived. The drivers wised up and parked the sundies in the middle of the courtyard leaving me with no way to approach and the tank camped the spawn building. So being the tactical genius that I am. I jumped off the side of the plateau and ran off.

... and mined the other end of the bridge!

Now I'm sure you can picture my sadface when the sunderor with 8 people in it turned right instead of left...

IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/903239686044462377/63FFA3DB52168D890068B3DC4A32009FE542272C/)

Buuuut at least I got revenge on that tank driver.

IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/903239686044465913/B4912BEFB0B9B070A6D5A8796B9CBF591A91AE91/)

I'm a generalist, so I'm upgrading lots on all classes. Something I wish is if you've got a common unlock, like C4, when you unlock it on the first class you get a discount on the second class to unlock it.

Scratched wrote:

I'm a generalist, so I'm upgrading lots on all classes. Something I wish is if you've got a common unlock, like C4, when you unlock it on the first class you get a discount on the second class to unlock it.

That would be nice, but no dice. Still I'm glad at the very least the engineer shares weapons with the light assault. As I play nothing but those two it's perfect. Specializing is the way to go in my opinion, lets you cert out much faster.

This happened a couple weeks ago.

IMAGE(http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/596993735575484122/EA0DCC55FCED1097762EA3257E8E659349B23218/)

I have some strange compulsion to save certs, and in other games I've played I almost always save skill points and try to get by with bone stock loadouts. In Planetside 2 my compulsion to save is capped and I have to spend everytime I get to 10000 again or I'm just wasting certs.

Funny thing is 10000 isn't always the cap as I figured out one day. Weapon medals still add to your totals when earned. This happened after I earned an Auraxium medal for my Serpent.

IMAGE(http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/596993909063679509/9BD030DB492F2E1F5764C9EB7252D195F2F303F0/)

That gun looks like it just walked off the runway in Milan.

AP Erebus wrote:

You also can't expect them to not accidentally break things as they work to improve, expand and balance the game.

I'll put up with some issues given the nature of a constantly updating free-to-play game, but I'm wary of any software that crashes to the desktop. Fortunately, the hotfix seems to have fixed some of the performance problems introduced with the big update.

I managed to get by with stock weapons/equipment for a long time, although I still think that weapon optics are the single most useful upgrade you can get as a new player.

As for common unlocks, I would have preferred that stuff like C4 unlocked for all (eligible) classes simultaneously. Of course, with the current system, you're basically unlocking it incrementally at lower costs for different classes. For example, it's cheaper to unlock mines for the engineer than it is for the infiltrator.

Speaking of mines, my new favorite trick is to put AV mines a few meters in front/behind a parked Sunderer so that the mines will blow after it's loaded up and moving.

i38warhawk wrote:

This happened a couple weeks ago.

I have some strange compulsion to save certs, and in other games I've played I almost always save skill points and try to get by with bone stock loadouts. In Planetside 2 my compulsion to save is capped and I have to spend everytime I get to 10000 again or I'm just wasting certs.

Jesus f*cking Christ! I only have 4755 + 264 cert points. Although looking at your stat page, you've played twice as much as I have and your xp/min is 270 vs my 93. How you do that?

RolandofGilead wrote:
i38warhawk wrote:

This happened a couple weeks ago.

I have some strange compulsion to save certs, and in other games I've played I almost always save skill points and try to get by with bone stock loadouts. In Planetside 2 my compulsion to save is capped and I have to spend everytime I get to 10000 again or I'm just wasting certs.

Jesus f*cking Christ! I only have 4755 + 264 cert points. Although looking at your stat page, you've played twice as much as I have and your xp/min is 270 vs my 93. How you do that?

A lot of that play time is during double xp first of all. But I just try to stay in a fight all the time, leave if you're getting farmed and roll with an organized group. A hex that says Enemy Platoon Detected with draw an opposing platoon to that hex pretty quickly.

RolandofGilead wrote:
i38warhawk wrote:

This happened a couple weeks ago.

I have some strange compulsion to save certs, and in other games I've played I almost always save skill points and try to get by with bone stock loadouts. In Planetside 2 my compulsion to save is capped and I have to spend everytime I get to 10000 again or I'm just wasting certs.

Jesus f*cking Christ! I only have 4755 + 264 cert points. Although looking at your stat page, you've played twice as much as I have and your xp/min is 270 vs my 93. How you do that?

He has XP boosts due to premium status and passive cert boosts which makes a MASSIVE difference...

The Alpha Squad boost is +50%, membership is another +25-50%, you get +10% for defending a zone, fighting on a low population continent is another +1-20%. And then you could possibly have a double XP event going on. The average kill xp is 100 for a player, plus another 100xp if they were in a vehicle.

Certs are "only" 250xp each, it adds up very fast.

I still say you guys are insane. My total cert count is 2700 or so. Then again i play less regular now, and I generally solo which doesn't help.

Had a real good fight today though, I've realized it's better to fight on a contient where you are outnumber but their are lots of people then on one where you outnumber them but low population. Had a fantastic three way fight at a biodome in my magrider. Damn fools didn't have any ammo certs for the sunderers though. Still at the end of the day I was at 5 kd and at 300 certs.

Argh, I just purchased the spawn point upgrade for the Sunderer and forgot (again) that new upgrades dont automatically get applied. So I started a 20 minute cooldown by pulling the truck and its just a big ol paperweight.

polypusher wrote:

Argh, I just purchased the spawn point upgrade for the Sunderer and forgot (again) that new upgrades dont automatically get applied. So I started a 20 minute cooldown by pulling the truck and its just a big ol paperweight.

Get the ammo dispenser too. No Sunderer should not have that. Also placing a sunderer can be really fun. It's probable the most tactical part of the game. Simple moving and deploying it somewhere can completely change the flow of the battle. I have ended large scale battles by simple moving my sunderer a couple hundred feet. Also assume no one will ever protect it or repair it ever. Cause there idiots.

New hotfix today. Lots of balance changes, glad they fixed the medikit bug too.

Depot - G30 Walker and G40-F Ranger now available for Sunderer
Membership status info pane will correctly show players’ membership tier
Medical kits can be resupplied again
The Stronghold will no longer occasionally spawn players at a bad location
Prowler Anchor projectile speed bonus was incorrectly set too high
Hill climbing restrictions on Flash Turbo removed
Improved some oddities with vehicle collision causing excessive damage
Fixed some issues with fall damage being a little more punishing than it should have been – especially falling onto vehicles
Gameplay adjustments:
Nanite Auto Repair System
Disabled from damage time decreased by 2 seconds.
Amount of damage repaired increased for all vehicles
ESF Composite Armor
Increased bonus against flak by 5% each rank.
Increased bonus against small arms fire by 2% each rank.
M14 Banshee
Increased direct hit damage to 140 (up from 110).
Magazine certline adjusted to 6/9/12/15.
Lock-on weapons (A2A Missiles & Lock-on heavy assault weapons)
Lock-on Angle reduced. Targets must be closer to the center of the crosshair in order to lock-on.
NS Annihilator
Base lock-on acquire time increased from 2 seconds to 3 seconds.

maverickz wrote:

That gun looks like it just walked off the runway in Milan.

It's like I'm wearing nothing at all!
IMAGE(http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/903239780153201850/95FBD95E4F2FB349FC86D1D9D901AE506897F332/)

I think the maxes calf's are bigger than it's waist.

master0 wrote:

Get the ammo dispenser too. No Sunderer should not have that.

Well, if you aren't supporting vehicles, then there are definitely uses for a stealth Sunderer.

IMAGE(http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/903239780176184901/9A98B852776221514488D635C4AAAF6E2DA2D9FC/)

I guess you have to pay tribute to the symbol of the death of the first game someplace.

Is that a MadCat?

I wonder what a WW2 or Zombie themed Planetside would end up like. Obviously you'd have to take some artistic liberties with WW2, and I'm not so sure that would happen in the era of 'authenticly real' shooters, but it would seem fun to me in the way that BF42 was. I'm thinking more Wolfenstein than MOH:AA or COD1/2.

I don't know if anyone would want to tackle the problem of thousands of people in a map that SOE did though.

Awesome!

Scratched wrote:

I wonder what a WW2 or Zombie themed Planetside would end up like. Obviously you'd have to take some artistic liberties with WW2, and I'm not so sure that would happen in the era of 'authenticly real' shooters, but it would seem fun to me in the way that BF42 was. I'm thinking more Wolfenstein than MOH:AA or COD1/2.

I don't know if anyone would want to tackle the problem of thousands of people in a map that SOE did though.

I do remember their was a ww2 mmofps, not sure how good it was, and probable didn't have a 10th the scale of planetside.

Itsatrap wrote:
master0 wrote:

Get the ammo dispenser too. No Sunderer should not have that.

Well, if you aren't supporting vehicles, then there are definitely uses for a stealth Sunderer.

I suppose that's true. I was more venting as I found four sunderer with not ammo dispensers while attacking biodome. It was a close and tough fight and having to go all the way back to base for ammo was killer. Not to mention I was having a killer run in my magrider.

I'm tempted to pick up the secondary laser gun for the magrider as I noticed people like to go in those. My machine gun is generally unmanned most times sadly. Plus it's only 200 certs.

You're thinking of World War II Online. It came out when dial up was still king and is apparently still going. In a few ways it had Planetside beat for scale. From memory I'd say individual battles are about the same number of people, just with tons of lag and bad graphics. Fighting at night was horrible there too. Few lights, no night vision and strict realism made it very very dark at night.

I'd pay $5 in planetside for Night vision, high contrast visor mode. Having to scope for it sucks.

Edit with some facts from Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_W...

Complete map of Europe at 1/2 scale, so WAY bigger than PS2
It has complex damage modeling for vehicles and people
Complete strategic layer for commanders

polypusher wrote:

Is that a MadCat?

No, its a BFR (Battle Frame Robotics), the last expansion to PS1 added them in. That particular model is the Terran Republic version (the red/black colors give it away). They are commonly considered to have been a horrible idea that drove customers away. *shrug* YMMV, of course. Never liked them myself, they had their good and bad points. I honestly hope they don't get added to PS2.

They made an undocumented change to vehicle zoom optics. While zoomed in your vertical mouse sensitivity is toned down a bit. This makes it much easier to aim at targets far away. The problem is they also applied this change to aircraft. I used to dogfight all the time with 1.5x cannon zoom, but now I can't do that AND bank into a turn at the same time.