We'll be taking a look at the plasma cannon along with all AV weapons as part of the vehicle work we are doing in 1.5.

Nearly fine

My main problem is more damage than a vehicle mounted large railgun turret

I'm down with losing splash radius, **** I'm ok with losing all of it.

I also wish it were harder to score a direct hit, not much harder, but something, cuz I rarely miss :/

I hate you guys. I see thread after thread of saying, "Let's talk over how to balance vehicles," but what they really are is, "How can we balance AV against HAVs?" Yeah, let's make forge guns balanced to a vehicle that is able to utilize cover and has 2-3x the health of a dropship. Let's just forget about those poor bastards in the sky, because they don't matter.

How about leave the blast radius but make the effect of the radius only effect shielding aka flux type effect, thus only a direct hit can kill infantry but it can still do damage to shielding.

Is it 100% perfect accurate. i kind of agree, because it really doesent require much skill to use. Would you say a slight travel speed reduction would do the weapon well? The accuracy almost seems required imo because of its ammo count. Or we could give more ammo for a noticeable accuracy decrease? whatchya think?

I'm only OK with nerfing the forge gun once more heavy weapons are released.......right now its a choice between close range or long range.....there is no medium range heavy weapon........and even if it does get nerfed people will just use mass drivers or grenades to camp objectives.....they might even use plasma cannons......you won't stop people from camping objectives just by nerfing one weapon.....in fact IMHO the only useful heavy weapon

I'm perfectly fine with how the forgegun works. I'm not fine with how HAVs and Dropships work.

Personally, I've never been mad at getting killed by a forgegun.

Is it 100% perfect accurate. i kind of agree, because it really doesent require much skill to use. Would you say a slight travel speed reduction would do the weapon well? The accuracy almost seems required imo

I think people need to specify what forge gun they're talking about. It'd be a shame if one change specific to the assault variant gets pushed on all of them.

I am in for a reduced accuracy
I would keep the Splash and radius.

I would most probably give AV weapon a different damage output to vehicle than to infantry. So a forge doing 2000dmg to a vehicle, would do 10%-20% of that to infantry, 200-400. AV nades do zero damage to infantry, it would be logical AV guns don't do full dmg against them.

Against dropship and tanks I would prefer they release proto vehicles and modules, then we can talk balance of that forge gun against them...

AV 'nades do full damage to infantry... if they trigger.

For a time they did on direct contact.

for the life of me i cant understand why any changes would need to be made to this weapon. IMHO, if a player can snipe you with this gun, then they are a superior player and deserve the kill. Just remember this:
1) there is no ADS with this weapon, so sniping MUST be done from hip-fire (which is definitely not easy with the size of the crosshairs)
2) you have to be a Heavy to wield the weapon, hence forcing the user to deal with permanent, unavoidable shortcomings of the suit (slow speed, large hit box, no equipment, etc)
3) the weapon take at least 5 seconds to charge up. not so much a problem when you are fighting at a distance, but in CQC that is 5 seconds you cant afford to waste, thus forcing the player to try and get a direct hit with the first shot or suffer the consequences (usually a volley of AR fire which depending on the weapon, can kill you before you get off the second shot)

i'm sure there are other compelling reasons, but i just chose the 3 that came to me off the top. if i want to kill a Forge gunner, i don't run up to his face and say 'Hi', i attack him from the side/back and make sure he doesn't get the time to shoot me first.i know a lot of guys that use the forums are good players, hence i dont understand why a simple tactic cant be applied to overcome any advantage that this play style has over your fitting builds.

I agree with the OP, Advance/Proto forge should be able to easily take out a standard Hav/dropship, but I don't agree that the weapon is strictly AV, it is 'anti material' as stated in the weapon description (the same description that stated it can be used against infantry) the fact that is is being used so effectively by a small percentage of the already small percentage of players that play Heavy should not lead to a 're balancing' of the weapon. it should lead other players to be cautious if you see one, and have a game plan for how to take it out.

The assault is the hardest to use, so why wouldn't it?