i wish it could, lol. but no, you just shoot them when they poke their heads over the edge to shoot down. you have to use the charged variant though, not the assault.

Last time I expressed my opinions about the Forge Gun it turned into a 12 pages discussion with the same 2 people impliedly offending my intelligence with poor arguments and quoting and liking each other's posts to no end.

So, this time, I will still express my opinion, but I will completely ignore any counter-post. This is my idea, if you like it, fine. If you don't, fine. End of story.

*Ahem*.

Yes, Forge Gun should be able to kill infantry, because it's not specifically an AV weapon, it's anti-material. And it's a heavy weapon, something you can equip only by using a restrictive dropsuit with massive exoskeleton and you need an advantage over the Swarm Launcher for this reason.

The problem is that it's too powerful, but not for Alpha Damage. It's the combination of the massive damage, accuracy, DPS, splash damage, splash radius and range. Speaking of "weapon VS infantry", it makes sniper rifles absolete and this is wrong.

How to balance it against both infantry and vehicles?

Damage falloff over distance.

No nerf to the raw damage, blast damage/radius and accuracy, you just need to MOVE if you want to control one area and you have to choose WHICH area you want to defend, without insta-poppong vehicles and infantry across the whole map. This is the problem with the Forge Gun.

Done.

The charge time makes it balanced. If you come around the corner at a FG, or really just anything other than letting them snipe at you from the rooftops, you have a solid 2-3.5 seconds (depending on FG Ops and AFG vs FG) to burn the heavy down with an AR/SMG, which is very, very easy to do.
If the heavy gets up high, it's so, so easy to keep them down, with just a MLT sniper or a TSR/CSR if you're really feeling angry.
If you're an idiot, a good forge will wreck you every time, but I'd say that overall they're fairly well balanced. If they're a little OP, it's balanced out by having to wear a fatsuit.

Forge guns needs to have a much reduced anti infantry capacity. Sure, all the forge gun users can sit here and talk because they want to maintain their crutch, but right now it's the best antivehicle weapon as well as a good anti-infantry weapon. There's really no give and take with it.

I've advocated removing it's 100% perfect accuracy, making the shots skew a few degrees from where you aim. That would effectively make forge gun sniping infantry impossible, while allowing forge guns to still hit vehicles from long range.

Lol physics.

The lack of iron sights, the limited ammo capacity, and the decreased mobility of deploying the heavy suit all contribute to balancing this weapon. I understand that it can be frustrating dealing with a FG, but with the nerfed splash, you really have to stay out in the open to get clipped by it. I generally run an ADV FG, and it can take 2-3 shots of pure splash to kill someone in STD dropsuits. Not to mention that during the charge phase, the FG lights up, makes a loud noise, and slows your suit down even more.

Forge gunners are generally pretty easy to pick off (most of the time I end up long range dueling other heavies) with cheap forge guns, so I recommend building a militia fit to deal with them.