Ghosts Chance wrote:just a public servace announcement to continue spreading the word that these little presents of explosive doom work better then ever at destroying would be tankers.
i dont give a crap what your opinion on current tank balance is, while you wait for whatever result your hoping for from CCP, spend a small amount of SP into these little things and grab some friends.
with em you can hold off tanks at city gates, place traps along escape routes, sneak up behind them and shove em up their ass.
but aside from a well skilled railtank this is the best method of complete tank annihilation there is.
a squad all with 2 levels in demos can place 6-12 tank traps.
a single fully skilled demolitions expert can place 3-8 traps on his own.
hardeners are on? doesnt matter these things have INSANE alpha....
need help getting the most out of these things? ask away!
Before I go any further, allow me to say that my method of killing tanks is to place 3 RE's on the rear of a tank, flux as many times as I can if it's a shield or once if it's an armor (I get my RE's on first, flux second so I can get the RE's on it without freaking it out and dashing off), set off the RE's, and try to lay into it with my swarms if it's still around. Now, let me tell you why this often DOESN'T work.
1. Any tanker worth his salt these days stays in 3rd person as often as possible so he can see you coming up behind him for this very reason.
2. At least half of the tanks I see (almost every armor tank) are running scanners meaning sneaking up on them is nigh impossible, and RE's/proxies are plainly visible to them.
3. A few tankers are smart enough to keep their top turret and have a squad mate stay in it to watch for enemy movement in the tankers blindspot. This is somewhat rare, but I've seen it several times over the last few days.
A few other points:
When dealing with 2 tanks working together (VERY common to see now), it is almost impossible to get to one without the other spotting you. This is also true of infantry, it is often suicide to try to get RE's on a tank simply because of infantry. It's easy to say "have the rest of your squad suppress the infantry", but with a tanker suppressing YOUR infantry and the enemy respawning every 10 seconds, that's FAAAAAAAR easier said than done.
As for baiting them into traps or dropping traps in general, enemy infantry spot them and shoot them all the time since almost every squad runs scanners and they don't want to accidentally get blown up by them (and, ya know, "free points"). And the infantry scans show them to tanks too, so even if a tank doesn't have scans, with as popular as scans are now any spot for trapping a tank is already getting scanned constantly by someone with a scanner looking for intel assist points or easy kills.
Lastly, a squad can drop 6-12 traps. IF they sacrifice ammo, injectors, scanners, and every other piece of equipment that helps keep your squad alive and going against infantry AND tanks.
My point in this is yes, it works occasionally. But there is no sure-fire, consistent means of killing off the tank spam short of having a tanker of your own in your squad. Let's say you run a 70,000isk AV fit (mine's MUCH more, but let's stick with just 70k to be conservative) and you all die 4 times a match running an AV squad (again, conservative estimates on deaths for an AV squad these days). 6 people sacrificing their K/D ratio, W/L ratio, WP count, and 280,000isk per player per game (that's 1,680,000isk combined btw) is not worth it to make 4 tankers go 30/1 instead of 35/0 on the other side and make them loose a grand total of 300,000isk combined.