CCP Rattati wrote:MINA Longstrike wrote:CCP Rattati wrote:Exactly. Some pilots just keep hammering this topic in an effort to win some forum points. Nobody is listening to this particular rhetoric at CCP.
It's not rhetoric if it's true Rattati, it's called arguing the point. Many of us find swarms so frustrating because they are mathematically guaranteed to hit. Its 'consistency' has often been a very frustrating point of balance, I remember 1.6 gameplay where I was shot down by swarm fire from the
other side of the map by someone who went 'oh noes there's a dropship out time to grab a swarm and aggressively hold r1 at this thing that offends me while standing on a nanohive for forever!'
The balance pendulum has swung many times on the swarm where it's gone from overpowered (pre 1.7) to useless (1.7 triple rep maddies) to powerful (hey it could kill tanks again!) to useless (dropships need only hit an afterburner to zoom away!) to powerful again (get too close to a swarm launcher and you are dead - user skill is irrelevant).
Maybe it's time to re-think the weapon from the ground up as it's clear that its current form is fundamentally flawed from a balance standpoint. I'd love to see a swarm launcher that can be boiled down to a wordsoup of 'plasma cannon + av grenade lockon'.
Who is more likely to die, the swarmer or the ADS?
The ADS. Once we start getting hit by swarms we almost always have to run, because we don't have the tank to handle that much incoming damage.
Here's the thing; right now we have a swarm that has enough speed to catch the ADS and enough damage to kill tanks. This is part of the problem. I created a thread about
making the assault swarm launcher anti-air while having the regular swarm launcher focus on anti-armor against tanks, but the problem is we are dealing with a weapon that
1) is supposed to be strong enough to deal with tanks, while fast enough to catch ADS when ADS don't have tank levels of health
2) we have no way of knowing when they are coming in until they hit our ship. Multiple pilots have talked about having some sort of warning system so we know we are in danger.
ADS don't want to be invincible in the sky. We just want to be able to fight back when someone uses AV. Rendering is still an issue for ADS, but even if it wasn't, we have no idea which one of those infantry is AV and therefore a threat to us, so we cannot respond properly until we are already being attacked. And then when we are being attacked, I'm dealing with damage meant for busting tanks when I struggle to fit enough HP to reach current base tank health. I honestly feel like separating the assault swarm to be anti-ADS and the regular swarm to be anti-tank is a great step in the right direction, because it means we can balance the two independently of each other; upping damage on the regular swarms to handle stronger tanks doesn't upset the balance between the assault swarm and ADS. But a warning system would also be another great step towards balance. I don't need to know where they are coming from, I just need to know they are coming.