With forge being such a game changer, honestly, I love disagreeing with Charlotte, I have to agree. Maybe give something back to assault players with an indoor map, inside a ship, something with out murder taxis.

Best bet is lower the forge out of a 2/3 shot weapon. See what we get once it is 4/5. Maybe resistance if a nerf is too much.

Give us prototype vehicles and our 5%/lvl PG skill back. Everything will be solved.



Can I please get some input from the AV guys on this? Is there a reason we should have to use standard gear to defend against proto gear?

Yes, nerfing the one and only player skill based AV weapon is clearly the best option...

I guess I might be a little butthurt that a forge does more damage then a large turret. Could resistances be a better option?
I feel both sides of the field. Getting a 2/3 shot is amazing, but... Receiving it and no clue where or where to run is frightening. Even more when it is coming from redicilous heights.

All or nothing.

Inb4 other vehicle drivers call for nerfs anyway, unless you absolutely suck as a driver its a pain in the ass to deal with vehicles

Ok just correct me here... but the only proto vehicle you have right now is the logi LAV right?

My prototype FG can 2/3 shot a militia/poor standard tank sure... as i think it should. But trying to take out adv vehicles is difficult even with proto weapons.
The Logi LAV can already take multiple FG shots, not taking into account theyre damn impossible to hit lol.

I think things arent perfect at the moment... dropships for one need a good going over, higher tiers need to be added and THEN we can properly look at the balancing.

The way CCP has chosen to make Vehicles, AV, Infantry rock paper scissors makes it very difficult to balance properly. Right now its all or nothing. Vehicles can murder infantry without risk, but as soon as two (solid)+ AV units are on the field, working together,

Good analysis of the problem. Right now all parts of the rock-paper-scissors-game are unhappy because neither losing nor winning is fun. Either you are losing without defense or winning without effort.

One way to reduce this effect would be to implement more anti-vehicle/anti-infantry hybrid weapons I believe. The plasma cannon is a good, if ultimately useless, attempt at this. Improve the mass driver's anti-vehicle capability, let the forge trade some direct damage dps for lowered charge-time to hit infantry better and reintroduce a dumb-fire-mechanic on the swarm launcher that doesn't kill everything in turn for some lower damage output.

Suddenly you will see a lot more AV hybrids on the field and as such a much slower progression from "I'm an unstoppable for of nature"" to "I had no chance of defending myself!" and vice-versa for everyone involved.

That "solid AV" you're talking about is AV grenade spam. That's all it takes to put a good Madrugar at less than half armor.

Ill agree to a lot of HAV complaints, but not with AV nade spam. AV nade spam works against overly aggressive or bad tankers (not the same thing). But tankers with ANY infantry support or good map awareness, its useless. Me and my buddy used to try and run our AV through nades and we would just spend all match chasing tanks and dying to snipers and other infantry (or tanks if they tracked us well).

Then we switched to a forge / swarm combo and we destroy tanks left and right.

AV nades work as a good supplement to regular AV, and maybe to help finish off tanks who have fled from other AV. But as a primary AV, nah, its bad against decent tankers.

Other tankers will hate me for this, but other than the fact that it's officer forge vs standard tank, i have no problem with forge guns. They require skill and do reasonable damage for their level. Let's assume we had ADV tanks with 8k HP and PRO with >10k HP. Suddenly, they don't seem so powerful.

I think mlt AV is too powerful for it's cost and it does its job too well for being militia.

My other issue with AV is the PRICE of AV nades. I, and most other tankers, have figured out that keeping 20m away from infantry will due away with the nade spam. If the cost of AV grenades were increased to 6k for basic, 10k for adv, and 20k for pro, it'd be better because it only takes 2k isk to kill a maddy, right now.

Plasma cannon is UP- mostly because of the unpredictable arc and velocity of the round.

Swarms are fine, except for that they're a no-skill weapon and should probably do far less damage than a forge based on that, alone. Perhaps if only ADV and PRO swarms could lock on...

Another thing to help with the LAV problem would be if we had a lock-on version of missile turrets. That's about 2020 Damage/volley. No lav can live through that, short of a charybdis.