AWFUL Alternatives to Vanu Meta Weapons - Planetside 2 RANT

B-Roll: Roulden

[ZealousVidya]

Note: In the video I said the TAR and hv-45 have same stats, so at least that is fair.
I was wrong, TAR has 40 instead of 30 ammo.

[Garlan]

i can see your point of "is not that important if Vanu weapons dont perform well for me"; you seem like a very relaxed and chill kinda person on Planetside. But i cant help myself to think about the all "it's an MMO game, gunplay is not that important". Planetside is a MMO "FPS". we cant just forget this is a shooter game because there is MMO preceding the name. Gunplay is the most important part of the game. We're not playing FF15, we're not playing Onwards, weìre not playing a genering asian MMO. It's a Gunfight game. and i'm sorry, but if i see that my faction weapons get nerfed because being OP and "everywhere" and then i see the other faction using 2 weapons counted (that recently became OP due to the arsenal "balance") and winning all the fights for it, then i just raise my hands and say "what's the point ? what made Vanu op weapons unaccettable and the other factions not ?"

[djm.o.d.]

what I find "funny" about this, is while playing, VS guns feel weakest, playing a heavy now, feels like I either get out damaged from NC or out paced with TR fire rates, VS weapons also have the same "kick" as physically firing a bullet instead of feeling like firing "energy weapons". I still enjoy playing VS and heavy even though recent patch changed it all up.
Right now, it really seems like the "difference" you get for being a VS is just "purple colored with laser sounds". IMO if they made VS weapons feel more like shooting "advanced tech lasers" instead of bullets colored purple it would be better, but then again would probably break what little "balance" they have...

[rodneywoods]

Well, for Vanu, at least they improved the Immortal reward pistol you get at master pistol rank. It now has unlimited ammo which makes it perfect for stalker gameplay - It now really is a true beamer upgrade. And it frees me from having to use ammo printer. right now I'm experimenting with target focus and assassin implant or vampire. It is so useful knowing how much health your target has left without having to reveal your location.

[Thiccmatty]

As a VS main I find the new changes to be a little underwhelming, but I'm finding ways to get kills with most Directive weapons anyway. If you practice with them, they are still valid in certain scenarios. I think this could be leading to a shift towards better loadout management for players as more weapons become useful in specific situations. I think this would be great for the game overall as it would encourage newer players to learn more about how each weapon is meant to be used, or even what attachments they should be going for when creating a specific build for a class.

I hope the devs decide to start sharing specific reasons why changes are made so that we as a community can at least be up to speed on why things are tweaked the way they are. Even a short, point form list for each item (e.g. attachment X was removed because XYZ...) would be enough to keep the players informed, instead of being left to guess about why things are done the way they are.

[Shadowhawkdark]

The majority of the time when I see complaints about VS weapons, its mostly in relation to them not having as high of DPS as other factions. The problem with that mindset is that its either really low tier players that don't actually 'need' the higher DPS because they are missing half their shots, or its higher tier players that 'do' need the higher DPS because they never miss their shots.

VS weapons are actually great if you look at them in the lens of "increased chance of hitting" even if they shoot less bullets. Imagine you could see each gun as shooting the actual number of bullets as their RPM. 698rpm shoots 698 bullets essentially. Now imagine the number of "hits" someone gets by having the higher or lower RPMs. It should be that given the exact same recoil statistics, a higher RPM weapon has a harder time being controlled and therefore is much more likely to miss, so its completely possible that someone that shoots/hits at a rate of 698/450 would actually end up worse off and end up shooting/hitting 750/375 or possibly at an even worse 'rate'. Even then, that "ratio" that I showed wouldn't be that bad, its when the recoil gets aggressively different that people don't realize how much they might be 'wasting'. 167 dmg weapons make things complicated in comparison to 143dmg matching 143dmg, so it's harder to compare capabilities and accuracies between NC and VS, but VS and TR are extremely comparable.

There are other factors involved in true DPS I will admit though. Aimed fire accuracy and recoil will almost always go in VS's favor, but obviously raw DPS won't. Reload speed tends to go in their favor too, but mag size doesn't, causing a bit of a disconnect between the two that might be more important than people realize--this might actually be a "bigger" issue for VS weapons than the DPS, since TR has a greater ability to move from one target to the next, and high tier players have an even better chance of moving on to a third player within the same mag-VS with lower accuracies is limited to killing 1-2 players while great players have to be more tactical and use their environment to work their faster reloads but can probably still consistently get 2 players per reload. That isn't to say that VS and TR can't kill more per mag, but it becomes much more unrealistic beyond those numbers, due to imperfections in accuracy, the amount of time it takes each enemy to be killed, and the fact that eventually someone's (hopefully) going to clue in on whats happening and turn around to shoot back.

[Xriswest]

Immersion, community and unique combined arms combat is what makes this good. A lot of other games are missing that and it's an important part to liking the game as a whole. If you are wanting to be super competitive, this game may not be for you. It honestly has a pedestrian game engine, average gun play, still riddled with hackers, pseudo-balanced, and a very laggy performance. It would be really nice if all those things could come together in one game and be great.

[CallofWar]

I dont play vanu very much. but they are my most feared faction to face. I do feel like they are harder to fight since their players are better and their tanks are hard to fight. I also play on the ps4, TR main and I'm not very good.

maybe I should try them out again. back in the day when I played them, I had fun with most of their weapons.

[spff]

I think what your looking at in this video is the double edged sword of faction flavour imo, all the factions get this to some degree.

The TR have the best cqc weapons in general due to their large magazines and higher rates of fire, but they suffer at ranged engagements because of a lack of weapon accuracy and fairly large sprinklings of horizontal recoil.
The NC have the best overall damage models for medium to long range engagements but at the cost of lower rates of fire, generally high recoils and a weakness in CQC.
Where as Vanu sits somewhere in the middle with good rates of fire and decent damage models with good handling naturally along with no bullet drop on the majority of your weapons, at the cost of weapon attachments and the fact that you are not specialised to any particular engagement range.

In regards specifically to the Orion, Anchor and MSR - W this can clearly be seen with the major differences between them being
the Orion does not get access to a compensator or SPA but has the best natural hip fire accuracy and best COF bloom values with no bullet drop.
The MSW-R gets both SPA and Compensator but has ironically a worse hip fire accuracy and higher COF Bloom Values than the Orion but otherwise shares the exact same damage model as it.
The Anchor being the best meta lmg for the NC for cqc has the worst hip fire the worst COF bloom out of the three but has the best moving accuracy of any NC lmg and can theoretically kill .04 of a second faster than both of its competitors if you land its shots.

Overall what we see is the MSW - R being biased for the best cqc effectiveness due to it being easier to use and having good attachment options, with the anchor being better at range due to its damage model and the Orion which can fight both weapons at slightly reduced effectiveness, theoretically outperforming the MSW-R in extreme cqc due to its better accuracy and outperforming the anchor at extreme ranges due to its lack of bullet drop.

These Trends apply to most faction weapons with the doku weapons being notable exceptions and I think looking weapons and saying lmao we only have like three meta weapons and everything else is trash is a very poor attitude to have due to the nature of the game, you will never have the best weapon for every scenario and even these "meta" lmgs will get out performed by other weapons in different circumstances.

And in regards to Vanu directive weapons getting a 20% reduction to mag size in exchange for attachments and infinite ammo, seemed like a good trade to me imo.

Please don't take this the wrong way as I do like these videos I just felt the need to comment on this one as I thought it was a pretty bad take, I think you are vastly underestimating how effective weapons are outside the "meta" and how the gunplay between the factions actually plays out in relation to the live game.

[coleajluni]

As someone who fights vanu all the time, the weapons are definitely worse, but my vanu versus tr kdr is still about the same so I think it comes down to vanu having more skilled players, also as dumb as this sounds, vanu are much more camouflaged at night and I find myself getting clapped whenever the sun goes down. Also I think there is just a totally different mindset in vanu fighting style, either stealthy infils or cracked heavys, there aren't too many light assaults roaming around. They are a very solo fighting style faction (ie lone magrider, lone infil) and there strength comes from other things than just there dps. Still it would be nice to see a slight buff to their other weapons to add some variety.

[tantrumsam]

I gotta say, people obsessed with the "meta" weapons and loadouts and all that crap are playing the wrong game. The whole point of this game, the apex of it's brilliance, is that there really isn't a "meta" anything here. The number of possible types of engagements in this game is so astronomically large that there is not and never will be a 100% best loadout option for ANY faction. Every time someone makes a video like this, they go back to same 4 or 5 weapons. Orion, Gauss Saw, vangaurd, minigun, Underboss, etc. It doesn't matter. Whatever the argument is, it doesn't mean anything because with every single weapon in the game, there are more scenarios where that weapon will be bad than there are scenarios where that weapon will be good. That's the whole point. It's a mixed arms combat simulator. If one faction is doing something the other factions think is unfair or unbalanced, there are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of potential responses that will tip the scale. Yes, some people get set in their ways and do the same exact thing over and over again and get really good at doing that one thing. Kudos to them! I guarantee that they have had countless encounters in game where they're absolutely melting people for what seems like forever and then up comes the one guy out of 300 who just happens to be running the class and loadout best suited to fight this person and boom. The reign of terror is ended in 0.4 seconds. When these situations happen, is the sweaty, melty, super awesome, high skilled player justified is complaining that the faction of the person who killed them is OP? Or maybe that faction's weapons? Or maybe just that person's particular loadout or class? Never mind that they just pulled a 12 kill streak and have an overall KD of 2.2 while the person who killed might be brand freaking new and have a KD of 0.4.

Every engagement, every weapon, every loadout, every faction has pros and cons. To try to rate all the possible combinations and take an average and call out a singular winner is an exercise in insanity. It's my experience that people who get so wound up about this are often much more rigid with their play style. This game encourages players to think outside the normal lines of engagement and heavily rewards creativity and teamwork. That's the real meta. If you join a group of people that get along well and play cohesively and creatively, you and your pals will ALMOST ALWAYS have the advantage in any given engagement (accepting that there are other groups of people who are also good at playing cohesively and creatively that you may come into contact with.) I can't tell you how many times a single, well coordinated squad has utterly wiped the floor with me and my team mates. It's happened to me on VS, on TR, and on NC. Doesn't matter. And every single time, without fail, members of that squad that just took a royal dump on us are all over the board in terms of classes, loadouts, ranks, skill levels, everything.

While comparing individual weapon stats is valuable information, you can't make accurate inferences on the macro scale aspects of the game based on a single weapon's stats. If you zoom out far enough, you'll see that over time each faction is successful and victorious just about an equal amount of time, regardless of weapon balancing. So saying things like "VS is OP because no bullet drop" is absurd. There's no way to substantiate that claim, just like there's no way to substantiate "TR is OP because Mosquitoes are too hard to hit" or "NC is OP because splat max". All factions get their time in the sun and that time is not dictated by weapon stats.

[giannerino]

TR has 90% of their weapons with 40 ammo in their magazine compensaiting the bad weapon accuracy of the new player, NC has 90% of their weapons with 167/200 dmg model that compensate the skill issue / iq of the average player (also after the nerf of the nanoweave the reaction time MUST be on point to avoid getting clapped by a 200 dmg model weapon), and VS has... well... orion LOL that seems balanced 2 faction being braindead 360° wile people say VS are broken because new players can get easy kills with the Orion, like meta weapons are a thing only in PS2. i wanna specify i played TR for about 4 years so this are not words from a FACTION LOYALIST

[marcinzysko]

Die hard Lancer fan here:
Most of battles are won through major firepower, that only a tank can provide.
And there is no better counter to enemy vechicles than The vechicle sniper rifle. Lancer grants best battlefield control. Has the longest range and can land shots where no other weapon can. If you can lead your shots, you can shoot down anything from infantry to esf's.
Just recently, Lancer got a dmg buff so its no longer as usless as it used to be for few years.

[attackpig]

Do you even play the other factions? "The magrider isn't that strong" - the magrider is the best vehicle in the game, period. Any semi experienced player can pull a magrider and go on a ridiculous killstreak that results in them getting bountied. Pay attention in the next armor fight you're in, EVERY single magrider is bountied while the opposition struggles to hit them because they can just turbo-strafe to dodge everything.

The truth is Vanu has been overpowered for YEARS and nerfs are necessary for them at this point if you want to keep the game alive. The magrider is too powerful and needs to be reeled in, the turbo needs to take the utility slot again instead of being "free" and upgradable to a point where it essentially becomes a high HP harasser with 2 weapons.

Vanu infantry weapons have also been way too powerful. You're getting the SAME damage model weapons as the other two factions with a more controllable recoil and unlimited ammo on some of them - how is that fair? I've had many conversations about this and several Vanu mains admitted that all the good players strictly play that faction because over all the weapons, vehicles and "special tech" are significantly superior to what the other two have to offer.

Honestly, it seems like you're a newer player who's only really played Vanu and if that's the case you have no business giving biased takes on game balance.

[Seekerz]

Pre-arsenal, i think the issue was beetle/orion being too good. Ive played with the orion and SVA, and both can be equally good and effective to use, just the orion being way more flexible. The pulsar is good too, with the only weapon id say being actually bad is the flare. It is the 167 dmg iirc lmg for vs, but compared to every other wep in the game, gauss saw included, it just felt so unwieldy and extreme to use, even for burst fire.

Fast forward to arsenal, and now it feels like most weapons just now perform as great as the orion does, or even better then the orion. This has somewhat broken immersion and frankly, feels like its made VS almost outclassed in most scenarios, because it feels like these attachments straight up cover other weapon downsides to a major degree while applying only a minor benefit to VS guns. I think its ridiculous VS say every gun but the orion is bad when in reality the orion is just the most flexible. But now it just feels like VS guns are bad in general compared to NC and TR.

[JanBoyZ]

@5:00 that Ant defense is *mwuah*~ french kiss~

[lloydrobins]

So the devs don't want one faction stronger than the others? Answer, nerf VS. Except on CERES, on PS4/5, VS is the WEAKEST faction. I've just spent the day trying to deal with the fact that all my directive reward weapons are now close to useless. The Skorpios is a joke. It fires now for so short a time before overheating that with my network lag, I'm reloading before my shots have registered. The Eclipse and Betelgeuse are not much better. The devs have all but destroyed the VS directive weapons, and on a server where NC and TR regularly run roughshod over VS, you have to wonder what's the point of playing. I don't like NC or TR, and have always played VS because underdog, but the devs have done the equivalent of kicking the dog when it's down and dying. Thanks Wrel. Really good way to destroy a faction, nerf it's best weapons. If you nerfed NCs weapons on CERES there would be hell to pay, but VS just has to put up with it...

[BigWyrm]

Also dont forget the new AMR's, once again VS gets the shit end of the stick. Why? There is no legit reason to keep handicapping VS.
SMDH :/

[dust]

i think the VS no bullet drop thing is only good for longer ranges makes it super useless mostly compared to tr cipls size and or nc power r way more usfall bake in ps1 vs weps did AP&AV maybe bring that back i feel like thay need something for shorter ranges

[HeyNavi]

What’s the name of the pink weapon you are using?