Feedback on Fire Support

With the most recent patch, we saw the number of unsatisfying and poorly performing supports increase rather than decrease. Unfortunately, this seems to be a trend, as supports seem to only have gotten worse with each patch.

Therefore I think it would be useful to make a list of all the supports that aren't really up to snuff, why they feel unsatisfying and what would make them better/useful again.

1. Helicopters: Not a round goes by when I don't see one or both of these get shot down by bots, often within seconds of arriving. As things stand, helicopters seem like a trivial threat to bots and a substantial threat to the players; while players are still forced into cover, the bots just blow the things right out of the sky

The worst part of this is that the helicopters were actually pretty good till a little while ago, when they acted like genuinely powerful but limited support and justified their one time only use by actually being powerful and not a massive gamble.

Ideally, a helicopter getting shot down, especially by bots, should be an extremely rare occurrence instead of the guaranteed one that it currently is. It's okay to see this occasionally, say once in a dozen matches, but any more and it just makes the support unstasfying and too much of a gamble.

2. Explosive Drone: This one has been nigh on useless since the beginning. It's gotten to the point where you don't even consider calling it in, since there's only 2 outcomes that you'll ever see; either it gets shot down or it glitches/gets stuck and never reaches the target.

I think that a simple solution would be to make it swoop down from up top (thus avoiding the many obstacles that it inevitably gets stuck on) and attack as a guided bomb (descending from a high altitude, guiding itself to the biggest target/largest enemy concentration, and exploding) instead of meandering in at a low altitude.

3. Poison Gas: The only somewhat useful one of the lot. The problem with this is that it doesn't really permeate the area it does hit, and even when it does, it's area of effect and duration leave much to be desired.

Make the gas permeate the area it hits and make it spread much further out.

4. Rocket Barrages: A somewhat infrequent, but very annoying bug seems to occur, where every so often, the rocket barrage just doesn't show up. No idea whether it doesn't spawn, or just explodes somewhere uselessly; but the bug is extremely annoying.

I'm bumping this because apart from the Explosive Drone, the other supports have either remained unchanged or actually gotten worse this patch.

Special mention goes out to the helicopters, which seem to get destroyed even more frequently by the bots. So while the players' response of hiding and taking occasional potshots hasn't changed, the bots just down those helos within seconds of arrival.

@cool_lad said in Feedback on Fire Support:

The worst part of this is that the helicopters were actually pretty good till a little while ago, when they acted like genuinely powerful but limited support and justified their one time only use by actually being powerful and not a massive gamble.

Special mention goes out to the helicopters, which seem to get destroyed even more frequently by the bots. So while the players' response of hiding and taking occasional potshots hasn't changed, the bots just down those helos within seconds of arrival.

I can explain this easily for ya. Critical components.

1.12 added the ability to take down helicopters with standard weapons if you can land shots on certain weakspots, like rotors. However, the rotors, in particular, are extremely fragile. They take four Mosin rounds, five FAL rounds, eight AKM rounds or ten M4A1 rounds to destroy.

1.13 doubled the helicopter's hitpoints. However, the health of the rotors have remained unchanged, so this tweak failed to solve anything as the bots target the rotors.

last edited by MarksmanMax

@MarksmanMax said in Feedback on Fire Support:

I can explain this easily for ya. Critical components.

Also, from my observations, it seems when players call in a helicopter on bots the bots react by making attacking the helicopter a higher priority than anything other than directly engaging a player. This means if you call in a helicopter at the start of an objective defense, all the bots that just spawned in stop moving to the objective and start shooting at the helicopter. They don't seem to run and hide like players do.

If the AI were changed to make not getting seen by the helicopter a higher priority than killing the helicopter, we might see the helicopters survive longer.

I think that if you don't have an AMR (for targeting rotors) or Rockets, you should have no business taking down helicopters. Even damaging critical components should only be a thing for AMRs; it's pretty ludicrous that any other gun would be able to bring them down in any amount of shots.

It's like a mechanic where you can shoot the fuel tank cap or engine on a technical to make it explode; makes about as much sense as an M4A1 briging down an Apache in 4 shots.

@cool_lad said in Feedback on Fire Support:

I think that if you don't have an AMR (for targeting rotors) or Rockets, you should have no business taking down helicopters. Even damaging critical components should only be a thing for AMRs; it's pretty ludicrous that any other gun would be able to bring them down in any amount of shots.

Yah. Technically, small arms fire can cause critical damage to a helicopter if it hits the right spot and with enough velocity, but it's fairly unlikely. Even our big .50 BMG anti-material rifles are on the small end by anti-aircraft gun standards.

I got killed by gas magically going through a wall recently, so that's a no. . .

The rest is accurate I think.

Should probably update with the status of the supports now.

The 2 most seriously in need of improvement are still the helicopters and the drone.

The drone at least makes it to somewhere near the target, but it still keeps getting shot and is thus, even now, nigh on useless.

The helicopters continue to keep getting shot down even now and are thus not really worth relying on. You call in 2 and maybe the second one makes it if you're lucky; they're too much of a gamble and not much of a support due to this unreliability.

At this stage, maybe the best solution would be to simply make the AI stop targeting these supports altogether, since leaving them as they are just consigns them to mediocrity.

Gas still needs some love. I think that it needs to spread a lot more and remain in the area for a much greater amount of time to be genuinely valuable.

I think it's bots using the new anti-materiel rifles that keep making short work of the helicopters in Coop.

last edited by Luri

@cool_lad totally agree with you. Esp IED is totally useless stucking disspointment.

last edited by Sulfur