Originally posted by AKWabbit
Hitech,
I think Tac overstates his case, but its not a sentiment completely unshared by others in the arena.
I don't think its off by much, but sometimes they seem a little overly lethal.
Do the buff guns have the exact same range as the fifties on fighters?
The guns have the same range, but the buff guns have a boost to maximum
effective range to account for net lag. Least that is what Pyro said long ago shortly after he and I went round and round about the buff guns being too weak. This used to be a pretty heated debate, and IIRC changes to the buff guns were made after Pyro had gunned for me on a B-17 and an N1K took us down from a near level 6 attack.
A prime example of what that counters, JonnyB and I jumped a pair of spit14s that were on another squadmate. Spit1 takes some hits and runs for the deck and home. Couple turns with spit2, he takes some hits and starts to disengage. At 600yds on my FE I decided to give him a parting shot and climb to disengage. I hit, he starts to pull up and I lay down on the trigger and send him spiraling down to mother earth. 600yds on my FE. He told me he thought he was safe because he was seeing 950 on his FE, and he was starting to open the range, which is what prompted the decision for a parting shot and climb to disengage.
Personally I think the pendulum swung a little far to the other side when the guns were adjusted. If a decent gunner dials you in you're dead, no questions asked and no chance to get away. So now the trick is more about not getting hit at all instead of trading a few holes in your airplane for doing damage to the fluff. But one of those few holes could verra well remove your wing and/or tail surfaces. In a flight with Xaqut1 as my lead we engaged a flight of 6 B17s. All 6 17s went down and Xaqut1 and I flew away with no damage to our ponies at all. It can be done. There is a balance of sorts here, but my personal opinion is that it's leaning a little too far in favor of the fluffs.
Now, Dale, a couple of questions if I may.
Do the buff guns still have that minor twink for effective range to counter the net lag? Or has that been removed? Deffinately feels like it's still there, which I think is a good thing. Considering what I posted above about the Spit14 and net lag and all.
And, is AH coded so you hear every hit on your aircraft that is made from a buff's guns? I know in vehicles I've been to the tower pleny of times and keep hearing hits after I've respawned, and jumped to the gun on my GV to see what's shooting me only to realize the sounds were from my previous death. Same with fighters shooting me down while I'm in a fighter, plenty of times I've heard hits after landing back in the tower.
But never from the buff guns. On the occasions I'm sent back staight to the tower I never hear the additional hits, and I rarely hear the 1 single hit (always the first in these cases) that caused the pilot death. Other times I see the tracers coming at me, don't hear any hits of any kind, then suddenly 1 or 2 big crunch sounds and my aircraft has been transformed into a flaming, spinning lawn dart missing one or both wings, all tail surfaces (or even the entire empenage), and 3/4 of the damage list red. All from just those 1 or 2 big damage crunch sounds. Of course, in this instance, once my kite has been turned into a flaming piece of falling wreckage I don't hear anymore hits.
In contrast, when attacking the ack on a field I have had times where I've survived 2-3 of those big crunch sounds w/ no damage at all. Same against fighters, hear the sound, get a little bit of space and hit ctrl-D to see what's bent and adjust my tactics accordingly, but nothing is red on the list.
Something in the buff guns needs to be looked at. But there's probably so many aspects/variables that I don't know about that I couldna tell ya what it is.
BTW, I've still got a film of me in a B-17 taking down another B-17 at a range of 1.4k. This was, I believe, in ver 1.03, just a few days before ver 1.04 came out. If the guns haven't been changed since then maybe it could help?
