Why was the Support's Airstrike 'nerfed'?

fixed that for ya.

anywho, all that about removing juice and all, then steam version is your friend. xbox version needs juice to break turtles, and you cant make too many custom servers on xbox, so its stuck like that.

its fine the way it is but supports could maybe use an airstrike cooldown thats in between the old and new ones. but the assault bomb does need to either regen after the first bomb is gone (like firebases), or the cooldown needs slower by like 20%, BUT NOT BOTH. also, might be useful to make assault bombs destructable in the same way ice traps are. and i play assault, thats noble of me to even say this

if i was sxd, id be trolling the piss out of anyone mentioning an assault nerf. but i understand he is trying to watch out for his own back. you cant expect others to watch your back for you, i understand.

Yes. Gold rate, silver skills and bronze armor. Silver skills mostly for Hack. How I've always played Support.

Airstrikes are useless against pros (that have ears), and if you have a team that knows what they're doing, you shouldn't be pushing bots as the Support. You should be supporting your team. Clue's in the title. Oh yeah, airstrikes are useful for Jackie Bot, too. Even then an Assault's bomb is better.

Pre-Spunky, a Support could walk out of his spawn at the beginning of the match, find the closest slim bot, over heal it all the way to the enemy base, juice and drop a couple air strikes on the rockets and drop the ball in the first minute of the game. This was my routine for almost every match.

Uber nerfed the juice gain from healing and nerfed the airstrike recovery time to where this isn't possible anymore. The way I see it, the juice gain rate was enough to prevent this but the air strike nerf was a bit too much.

Just my opinion though.

I don't agree. I consistently push as a support - the bot buff aura is really built for the support to push.

I follow a tank/gunner that's pushing. Bot buff aura works really well in that situation.

Confining the support's role based on the name has always been, IMHO, a rather short-sighted way to play the class.

I find airstrikes to be very useful against pros...whether they actually kill them or not. Airstrikes aren't just about hitting pros...they're also useful in pushing pros back and staking a claim to a spot in the map. And if you're any good with a toss, you can throw airstrikes into the thick of things from a distance, so at least pros don't see you throwing the airstrikes until hopefully too late. I just have a hard time believing any good support would think airstrikes are useless against pros.

And regarding pushing bots: unless you start a match an specifically want to turtle the whole game, there is a way to be highly effective as support in controlling one bot late at least halfway up the map. You may lose your firebase periodically, but you're being a pest and positioning yourself to help your fellow pros via heals, because if you're at least somewhat on the offensive, you should be beside others who are clearing bots or pros out of the way.

I agree, I get Ground Zero'd ALL THE FREAKING TIME. Normally by a friggin' level 1 airstrike, too. If anything, airstrikes are more powerful now, since people know how to throw them

Obviously, you're not going to be swayed, so I'll post my normal plan and leave it at that:

Stage 1: Set up firebase for map control.
Stage 2: Periodically return to base to Hack
Stage 2: Using bot support aura, assist teammates (normally a Tank) in pushing.
Stage 3:Use Airstrikes to destroy enemy turrets

Note also that I don't limit the classes based on their names. I clear the bots as an Assassin, I rarely snipe as a Sniper (yeah that is bad, but I can't snipe). Support just happens to be a great description.

I think that sums it up.

Except that was really due to Juicing as you already pointed out. Support's ease and rate of Jucing used to be an issue. Juice rate reduction, no juice gain from overheal, regen rate slow as dirt, no regen during respawn (which was supposed to just be about FB skill regeneration while it was still deployed and you were dead), FB deploy nerf, decreased hack duration, RoF almost required for H/H gun due to another nerf from first patch, hack enemy turrent increased, hack enemy only @ lvl 3, airstrike nerf, etc. decreased $ rate due to do all the changes (unless you are playing in a pub and drop your FB in bot lane)...etc.. again, it's not just about the Airstrike regen time that hurt the Airstrike, its all of it added together. Some of the nerfs, such as Juice gain and overheal gain, hack through walls, etc. were totally called for, but the sum of all these nerfs really hurt the guy. You have to upgrade pretty much everything, you have to use specific skills, etc. I could go on and on, but im so sick of this topic. I'll will say though, if you missed the thread where I broke down the # Airstikes available by regen time, match length, gold endorsement, death, etc. that the fact you can only get 25-30 off if the match goes through OT (with gold), is absolutely crazy. It as though they were thinking of # of uses divided by match length and nothing else.

And unlike what PEN was trying to say... It is not BS that no one (or very few) people complained about the airstrike. If there were additional complaints they must have come from emails. The forum is still fully intact, its easy to go back and read/search, and its been proven many times (and remembered easily by everyone that was around then) that this was not a legit or often brought up complaint... however, Juicing definitely was.

Anyways, this is starting to seem like a worthless repeated topic because Uber does appear to have some adjustment plans if the PC can be taken as any kind of indicator.

I do agree with you on all of these points, Mute. The answer to why the airstike was nerfed was summed up pretty simply by SHSTiger. That's why I quoted him.

The rest of the list you made is the reason I don't play Support when I play solo. If my team refuses to push, I am screwed if I play Support. He has nearly ZERO offensive power if your team won't push. Hell, I've won games as an Assault while the rest of my team turtled. I pushed bots, took out rockets and dropped the moneyball damn near solo. It is much more difficult to do that now as a Support. He has been nerfed to the point of being almost obsolete in the current meta game.

I agree with Jon#'s earlier comment that the air strike nerf on top of the juice nerf was a bit much. But I still see a lot of great supports out there, including the OP. Solo support just isn't as viable as it once was, you actually do need to support your team to maximise your potential.

Zombie Chaos spent a couple of rounds with his heal gun stuck firmly up my gunner's butt last night and it felt good! We were pretty much unstoppable. You need to be fairly selfless to play that way and do it for the team/win though. He ended each round with only a handful of kills, so if end game stats make your epeen swell, it ain't for you.

On topic, I'd be happy to see a slight un-nerfing of the airstrike recharge rate, although I still find it very useful when I play support, just not in the crazily offensive way I did pre-nerf.

Yeah Jon, I'm with you. Was really meaning to add to what you had said in earlier posts.. not take anything away.

I'm one of the lucky few that doesn't care about end game stats. We win I'm happy.
We lose, I did my best to win. Always been like that.

Moot, anytime you need my heal gun up in there again let me know.

Nerfed as in, increased the cooldown time for it?

The nerf was unwarranted that's why they switched it back in the PC version of the game and it will probably return to pre-nerf status on 360 as well once we get an update.

Yep. It used to take 10 seconds to recover 1 air strike at level 3 with silver skill regen. Now it's close to 25-30. :cry:

Not unwarranted, more excessive.

In my opinion, firebases should have gotten the nerf and the airstrike should have remained the same.

I'm not sure if the airstrike "nerf" was warranted or not.

I do think nearer the release and early stages of the game the airstrike did help make the support seem OP as he has a lot of "indirect" (something besides directly shooting/slicing/grappling) ways to damage (eg: firebases, airstrikes, one of the strongest spawnable bots, built and hacked turrets, etc). This took the general community as a whole a fair amount of time to really learn how to deal with. In my opinion, that would have been a better time to nerf the airstrike cooldown.

The issue I have with it now is that as the community has progressed and become better informed and practiced at dealing with all the classes, fewer people have trouble grasping how to deal with a support. More people move away from airstrikes on average now than they used too, more understand the concept of supports throwing beacons on the level below you to have the airstrike come down on your higher vantage, more folks know how and when to attack firebases, etc.

In that light, I am not sure the nerf for the airstrike being in effect now is as good for the game balance as it would have been early on, if that makes sense.

However, I am probably part of the statistic the developers used to decide to nerf the airstrike as I exclusively played support from the day the game came out until the spunky dlc. In those months there were very rarely times I didn't lead in kills and money unless against organized teams (I don't play competitively, so this is entirely from a pub game perspective and only my own opinion). Airstrikes were plentiful and with the help of watching some good supports chunk them (greg/showyourheart in particular) i got to the point where i would attack any class without fear as my airstrikes could limit their range advantage and force them to either run away or come closer into shotgun/firebase range. I got my "skymaster" protag before my 2500th shotgun or hurtgun kill.

My rambling point here is the support was, in my opinion, a viable mainslayer before the nerf while also being a reasonably effective turret killer. Now he struggles more with both of those but retains his bot pushing abilities and his true "supporting" strengths with healing and such.

So I'm not sure he's broken so much as his role strengths definitely got altered. However I feel as the community as a whole progresses and develops and the knowledge base of how to counter classes spreads, it might be worth giving him his airstrikes back or finding another suitable way to increase his effectiveness against the classes with exponentially stronger ranged attacks. Which I believe is pretty much every class.


tl;dr: I would have agreed to the cooldown nerf in the first 4 months of the game. However, I think the metagame has changed enough they need that tool in the current state of the game.


Just my thoughts.

(I swapped to maining assault post-dlc because, though i try to deny it, i like seeing my kdr go up. And assault vs support is pretty much comical unless the support somehow uses his ninja skills to sneak up and get a point blank shotgun blast.)

Well stated sir.