Hover tweaks needed

Discussion
1

Hi all!

I’m wondering if we could get some tweaks made to the current hover functionality.

You (devs) dropped the speed of both hovers. That’s fine. It was a necessary adjustment at the time.

Next, you dropped the effective hover ground clearance. This made it so any ground vehicle could contact and push a hover build at will.

Additionally, the lack of true vector thrust modeling has resulted in hover builds becoming air hockey pucks. No small arms fire should be able to steer, let alone stop the active thrust velocity of, a hover build.

Yet, these builds are literally spun around, pinned against walls, and frozen in place by machine gun and autocannon fire.

Like true multi-engine vector thrust rockets work, these builds should be able to counter the forces applied by incoming small caliber rounds; simply calculating damage accordingly.

The flip side to this is that weapons like Reapers should not be capable of becoming propulsion devices when attached to hover builds.

Additionally, hover builds should be able to roll out of this imagined grip of every ground vehicle that decides to push them around. There are plenty of great designs out there which incorporate mechanisms to latch onto a hover build. A flat-faced vehicle should not be able to do the same.

Finally, all hovers should get an additional innate ability to jump skyward or dash in the camera’s direction, just like walker legs–or both. Yeah…both. And make those features upgradeable.

OK, now as the sarcasm of my last point irrationally escapes certain people, please address the real concerns and solutions proffered.

Thanks!

TL;DR

Hovers done got broke. Please fix. Then make uber OP. M’kay?

2

This is becoming extremely ridiculous. I sincerely hope that it is being addressed in the Speed revamp.

3

I personally don’t really have a problem with hovers being pushed like ragdolls by melee cars or even by incoming fire. Hovers builds are very maneuverable, they can easily change direction on the fly and are menaces at long range due to how easily they can jump in and out of cover. I think it’s fair they suck at melee range. On top on that seeing the speed chances the devs want do do, they will recieve a buff in the current iteration (that may change) because engines may allow to go back to their previous 90, or even 95 km/h for mark VII, which will make them faster than many builds so dodging should be a piece of cake. My only real complaint with hovers is a minor one : I would have prefered they kept a small height difference between IV and VII because I loved the option to make slightly sloped builds without having to completely mess the center of gravity and front load all the weight.

5

Thanks for your input. While I do agree that an increased top speed will assist in outrunning some current builds, I believe the point is moot as the vehicles which can currently run you down will also receive said speed boosts. We’ll see how it goes.

Dodging comes down to the total vehicle mass and each hover’s acceleration efficiency. A top-end speed boost would have no effect on that front.

As far as the hover height differences, perhaps they could add another upgrade perk option for increased ground clearance. That way, it could apply to both Mark IVs and VIIs. To keep things balanced they could correspondingly increase the power drain if that perk is applied.

Approaching it this way allows for balanced slope builds. This might also allow for spinning out of a dog push, as you would no longer be on a flat plane. Much testing would be needed.

Thanks, again, for your feedback.

6

Thank you, Chat GPT, DeepSeek, (or whatever other AI is the flavor of the day) for your reply. I can’t wait for my writing to show up in someone’s doctoral thesis.

Your plagiaristic summarization is appreciated.

1 Like
7

I’d like some feedback from a dev to know that this issue of being pushed around by small arms fire is being addressed. It is utterly ridiculous that one cannot move for being pinned against a wall from halfway across a map.