The Vengeance of the Low Flying Light Assault.
As any other class I despise light assaults. Their ability to appear from nowhere, gun you down even when you are shooting them with a heavier calibre gun then flee is painful and very frustrating. Especially Terran Light assaults as their gun is ridiculously good, able to drill through a heavy assaults shield and health faster than the HA can drop them.
Which is why on Saturday I decided to give it a go myself. I wasn't hopeful, I'm not one of these guys who gets huge K/D scores. Usually in fact mine is .5 or lower unless we're doing something with tanks. The gun I use is the same as the medic weapon the NC Alpha squad unlock which is very much my favourite gun in the game discounting vehicle weapons. It fires consistently where you point the thing, and although it only has 20 rounds the damage is nice. Its the only gun I can consistently get headshots with as you aim at their throat and at usual engagement distances the 2nd and 3rd shot get them in the head. I do need to get a compensator and other attachements for it at some point, but it does me fine at the moment.
So armed we headed to Eisa Tech plant. The Zerg was attempting (note that word) to get into the place and capture it, but sadly had neglected to hold down the spawn room behind them outside of the main base. This meant that the Sunderors they were spawning from kept getting attacked and destroyed. So I took my mini squad of DL members to the spawns to hold it down.
Oh gods.
On a Spawn that doesn't have elevators to the roof Light assault is a godsend. Get on the roof and cover the balcony/doors from there. It is a universal fact of humans that we don't usually expect attack from above, so few people look up. People do however love standing on the balconies and sniping down on the people who are trying to hold the spawns down...
Can you guess what happens next? Yup a Light assault shoots them in the back of the head. Then a medic tries to heal them and they get shot too, and a second medic goes for the first and suffers the same fate. After a few minutes I had to swap to my pistol as I had run out of ammunition. Eventually I got killed by an enemy light assault as he had a gun and I was down to trying to knife him to death.
There was a considerable issue with finding this out. The wonderful stack of Certpoints I had built up suddenly dissappeared in a haze of better jump packs and nanoweave boosters. It did mean however that I lasted much longer and could kill the enemy with greater Impunity. Which for me is a benefit.
I built up a nice stack of cert points again and resisted the urge to spend them. So we got into tanks (me as an Engineer) and went off elsewhere to cut the vanu off from the base to make it easier to take.
Which is where I saw the worth of Antitank mines... bye bye stack o' certs. I've not managed to get a kill with them yet, but I'm hopeful.
Friday night was a very good session, seeing me named as the driver of the mountain goat sunderer. When you end up with it parked on top of cap points, you get a certain reputation, although my fleeing from a magrider almost vertically up a mountain may have helped as well (we survived). The majority of my night was actually spent as an Engineer or a Medic both classes that I play pretty well if I am honest. I racked up vast stacks of certs simply by Standing there and keeping our guys up as we assaulted a biolab. It was an excellent evening with our three squads acting in a well organised method, and even in some cases acting as distractions for others.
Planetside 2 is frankly awesome so far and as I draw more mates into the game it'll just get better!