The NTW-50 should be buffed to become a proper anti-air weapon
As it stands right now, the NTW-50 is far too weak and has far too high of a skill floor to be an anti-air weapon. People struggle hitting rockets on RAMs, they will struggle hitting shots with the NTW-50 on air.
Second, having 1 MANPAD player and 16 does not make much of a difference. Having 1, 2, 3 or 4 NTW-50 players will each make a MASSIVE difference ranging from a slow solo to the nightbird dying immediately, which is akin to the constraints ground vehicles have to play in. This will be better for the game.
The rest of this post is a bunch of specifics as to why it's currently bad and how I think it can be betterer and gooder more, best most, so if you don't want to read, you can stop here.
Here's some damage values to paint a picture:
It deals 23 damage against nightbirds, stealth helicopters and jets, EXCEPT if you hit a "weak"point like the stealth's belly or the jet's thrusters, where it will deal 18 damage (?!)
It also deals 23 to pondhawks, and 14 to attack helicopters - for reference, it used to also deal 14 to air transports, but after the 10% and 20% damage buffs against condors and hinds, it now deals MORE damage to transports than attack helos.
And just as a bonus sprinkled in... It also deals 14 damage to LATVs and hovercrafts, and 23 to civilian transports. They're not air, but this little damage is ridiculous.
All of this is with the 2.66 seconds between shots and ~7 second reload.
Then, the ammo types. The HP ammo is essentially a flat upgrade to the regular anti-material ammo when it comes to vehicles. It plainly improves DPS, and the velocity decrease (600 vs 510) is completely negligible. Again for reference, this is the exact same bullet velocities when switching an M5A3 from the default ammo to close combat, keeping the default barrel for both. Maybe you notice that difference, but does it really impact you that much?
Finally, infantry one shots - does anyone actually care about these? At launch, Angel could give anyone armor, this is no longer the case. I would be completely fine with removing this annoying mechanic in exchange for making the NTW-50 a full blown anti-vehicle gun. Secondaries in 2042 are already very very capable so you can have a primary weapon that sucks against infantry. Or add a third ammo type with bad vehicle damage if for some reason people like getting 1shot 100m away in the chest.
I propose basically fixing these things. Dusting is probably something not getting fixed, so damage can be balanced around people missing 1 or 2 shots.
Regular anti-materiel should deal the current HP damage against air (maybe minus transports), with drastically increased bullet velocity (~700-800) to make it more accessible for people. The HP ammo should have 4+1 shots and instead trade higher damage for drastically lower bullet velocity, slightly lower than the current, let's say ~400-450. More skill = more damage, as simple as that.
Remove air vehicle "weak"points altogether. A hit should deal the same damage anywhere, the pilot is the weakpoint.
The nightbirds should take 28.91-31 damage. See maths at the bottom for more; 2042 works with float damage and health, rather than integers, as it should. Unlike tanks, nightbirds are fast so it is much more plausible for it to fly away or attack you very quickly. With ~30, having 1 HP player and 1 regular ammo player hit a nightbird twice will be enough to kill it.
Stealth helos can have a meaningful choice between repairs and flares. Use repair to better survive NTWs, use flares to survive lockons outside of stealth. I am fine with that helicopter getting some sort of other minor buff if this makes it too weak.
Jets should take 35 damage and hitting them on the thrusters should be 44 damage and a guaranteed mobility damage state every single time. Reward players for split second good leading. Jets have repairs. People will not be hitting jets from extremely far away with the further reduced bullet velocity, they'll likely hit them as the jet is trying to kill them. The jet can and most likely will simply fly away immediately. 35 damage means the jet will die from a MANPAD without repairing, 44 damage makes repairs less likely to do that. In either case, I'm open to these values being even higher, but unless jets become a bigger threat to infantry I think this is fine. They might become a bigger threat if DICE changes their mind on the A10 issue.
Attack helos should take ~25 damage. They are no longer a slow easy target.
Pondhawks should take 60 damage with a guaranteed mobility kill, and LATVs/Hovercrafts should take 28 damage. Civilian transports should take 35, replaced by a 55 + guaranteed mobility kill if hitting the engine block so the NTW-50 gets to actually do that engine thing material boom boom it do while still being balanced.
I'll give a mention to some bugs. The NTW-50 has a cocking animation of 2.6( 6 ) seconds. This is higher than the tactical reload of a good chunk of guns, yet it has no stages. Other snipers will skip the cocking animation if you switch off after ~1/3rd of it has played out, not that I think the NTW-50 should be easy to skip, but more as a reference. The proper reload also looks to lack stages. Pulling out the + menu during the cocking animation will completely break it and you will have to redo it, even if that animation finished long ago and you did nothing in the + menu. The iron sights have an extremely slow ADS speed compared to any of the 1.25x sights. And like every gun, when you spawn in it plays some broken inspect animation.
*The Nightbird's repairs repair 23 health over 5 seconds. This equals 4.6HP/s. Let's assume the NB pilot has a reaction time of 26( 6 )ms, this is probably on the slow side. The NTW-50 shoots every 2.6( 6 ) seconds. For a 1 second window for the shooter, this means if a nightbird repairs for 3.6( 6 ) - 0.26( 6 )s, it should have exactly 0 HP. Let's make an equation, x is our NTW-50 damage.
4*x = 100 + (3.6( 6 ) - 0.2( 6 ))*4.6 = 100 + 3.4*4.6 = 100 + 15.64 => x = 28.91.
For 0.5s, x is 28.335, IMO the bare minimum. For 0.3s, x is ~28.1, now this implies constant nonstop shooting. For 29 damage, the time window is 1.07s, and for 30 the window is 2s. Beyond 30.75 damage, the nightbird will be unable to outrepair the damage. I'm not sure how the low damage all guns to now to light air will factor into this, especially given the HUD integerness of sub-1 damage values...
