Hands up if you’ve been a Grand Theft Auto Online player for long enough to remember the days when the Hydra was the go-to vehicle for griefers when they wanted to mess up a public session. The fighter jet was eventually replaced by the Oppressor MKII, a flying armored motorcycle with lock-on homing missiles. The scourge of the skies for years, some fans suspect Rockstar Games is hinting at an upcoming nerf.
Both the Hydra and the Oppressor MKII were major nuisances, as they allowed griefers to easily wreck any public session where other players were moving valuable cargo as part of business sell missions which the game did not allow in private sessions. This led to the rise of techniques for lagging yourself out into a solo public session, but those methods were not perfect and it was only a matter of time until matchmaking started dropping others into your little pocket dimension.
The Oppressor MKII was particularly notorious.
A newer addition to the game that wasn’t present during the “heists-hydras-kurumas” era, it has a much smaller profile than most flying vehicles, making it a harder target to hit. It is also very fast, highly durable and packs a serious punch with lock-on missiles. It’s been our suggestion as a go-to vehicle when flying around Freemode or farming repeatable missions for precisely these reasons, but these advantages sting when turned against other players.
With the release of GTA 5 Expanded and Enhanced, Rockstar Games teased more changes and updates coming to Online at the end of their official Newswire post. Included in the said post was a section about rebalancing content “such as vehicles commonly used in PvP combat.”
this gotta be a mk2 nerf teaser haha (from newswire)
byu/chrisproske01 ingtaonline
Fans immediately thought of the Oppressor MKII when reading that, and speculation mixed with hope has overtaken the GTA Online community ever since. The Oppressor has been living up to its name since 2018, and many fans are exasperated by the griefing – as GTA Online has wildly ballooned in terms of population, that means even more bad apples ruining more public sessions. Now that the game has gone standalone, and temporarily free on PlayStation 5, we imagine the player count will spike once again.
We can’t know for sure if this slight tease really does mean that the Oppressor is getting suppressed yet, but with such a vocal fanbase calling for its nerf would make it seem like an odd move from Rockstar to leave the vehicle as-is and rebalance others. What else needs rebalancing, anyway?
Players have already been offering suggestions as to how an Oppressor MKII rebalance could look like, with many suggesting that the missiles simply need to be removed, with the vehicle’s other capabilities remaining. This would essentially de-fang the bike, making it useless for griefers, but its utility for getting from mission to mission quickly would remain.
Hopefully we’ll learn more in the coming days, and with any luck an entry in upcoming patch notes for some smaller update will detail the ways the Oppressor MKII has been nerfed in GTA Online.
