A sad time for pilots

AV

Not taken away, fixed. No more fire and forget. No more reloading while shooting your primary (vise versa). No more insane smart tracking. Possibly a rework of the flare system (ammo based).

The point? I want to know what the counter is besides b*tching out and hiding in a zerg full of flak. There are counters for everything in this game, WHAT IS THE COUNTER TO A2AM?

I'm just going to leave this here, as I feel it is relevant to the discussion in this thread.



As to what can be done about them, a lot of suggestions have been made, and at least one has made it onto the dev's drawing board at one point(before the OMFG patch there was supposed to have been a large update that focused on Air balance, and having to maintain lock with A2AM's was one of the proposed changes). I think giving flares an ammo capacity and short cooldown, as has been suggested, would be a step in the right direction.

If you are scissors, what is the counter to a rock? It isnt scissors.

A2AM are designed specifically to kill air. There is no counter, there is only "dont be there". This is called area denial. What is the point in using A2AM if there is a direct counter to it beyond what flares already do?

What is the counter to a shotgun? Do you see where I am going with this?

Yeah I've seen better BR 100s Libs out there - if you're having loyalty issues, that's pretty terrible. The resident BR100 TR super Lib on Connery is having no problems at all. And they fly solo most of the time even, no 2nd Lib.

And AV capabilities... like the ESFs pack much of an AV punch these days anyways. You want to marginalize an already terribly marginalized platform. They're like tissue paper, and these days they aren't even glass cannons, more like glass mini guns.

Yes ESFs are hunting more Libs now - cause their nose guns already got the AV nerf you're talking about. The more you nerf ESFs A2G, the more they'll just hunt air instead.

And Libs can take a beating - if you're getting killed by A2AM spam, have you thought about flying with ESF escorts. Sadly it seems your "pro" air outfit can't even provide air cover for one of their Libs! Its also pretty sad how your BR100 gunners would rage quit after getting killed on you.

The reason most lib pilots choose to fight other air is that attacking ground is nearly futile. As you said most armor columns have a skyguard with 1k range that will completely deny the lib. Libs are huge slow moving skywhales. I regularly shoot them down the my magrider which is the worst tank for shooing aircraft. It is much easier to shoot them down with a lockdown prowler or a vangaurd that has 50 mps more velocity than the mag ap gun.

Last night i jumped in a shredder for the first time in a while. I was curious to see how long it would take to kill a sunderer. 700 rounds. Yes it was being repaired, but 700 rounds is a little crazy.

A sunderer with two basilisks is a match for a lib these days lol.

My advice is to get a tank. Its a 2 man just like the lib (sarcasm, lib should be a 3 man vehicle but it really isnt) and its way way easier to kill things. If you want to kill Air or at least deny them from a fight just grab a skyguard.

You wont have as much fun in the tank, its still fun though, but you will kill a lot more things on average per death, and your gunner will stick around. Especially if you give him a proton ppa and thermals.

Without being presumptious, werent lib crews the first to BR100 because they could spam Zepher's back in the day?

I think a nice way of countering the Missile Spam, be it A2A or G2A, is changing the Flare Cert line. Hear me out.

Right now we all know that flares work by a cool-down timer, and when you upgrade the flares, the cool-down timer is lowered. How about instead of having a cool-down, we get X numbers of flare cartridges on the first level, and every level upgraded will add X number of flares cartridges to your flare dispenser. (I leave X for the amount because of balancing purposes and that could be discussed)

And maybe Liberators could have more cartridges on the dispenser than ESFs, because they are bigger, slower and more cumbersome than ESFs and could theoretically have a bigger flare dispenser.

The pilot would deploy the flares at his discretion, every flare will distract any missiles incoming, so the pilot has to judge the right time to use his flares, and if he runs out he runs out, he must return to a landing pad to re-arm his flares.

This can give Liberators, and ESFs that are being enganged by A2AM ESFs, a chance to fight back, or retreat to a more friendly airspace. And if they are entering a heavy G2A MANPAD area, then they could at least survive for a few more seconds.

Discuss, you guys think it would be good or bad idea? Any thoughts if it would be balanced or not? And if not how could we balance it? Or am I just day-dreaming here, and this idea would get shot down in a few seconds.... xD

(I have always wondered and discuss this with my outfit pilots, and other pilots, and most think it would be a nice change)

I think the combination of the title and the original content holds a tongue in cheek interpretation of the word "pilot" and a critique to those who don't fall under said category.

Range.

I have always thought of something similar, but think of the impacts from G2A when you could bombard until you are out of flares and then only pull out.

You would also need to greatly increase the number of missiles you have considering at max you have 10.

It certainly would be much better than the current situation however i still think you should be able to dodge the missiles with some hard to do maneuvers. If flares are the only way to deal with the missiles you absolutely must have flares all the time and everything else like fire suppression become useless.

A2A missiles need to do about 50% of the damage they currently do. They should NOT outperform a nosegun that requires skill to aim, under any circumstances!

In a FPS new players shouldn't expect to regularly beat seasoned vets. That type of game is terrible. Its WoW or something. Everybody gets to win and you dont have to be able to play well at all. That kind of crap has no place in PS2.

There are lots of pilots in the sky and we all learned to fly without OP A2A missiles, so the argument that new players need A2A missiles is fallacious.

If A2A missiles did considerably less damage then they wouldn't be OP and they could still allow new players to feel at least somewhat effective. I recently got my friend to start learning and he was hating it until he got his A2A missiles and he felt as though he could at least hit the ace pilots once before he died, and im ok with that. Let the new players get a couple shots in while they are learning to fly so that they don't feel like they got totally owned, but br9 pilot with A2A missiles and 3 hours flying time should not be killing pilots with hundreds of hours of flying time.

That just kills the competitive nature of the game and especially the air game which requires the most practice and skill to master. Which i might add is a very good thing!

The liberators that have been cheesing infantry from the start are starting to get cheesed by A2A missiles and now you're on the forums complaining. On behalf of all the infantry that have been instagibbed with no counter I like to say....Good!

And don't tell me to pull a skyguard or a AA Max cause that doesn't do a bit of good when I'm getting hammered from the sky as a bloody medic, At least with ESF's I can shoot back albeit not very effectively but the capability is there.

I'm not saying A2A missiles aren't broken because they are, I just don't care about the complaints of liberator pilots when it comes to cheap kills.

Sorry I said earlier in a tower fight. What is the counter to a shotgun in a tower fight?

To weigh in on an argument that probably doesn't need more opinions...

Lock-on missiles and flares have the big issues of play and counter-play: namely, there isn't any.

As much as I fully acknowledge that an ESF with A2AM is a counter to a liberator, it's not fun to get shot down by an A2AM ESF because there's often nothing you can do about it. Not evade, not flare, not hide. The only thing you can do is hope a friendly takes the ESF off your tail. And given the speed that an ESF can jump a lib, it's quite probable that friendly aircraft can't hope to stop an ESF strike team before that strike team has done its damage.

So what is needed is some form of counter-play. I'm fine with the liberator being in trouble, but to be essentially a free kill just waiting to happen... no, bad design.

There's a couple of things that could help the liberator in this case:

1. a tail gun that's actually worthwhile.
There's nothing inherently wrong with the walker, but the combination of the walker, the mount position and the aircraft's pivot makes this gun a real PITA to use accurately unless the liberator is not moving. And no liberator is going to be unmoving if it's trying not to die to an ESF. The tail gun's position, traverse and effectiveness needs to be revisited. I'd honestly mount it on top of the liberator, and remove the bulldog.

2. revisiting flares and their role against aircraft
Flares operate on a cooldown. X2AM operate on an ammo count. While flares can theoretically stop an infinite number of lock-ons, they have long windows of useless that the missile operator is aware of. Both flares and missiles should rely on ammo.

Aiming in the head and trying to make the opponent miss? I mean sure you can be killed instantly while running around corners, i don't really like it either but at least the enemy has to position him self correctly, aim and actually hit you unlike with A2A missiles. The shotgun still has significant downside since it requires you to be at close range while A2A missiles dominate from all ranges.

Last time I had to check, you had to get in range and aim with A2AM, you also cannot one shot anything. I agree that like shotguns A2AM have a degree of cheese. But trying to solo a lib with a nosegun in an ESF when you yourself are dealing with enemy G2A, A2A and said lib's dalton is also not simple.

Considering you can maintain lock even when the target has moved outside the targeting reticule, I'd use the term "aim" loosely.

That's just it, ESFs should be the main counter to other air, not ground and not in the current state that it is in. Deterrents are deadly and they shouldn't be. I also have no objection to flying ESF escort but the fact that a ESF can't protect me from deadly G2A makes the idea moot since I have no role attacking ground anyways.
As you can see people have been commenting about the other thread that I made which is to remove ESF AV. I feel the main reason for heavy amounts of AA is the fact that frustrated tankers and infantry can't operate without ungodly amounts of AA because air is OP if not controlled. You kill their tanks, you kill their sundies, and then here we are with massive amounts of AA. The problem here is that Air should be controlling air and ground should be playing a small role in that, not a major role.
How many pilots do you see actually focusing on air and how many pilots do you see focusing on ground? ESFs ground capabilities has created a constant flux of someone always getting screwed over because of lolpod spam and dedicated AI nose guns. (the AH is a bit lacking but thats another topic) People get farmed by something that can easily get away and their defense is a better offense then their threat has which is really frustrating. A large portion of the A2G pilots you encounter don't fight, they run. They start getting attacked by another ESF and they run to their own deadly flak source where you cannot follow. You follow and you die or you let them go and they continue what they were doing.
Fix ESFs A2G while simultaneously fixing AA.
Dependant on what you do with AA you either leave the Liberator as is or you increase its survivability against ground.
This will mean that ESFs will be focused on air, Liberators will be focused on ground, and ground won't be the death of every pilot in a populated hex.