Liberators are fine: AA is the problem

The crossbow is pretty mediocre, if you want 2 shot kill go with comissar and shoot for head.

That said, I have mentioned elsewhere that ESF's are pretty difficult for the layman to use effectively (in comparison to pretty much everything else) but in my experience, most people who use them tend to get lazy and just hover spam squishies or chase things directly behind them.

That said, of course having a 2 on 1 situation is going to be bad (ESF allies) considering it's actually 4 v 1. That's not really surprising, but in the same way a harasser/lightning has to rely on agility to defeat an MBT so does the ESF.
It's good that you know your limitations, but if your ESFing alone you need to understand that you won't get much done that way as well. Simply having a wingman that communicates can make a HUGE difference.

Commissioner cant be silenced or equipped with decent sight and reliable headshot in poor light require being pretty close. QCX kills with 2 body shots very silently and even at mid range. With some background noise you wont even know what took off your shield in 1 hit, until you get done with second shot. Or you can guess and start running to random cover, hoping that you are lucky enough with direction. And that can happen in middle of your platoon. Stalker + QCX are not overused only because they require tons of patience.

Lib even with random team can farm very well. Heck, even 1 guy with dual PC can kill bunch of meatbags and lazily stroll away, considering current lib armor (better armor than MBT!) Pair of ESF require srs coordination to be effective.

The answer to a 3/3 Liberator is three 1/1 Skyguard Lightnings. That seems fair.

That's probably the biggest issue, being stuck in an AA role while air is basically good at everything

Waveing the teamwork-flag and then jumping into a vehicle that kills enemy teams solo....makes sense....really. If anything is NOT promoting teamwork then it's vehicles that can kill entire squads alone.

That means 3 times the certs invested....and 3 times the resources....and then you are sitting in skyguards that watch a liberator fly away or bombing them from the horizon where they just get hit by lucky skyguard shots due to the ridiculous cone of fire. Really fair. Not.

Not to mention that skyguards anyway only make sense in huge zergs cause they can't defend themselves against anything but close range aircrafts.

Lets put it this way, I've never been killed with the QCX, and never seen anyone around me killed with one. I've maybe seen a handful carrying them and really if you want something that slow firing and reloading for killing people from "mid range" you're better off with a battle rifle or bolt with a lower magnification sight.

Most stalkers I've seen using them either shoot and then knife, which is also quite feasible to do with comissar. The fact you can't silence it doesn't matter if you are using stalker cloak and hide in obscure locations.

At any rate: OT
The lib seems extremely powerful because existing counters are either too difficult to use for most (ESF) cost certs so few have them (Skyguard) or are broken (lockons).

You improve the skyguard, give MBT's an AA alternative that has high damage and low RoF, and create a cheap and effective deterrant AA that most players will be able to use on their infantry. Bam, libs are still useful, but people have options for dealing with them.

Wow.... and this thread is why this game gets dumbed down. The reason why gunships fly away after you shoot at them is because you guys open up on the guys (since this ship requires a crew) as soon as he renders on your screen, which allows the pilot plenty of time to make adjustments and fly off.

What rational intelligent people do, is wait for the gunship to get to a point of no return, then open fire/lock on/etc. The funny thing about this is that gunships don't even know where the hell the damage is coming from until you fire on the guy. They don't know who is locking onto them or where it's coming from until they can trace that red dot from it's source as well. Hell, when my gunship gets barraged with flak fire, I can barely tell alot of times where the hell it's coming from, and whether or not you are firing at me almost 2 hexes away or me trying to squint through the explosions to pinpoint what tree or spawn room you are shooting out of.

I play on the ground and I play in the air, I'm not bias towards any side since I consider myself proficient in both, but when I die to an enemy gunship while on the ground, I don't feel as if its undeserved. Right time, right place, and right circumstances is what dictates a gunships success, you have some flexibility pending on pilot and crew. AA does not need buffs, the only buff that is needed is in peoples minds. It's very easy to counter air, if you are solo anti-air and a 3/3 gunship manages to take you out (while being hurt in the process), then maybe you shouldn't have been standing out in the middle of a field or something, because I simply take cover if a gunship is fighting in a small scale fight.

You mean what skilled coordinated squads do. The problem is that there are not so many of those squads around and even then there is likely still some random that starts shooting early and ruins the trap.

In reality it looks like that: You can choose to either fire early and hope the enemy gets scared and runs...or you wait...he kills some of your allies....you shoot...and he still manages to escape easily. No decent pilot get's that close to your gun that you can shoot him down on your own for sure. It needs just one pilot...but it needs a dedicated squad to take him down. In case of liberators even the coordinated attack of three AA-players does not guarantee a kill unless the pilot decides to fly low and right at them and not change direction upon the first hits(which means he is a really bad pilot).

And then the gunship will magically vanish? Taking cover is not bringing it down...sorry to tell you those news. Not to mention that it is not so easy to take cover from Daltons...given that they seem to ignore walls etc. at times. If it was as easy as you claim, then I wonder why we have spawnroom camping hovering libs all over the place....it's likely cause the pilots are great and the players on the ground are all crap. Yeah, whatever...

I see gunships that get shot down multiple times during a playing session. The best gunship pilots actually fight other air for the most part as well on Matherson atleast.

Also, in order for you to even render on a gunship as an infantry is 300 some odd meters off the ground, gunships can't see any infantry on the ground at all unless they are rolling very close to the ground. Also, if either one of you are canceling each other out, you are doing your job as anti-air. You are fighting something that goes 200+ kmph that is able to engage and disengage, if the role of AA is to get confirmed kills every chance 1 v 3 (gunship crew), then I wouldn't even bother flying nor would many people as well.

Also, if you can't kill a gunship that is relatively close to you with 3 skyguards then I feel bad for your 3 skyguards (or your skyguards are in a very bad position)

What an odd comparison, tanks camp spawn rooms, infantry camp spawn rooms, when the fight devolves into corpse camping, the fight was already lost to begin with. If you have a vendetta to take against a gunship you have multiple options.

AA is a deterrent that is deadly when used effectively or in mass. Being upset because the zerg is uncoordinated enough to execute properly is not a problem of game mechanics but a problem with people. If uncoordinated fire was meant to straight out kill air then it would be a shame for this game.

Holding a rocket launcher over an enemy aircraft until a light goes green, camping inside of a spawn room with an AA max so that enemy air can't hit you, AP rounded, dumb fire rocketed because you are hovering too low, basilisks and other assortment of gun fire that can damage gunships, the list goes on and on and on, and on. I haven't even touched on other gunships and air threats.

If you really want to get that kill and follow that gunship until he's dead you could always learn how to fly an ESF. Believe me, flying aircraft in planetside 2 is far more skillful then holding up a rocket launcher until it turns green or spamming flak on a gunship. Punishing people who have learned how to fly after count less failures with simple simple simple counter methods that I can teach my grandma to do is shameful. I could teach my grandma how to play an AA max and she would probably do the job just as effective as the generic planetside 2 player.

The counter to Air being Air doesn't work out so well when Air is a finite resource and can run out pretty quick if your Empire doesn't have an amp station due to being Lib Swarmed wherever you go.

AA, alone, isn't the problem, the problem is the Balance between ESFs-Libs-G2A is broken. Putting in a new launcher to correct this won't.

See https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/liberator-really-op-now.177660/#post-2569253

The same scenario can be played out with vehicles as well. If you get "tank swarmed".. That's why SOE implemented the heavy assault class. If you don't have the resources to counter something, you downgrade to the lesser counter.

If your team doesn't control the air over your head, then yes you have a problem. That is how it works in the real world as well. Either help gain control of the airspace, or adjust play accordingly. You cannot spend a lot of time out in the open if the enemy has the sky locked down.

THIS is the core problem. Many lower-ranking infantry want to play as if the airgame doesn't exist, but it does and always will no matter what tools are provided.

A decent lib crew should have no trouble at all taking out a Skyguard.

In a vacuum yes, very rarely have I ever encountered a solo sky guard tank by itself sadly. The post you quoted, I believe implied 3 sky guards as well.

With the new Lib update, they buffed the Walker and Ranger AA weapons. And to my knowledge, Composite armor does not provide more Armor against FLAK than it use to. still just 10% more armor against FLAK. so instead of crying that your MBT's AP rounds are not as effective (They were never intended to be used against Aircrafts) Maybe you should start using Ranger / Walker on your MBT's secondary weapon. As far as I know, Dual Bursters MAXes and Skyguards still do the same damage as they did before and the Devs buffed Walkers and Rangers which are dedicated AA weapons. So its only fair that they provide Libs with more armor against tank shells which were never meant to be effective AA weapons.

We need new AA weapons that can damage invulnerable liberators. Got one at Mekala ~30min ago.

Hahaha, you literally can't be serious. To be an effective A2G craft, a Lib basically needs a gunner. There are players that can strafe Sundies or deter footzergs by themselves, but they will not be nearly as effective as a two/three man crew on comms. The solo Libs that people complain about are almost exclusively AA. Pilot + Gunner = Teamwork. Or, wait, were you talking about MBTs? lol

Furthermore, I'd say Libs encourage enemy teamwork if anything. If one Lib comes and spanks your squad, your squad obviously lacks teamwork/comms/unit cohesion (the same stuff I said in the post you quoted, yet somehow ignored). The problem is not the Liberator, it's how you and 11 friends managed to let two dudes run train on your entire squad.

The funny part is, instead of spawning at another base and grabbing any sort of counter, or planning how to deal with a Lib, people log off for the night, cry on the forums, or log alts to TK the people who are 'abusing' them.

You take your logic and strategery and git! Way to ruin all the secrets of AA. Why don't you just go ahead and tell people that locking planes without firing is more effective as a deterrent, because they won't find you...

Total BS. Give me a Lancer (not even a lock-on), and two other Lancer guys who let me tell them when to fire. No other weapon solution vaporizes Libs faster than the Lancer.

Actually, it works well in theory, because both sides use the same resources, and acquire them in the same manner. The funny thing about Amp Stations is how many damn AA turrets they have on them, ... you don't even need Air to defend against Air there.

I can't back this up, but there are multiple reports the new flak value is actually 14% at max rank, the tooltip simply wasn't updated. Also, the Ranger still sucks, and will continue to suck, unless the reserve ammo is extended significantly. The other stats are completely hamstrung by the low reserve ammo. Walker was and is hilarious still.

I just saw the topic and laughed. Literally, this exact conversation was had about a year ago, around the February balance pass. Then they buffed AA, and the ESF became worthless, so they nerfed the liberator and AA into the ground, then the ESF was a problem, so they added ridiculous loads of lockon and buffed the burster and on and on and on. AA is underpar, but if they improve it the ESF will be too fragile. Something more broad needs to be changed than to simply buff the AA.

But you can have 3, 1 man libs take out three skyguards with ease
That seems fair