The REAL Anti Air vs. Liberators Problem?

It is not a game of being flanked, Liberators can fly straight at me And murder a light tank using tank buster and the dalton underneath without taking more than 30% damage from my sky guard. 'You should move more!' No kidding. I thought Lightning's were like prowlers and had to stay stationary the whole time! Genius, you can move?! The only time I've killed -one- Liberator with a skyguard is with two other sky guards in the same area firing all at once. And the Lib still killed one Skyguard. What about That crew of Three Liberators flying through low pop areas? They fly away once you have enough Anti air, making you useless and you've wasted those resources.

Low risk compared to anything. Tankers know they can be burned with single footman, heck they can be burned with 0 enemies around, just by driving over forgotten AT mines. With multiple enemies tanks and harrasers utilise hit-and run tactics and still can be owned very fast. What is a high risk for lib? Flying in ambush of 5 skyguards? Almost never happens. 5 libs/esfs? yea, thats bad to rush in a middle of crowd of units of same class as you. Hovering over 10 ppl with lock-ons or amp station with max possible manned AA turrets?
All these scenarios include being grossly outnumbered. 2/3 lib is a huge threat to any 2-man team and any vehicle and most of time lib decides when to attack and retreat, not AA team.

Amp stations are high risk. Tech plants are high risk. Towers are often high risk. Often times what will be low risk at the beginning of a fight will turn high risk after the first salvo. Going into areas with high enemy air traffic is high risk, even if you have anti air on the ground. The difference between a tank and a liberator, is that you have to travel some distance before you can repair yourself. You're also provided very little cover while you're in flight. And yes, two man teams can be highly effective against liberators. I personally find both the skyguard and the burster MAX to be effective counters on their own, in addition to ESF's, but if you pull two pieces of AA, you will negate that lib's ability to do much of anything. If more libs come, you can negate them too. If you're any good, neither of you will be seriously threatened.

And yes, the whole point of air is that it gets to choose its fights. It gets a whole other angle of attack on enemy positions. Ground anything, by its nature, doesn't get this advantage.

Pfft, I see lots of air, owning techplant G2A like soap bubbles. Defenders can pull A2A but its not combined arms when you need OP to counter OP.
Tanks can dive in cover mostly in horizontal plane, lib can move in 3D. Smart lib pilot always has some mountain nearby to hide, and no tank can compete with speed of libs hit-and-run. And average platoon firepower is way more potential vs tank than air.

Effective team means enemy is dead most of time, not lazily retreats to be back in a minute. 2 Skyguards cost more than lib and lib has a great chance to get close, kill 1 SG and run away to repair, or just hop to next base, leaving defenders with useless SGs. Same with MAXes: more expensive, less chances to win, stuck with skillsuit after usage. What is lib's risk? Even with 2 SGs killing it without reload would require landing most shots in fast target moving in 3D, and lightning cant drive well while looking in the sky. Lib's pilot can concentrate on controls while his gunner can concentrate on shooting and if dalton/shredder wont finish SG at first try - no need for reload, just add some from TankBuster.
Or we can compare 1/3 lib with single SG or AA MAX. What are chances of SG vs TB?

Huge advantage of choosing fights (or choosing to end them) should be balanced with huge disadvantage.

Well seeing how their servers can't handle they have to deliver now, I can only imagine if they had to add all that in. But yes, I totally agree with you, they need to get out of the 90s.

The thing about tech plants is that it has plenty of built in AA defenses, in a covered space. A handful of engineers can keep those turrets up indefinitely, unless the turret deck is taken over by enemy infantry. If the enemy has a significant, unanswered air presence, then air is going to have the opportunity to suppress terminals, spawn points, buildings, etc. which means that it is even more difficult to deal with, without redeploying. However, it really does not take very much AA to counter aircraft. I'd say at the absolute max AA to A2G balance is 1/1 (per vehicle, not per crewman, not including galaxies), but because aircraft don't typically coordinate their efforts, you can keep multiple aircraft suppressed with less AA pieces than they have.

Right, but the liberator gunner has to maintain accuracy in consideration of that 3rd dimension. Most liberator bellyguns are precision weapons, which means they have to score a hit. The skyguard is far more forgiving in its aiming. So long as you fire in the correct direction, you will score hits. This means that the skyguard can stay mobile while firing. Though the liberator is 'maneuverable,' it still travels in straight, easily trackable lines. If you stay out from the front of him so he can't tankbust you, and watch the muzzle flash on the belly gun, you can easily dodge shots, while still dealing damage to the lib. So long as nothing else comes in and attacks you while you're engaged, you have a major advantage in this engagement. With a second skyguard, you could probably score a kill on any liberator that tries to engage you.

Here's the thing about air: it works exactly as it should. Air's purpose is being able to choose the engagement range, and to strike the enemy at inconvenient places. It's disadvantage is that it is highly visible and thus must put itself at risk to attack. If you catch air with AA before or during its attack run, it has a very short period of time to get any damage out, or even to escape at all. Even if it escapes, it's now even more vulnerable to enemy air than it was before. I can't think of any way of nerfing air without making it effectively useless. Any nerf would have to be responded to with a buff, either in its ability to get damage out in one run, or trade damage output for survivability. A straight nerf would mean it would always die to AA, unless there was an air swarm, in which case there are still means of AA that air has no response to.

Imagine what would happen, for a moment, if the liberator was duplicated, given the model of a ground vehicle, and given absolutely identical cert options, save for the replacement of airframes with tank frames, and the removal of air-only oriented options. Move the belly gun to the top of the vehicle, and allow the pilot's gun minimal firing angle adjustment, similar to the flash (Spur has superior firing angle vs the tank buster / vector)

The above vehicle is identical to the Liberator, save for the belly gun now being on top, and granting the pilot's gun slight firing angle adaptability. Now insert the new tank into the game as a NS MBT. For the sake of "balance" grant it the same agility and mobility as a Vanguard, the worst of the current three MBTs.

You have composite armor that covers the entire vehicle, universally - no hit zones, and this armor gives you resistance to your primary counter... tank shells!

You have three gun choices for the pilot

1. Vector, the default: High DPS up close, not much alpha strike damage, but excellent sustained damage, and good range.
2. Spur: Excellent firing angle in exchange for DPS, still workable, and excellent at countering light vehicles and infantry.
3. Tank buster: It just giggles at lockdown prowlers and vanguard shields alike.

For the belly gun, just imagine the Dalton mounted atop your Vanguard, Prowler, or Magrider. How about the Shredder, or Zephyr? I, for one, need several spandex pants size upgrades to think about this for long.

If the above isn't enough - this would be the first MBT with a rear gun seat. Let's even remove the new AA rear gun option as a bonus - You can pick between a Drake, Bulldog, or Walker. Even the walker is an acceptable close range AI option, and the Drake and Bulldog are just amazing at close range.


For fairness, let's say this tank is now vulnerable to AA flack turrets, which damage it in an identical manner to the current Liberator. Now, all that has changed about the Liberator is the repositioning of the belly gun, a slight aiming ability for the pilot, the removal of it's ability to fly, and for good measure... let's cut down it's max movement rate to 80 kph at full speed, approximately 1/3 of the Liberator's current state with racer / afterburner in a dive.

Convert the air resource cost to vehicle resources, 450 to pull the new NS MBT, 450 to pull the current ES MBTs.

Would you ever pull a faction specific MBT again?

Lol Badname707. Libs are low risk, high reward and you know it.

Low risk: Only real threat is 2 skilled esf pilots, or another skilled lib pilot. Any and everything else you can either kill easily or run away from. Only to return with a game plan after repairing, and take the previous threat out before getting back to farming.

High reward: Being a threat to every single unit on the battle field. Being able to farm until the enemy makes a concerted effort to drive you off, then flying off to repair, the it's back to farming.

Every other unit in the game is a high risk unit. There are a multitude of units that can seriously threaten a tank. There are even more units that can threaten infantry or a max. Esfs are good when played well, but can be countered and destroyed very quickly.

I LOVE how air players always talk about the team work that their targets should be using to deter them, but always fail to forget the team work coming from their own side. Yeah the defenders can pull an AA max, and get killed by your infantry, or tanks, or other maxes, or your lib, or the esfs who came to farm with you. Poof, resources gone, and the lib is back less than a minute later. So I roll a HA with a lock on AA launcher. Every time I step out of the spawn room, I'm at risk. People love killing targets that are focused on trying to bring down an air target.

Don't get me wrong though. I make it my mission to kill as many of these air jockeys as I can, and I'm murderous in a double burster max. However my success is only because I duck in and out of the spawn room, and there are enough people that you've locked down in the spawn room, that one of the engineers there keep me alive. Maxes are easy to take down for air units if they do so much as stand in a doorway.

Liberators need a nerf. They should have their effectiveness limited to a single type of target per gun. Shredder should have no real effect on heavy armor, and they should be unable to fire on aerial targets with it's belly gun.

Quoted as this couldn't be said any better.

The Lib either needs a big nerf to it's guns or it's armor. In it's current form it's the best vehicle in the game by a massive margin.

Just yesterday I put 2 full clips of skyguard into a Lib. That's around 30 seconds hammering the thing as it hovered on the spot.
It flew off only to raise up from behind cover about 30 seconds later and killed me in 5 seconds. You call that balanced? Give me a break.

Libs are only defeated when you heavily outnumber them with AA spread out across the map. If all your AA is within one hex you won't stop a Lib doing s strafing run and blowing **** up. You have to have skyguards and other forms of AA hidden in the mountains to even think of ever defeating a lib now and thats ONLY if you catch them after they just came back from a base attack where they took heavy fire. EVEN then they do escape.

No Vehicle no matter if it's ground or air should have the best survivability and the best weapons.

4 aa turrets, easily flankable, with big blind zones - how is it good AA? Most of time i see 2 ESFs totally owning 4 turrets with all engies around. Lib can just fly strait to turret, TB one and shred another at same time, then go to blind zone and retreat for repair. AFAIK aa flak shell doesn't even explode at point blank range.
I'm yet to see 2 guys with lock-ons or single max deter lib with decent 2-men crew before they get their share of kills.

Lib's prey moves in 2D. Lib is most stabilized mobile fire platform in game.
How exactly SG should move, while he's looking up at muzzle flashes and shooting? Should it blindly move around, jumping on every rock, till it fall in some cavern? You totally ignored inconvenient line about GSs weakness as 1man vehicle.
If lib really was slow and clumsy it would be balance, but its not. It moves fast and turns fast for such huge thing. SG should stay still to consistently hit target and wide flat Lightning is perfect target for flying cannon.

With superb manoeuvrability and highest speed aircraft can use terrain even better than tank, it needs only 2-3 seconds to get in cover. Visibility doesn't make lib easy to hit. I see whole squad at pads of tower, hunting air and somehow, sky doesn't become clear at once. Air is not that scared of AA, like you describe here.
And keep not thinking about straight nerf, because air needs revamp. We need AOE bombers and light battleplanes with inaccurate A2G rockets, to punish all these ppl sitting on top of hill with 20 tanks, not flying supertanks and megaharrasers, ruining small fights with their sniper's accuracy.

The Amp station is high risk, not only because of the turrets, which are free and easily repaired, but also because the walls, tower, and spawn building provide excellent cover for burster MAX's, lock ons, and skyguards. Most bases have structures, or high terrain of some sort that can easily hide AA positions from at least a sizable angle of attack, forcing aircraft into its zone of control to attack it. This also can give them cover from ground vehicles, or possibly even unreachable to attack by ground forces. Lol, that hyperbole doe. You should really give the lib a try before you start making ridiculous claims about its capabilities.

Sure, but the liberator can't stop moving. It can only slow down and turn. Whereas ground vehicles have good control over how far they move and in what direction, liberators and aircraft fly in a line. This makes them relatively easy to track, for both aircraft and ground vehicles. You don't aim at the vehicle, you aim at where its headed, and if you are a decent shot, it'll take effort for the pilot to evade your shot. The claim that the lib is the most stable weapons platform is also false, if the pilot doesn't want to get shot. When the liberator moves, the belly gun moves with it.

The advantage of the skyguard, is that it has a high RoF weapon and a much smaller hitbox, especially considering that you don't even have to hit directly with flak. This means that it can keep scoring hits by just following the libs trajectory with his cursor. The liberator, on the other hand, typically has low magazine sizes and high precision weaponry. Because the liberator is at flight, it can be seen from a greater distance, and thus generally engages at a greater distance than ground vehicles. This means that the rounds have travel time to hit their target. No matter how far the liberator is, it has to hit you directly to score a hit. This means, if the travel time for his shot is, say a second or half second, you can easily evade his shot by moving forward or in reverse, or stopping or reversing your current motion. In addition, you can easily change the direction of your lightning, so that the gunner has to aim in a horizontal axis to hit you while doing this, further reducing his accuracy. Though you will certainly occasionally crash into things, if you know how to work off the minimap, or better yet, pick a good spot to engage air from, you don't even have to move very far at all.

The lib is not the most maneuverable or the highest speed aircraft. How quickly it needs cover depends entirely on how its positioned, and entirely on whether or not there are mountains, trees, and other structures to block the Line-of-Sight of enemy AA. AA is highly effective against air, when used right. However, good pilots tend to know far more about AA than the AA users themselves. Unless there is literally a half squad of people all focusing lock ons on a liberator, most liberators know they can take one full salvo of lock ons (2 or 3, at least) before they have to break LoS, assuming there are no other threats. See, lock on launchers aren't supposed to be killing machines, at least not unless used en masse. They are free, easy to rearm, easy to use in terrain, on a squishy, but revivable weapons platform. They're only really effective when used in numbers, or to accompany other forms of AA.

Then you have bursters, of several shapes and sizes. The burster MAX is useful because it is on a somewhat durable, revivable weapons platform that has great terrain handling. Buttoning down a burster MAX with engineer support, especially when positioned by a spawn shield, is a constant threat, unless overwhelmed and left alone. The problem with burster MAX's, is that if they are well positioned, they can easily escape and repair, and go right back on to attacking aircraft. You also have turrets and skyguards, which have been discussed.

The fact is, none of this stuff is supposed to be a guaranteed kill against air, unless the G2A actually coordinates to do that. If the balance was that AA would kill its target more often than drive it away, then you've literally removed the air game from regular play. This was the state of air a long time ago, around release. Air was incredibly squishy to skyguards and AA turrets, but was given incredible power to compensate. This lead to generally clear skies, except for in small base fights, occasional massive air swarms, and mildly successful bombing runs, which are less efficient than just ground pounding. No, the point of AA is to limit the operation time of aircraft in a region, to soften up to kill by friendly air (a full health liberator has a pretty good chance of winning an engagement with an ESF, a wounded one is an easy kill to an moderately skilled pilot), or to give complete area denial to air when used in concert.

Your ideas for air weaponry unfortunately have some problems. Inaccurate weapons, ala the duster, don't do **** except for at close range, aka the range at which aircraft is easily made dead. An AoE bomb I would assume would give you the opportunity for one shot before having to disengage and make another pass, yes? How big is the explosion, and how many people die in it? If the answer isn't more than one, then it will not be worth using. You almost might as well just crash the lib into people at that point. If things died easier, than sure, it would make far more sense for a lib to function like that. But you can't make useful, balanced weapons that people won't be pissed about that are inaccurate or indiscriminate.

First - http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/brevity

Did I ever said AMP stations are example of low-risk? They are better than other bases in terms of A, still, unless all turrets are manned and all walls reek of bursters and lock-ons, libs can hit-run-repair for ages.

Ppl came on this forum with stories like "I jumped on lib with my friend, practised for 15 min and then went on XX killstreak" But you always can say that that's not enough and only person with even more experience can judge. Point is, if chef cook me sh*t, I can recognize it by smell alone even if my cooking skills are worse than of 1-yo baby. I dont need to be chef myself.

Lib can manoeuvre very well. You suggested SG moving forward or in reverse blindly, while shooting, like it's not predictable movement.

Same with any vehicle. But OK. What is most stabilized mobile weapons platform in game if not lib?

From above lightning hitbox is pretty big. If SG can see lib, lib can see SG. Lib can easily get close and shoot SG almost point-blank. And as you mentioned, its lib who chooses fight, not SG. Lib can easily move away from perfect spot. In imperfect spot, blindly moving SG will jump on smallest rock, ruining aim.

Lib is fast and manoeuvrable, second only to ESF. Basically you are saying that its ok for lib to be only deterred with moderate AA, while for any ground target its ok to be KoS'ed by lib. Small pile of resources doesn't justify easy farming.

3 splashes from zephyr and max should run away for repair, not exactly best deterrent, while costs same amount of more valuable resource.

After release lol-pod spam was cheese among cheeses, dont tell me about weak air.
If air cant be balanced in its current state, it should be revamped.

So AA should show excellent teamplay to get rare kills while dieing alot, and libs can "lawl, lets jump on 2/3 cert printers with 2 squads and chaotically pound that base"? Simply incomparable in terms of efforts and rewards.

Cassette bombs. 2-3 cassettes per load. Lib gunner clicks and one cassette get emptied in few seconds. Bombs are numerous and weak, CoF is huge, so hovering lib can burn small area, moving lib can cover wide corridor with moderate damage. Few coordinated libs can make small field into a scorched earth in a minute. That would require real teamwork, not just "I pilot, you farm any sh*t you see with shredder." Also that will give lib really useful and respectable role of clearing lazily sitting clusters of campers instead of current preying on weak and running from strong. ESFs would provide cover from A2A and lol-pod survivors.

So aircraft deserve to be overpowered because they just do?

The fact that outfits even exist that only 'main' air should underscore how broken they are.

https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...h-fighting-air-is-boring.186266/#post-2695130

There are also outfits that 'main' ground vehicles, and even some that 'main' infantry. I knew of some that were infiltrator only, though I think they are only infiltrator flavored now. That said, I TK'd rGuitar (PREY) with a frag grenade on accident the other day. Go figure.

First off, I put everything on the table first, because some people are half literate and don't need to hear the same argument twice. But here we go.

Acutally, no, it doesn't even require a 1-1 ratio of AA to air for AA to provide deterrence. Amp Stations just have a lot of space where AA can pop out at you, and lots of free AA for anyone to use.

Yes, you do. Just because you don't like his cooking doesn't mean you can do what he does. People talk out of there *** most of the time in forumside. If it took random forumsider 15 minutes to lrn2lib, then that's a pretty simple time investment. Get yourself an education.

The difference is the RoF of the weapons. Skyguard has a large magazine, high RoF, easy to shoot weapon. So long as you are any good at leading your target, you will hit. The liberator doesn't have the option to stop or reverse flight. The dalton is a high precision gun, that often has over a second of flight time before it hits the target. The skyguard can move at the time the lib gunner fires, without seriously compromising his accuracy, and still evade the shot. Or if the terrain allows, he can just stay in motion, and just change directions whenever the lib fires. When a skyguard does this, it's almost impossible to hit, and still difficult to hit at close range.

The secondary gun of any ground vehicle, for starters. Galaxy guns are also pretty good. When the lib turns in any direction, the gun changes too. A lib moves in 3D, which means it can be very difficult to keep a bead on your target while under fire, unless you and your pilot have figured out the comms aspect.

From a distance, lighting is pretty easy to miss from a lib. But, it's as you say: if SG can see lib, lib can see SG. The big difference here being that if a skyguard sees a lib, it can also almost definitely deal damage to a lib. A lib can approach to point blank, put its putting itself at great risk to do so, and if the skyguard got a headstart on damaging the lib, it will probably win, especially if it moves around.

By your logic, the galaxy is the third fastest and most maneuverable vehicle. Irrelevant to the rest of your point, though. If one AA piece was enough to deter liberators every time, then liberators would be useless most of the time. Air is frequently deterred, whereas AA can stay safe in one spot most of the time. Libs can't KoS infantry, or vehicles, that are under cover, nor can they operate very long in an area with any number of AA.

Sure, but MAX's can be revived and repaired. They can sit next to a shield door and have an engineer run out to repair whenever the lib isn't firing. They can hide and shoot from terrain. They can change loadouts. They are difficult to spot from a distance. One MAX may not be very good against one lib, but several MAX's are very good. When the lib leaves, the MAX can change his loadout. When it returns, he can change his loadout again.

Okay, when, and who's paying for it? I say the air game is basically where it needs to be, a lot of pilots agree, a louder, larger minority completely disagrees, and the majority of the population is far more concerned about other things.

Well, yeah. If AA was easy and powerful individually, there would be no reason for air. However, good AA can completely shut down air, or at least seriously reduce its damage output in an area. Libs take a ton of practice to be good. It doesn't take much to have a friend pull a second skyguard, and more than double your effectiveness against air in the area.

Have you tried the duster yet? Take that for a spin, and get back to me.

I play on Briggs I spend most of my time playing as a skyguard hunting all air lol Libs are not a problem sure they kill me from time to time but u need to use some common sense when fighting them I use on my skyguard Racer 3 so I can flank them and even chase them down.

https://www.planetside2.com/players/#!/5428186718608646673

Except that with the changes to nanoweave, strafing and the penalty to aiming down sights to get the lock you're basically free certs for snipers, no matter how much you try to dodge. Add in the time it takes to get a lock and the lib will just dalton/zephyr you into the ground before you get the lock.

ESFs should be supplying anti-air, but they're off elsewhere farming with rocket pods because it gets them risk free certs.

Change your camo, son. Or stop trying to shoot from on top of the spawn room. The lib shouldn't be spotting you that easily.

That's great, maybe if I wasn't in a low income job then I could afford camo.

Also, any skilled lib pilots will hang out in places where you can't shoot them from the safety of the spawn shield. Usually by hiding directly above the spawn room so that the massive shield designed to protect you from them will actually protect them.

However, You've missed my point entirely. ESFs should be supplying anti-air rather than farming infantry with rocket pods at another base.

Quit making assumptions son. I have like 20 different camo's for all terrain types plus helmets that make my TR look like a Vano or NC. (Artic Wolf is one I normally go with as it's dark and looks like Vanu helm) I can say that camo and helmits rarely fool anyone but BR 1-5 players and that's normally them team killing you

Not to mention many Libs run with different visions on their guns to spot enemy players even if it's dark.

BTW As soon as you aim that rocket the Lib gets a little lock on indicator so they either wait for the tracer from your rocket if they can't find you then drop a Dalton on your head or move into cover before it can lock.