Remove esf secondary weapons.

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by TheRealNattyIce, Feb 26, 2015.

  1. ColonelChingles

    I generally feel that aircraft are not OP. I'm perfectly fine with the amount of damage they deal. Yes, this even includes the Tank Busters.

    It's just that AA is terribly UP. That's the problem. Aircraft simply need to be much more fragile relative to AA, and a Skyguard should kill a Liberator about as fast as a Liberator should kill a MBT (faster even, considering one's a heavily armored tank and the other has to be light enough to fly).

    I mean a Liberator has 30mm weapons... and a Skyguard gets 40mm explosives... :)
    • Up x 2
  2. Plastikfrosch

    The problem in the last weeks is, there are too many A2G farmers with lolpods from extrem high so you cant lock them on and the pods do not render. you will get the damage, but there is no sound and you cant see any explosion. you think you are getting shot by some infantry and you are jumping and looking around not noticing that the damage comes from above and till the moment you realize it, its too late (i think thats some kind of bugusing) from those A2G-farmers because they have to know that the pods are invisible and soundless from such hight.
    The other problem with ESFs is, they are relatively cheap (cheaper than a Max), and they can take out a double Burster Max faster than the Max can take them down and they can run away to fast.
    I think, only ESFs with the extra fuel tanks should be albe to use afterburner and if you use a secondary you should not be able to hit and run so fast.
    Also the bursters and the skyguard need to be stronger (especially the Max bursters). I mean you have to pay 450certs for a Max (and with a double burster you are only capable to do real damage on Air) while an ESF with a normal nosegun (not the A2G) and the Pods or hornets can **** everything on the ground and in the air. They are to versataile and are able to get away to easy.
    There may be some pilots that can kill everything with only the default noseguns but i would say 90% of the ESF users are A2G farmers that cant aim for **** without pods and A2G noseguns.
    To get such an ESF down it mostly takes 2 or 3 burstermaxes (only if the pilot is rally stupid enough to hover totally still and if he is trying to kill another target you can shoot them down with 2 full mags - 1 mag per burster - to get him down).
    1 burster Max should be enough to go toe on toe with an ESF (he is more expensive and less versataile and a lot slower than the ESF so he should be stronger).
    And if the user of an ESF secondary would not be able to use afterburner they would not be able to run as fast from G2A-lockons as are now. They should be forced to decide: beeing able to kill everyone and everything or beeing fast and able to hit and run.
  3. Meeka


    As a long term player, air IS overpowered... between the fire suppression/auto-repair cheat (and I call it a cheat) and the ability to equip after burners with any weapon load out is what makes it OP... I agree with the other poster and had said it in the past. Afterburners should only be available when fuel pods are selected as a secondary.
  4. TheRealNattyIce

    personally i think esfs need nothing more than that of the nose gun
  5. MahouFairy

    Don't give me that nerf mentality. It's contagious. If AA is UP, buff it. Not nerf air. At this rate, I think we should all have a pistol fight instead.
    • Up x 1
  6. MahouFairy

    Well, personally, I think ESFs should be fully armed with missiles, rockets and noseguns. This isn't WW1.
  7. ColonelChingles

    Well yea. That was the point. Keep air as powerful as it currently is, with the weapons it currently has and the damage they currently do.

    Just buff AA so that it is equivalently powerful. Allow the Skyguard to become a 1,000 DPS weapon like the Hornets by buffing the explosive damage (so it would still behave poorly against infantry and tanks) to 260 damage (a 433% increase from 60 damage) per shot.

    This balanced weapon would kill a vanilla Liberator in 30 shots, an ESF in 8 shots, and a Galaxy in 45 shots. The TTKs would be similar between Liberator TTK versus a MBT.

    Boom, balanced AA and A2G, all without nerfing anything! :D
    • Up x 1
  8. Haquim

    Usually I totally agree with you, but this would mean that a single skyguard can literally lock the airspace in 1km around him down.
    With 8 hits most ESFs would die before they even have a chance to realize they are getting shot at, courtesy of server lag.
    Not to mention, if the Skyguard gets such a buff, what about the ASPIS turrets (the fixed AA guns in bases) or burster MAXes?
    Also: Walkers? They are already powerfull as **** with 1km/s velocity and, maybe more importantly, the ability to mount two of those on a Sunderer, which is the hardest vehicle to destroy for an ESF, maybe with the exception for the Galaxy that obviously is made from adamantium with a shot unobtanium. Another buff to those?

    Im totally for making airgame more lethal, but then the airunits have to be lethal enough to still be useful. That would kinda turn it into a "the guy who hits first wins" scenario, which pretty much rewards skill and a correct approach to a sitution (thats not necessarily bad). Which also means - if you have no AA you're ****** when a single ESF shows up (That IS bad)
    The tears would flood the forums: AA is boring, nobody wants it, and IF somebody does it - the Airknights simply don't go there anymore and attack a different base.

    I'm absolutely against a buff like that if the buffed unit doesn't suffer a heavy drawback that makes it an easy target for ground units, and neither Lightnings nor Sunderers or anything else(mb with the exception of the ASPIS) is easy to destroy if it is 500 m behind enemy lines.

    If anything, this game needs something akin to that WWII 88mm (i think?) FLAK. Mount it on a Lightning or maybe an MBT.
    Give it low turret turn rate, make it very accurate, slow firing, and give it really ******* fast projectiles with (almost) no drop.
    Kills ESFs on a direct hit outright, has a bigger explosion than a skyguard and a close proximity hit equals about a G2A lockon hit.
    And if no enemy air is around you can take the risk, lower your barrel, and play long-range tankhunter with your ****huge cannon, but if air suddenly shows up you propably won't be able to lift your barrel before he kills you...
    • Up x 3
  9. Plastikfrosch


    Dou you mean like an infantrist or a Max unit that gets instakilled by an Airhammer/Banshee/PPA attack (while the PPA takes longer to Kill a max and there is a chance to escape)? Or a skyguard (or any other lightning that gets nearly instakilled by a tankbuster-dalton-lib?? I dont see why AA shouldnt be as powerfull against air as air is against ground.

    The walkers are strong and its easy to hit air with it, BUT it takes to long even with 2 of them on a sundy. They are good to keep air away from the sundy but if the pilot is not totally ******** he will not get killed by them.


    Thats actually the case if there is one lolpod+A2G-nosegun-Farmer and no AA around.

    That sound so heroic but most 90% of those ESF pilots is not able to do A2A fights and they can only hit groundtargets and the specialize in farming infantry with hit and run tactics. And yeah, AA should force them to go somewhere else.

    In my opinion the Liberator (or even the Battlegals) should be the A2G-Aircrafts that are allowed to take and survive damage from AA (but the Lib has a better survivability against AA than a heavy armored Tank has against a Lib and thats BS).
    ESFs should be a part of the AA-game because Libs and Gals can still leave the AA-zone and ESFs should be used to hunt them down or to protect the own Libs and gals against hostile ESFs.
    But ESFs are one person vehicles against everything while you have to decide how you will use your max/tank/sundy.
    • Up x 1
  10. Recel

    The way I see it, the problem isn't that air is "OP", or that AA is "UP". But that AA is just useful against air.

    You can usually use AV weapons against infantry to some extent (sometimes it's even better against AI than AV), so you have a bunch of people running with weapons that are good against vehicles out of the box and can still be used for AI, or you have a secondary weapon for that job.

    With AA this sort of falls apart. AA is rarely useful for AI or AV, which means pulling anything meant for AA will be only useful when there is enemy air around, so it becomes useless, or you have to exit the battle to switch lode-outs to continue fighting.
    Plus, in most fights I've been in, there were either too many air around or too few. So it either feels useless to pull AA because you would have to switch weapons back and forth as the air pops in and out of the battle, or you are getting shelled so hard that you can't put up a fight against air.

    Another problem is that Heavy Assault has lock-ons, but even if powerful, it takes a lot of time to actually make the lock. Especially if the terrain is against you. Than there's sky-guard which is fragile to everything, and Max units which cost 450 resources and their flack canons are practically useless against anything else than air. (I didn't mention AA towers, because they are not everywhere and they are just... bad.)
    These are few and limited choices. Plus, except for one flack for the Max everything has to be unlocked first for lot of certs. And except for the heavys rocket launcher they are not flexible at all.

    I'm sure both the desire to pull and the effectiveness of AA would go up if we would receive weapons, or the current ones would be reworked, to be more flexible. So you could carry AA weapons around without gimping your effectiveness in fights too much.
    But until that people don't seem to really have the options or the desire to pull AA.
  11. ColonelChingles

    Awww... :(

    Well then I guess if I'm not going to get a 1,000 DPS AA piece, then that just means heavy nerfs for the TB and Hornets and all other A2G weapons! :D

    So long as Skyguard TTK versus Liberator = Liberator TTK versus MBT I'll be happy. How you do it through buffing Skyguards or nerfing air units is really not that important.
  12. Haquim

    With the current banshee you are lucky to kill one guy in a strafing run, powerful and OHK looks different. Also good luck on taking that MAX head on, I hope he plants his feet and slugs it out with you.
    The AH has to go in so close you got a good chance to put a decimator to his face.
    With 10 seconds effort I can make an ESF fly off and bother someone else for the next 45 seconds.
    Usually infantery consists of approximately 50% HAs.
    Don't tell me a single ESF is dominating your fight. I could dominate a fight with nothing more than my pistol and knife if nobody bothers to shoot back, the problem is not the ESF.

    And yes, walkers usually don't kill ESFs. And the reason is simply becuase the walkers shoot everything on sight, sometimes over a distance of more than a kilometre. Only a ******** pilot would voluntarily fly into their effective range.

    Also "Airknights" is a nice word creation from forumside that I actually really like. Although I'm violently against ******* up G/A balance in favour of people who just can't be arsed to do something against the airunits farming them, there is little that I despise more than those "look at my MLG K/D" lolpodding, renderdistance PPA spamming, bailassault skypests.
    No matter what they claim to do, they ALL farm ground, and everybody claiming that they only bail when they get taken down "unfairly" is simply spouting high-quality BS.

    Regarding the flexibility, my heavy FLAK proposal would kinda deliver that.
    And taking a G2A lockon only really reduces your effectiveness against tanks, you can still shoot MAXes in the face with it.
    Which is the main reason why I have zero tolerance for that "air too stronk" BS. I've seen liberators explode in mere SECONDS when some HAs finally got their **** together.
  13. Ballto21




    First off, *LPPA Maniacal laughter in the distance*

    Second off, the aircraft need two weapons to be, Ah, ah,ah,ah stayin alive while no other vehicle does.

    If you look at the magrider or any other tank including the lightning, it can defend against all comers with varied degrees of success. The default HEAT/PC cannons can kill both armor and infantry with decent effectiveness
    The HE cannons can defend against tanks, albeit not as well, and will kill infantry
    The AP rounds will destroy armor, infantry, and even aircraft (damn vanguards) with decent aiming.

    Not to mention you can get a secondary gunner to do any combination of the above.

    With ESFs, this is not the case. Look at the LPPA for example. It is an infantry shredder. Dual burster maxes have issues defending against it. Try using it in dogfighting though, youll die instantly. Try using it against armor, it kinda works, but wont do anything major unless its adding some DPS to rocketpods or hornets. The banshee, while overnerfed, will still shred armor and can be very effective against air, but will be unable to fight infantry really at all. The airhammer is good against MAXes, aircraft, and crowds, but really not much else, and you need to be very close.

    If you want to use the LPPA and survive long you need coyotes or A2A locks for the inevitable guy with a needler to show up.

    If you want to be a credit to the team with a banshee youll need rocketpods to break up infantry zergs

    If youre NC youre probably not doing anything useful anyway but if youre the red herring (hehehe, the normal nc are blue herrings) youll need rockets to deal with armor.

    TLDR: Tanks can defend against all comers. ESFs without secondaries cannot.
  14. Scorponok


    you mean do like Battlefield has it? would make it 2 stronk.
  15. LodeTria


    I never understood this argument. If you let a ESF get into your effective range, he's already started attacking your allies. You've failed even as a deterrent and have let your team down. Also you most likely won't get the kill.
  16. Haquim


    Well I don't think there is anything wrong with the TB to be honest. Usually when somebody shoots at me with the tankbuster I can shoot them down with my AP gun. And there are people that think getting snuck up on by a light assault means you should die as a tank, so how would it be fair when you can survive getting snuck up on by aircraft larger than your tank :confused:

    Regarding the Hornets.... I agree that they have too much DPS. I would not lower the damage on the rockets though - quite the contrary. Double the damage but make the reload something like 20 seconds.
    You get a terrifying alpha strike, much lower dps, and thanks to the slowest reload ever it is totally unsuitable to farm infantery.

    I kinda like taking Skyguard TTK vs Lib = Lib TTK vs MBT as target for balance, but there are just SOO many freaking varibles here.
    Is the Lib equipped with composite armor? Is the TTK including firesuppression? I assume the Lib is using a dalton, but is reload maxes? Does the gunner have 100% accuracy? Does the skyguard? How big is the distance between the Skyguard and the Lib, and how much distance is between the Lib and the MBT?(Skyguard got quite the CoF, unlike Dalton - which got a lot of drop instead)

    Not really a statement, more of an observation. I'm not saying that they are doing something wrong, but it sure as hell won't net them any kills, unless a huge airzerg decides to try and blast through. And I think the walker is rather effective - gotta admit though about half my kills are panicking pilots ramming something when they notice how fast their HP drop, and I'm not using it very much. More of a Grounder/Skyguard guy.
  17. \m/SLAYER\m/

    good suggestion, but we have primary AI, since NC AH superior in A2A...
  18. Obstruction

    this is exactly the problem, and that ground vehicles have to make crippling tradeoffs even to carry an air deterrence. if these obstacles were removed, the exceptional power of AA to deny gameplay to air units would become immediately apparent. right now it's only seen in conflicts with high population density, or with organized groups that exploit this power but keep very quiet during (or intentionally derail) balance discussions.

    in general i'm against "tradeoff" game design, at least hard-edged trades like many that exist in PS2. i'd rather see more of the soft-edged trades like we have in Liberator weapons, where for example the Zephyr is not good at AA or AV but does enough damage to provide a credible threat in most circumstances. i think this design style should be more prevalent, especially with regard to G2A, so that we can get more satisfying balance and more complex, adaptable gameplay.
  19. Pirbi

    ESF should only be used to get you to the altitude of another ESF so you can jump out onto it's canopy and knife the pilot to death. People treat this game like it's some kind of futuristic war sim.
    • Up x 1
  20. Champagon

    Some of you "Ace" pilots really need to cool it. A2A rocket pods are part of the game, get flares. Don't request changing an established part of flying simply because you don't want to equip flares/farm ground and "noob" pilots like myself.

    This feels like an ego thread