What does an excellent ESF pilot fear?

Well, yes and no.

In standard forward cruise speed the reaver is slowest, mosquito fastest, but the difference is small.
However, when you factor in using vertical thrusters for forward motion that gap gets smaller because the reaver has stronger vertical trusters.
Then finally, the reaver has better afterburner than the rest - so much so that it actually outweighs slower cruise speed. Over long distances the reaver is actually faster than the other two, making the scythe slowest. The advantage of the afterburners is multiplied by using fuel-tanks, making them extra good on reavers.

So yes, the reaver is for practical purposes the fastest both over short distances and long distances. This isn't very intuitive from reader int the ingame description, so I can understand why you would be confused.

-Stigma

Well, personally when I break out my ESF for anti-ground purposes I have the most trouble with well positioned burster maxes and skyguards. I should emphasize the 'well positioned' part of that sentence - if I can fly around buildings or cliffs and only get tickled on each pass then I'll make a few passes and rack up a few kills and then head off to resupply ammo and repair, rinse and repeat. Lock-ons do little more than inconvenience me and force me to fly low - which does act as area denial to a certain extent and certainly prevents me from outright farming and minimizes the kind of damage I can cause but I wouldn't say I'm outright afraid of an infantryman with a lock-on launcher. If I'm lucky and can spot them in particular I'll just gun them down.

Depending on load out anti-air ESFs will wreck me, assuming I don't have friendly support keeping the skies clear. If I happen to have my rotary equipped they aren't a big deal but it does limit my ground engagement to lolpods or hornets only. Typically I'll bring the rotary if I know there's going to be a high likelihood of enemy ESFs about.

Im not the best pilot but i keep an AA tail gun and sometimes nose gun to prevent ESF from causing trouble

Someone made a video comparing the speeds and boosts and the Reaver was the slowest for speed but had the best boost
Mosquito :

• 219 KMPH with just W
• 247 with W and space
• 329 w Afterburner

Reaver :

• 199 with W
• 217 with W and space
• 352 w Afterburner

Scythe:

• 200 with W
• 226 with W and space
• 322 w Afterburner

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/104377/mosquito-and-other-esf-top-speeds

They probably fear AA weapon. Which is quit ironic because the damage they deal is high... but not so high to automatically tear ESFs to pieces.

It's rather fun the anti-everything solo vehicle is afraid someone gets to same level of power.

Friendly aircrafts crashing into you.

and Vanguad AP, Decimator, Dalton, Striker.

/edit: also trees.

Mostly just annoyances really, anything that might render some sort of pucker reaction for me is flying in a large battle and seeing 3 X lock-on alerts on my screen.

"Hmmmmmm now is that someone shooting at me with the swarm or am I about to get insta-gibed?"

that liberator friend of yours must of been a terrible pilot. It's easy to keep the belly to the enemy ESF. What's hard is to keep the nosegun on one if anything. But ESF vs Liberator is pretty even.

Actually it was WycliffSlim, if you remember him. Though I don't exactly recall him saying it was the ability to keep your bellygun on target, I'll admit...

It's been a while since I flew a Liberator

Comparing the Q4 ESF causes of death to regular ESF causes of death is interesting.

The top 7 are the same between Q4 and everyone else. These are:
1) Vehicle suicide (crashing into the ground)
2) Vehicle collision (crashing into a hostile vehicle)
3) M18 Needler
4) Saron LC
5) M20 Mustang
6) Friendly collision (crashing into a friendly vehicle)
7) Vortex Rotary

After #7 they split for a brief bit. Regular ESF pilots are more likely to die to sources of ground fire. Q4 ESFs are more likely to die to A2A weapons instead. But that's pretty far down, which suggests that the things that kill a BR100 ESF are just about as likely to kill a BR1 ESF.

I do know him in fact. He doesn't play that much anymore, but I was pretty much 24/7 in the same teamspeak as he was if that tells you anything. Yes an ESF has an advantage at lower skill levels. But at high skill levels, when you got gunners like colors, zelp, limits and such, you become really scary. A shredder can easily make it really hard for a single ESF to take you down. They can definetly do it, but it's not gonna be a walk in the park if your gunner is good.

If you ever want to sit in the tailgun of a lib, feel free to ask anybody in prey or libz; as long as you're not being a *******, usually nobody's gonna have a problem with it.

Changes to airgame.
If something other than nosegun becomes a viable option for a2a combat there will be endless nerf threads, nobody wants to lose their time invested in mastering the nosegun.

Another excellent ESF Pilot...

I would love to see a race between a mosquito and a reaver to see if i'm really that wrong thinking your theory is schmock.

Most mechanics generally aren't feared or usually on a very subjective basis.

The thing i think every esf pilot that played for a few years fears tough ... well it's an empty sky.
The rate at which people get fed up with the airgame (even "skyknights") is what's realy scary.

it's ok. When nobody's flying, you can go shoot peasants until they decide to pull aircrafts. Tho not really as far as pilots go. Most of them fly all the time.

Once again the Point and Click Republic take top spots. DBG needs to fix this ****

The difference between the Mosquito, Scythe, and Reaver isn't that significant. They come in at 4.99%, 4.26%, and 4.14% respectively. That's a difference of less than a single percent.

You also have to consider populations or usage times. That might account for the minor differences.

magically rendering trees

Actually effective but completely imaginary AA?