So when are you addig anti-air to game?

AA is not fine.

Even 3 AA maxes, with dual bursters, have trouble bringing down good pilots. And if you own the mossies too much, they get in a high flying liberator, that you have no chance spotting, hitting, and just pound you down. And then they move in and rocket pod you up.

And as pilots start getting the certs to ignore amounts of flak, AA is going to be nearly useless unless you have 10 AA on 1 air...
And that is not how it's supposed to be. Every thing in this game is supposed to have a hard counter. AA is supposed to be a hard counter to air, as AA does absolutely nothing against anything else. But air, does good against anything...

So unless you pilots wants all your rocket pods, armor and stuff nerfed, AA gotta be buffed alot...

you lost all credibility from here

actually 3 or 4 dual burster AA maxx's can hardly take down 1 plane that is supposed to be a light fast assaut plane, while in the same time most of the pilots find that it is normal to lonewolf over a fully defended base or to be able to take down a heavy armored and defended sunderer in 5 sec with 2 rocket packs while hoovering 10 meters over 3 maxx's head.

if you cant see whats wrong here i cant help you . just stop to think about solo when you talk about air balance.
if PS1 was full of maxx as AA defense while in PS2 you dont see anybody using them , there is a good reason imo ...

Just so that you know.

A single one armed Burster will get an ESF down to 50% armour in around 8 seconds, if it can make all rounds hit. That's EIGHT seconds. In real gameplay conditions that isn't going to happen.

As it stands right now Aircraft has far too much health, this is especially true for the Liberator. In order to reliably take down or chase away aircraft i have to dedicate a good part of my squad for it. (Think of 5-8 Max Units) Now to some degree this makes sense and i agree a single AA unit should not be able to decimate enemy air superiority. But any capable ESF will have a very good chance at getting away as it stands now, unless they get greedy and engage. The same for Liberators or they just stay and kill your AA if you don't have enough at the initial engagement.

Amen to that. OP, you may have experience, but having a hyperbole like that as your first point screwed your credibility. There's a reason I blew my certs on a second burster arm when I should have been focusing on my primary class. One burster arm is basically like waving your dong at a passing fighter. It's annoying to the pilot, but it's more likely to net you a rocket barrage to the face than a kill. And Liberators are like flying honey badgers. Throw all the burster MAXes you want at it, Liberator don't care.

Flying is a high risk activity; you cannot hide in the sky. There is no cover or concealment. Being an effective pilot requires a measure of skill. Aircraft are costly for resources and have major cooldown times. Aircraft also require a large number of certs to be effective.

Sitting in an AA turret is relatively low risk. Unless you fire, probably nobody is going to see you and you wont be immediately spotted just by someone casually scanning their view. AA requires little skill; point at the sky, fire. It takes next to no skill to sit in a turret or Skyguard and spam at the sky all day. Lastly, AA turrets and AA launchers don't have a cool down and they don't cost resources and they require a low amount of certs relative to aircraft to be effective.

Lets review:

Flying:
-Is high risk.
-Requires a good amount of skill.
-Requires a sizable resource investment.
-Requires a sizable investment of certs to be effective.
-Has a considerable cooldown.

Sitting in AA:
-Is lower risk.
-Requires next to no skill.
-Requires no resource investment.
-Requires a relatively low investment of certs.
-Has no cooldown.


Flying is high risk, high skill, high investment and thus should be a highly rewarding and highly effective activity.
So, why exactly should AA be effective and rewarding when it requires little skill, investment or risk?

And if you beg to differ and think that flying well is easy and doesn't require an investment of certs and resources, you're welcome to hop in an aircraft and use it to clear the skies of enemy aircraft. Let me know how it goes.

Some people just want to sit in a turret, hold down Mouse 1 and roll in the easy points and clear skies. Some people are annoyed that there's actually a counter to their tank so they can't sit back and farm infantry with impunity. Some people are genuinely surprised that if they stand around outside massed in a group of infantry, that they become an inviting target for ESF rockets.

Double post.

Yep. It'll do that, then I'll shoot at it again and it runs away again, dealing no damage to ground troops. I completely shut down the enemy airforce as a dual burster MAX. Not saying I can't be overwhelmed by aircrafts but it is very easy to keep 4-5 ESF's away with just 1 dual burster. They can try killing the tank but ESF get killed in the process, unless they use *gasps* teamwork.

I agree that AA MAXes and other ESF are about the only counters to ESF, but "what if" or "it's boring" aren't valid arguments here. The rocket pods cost certs too and are boring. What if there's like bazillion heavy assaults on the ground and everyone started shooting at the ESF? Anyone can make and counter that statement. I for one don't find AA MAX to be boring. If anything, it is more exciting than ever. Now I need to lure them in before I open fire if I want to kill them. Of course I can just start firing at aircrafts the moment they come to view but that just makes them run away. The skyguard however is utter garbage. Big target, relatively slow moving, obnoxious and weak gun. Only good side to Skyguard over MAX is that you can jump out and repair it yourself.

It's very hard to balance the AA and ESF. If AA suddenly started downing every aircraft they shoot at, nobody would fly again and everyone would be rolling out tanks and skyguards. This is what it was like earlier in the beta. Aircrafts were useless because they died as soon as someone gave them the evil eye. Now they feel like they are overpowered because everyone flies one and nobody plays AA. There was good suggestion around these forums about giving AA players XP for every hit they score on aircrafts instead of kills. That could make playing AA more appealing. Just because 1 ESF can fly in, wreck 1 sunderer or 2 tanks and then be out of ammo isn't OP when 1 MAX can run around, shooting at everything in the sky, either driving them away instantly or destroying them over the same timespan it takes to kill a tank with ESF.

Anything in this game is overpowered when there's overwhelming number of them. I have seen it and I have experienced it. When zerg rolls out, you are gonna need a bigger boat to stop them. Hell.. They could roll out with nothing but Infiltrators riding Flashes and it would feel overpowered. If you think AA can't be devastating in this game, you haven't seen the half of it.

Buff rocket pods! It takes 2 of them to kill me as AA dual burster! Clearly i'm OP as anti air if 2 planes can instagib me.

Buff rocket pods, and give them more splash cuz 1% of time i see a softie survive it.

Personally I think the major problem is the HA AA, it's pathetic. In real life you have guided stingers or unguided RPGs, both capable of taking down a helo in a single hit. So we develop counter-measures against them. In PS2, you have exceedingly weak rockets AND countermeasures which just leads to huge amounts of issues. The AA rockets vs the single player fighters seems good, but against liberators they are useless. One lib took 7 rocket hits the other day and flew away with somewhere around 25% hp left.Also "Air camping" has gotten annoying.

Solutions:
-If the rocket is to remain that weak, it needs a shorter lock on period. Or keep the lock on the same but increase the damage
-Keep the rocket damage the same but lower the libs armor.
- For Air Camping:IRL it's unrealistic to have more than a few minutes of air cover, much less a liberator hovering there for 12 hours of in game time camping a spawn room. Maybe add some sort of "fuel" mechanic?

Like I said, I don't play MAX or skyguards enough to have an opinion on them but I curse my lock-on spitball thrower all the time.

ou and while we are at it...how can AA hit celling lib bombing the **** out of base if nothing goes that far? And more important....how can a lib see stuff if you don't render so far?

This one is serius tho, how?

Half of your points are about listing nerfs that Air has taken in the past. I am not interested in those, because they bias the picture and attempt to distort it from what is reality.

Buster MAX is not a serious threat to Aircraft and that you would even suggest that a single Buster can bring down an ESF to half health in under a second is sheer and utter nonsense, i'd even go as far as to suggest you are blatently spreading lies to further distort the truth. What you suggest here is that a MAX can take down an ESF in just 4 burster hits. Complete and utter nonsense, it couldnt be further from the truth. 50 shots is a much more accurate number and even that is being very generous.

Here is the reality. The sky is littered with ESFs and Libs because anyone knows by now that its an easy way to farm exp. And as soon as **** is going down, you have a very good chance of simply escaping the thick of it.
It is absurd to claim foul when others want AA to be properly effective against Air, especially when those who do abandon all chance of fighting anything else. They give up a fleeting hope of fighting vehicles or even infantry just to get their anti-air. And at the same time the flyboy apolagists sit in your cockpit of an aircraft that is good against everything. Doing exactly what they claim others shouldnt do, solo stuff.

At this point its obvious where this is going. Air is going to get stronger when they get more and more stuff certed. Whereas the AA has very little, if anything at all, left to cert into. AA isnt going to move forward anymore, and its already struggling with Air.

0.0000001/10 for effort

An AA MAX has resource costs, and a timer.

The cert cost is a strawman. The second arm alone costs 700 certs.

Bought the second burster for my MAX and took out plenty of enemy aircraft with it yesterday. It seems that everyone trying to fill the AA role thinks that they should be able to shoot down an aircraft just because they can see it. This is not the case, you should always wait until the aircraft gets closer before you open fire, I got plenty of kills this way. Firing at them from a distance just results in many, many missed shots and a fleeing aircraft. Shooting an aircraft that's moving towards the base and engaging your allies results in a LOT of hits and a downed aircraft. Not sure how good your aim is, but once an aircraft gets close it's nothing but fodder for my dual bursters, if I damaged them any faster then I could destroy a whole swarm of aircraft that are engaging the base all on my own.

I've also found MAX spam to be a bit counter-intuitive, as every single one starts firing on the enemy aircraft as soon as they spot them (max render distance), resulting in all four MAXes only landing two or three hits and driving the aircraft away. It's an amazing way to keep the aircraft away from your AA while they still retain their ability to pick off any targets that aren't hugging the group of MAX suits.

Just my two cents. I like to fill an all-purpose role using vehicles, aircraft, and acting as infantry. I've never had any trouble with enemy aircraft unless we were completely outnumbered by infantry and vehicles first, which is hardly a valid scenario to be judging aircraft in. Only time I've died to an aircraft while in a sundy/tank is when I was alone with no support from allies at all and out in the open, which is a situation a ground vehicle should never win in.

so many AA. the one tank has anti air, the heavy assault has a AA rocket, Air vs Air and the AA from max. i think its enough.

its fine in the moment, with more AA its Aircraft useless

Umm, Ive destroyed TONS of Aircraft(all types from all 3 factions) with the starter rocket launcher that Heavy Assault carries, as well as most vehicles from all three factions. Also, turrets rip Aircraft to shreds and from my experience, an experienced vehicle operator seems to survive longer than experienced aircraft pilots. This is just my experience however.

SO I dont understand this post. People say aircraft dominate and this is true ONLY if your faction doesnt spawn vehicles, HAs and mount turrets/engineer gun emplacements to take on these aircraft. Also, those that stay in the open and dont take cover or know how to avoid air fire seem to have the biggest issues.

Anyways, GL! S!

@ OP
Frankly, all I see are people complaining they can not single handily stop an air raid. 3-4 dedicated skyguards can protect an entire tank zerg. If you have a few of your own air up, then enemy air has not chance. Heck, I have seen sunders entirely packed with 1 armed maxes jump out and attack libs with amazing efficiency. Air and AA is as balanced as I have ever seen it in PS2.

10 hits from the AA base turrent took only 10% off my mossy if that, so its about 1% per hit. The only thing that seems to kill my mossy is AA missles.. or a lucky shot from a AA gun to finish me.

As of right now, I oppose any buff to AA (or nerf to aircraft) until render distance in regards to AA Maxes is fixed.

In a heated battle, a small battery of 3-4 Burster Maxes become something impossible to cope with. They deal decent enough damage at range to deter, while at the same time being able to deal that damage before the aircraft can even render them. This makes them immune to harassment from aircraft in larger battles. As frustrating as it can be to be infantry and get demolished by aircraft when they have little / no air support, I can honestly say that nothing is more frustrating than being killed by something you can't respond to because it has not rendered.

Once aircraft can spot an AA Max battery at a reasonable distance in a heated battle, then it would make more sense to buff AA or nerf aircraft, because the artificial hindrance that is Infantry render distance hampers aircraft's ability to make quick strike runs or spot threats before they are threats. As of right now, there have been times where AA Maxes won't appear until I am at a distance of 100m. Two or more maxes who hold their fire, and I'm pretty much dead. Not because they chose an advantageous spot to ambush passing air, but because they did not render.

its your teamates job to spot them ,and its their job to tackles the AA to get a decent air cavalry support ...., pilots already have the tools to know where the danger come frombut it mean teamplay , as it should be in planetside world.


People really need to stop to always think about air balance as a solo pilot , excepted some kind of rare air aces , a solo pilot should be a dead pilot anyway period .
AA maxx was really efficent in PLanetside1 and they was X10 more played than they are actually on PS2 and good pilots still had many way to counter them and none of them was complaining about AA , because they was mostly playing inside an aircraft outfit and coordinated , and not just randomly dogfighting the first target they found.

99% of the QQ that grant them the last AA nerf came from noobs who was mostly soloing in their non upgraded aircraft like they did it on BF3 and 2 , and they just cant deal with the fact that a solo plane in an empty sky cant last long if he dont have any ground support. if you want to be a solo dogfight hero just give a try to world of warplane.