Anyone else getting blown out of the sky in less than 5 secs lately?

For all this whine about AA MAXes, I've never personally had much of a problem surviving their fire, bar in situations where there's say, 3 AA MAXes opening up on en concerto and I'm hovering within a few hundred metres.

Besides that situation, I generally find it easy enough to dodge the remaining shots after the first tracers or flak explosions and get out of the AA zone. Pretty much any death to AA I have, comes from fighting the AA. As I often run in my A2G build, I find it's a 50/50 whether I'll win or not if it's an AA MAX that's reasonably good and/or has flak armour. Far as I'm concerned, that's balanced.


For those having problems with AA MAXes, here's a protip that you might have dismissed or not thought of:

Do a barrel roll.

You should have played beta where it only took 3 seconds.

If your flying into an area an not expecting heavy enemy flak / missiles / skyguards.....your an idiot!

If your flying into an area to where you see buddies being blown out of the air, and STILL venture into the area....your an idiot!

You are in a vehicle that is NOT a super battle robot from Saturday Morning Cartoons. It has limits to how much damage it can take. An that is less than a liberator or galaxy for obvious (or should be obvious) reasons. Your to get in, unload your payload, and race out of the area. If the area is to hot for such action.....ask your infantry and armor to terminate the threat(s).

Its a TEAMWORK game guys. You have to work with your Squad / Platoon / Empire, to accomplish common goals. Your ESF is just one of many, but if you use poor judgement, yeah, you should be blown out of the air. A good organized group that sets up over-laying fields of AA MAX fire, is not something to toy around. The AA MAX's should not be nerfed because you were stupid enough to walk into their zone of coverage.

Everything in the game has a purpose. If you do not use it correctly, you'll get killed a lot. So learn when to use an ESF and when not to!

ESFs are glass cannons with weak cannons. Every single place where any meaningful combat is taking place is essentially an AA nest. It's pointless to fly an ESF, because you have literally zero influence on any battle. There is nothing an ESF brings to the battlefield that an MBT doesn't.

Some Scythe drove towards me today while it had some smoke coming out of it, and tried to lolpod me. I hid behind a rock, then came back out, and actually shot it out of the sky with about a full clip from an SMG. That **** is dumb.

ESFs need to be immune to small arms fire. I'm pretty sure I can kill an ESF with any small arms weapon faster than I can kill a MAX.

Airplane.

Robotic exoskeleton.

Wait, it didn't try to dodge you shooting at it with the SMG? Was the pilot dumb? What was stopping him boosting up abit to both dodge your shots and get a better angle?

Unlike the other people in the thread Im an above average pilot and AA max and I can assure you:
1º I never die to flak even if Im above the max. Afterburn past the nearest object (mountain, building, etc) repair and continue your uber farm somewhere else.
2º With the AA max you cant kill anything at range. The ammount of people on the forums thinking you can kill anything past 300 meters is so high I think they all started flying yesterday. Maybe they're the kind that never uses cover or runs in straight line lol
3º Dying to small arms? Lol. Like I said...

I get locked on no matter where I am and I get hit over and over and over again until I am dead or nearly dead.
Flying kinda sucks IMO.

He was probably dumb. Either way, the point is that I managed to drop an ESF with an SMG while it was at roughly 50% health. It was more or less intended to be a representation of how unnecessarily squishy they are.

Rocketpods honestly should have been left the way they were prior to the nerf. As it is now, they're useless for pretty much anything outside of farming really, really stupid/slow people.

Edit: This is coming from a guy who got pissed off while getting farmed by lolpods at every spawn in the game that wasn't a bio labs. Now it's shifted to everyone spamming MBTs and doing essentially the same thing.

Another pretty legit point.

Lock-ons in addition being as durable as a flying tin can is pretty awesome, clearly.

I have stopped most ground attacks with my ESF and just become a pure dog fighter. I do strafe ground targets with my Vortek though but most of the time I am around 1,000 Meters looking for targets. So I tend to stay a live a lot longer than most pilots

I started doing this because the ground AA has become so bad lol.

Um, no, rocketpod nerf was good. Didn't affect their intended AV use and they're still capable of dishing serious hurt on infantry and MAXes, especially if you land a direct hit.

If you want to farm infantry, there's primary guns for that. Although the NC's A2G is actually better for AV use than AI, so maybe that's why you feel the rocketpod nerf more.

In fact, I bet some of the NC pilot whine* about AA is because they lack a properly dedicated A2G weapon.

*(Don't mean to imply it's purely NC pilots who whine about AA mind you)

GU08 separated the skilled ESF pilots from the rest, now enjoy the wonderful AP rounds.

Unless you are under popped, in which case you face nothing but tank zergs on top of air zergs now.

GU8 was a big bag of crap for anyone who ISN'T the biggest faction on the server, most likely vanu.

Who, by providence, have a tank that can't shoot down ESFs easily like a vannie or prowler can.

Underpop is another issue that affects all portions of the game.
Magriders elevation on the main gun is horrible, slowest velocity and all that, sure it requires more leading than the other 2, but either way the survivability buff alone accounts for OP's curiosity about OHK rounds flying around in the air since ESF's are not the instant death from above that they used to be, so the MBT's wont have to hide as much.

skyguards vanguards magriders

The instant gibbers of all ESF's. It's strange we don't get more complaints about them and less about busters/lock ons.

to which i reply fine aa should kill me in 2 secs my HIGH EXPLOSIVE rocket pods should shred anything not wearing 2 inchs of steel. your move ******* p.s i do well in esf do not get shot down in 3 secs but people like you are why troops without flak armor can live through 9-10 HIGH EXPLOSIVE! rocket pods. freaking whiners. p.s that goes for bothsides.

Connery is a tank zerg for the TR now, so I don't see any logic in "bad ESf pilots" when the VS are stuck in warpgate with tanks patrolling the outside and swat anything that comes out.

And it isn't that hard to hit ESFs with a vanguard or prowler, but just like every update the vanu get shafted. again. They try fix the game by nerfing and buffing with no thought. again.

How does SOE expect us to stay when they pull this crap? tanks shooting down aircraft BETTER than a max or skyguard can?

Madness. No wonder PS2 is dying.

Y

Yes, obviously a tank shell would insta-gib an ESF. But to you really think that tanks killing ESFs happen more frequently than than a max/skyguard? Do you also think that the reason why apparently "PS2 is dying" is because of the ability for tanks to kill ESFs?

I'm an avid pilot myself and I know that when I get shot down by tanks, it's because I hovered too low and for too long while some tank was eyeing me from the distance. To blame SOE for you being swatted by a tank is stupidity, if your claims of being shot down my tanks which are apparently better at killing aircraft than max units/skyguads are true, then maybe you need to get out of the 400 altitude-I can kill everything but expect to not be killed by anything - attitude?

Edit: Just read your post again, "It isn't that hard to hit an ESF with a vanguard or a prowler" ??!! Really?? Prowlers cant even one hit ESFs with the AP round, assuming you were lucky to hit the first shot, the recoil of the first shot along with the continuous movement of the ESF on the second means its almost impossible to land a follow-up shot.

I seen outfits pull a whole lot of tanks and bunch them into a ball. It stopped every vanu push dead in its tracks and the tankers were all vets.

ESF tries to pod one? Swatted by the other tanks.

Tanks? Destroyed.

Infantry? Sniped en masse with AP.

It got so bad the vanu pop dropped to practically nothing and we were warp gated almost the entire day on Connery. Now I am seeing more and more vanu just up and leave because we get continually warp gated and there is little we can do about it.

With the zergs outside the warp, prime time is just not fun. Off hours is even less fun because there is no one on. On Connery I don't even see maxes and skyguards anymore, I just see the same tank zerg.