Possible change to hover characteristics for ESFs in PTS.

I'll be straight up: I don't want this to happen. A change in the factor from 8 to 2 is pretty bad.

• We’re also trying out a change to the lift factor granted by afterburners when in hover mode. We’ve reduced it from a factor of 8 to a factor of 2. This should make the reverse thrust still doable but will lower its abruptness and diminish your top speed while doing so.

Thoughts?

Another ESF nerf?

Ouch, looks like they are taking it out because most players don't even know this move is possible and are getting eaten alive be players that are very good at it.

I don't think this is necessarily the problem, but that the existence of the reverse maneuver as it stands invalidates two of the airframes since effectively, every fight DOES turn into a circle jerk. Ask anyone who performs the reverse maneuver, and they VAST majority say to use the hover power airframe.

Personal opinion though.... I LIKE the reverse maneuver, but you wouldn't see the invalidation of two airframes if vertical flight was a toggle. Instead of everything becoming the circle jerk because of the low hover speeds, we'd at least have some more options.

Large fights actually involve less reverse maneuvers, because flying in a direction you can;t see is not good when several other aircraft are darting around you in every direction. They also require you to slow down to use, which is basically a death sentence. You get focused very quickly if you are trying to hover fight someone in a large, coordinated air battle. That fact alone makes dogfighting airframe more viable. Scouts for these groups, as well as solo players, also will see tons of benefit from using Racer. So no, there is still choice between the airframes, and they all do have benefits that actually pay off.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if this was done for the console version of the game. Needless to say if this change gets implemented, I may find the game growing stale fast without the unique air combat model to keep me entertained.

I use dogfighting. I reverse in almost ever fight I have that doesn't involve me purely chasing down another ESF, I find it advantageous to use this frame over hover as it allows me to adjust my aim with a lot more ease during a Vthrust duel.

I've made my opinions clear in the patch notes thread, but to summarise:

ESF dogfighting (VThrust included) is one of the last pure-skill based things in this game (Excluding A2A missiles), to dumb down the effect of the reverse maneuvers simply penalises those of us who have learned how to use it to our advantage. It is an easy technique to activate, but incredibly hard to master.

In a proper duel, you must lead your shot whilst compensating for the massive vertical drop induced by your thrust, you must avoid enemy fire without any forward momentum, and you must also keep your nose pointed down in order to prevent your engines for tilting forward, effectively "stalling" your aircraft for a crucial second.

Yes, new pilots will die when they face us, but its not because the ESFs are overpowered, or that one gun is significantly stronger than another, it's because we are very, very good. We practiced this, dedicated countless hours to perfecting our techniques, and to reduce this crucial maneuver's effectiveness so to cater for those who are new is a cruel joke.

We already have to content with one batch of almost balanced A2A missiles, and soon we will have to deal with an A2A Striker. These are the options for new pilots. Without flares there is very little we can do to avoid them, especially if we are fighting against more than one enemy.

We are going to need our manoeuvrability to survive, please don't take it away from us.

I suspect this is going to be the reason right here. "Leveling the playing field" and making the game mechanics more console friendly for coding (one codebase vs 2) or something of the line.

Much as dedicated players love to put skills to good practice, in the end, the best business decision is to make the game more accessible for the many. I will mourn the loss of the RM .

Yes, you could be onto something here. The PS4 allows players to play with Keyboard + Mouse rather than a gamepad.

I sincerely hope that the proposed changes to ESF Reverse Thrusting are not due to a need to cater to console gamers.

In fact, I think many of us pilots would very much appreciate some kind of explanation from SOE as to why they think this change is needed? Even if it's a sure-fire thing that is going to go in, an explanation could at least let us sympathise with why the change is needed. Of course, as we know, SOE never respond to polite requests with actual effort put into the reasoning, so instead:


HIGBY WTF?!

I don't fly ESF's much, but this is NOT a good change for the game . Why would you want to normalize skill between ESF user(s) ? As it is there are too many factors that already limit skill ceilings artifically ( For many other playstyles not just ESF's ) in the game in the name of " balance" ..

The skill ceiling for flying ESF's is insanely high, and the learning curve is more like a wall, thanks to the dominance of very experienced players. SOE has stated before that they want to make flying friendlier to less experienced players. Whether this is a good way to do it is something we need to test.

Let us reserve our judgments until we try it out. Remember, they aren't going to get rid of the reverse maneuver, this change would just make it slower. And, of course, it can be tuned; maybe testing would show that a factor of 4 is best, or maybe they'll find a different way. We can't give feedback on a feature that we haven't tried yet.

NOPE

It's on PTS at the moment, and opinions from pilots are coming in, and it's not good.

Personally, I dont think you should make an experience appealing to new players by penalising the old. Do something different perhaps? Why not have "regular" VThrust as a cert line option? Perhaps an alternative could be higher grade armour to reduce bullet damage for those who are not able to do the techniques.

As I said in my post above though, the soon to be new abundance of A2A missiles should make the skies friendlier for newbies anyway.

Or, they just combine this with the supposed AB cert upgrades, ta da, a meaningful decision to be made by the pilot, carry lolpods/A2A missiles or be able to properly nosegun dogfight.

Instead of having a tiny drawback in slightly less AB when using a secondary.

I can only assume that by doing this they are trying to encourage a more traditional style of dogfighting flight.

It's hilarious that people even suggest this... 95% of the 'good' dogfighters I know use Racer, the other 5% use Dogfighting... Hover Stability really doesn't help you out in hover battles at all. It helps you keep your guns on that damned infiltrator that keeps phasing out of existence...

*Please note, those 5% will adamantly maintain that 95% use dogfighting and 5% use Racer... I've still yet to talk to anyone who uses Hover for anything other than lolpodding and derping about.




So, now that we've more or less covered that fallacy, let's get on topic. What the **** is the air game going to be if it's not about circle jerking? Being able to perform the air reverse manoeuvre at 25% of its current speed is begging for death really - I don't even know why the developers have kept in the ability at all if it's going to be nerfed to this extent...

We know this is all about taking away what the 'aces' have and letting the little guys be competitive, but at what point are we going to start seeing air getting buffed? The whole point that set this off was that a few people were 'Gods' and everyone else couldn't kill anything for toffee... Now we're taking out the Gods, but without buffing air as a whole, this simply means that EVERYONE in the air can't kill anything for toffee, instead of most people...

BAH! Give me control of my VThrust. I hated the F-35 in BF3 because of 'speed based vertical thrust'.... I tolerate PS2's system just because I keep thinking, MAN if they DID give me control over that thruster.....

*wipes drool off cockpit console*

I find Hover nice on my Mossy as it is already has great handling and needs more breaking power. I can stop mine on a dime now.

I use Dogfighter on my Reaver because the extra agility is great and turns a flying brick into a flying snowball. Still not aerodynamic but flies further.

I prefer running Racer myself. Just stated that MOST people seem to use / recommend hover. *shrugs*

In fairness, I use Hover quite a lot on my Mossie too (mainly because I lolpod, but the extra braking is nice, true), but I didn't really want to get into the fact that Mossies have enough strengths that they can afford to use upgrades on vanity *derails to Mossie>Scythe>Reaver thread... *

Oh please, stop pretending you are all some skillful reverse maneuver pros, and stop pretending the reverse maneuver can only be pulled off by only the best aces. It took me 5 minutes to learn the reverse, and once you get that learnt, you just need to improve your aim and dodging/evasive skills. The reverse maneuver just turned every 1v1 into a hover duel. The people that say they love hover duels are the same people that are the best at it. It getting taken out is gonna be the best for dogfighting.