I can see both sides of this, but I do have one guilty confession... ...my Skyguard and I kind of like the idea of there being more low skill pilots around.
Main gun you can kill faster when hovering 50m off the deck just using A and D to turn with a larger clip. Most of us use AB so you learn fast how to kill with main gun anyway and find its much faster than LOLpods.
I bet most don't - but good pilots often do. Looking at stats you can often get a fair sense of the level the pilot is at by comparing the kills by weapon. The best pilots will tend to have 40-50% or even higher number of their total ESF kills by rotary - either because they are dogfight-specialists (which tends to require a fairly high level of skill to focus on) or because they are close-air-support pilots who have advanced to the level where they can aim well enough with the rotary (or stock gun, which has higher accuracy) to use it as a primary means of killing even infantry. At high skill-levels the nosegun is actually more efficient in many instances (you can certainly kill a lot faster and have more of a surprise element if you just can land the bullets), although rocketpods are nice to have if you need to finish up a target that got gravely wounded, or you need to take out hardened targets. On the other end of the scale, the poor pilots tend to have 10-15% nosegun kills or even lower, with most of their kills coming from rocketpods, PPA/banshee/airhammer and maybe a smattering of A2A missiles. This typically indicates that they have spent most of their time in the air shooting down at infantry targets and chose the easy-route to do this where you don't really need to aim presicely but just splash the area and hope you get someone (at the expense of their ability to dogfight or protect themselves from other air). -Stigma
Anyone who thinks top A2A pilots getting mad will reduce them getting attacked on the ground is clearly oblivious of the situation. Top pilots keep the air clear of low skill Pod farmers, they leave and rocket podders will be everywhere. Top pilots are very good with the nosegun and may turn it on infantry if they don't like air combat, and it will be effective. Let's not forget that Locust Cannons may end up being the new rocket pods, but considerably better. Scrubs should NOT rejoice if this goes into effect.
don't be so high on yourselves. you know very well you may run wild for a few weeks and then the dalton would get nerfed five different ways and aa buffed again until the uproar died down. the dalton would stay gutted.
You realize the air game is going to stay almost exactly the same? Server aces are going to still stomp everyone. The only thing the change effects is the ace vs multiple enemies at once and the ace vs ace combat since we won't be able to dodge anymore.
