Liberators are fine: AA is the problem

I'm glad someone else sees this for what it really is.

That won't work
You will still get instantly tankbusted from a lib, like I've had happen a few times today. All that AA alternative will do is annoy them so they can instant-kill you.

Because, you know, that makes sense. Let the 450 resource (1000 cert AP, 750 cert AA) tank instantly die from a 1 man 350 resource liberator with a 100 cert tankbuster. There's no counter, even if he's flying 10 feet off the ground. He just flat out resists more damage than you. You're literally sitting in free XP for them.


Oh, and by the way I trialed the AA Grounder for heavy assault.
I have literally never had a more boring 30 minutes in my entire life.

At first, the sky was full of aircraft. Locking onto galaxies are pointless, as you do not do enough damage to warrant any XP or enough to even get an assist.
And locking onto liberators rarely net you the kill. In fact, you just become a giant red dot on the map to shoot. And somehow they manage to leave the battle faster than an ESF? How can they be that tanky, destructive, and that fast?
The only kills I got were from ESFs, which the AA seemed to do fine against.

My conclusion was to not buy the AA Rocket launcher, since it did not net me enough XP to be worth how boring and ineffective it is. I'm not even going to look at the sky anymore. I'll just ignore it like so many others do. It's literally pointless.

I'm happy for you, being vanu with a useful weapon, and all.

Gotta say after playing a bit earlier today, I still don't see what all the fuss is about liberator's instagibbing you. I still think we do need more AA options, but in regards to their strength the enemy had several but was unable to do hardly anything aside from pop out from the mountainside to try and squeeze off a few shots before everyone started bombarding them with AA.

On top of that population was pretty even, and while they got some scattered kills now and then, they were hardly able to do anything than delay the inevitable. In fact, the few tanks that came over were far more effective at sowing chaos because they could hug the ridge and sling HE shells at us without having to worry about as much return fire.

My main is TR and I find your comment hilarious

And this'd be fine if we were guaranteed an Amp station but we're not. If you lose your amp station the only counter to enemy air is now in real short supply.

If you go for a lib with an annihilator and wait till the light is green then you are dead. Simple as that. Either the lib got you...or some infil got you. And even in the unlikely situation that you are not dead...there is a good chance that you are dead a few seconds later without of doing any significant damage to the lib.

To say that it's not the developers fault if the players don't play it like they should, can only be a joke(as if players would play any game like they should. They always use the easiest way...that's why you have Libs hovering over spawnrooms....which likely wasn't intended by developers either.). If you have a game that is based on teamplay but people still don't manage to exercise enough teamplay to make a strat work after a year, it means that you can scrap the mechanic cause people will NEVER make it work on a noteworthy scale. If that strat on the other hand is vital to keep some vehicle from being OP, the result is that the vehicle actually is OP.

And yeah, it's very interesting that the liberator that had quite some complain-threads going about being too strong, got even buffed at the same time as new buyable weapons for them come out. Very odd coincidence, SOE.....and not very smart on the long run.

Currently Flak is a little too powerful on ESF's, but Liberators and Galls should take a bit more damage from flak with out making ESF's "Glass cannon's".

You don't notice kills performed by supersilenced invisible guy? Who could think of it?
Its all about you meeting opponents who are good with this combo or not. I've seen enough QCX kills, 90% of them were during night, inf was sitting in place where he is hard to spot even without cloak and most victims were not on their toes, cause they thought they are in relative safety. Its hard to keep dancing ALL the time.

Same goes for libs. They require user being smarter than average monkey, so there are plenty weak libs, which make some ppl think that libs are not big deal. But when 2 (not even 3) decent players get to somehow certed lib its already a farm machine. While slapping together 2 guys with AA RL you still get cannon fodder.
Efforts to kill with lib and to kill lib are simply incomparable.

MBTs wont use AA secondary alot, most ppl need AV or AI secondary to be really effective, especially on magrider with its crappy nose cannon.

IMO, good solution would be making AA weapons more versatile. Make skyguard better for AI and AV, walker for AI, make AA launchers more accurate vs ground targets, etc.
Dedicated AA players should have something to do after they done with this pesky lib.

But, I guess, popular AA would kill lib weapon sales.

Right. And zerg is teamplay too. 1 solo player + 1 solo player +... + 1 solo player = teamwork. They are moving in same direction and attack same base after all.

The fundemental problem PS2 has with air, is that they combined the sperate A2A and A2G fighters from PS1 into the ESF in PS2.

Until they resolve that problem, PS2 air will remain effectively unbalanceable, instead always tipped too far one way or the other.

A solo lib against 3 skyguards, I reckon I know crews who could do that.

I am going to have to say that AA is typically the problem as well. There just are not enough effective counters. The whole run and repair thing is annoying as well especially for highly mobile enemies.

Just a little thinking out of the box. How about a weapon that would limit repairs, or slow them down or make it unrepairable for x time. How about a weapon that slowed down air/armor/max? What about something that disable controls for a couple seconds? How about one that blocks out their vision? How about heavies could exchange Rocket launchers for a walker/ranger type. And so on. I think creative solutions might be effective and even better, fun and potentially tactical.

For armor there are more counters and very effective ones, there are just less so for air. If we could only get anti air mines/C4 that would help. And I agree with the OP there should always be a semi effective free counter to anything in the game. It does not need to be the best, but something that does not cost resources (and lockons are poop).

I also feel a good crew that spends resources for anything should be very effective, but 3 people in a vehicle should not trump double the people on just infantry or whatever means. Spending resources should give you an edge but not a super huge edge, but the amount it should favor I think is a good debate.

My frustration with AA is there's this stupid balance scale where on one side not enough people pull it to make it effective, and on the other side everyone has it pulled making it pointless. That I think is what really is frustrating. You whittle down a ship and it's almost dead until it flees behind cover because you didn't have enough support to take it down.

Pretty much, you got 1 skyguard, maybe a burster MAX and a couple AA launchers versus 10 ESFs, 3 libs, and 1-3 Gals. That does nothing unless you can all focus on one target at a time which never happens. not to mention as soon as a lib fires, everything starts dieing.

If it's not that, it's 10 skygurads, 5-10 burster Maxes, everyone having a lockon versus a non existent air force. Every time a plane appears, it's instantly killed and you feel your tank resources are now wasted.

So what ends up happening is either people see no point in doing AA because it's just too overwhelming, not to mention they're sitting ducks, or it's boring and pointless because with so many people having it out causes a majority to have nothing to do.

Nobody knows why the libs got that armor buff.

I will say, if we want the air game to become more popular, what needs to happen is ESFs need a reduction in initial cool down time (maybe 10 minutes), and 10%-20% reduction in cost. Maybe rather than the ESF, have an NS plane like stated in one thread that was generic and couldn't carry any types of pods. Only a nose gun. You'd have more flyers which would in turn help against the Lib problem. My theory is that more ESFs mean better measures against Libs. The increase of ESFs would in turn increase AA usage. Overall you'd have people see a reason to pull AA.

No you don't. In a vacuum, 3 non mouth breathing skyguards can completely wreck a gunship.

If they try to fly over them at height, certainly.

If they come in low behind terrain they'll get 1 or 2 of them..... and maybe all 3 in a couple of passes. (you simply don't have enough time on target to do enough DPS if they fly like that - where as they have more than enough to kill a Skyguard or maybe 2)

However that requires a top lib crew, but they certainly exist.

In a game with millions of variables flying all over the place at any certain time, in a vacuum, 3 sky guards should never lose to 1 gunship. I am not saying it's impossible in real planetside 2 fights, but I am saying it is highly improbable that a gunship could win a straight up fight against 3 skyguards.

The fundamental problem with air is that players on the ground bunch up into high density small areas, outside of that the pickin's are pretty slim. You can't balance a liberator against 30 players with strikers all in one small area.

And the reason why players on the ground bunch up into high density small areas is because the Sunderer is a big fat non-cloaking target, and the only safe place to deploy them in the center of mass of a zerg.

We do. New lib armor - Libs become FOTM - New lib weapons - Increased sales - Smed becomes richer. Aren't you happy for him? You should be. It's only reason why we play this game.

Indeed.

But in a "real world" PS2 situations such a Lib crew just wander around looking for easy farming targets, and avoid conflicts that are bigger.

As for the likelihood, well it depends on the skill of the crews, but certainly Miller seems to have a high proportion or ridculously skilled ones.

Because cover is so readily available in the open wastes of Auraxis right? Most of the time you are lucky to have any kind of roof over your head since SOE seems to be deathly allergic to putting roofs on things to protect vehicles and infantry from hover spam.

CoF of Skyguard and AA Turrets needs to be tightened.
Bursters vs Lib could do with a small damage buff.
All AA Projectiles need a better effect so you can actually see your tracing in the distance.
Burster bonus damage from ZoE needs to be removed. (and any other NS weapons in the future, ZoE is Vanu technology and should not work on any Nanite Systems weaponry other than Vanu Weapons.)

/My Opinion