How to get better at flying

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Devaktus, Apr 5, 2014.

  1. Schwak

    Practice practice practice. This is the way to get better. More time in the air means more experience. Get some friends together that like flying and roll with them. Find people that are skilled enough to be able to pull you an ESF while there's is still up is what I'm saying. One last word of advice, only use the nose gun. Secondaries will make you bad in the long term. The more practice you have using a skill based weapon the better you will be if you decide to use the skill-less weapons later on. Also, make sure you fully cert your fuel tanks, because those suck without being fully upgraded.
  2. Kurohagane


    Try to get in touch with some ABTF or MCY guys. I see them flying all the time.

    The most important thing in aiming with the nosegun is just being able to place your cursor where you want it to be. Then, you can lead. When firing on another ESF, don't look at the crosshair, focus on the tracers that you see. If you want your tracers more visible, play on low brightness (and slightly up it depending on time of the day so you actually see anything) and below high "graphics quality" setting.

    First, try to fly with someone if you can, and learn to aim and lead at all, even when chasing someone or such. When you get the hang of it, try learning hover-fighting. The hardest part is to be able to correct your leading and such while at the same time moving yourself. Set your sensitivity 0.01 higher each session, and see how you fare - if you seem to be doing better, keep going and keep that in mind, if you go even further and think that you're doing worse, go back, etc. Determine your perfect sens level that way. Ideally, you want to be able to lead targets in point blank range while at the same time being precise at longer ranges. You can use pitch binds (mouse thumb buttons are good for this) to assist you in point blank turn fights.
  3. Obstruction

    yeah :( well cert those afterburner pods along with your timers and hover frame. the afterburner nerf really hurt new flyers more than anyone else. it's a growing trend in planetside 2, where devs attempt to nerf high skill areas and only hurt new players in the process.
  4. AssaultPig

    the only real answer is practice. It stinks because ESFs are fragile and the margin for error is small, so you'll get your lunch eaten a lot by more experienced pilots.

    Then you get a life where you kill 2-3 enemy fighters and it feels really good... until you fly into an ammo tower.

    The most helpful thing for me was trying to fly with/above friendly zergs a lot. That lets you practice with some friendly air/AA around. If you get into trouble you can just run back toward the blob and get to safety a lot of the time.
  5. GaBeRock

    For a specific practice routine, try flying as fast as possible as close to the ground as possible in vr. Make sure to go under rock archways too. This teaches you the hitbox on your plane, so you can hug terrain to avoid shots, while NAN repairs you so you can hoverthurst and deal damage back.

    Some other things: you absolutely need analouge thrust, pitch up, and pitch down on physical keys. It makes an insane amount of difference in getting into hover mode. Learn to continuously tap your yaw keys and spacebar to manuever, this cuts down turn time and helps turn precision. Running with AI nosegun/ab helps teach you how to aim and fly while avoiding flak/lockons, and is also cheap (100 certs for nosegun, 2 certs for ammo expansion and 1.25x sight) plus the same upgrades you'd use for everything else (NAN, fire suppression/flares) help out here. As NC, you'll need to get closer to the ground than VS or TR to farm those infantry, but at the same time the infamous air shotgun makes a somewhat-decent extra-close-range A2A weapon for your reaver.