Waterson Air is a Crucible of Pain and Death

I just have to say I found it extremely entertaining once to have been flying around Esamir in my Reaver, get jumped by two Mossies, both of them attack me, and as I whip around, trying to evade the people, firing off some Breakers and a few clips of my Airhammer, I suddenly start getting shot by two NC Reavers, dropping me in a second or two.

And then I get four hate tells (One from each guy, dat faction diversity tho) saying, "****ing interrupted a good duel, ******", "****ing duel breaker noob", etc.

Then I realized that the new "elitists" air group sucked. And then I brought five good, IRL friends who happened to be on at the time. Friendly fire with six skyguards doesn't bode well for elitist nubs. Heh.

The tears were glorious.

For someone whos played since launch you sure as hell have no clue.

9/10

You forgot to mention ZAPS. The thread is about ZAPS. Please, stay OT.

I wish Peruvian was around to save me/murder me depending on his faction choice for the day

I just want to add the intensity of the air game here is what makes playing a Ranger Harasser worth the 8k SPH I get, lol.

When I finally get my outfit running, we are going to go around the map in 4 Skyguards, and repair and ammo Sunderphants with dual rangers, just to make NC and TR miserable.

On another note, my scythe is fully certed for farming infantry as well, but I don't want to be swarmed by 9 reavers without my coyotes.
I still stand on my point that coyotes are amazing on Waterson. You could power Auraxis on the rage generated. As of now, I've got hate tells from rguitar and smurfstew after Coyote/Hailstorm ing them to death.

There are a few things that incite rage while doing Air Game on Waterson.

1.) Gank Squads - This is infuriating because there's no defense. I'm looking at LUXE, XOO, 3GIS, OPTR, OAK, and a few other outfits. I don't play VS and TR enough to know what NC outfits do the same, but pulling 5-10 ESFs for the express purpose of gangbanging any ESF you run across isn't fun on the receiving end. This makes any pilot who's just learning the ropes or isn't

2.) Response to Gank Squad - This is the stranger part, I've been a part of RCN6/C150/SET counter Air Squads where we'll pull ESF and Libs specifically to hunt down the gank squad. We have the certs and pilots to do it, but I can't imagine what it's like for the players who don't. It's 'fun' to a degree, but it turns into a massive cluster where it becomes a game of numbers and each side calling reinforcements until we've got 30vs30 air battles raging.

3.) Epic Air Battles of Doom - This is what it ends up looking like.


ESPECIALLY the friendlies ramming into each other.

Most of the time I'll run AH since I can use it effectively enough on Air Targets while retaining both the hilarity of such a ridiculous weapon and ground effectiveness. I'll even forgo using it just to run people over. Sorry to anyone i've done that to, but the flat bottom of the Reaver is perfect for doing that.

By no means am i an "elite" pilot. Most dogfights I end up either getting ganged up on, or simply out manuevered - I play ESF mostly for ground pounding and trolling about running ppl over (seriously, i'm probably halfway to auraxium on Reaver Roadkills ) and facing off against those elite pilots can be pantcrappingly terrifying. I can have a nice duel with 1v1 or even 2v1 if pilots are average.

Serioulsy, Air Hammer is teh funnest weapon in this game, and it saddens me when I get ganged up by 3-4 lockon ESFs just out to gank enemy ESFs.

Would be interesting to see what happens with the merge. They will get to experience the kamikaze brigade here on Matherson, where people don't care how your esf is put down. They make a game of how many rage tells they can get from the flyboys. Those tells are pasted in platoon chat so everyone gets a chuckle.

I once had someone raging that I used only Coyotes on him, had the Banshee and I didn't want to waste my ammo without a clear shot - he kept turning around in tight circles instead of fighting me, so I just led with Coyotes whenever I got windows to shoot with. Later on I checked his killboard, looked like he was running a Vortek/Coyote setup. Why he didn't hover duel me (and he'd likely have easily killed me then) I have no idea!

well you're obviously new, and probably just rush when using coyotes, sure, there's a way to counter that. There's not a way to counter the already decent pilot that is spamming them while barrel rolling making them quite hard to hit while they have 100% acc. Right now they are being used by already good pilots to lower ttk instead of helping lower pilots. This can be changed if a skill based setup was more effective but currently it's not.

The only thing that's "different" on waterson is the lack of pilots and the few that are there are in squads of 5-6 esfs. Nobody is going ot win that engagement solo. I mainly run the rotary now because of this as I can still get 2-3 if they aren't very smart because the dps of the rotaries.

I'll admit I hear #(*#ing PREY/ZAPS a lot on my TR alt when I'm flying in air squads.

We're not even pilots bro

The pilots on waterson feel extremely organized

• all of them have a wingman or 2
• they're all VOIP'd
• have memorized the entire map
• have the entire map organized to A-Z,0-9 grid (and communicate it with military precision)
• broadcast the position of every skyguard in auraxis to a centralized skyguard taskforce database that every ESF/Lib super-friend has pulled up on a secondary monitor
• have the prime directive of demoralizing every non-pilot into playing another game

Judging from this I would say you really haven't experienced the air game on other servers. Connery certainly is a bit zergy and a bit focused on lock-ons, but Mattherson has a very similar style to Waterson. Most of the regular pilots will fly with nosegun+afterburners when fighting other air. Having played on both, I find that there is a larger number of both competent and good pilots on Mattherson, but that is an entirely different topic.

The air game has always been and always will be punishing. There is no room for error. Honestly though, if you get better it becomes very rewarding. Try asking some of the people who beat you for tips. A lot of pilots are actually nice guys who will be more than willing to help.