Hi there fellow players ! today I want to talk to you how I have experienced the odds and ends of beeing a new ESF pilot from a now more cooled off ( I got quite heated the last time ) perspective . 1 . Earning your wings ! So In my case I have started as a somewhat experienced infantry player that got through a good portion of the beta and came back every now and then - never been realy a top percentage player , but I had a fair share of fun . After a while the walking and shooting got a bit boring so I decided to give it a new approach as ESF pilot , in usual manner I looked up all the guides I could find and thats already the point where I became a little frustrating because all the info I could find seemd either completly outdated , contradictory , or completly biased Heres a little example : by just using google you'll get as many different answers as there are options avalible like for example ; oh ! you have to use this airframe its the best for this ESF while the next vid may claim the complete opposite I decided to go with my personal preference and used the first certs on the racer airframe and the hover airframe both seemingly a good choice only to be later frowned upon by many others who claimed the dogfight airframe to be better ( but thats how personal preference works right ? 2. Oh boy ! wat am I gunna be when im all grown up ? as theres quite a variety of loadouts you may want to ask yourself whats my main purpose in this game ? As dofighting seemd a little stale for my taste ( all the overing and rotating made me quite sick in the beginning ) I tried to be a good little champ and support the ground units , got me the fitting loadout , tried countless hours of highspeed low alitude flying in VR --- Ready to roll ! well .... not quite because everytime I got into the fight I was imidietly the center of everyones attention - like showing up to a fancy dinner party in a clowns costume the realisation was : well whoops has to be my fault and stuff im new after all ! -- trained a bit more in VR got stealth certed --- again ready to roll ! ehrm .... it seems like my ESF has ben shredded even worse this time ... conclusion you have to be A. pretty damn good at this or B. be at least perfectly certed to maintain ANY effectiveness . And by any I mean not getting an assist every twelve minutes only to be killed after seconds and waiting for the next ESF to be ready 3. I cri evry tiem Time laps to 3 weeks later , unfortunetly no progress has been made whatsoever , self esteem is down to a point where you want to gauge a dull object into your head everytime you see the death screen ( I know a bit emo but dont cut me off yet ! , pun intended ) all the training you've put into it all the certs ( painfully scavanged from the 1/2 assist kill every 12 min ) are nothing worth at all because its the same other ESF pilots that shoot you down , the same 40 flak maxes that only have the life purpose to completly deny any A2G attacks the same question over and over .... why am I so bad at this ? am I the only one who sucks so hard at this ? and the realisation ... yes ! yes I am the only one because there are litteraly no other lower leveled ESF pilots that I am aware off -- even the friends I have started with are long gone and have given up already because the frustration potential of this is way to high 4. Grande finale: Summary from what I have witnessed there's only a hand full of ESF fighters remaining which I look at in awe and wish to be them but on the other side hate em because they are the ones who prevent you from gaining any advancement whatsoever ! with the sheer amount of anti air that can litteraly shoot you down in one shot ( tanks , liberators etc etc preventing large areas of the battlefield you have to scavange the outer skirts of the Hex only to look for stray kills that in no way helps your teammates the only summary I can give to this point Get to high up ? get shot down by ESF ! get to low down ? be vaporized by 5 maxes Mid air ? wait here for 3 lock on rockets that force you out of combat and your name on them Does the general tone of this has to be so unforgiving ? I think not For my part ... I have stored my ESF in the hangar , put the stylish 80, top gun helmet back into the wardrobe and gone back to infantry service where I can make twice the amount of certs , have fun , and can be useful ! to the few remaining pilots out there I can only wish a good flight and a good amount of beer to drown their sorrows because you might be the last of your kin !
the problem with air is that the skill ceiling is so high nooby pilots have next to no chance on their own against other pilots. against ground it's mainly because of how frustrating it is to get killed by an A2G ESFs, as most of the time it feels like you didn't have a chance to avoid it, so you immediately run and grab AA to make the annoying player go away so you can go back to your preferred play style. Don't get me wrong though, back in starwars battlefront one I was an ace that could easily get a 40:1 kdr. but this same problem happened and was so bad that when Battlefront 2 rolled around air combat had been completely removed from the main game and was given their own separate maps. Sadly I don't really see a solution to this problem other then rolling with some more experienced pilots that will have your back.
I feel you bud. You'll have BR 100's that are pure try-hards, even worse when they're in a large airball teaming on a single ESF. It's brutal, shameful, and people have no honor. Not much advice I can offer you than play with a larger group of pilots, stay in safe areas, avoid chasing enemy ESFs into their territories. Try asking ingame for a wingman. And prepare to die instantly to BS. Side note: Practice doing the aileron roll mid air repair, and the very abused reverse maneuver. And awareness is EVERYTHING Motivational note: "You can only learn more from what they already know."
Well, as a starting point. What you should of done is ask a good pilot on your server for a loadout. There's really only one option and most players will confirm that. The only place where you can kind of change is the liberator, where some people prefer precision bomber. As far as ESF goes, the hover air-frame dominates the others DRASTICALLY. The problem is hover makes you faster because of vertical trust. It makes you maneuver better because of vertical thrust. It makes you more stable to shoot things. And, it makes you turn faster than dogfighting because vertical thrust is what you use for turning also. Just ask anybody from PREY (rguitar87 got a youtube channel, and he answers comments 100+ ESF days combined afaik). Or the short answer would be: Default nosegun+AB - fire suppression - hover airframe - Nanites auto-repair. Otherwise you can ask on reddit, the end result is that any good pilot will tell you the same thing because it's the one thing that works the best... drastically. I mean, racer has a few things, but overall, it's still way inferior. Dogfighting is pure useless. If you think you're having it hard. Imagine how some of us, that learned with the old ressource system (remember those 4 minutes ressource ticks...? Where you could wait 20-30+ minutes to pull 1 ESF?). On the flip side, they ****** the controls really bad recently. So now controls can be unresponsive, jumpy etc etc (they are still patching, but my guess is it will still stay bad.... hopefully not). Not many pilots are left in the air... But you can ask any of them help; and most if not all will jump to your help and willingly spend time - hours - with you, helping you. Well, I'm not sure some pilots will still do that. A lot of them including myself consider the air-game dead (hell, I bought coyotes recently!) but people will most likely still help you to get a decent skill level. As a sidenote, I'd like you to ignore whatever the guy "comradehavoc" said. Just look at the vocabulary he's using. Every br100 is tryhard (or is it only br100?). Reverse maneuver is now something that's "abused"?(my guess is he doesn't know what it is...). So if you don't want to listen to me, that's fine. But you shouldn't ever ever listen to anybody who tells you that pilots have "no honor" are "all elitist ****" or "reverse maneuver abuse". Those are key things that unexperienced players say when they try to justify themselves or their failing arguments. It's just something to stay clear of; definetly plenty more, but that will get you past the 90% of air-haters who actually never flew and just speak to speak. Just curious, what server are you on?
I don't believe you. Everyone knows that you will shower in certs when you fly an ESF because its stupidly overpowered against ground and anti-air is useless. You were probably flying a Valkyrie, not an ESF. On a more serious note. Flying takes a lot of experience and a huge cert investment to be successful. There's not much to say other than hang in there and practice. As for certs, focus on increasing your survivability for starters. Therefore you should start off with certing out fuel pods first and use the Airhammer if you want to continue engaging ground. Fuelpods is inexpensive and super helpful when you're getting into some troubles. Fire suppression is next on the list it's really important to cert that one out asap. Don't put too much weight in airframes in the beginning. It won't make your life easier unless you already have the experience to take advantage of it in the first place.
You should consider that those skyknights you admire or hate were once beginners, and had to suffer all you're suffering right now, however its true that flying "learning curve" is probably too big for a new player, specially when you're Overwhelmed with lockons, flak, gankers, bad players, etc. The fact is that flying is a very sentimental experience, you'll die a lot, you'll get angry a lot and you'll feel discouraged from time to time. I can only advice you that every time you feel discouraged take a breath and start again, learn from your mistakes, analyse every action, learn new technices and the most important part: be consistent and realistic, there's no pilot that mastered flying esfs in just 3 weeks, some of them have spend months to be what they are.
This is accurate. One thing I'll add is that Coyotes can make the learning experience easier. Yes, you'll get rage tells from the skyknights; yes, they're arguably OP and un-fun; but the point is, they'll let you get some reliable damage in while you learn to maneuver and evade enemy fire in a dogfight. Use them as a crutch at first, but try to wean yourself off the coyotes as soon as you can, because you need to learn to use your nosegun to be a truly proficient pilot. Once you've mastered the nosegun, you can re-introduce coyotes if you want to be cheesy and effective, or stick with AB tanks if you want to be respected and/or just have more fun. If you don't want to get better and just want to farm rage tells, use tomcats. They're the most blatantly unfair weapon in the game and they have an extremely low skill floor. Regarding A2G work, the trick is to run to a different fight when the AA gets too hot. Lock-ons can be countered with flares, but if there are enough burster MAXes or skyguards in the hex, you can't survive there. If the enemy has a gank squad up and running, you're probably better off just pulling AA yourself.
Lockons are a huge step back for any flying learner, any experienced pilot knows how to deal with them and using them will only create bad habbits in your flying technice, never use them unless you already are a competent pilot.
About your point on needing to have a fully certed ESF to have a chance to win. Nope, it's not like that. Fully certed ESFs are a luxury, not a requirement. Take it from someone who has one, and still sometimes can't get an enemy pilot kill per aircraft pulled. A great pilot who knows his craft will be able to perform well even on a brand new character with no certs, he just won't have the luxuries he enjoyed previously. The only time you'll see a hard vertical improvement over stock is with Composite Armor certline. This is not to say that you should definitely cert CA because it's superior or something, or that other things don't improve with certs, but... I'm struggling to come up with a way to say what I mean. With frame upgrades, nanite repair, increased mag size and the like... you'll get a benefit, but you actually need to UTILIZE that benefit to make it matter. If you are flying straight forward, Hover 3 isn't helping you. If you are in a hover dogfight, Racer 3 isn't helping you. If you are fighting an opponent who can land shots consistently, nanite repair 5 isn't helping you. If you can't land more than 20% of a mag at a time, mag size 4 likely isn't going to help you. Etc... It takes an experienced pilot to make that little extra something count. The reason CA is different is that good or bad pilot, equipping CA WILL increase the number of Flak rounds and small arms shots it takes to down your ESF by a pre-determined amount, it's not up for debate or the skill of the person flying it, it's hard fact. Maybe honorable mention to CA would be fire suppression, as that gives a definite benefit as well, but it's still an active use mechanic, and still also situational and tied to a cooldown. My two certs, from a pilot who at one time used to be really good, but then everyone else got better... Just keep at it.
another thing that needs to be said is that positional awareness has become really critical in the current overall meta. what i mean by that is that it's really easy to overextend and get wrecked by any or all of the 48-96+ enemies within your visual and audio render over the main conflicts, and there are any number of mid-grade thru established pilots lurking around just to pick you off when you do. think of it like lane position in a MOBA. if you are an ace or a highly skilled lib team, you can jungle, gank, or even tower dive. but if you aren't, then you need to be in lane, under your tower (high friendly pop on the ground, or some type of friendly AA screen.) you also need to be aware of where the enemy's safe zone is, where they have a big pop or an AA nest, and try to engage away from those areas. like WUNDER8AR said, the AB tank upgrades and Fire Suppression will help a lot in being able to reposition after taking damage and still compete in a fight. but you also have to be able to reverse and you have to develop a sort of big-picture awareness so that you can stay in a good position. or at least learn from your deaths what bad position is, so that it becomes more a matter of slow progress than one of perpetual frustration.
I'm speaking from experience when I say they help you learn. You're so hopelessly disadvantaged as a newbie with just a nosegun that you won't live long enough to learn anything, not to mention the effect that has on your morale.
Just try and find a squad that you can be a Wing Man in ... Help other ESF get their targets.. play assist for a long time Shoot at what they are shooting at, and never leave your wing man... That will get you some certs, fun and lots of experience.
your experience seems to vary from the overall consensus by a signifigant margin. it may have been true long ago that any frame with any secondary could learn from scratch just as well as any other, but with the changes to hover frame and pods last year it just isn't so any more. i'd even go so far as to say that both the hover frame and the AB upgrades are necessary before you even lift off, because that gives a brand new pilot the most room to make mistakes that waste fuel. with another secondary, or no frame, you are setting yourself up to play on the hardest possible mode, where running out of fuel means losing maneuverability and then a quick death. it's only established pilots that really shine with alternate secondaries, because they are already competent enough to get away with less fuel capacity and efficiency.
There will be a lot of advice in this thread that you should take with a grain of salt. Conflicting priorities, confirmation bias and probably some straight up trolling. If there is one thing any new pilot needs to know about learning to fly, it's this: Take advantage of Indar continent locks. Switch factions if you have to, because there's no substitute for time in the air.
First of all i feel your pain ... i went trough the same and heck i still am struggling (i quess that will never change or at least not in the near future) I even made an alt that just did a2a fights from 0 to fully certed (br 30 for me) Now there a are plenty of tips out there on how to do it "right" and each and everyone of them is right in their own way, but that doesn't necessarly mean that it will work for you. I am not a sky god ... so my input on that front won't be different than the stuff everyone else writes. I ll try and focus on a different aspect ... how i made my struggle and tough times work so far and still maintain a level of fun. 1. Set yourself goals This could be pretty much anything. And no i don't mean stuff like get good or bs like that. For example, one of my first big goals was to learn how to take down a liberator by myself. How to aproach it, what distance to maintain, how to evade the op as well you know dalton (in the right hands ofc) 2. Make enemies Don't get me wrong ... i don't mean piss off people deliberatly or anything like that. What i did was using recursion stat tracker, to find and remember a bunch of pilots that kept wrecking me over and over again. Remember their names, their moves, their loadouts and get to work. Start by imitating what they did and work on the weaknesses in your flight style they use against you. This not only helps you to stay alive (aka avoid fights with your nemesis, when you are low on nanites), but also gives a sense of acomplishment and satisfaction once you surpass them ... or at least survive longer than before against them. 3. do whacky stuff One of my favourite ways to improve my mood is to do stuff in a completly strange way. Fly upside down a bit and engage like that (don't expect to win ^^) Stay in an area with flak, just to see how long you can evade/stay alive (this helps a lot with future flak issues) You won't survive, but you will learn what works best ... what puts their aim off. Bases with single aa guns in use work well for that. I for example love to play chicken with other pilots (just don't do it against scythes ... those things are too sturdy) 4. switch it up My main focus is a2a but that doesn't mean i won't lolpod the living crap out of a biolab/tower from time to time. Doing the same stuff over and over, will get you frustrated very fast. If you are the cautious type that stands back and picks his targets with care ... go nuts and be reckless or if that's your default, stay a hex behind (in any direction) of the fight and pick off people that overextend or retreat. The problem with the airgame tough is, that you cannot afford to take a complete break from it ... try instead focusing on other aspects of it for a while. 5. walk in your enemies shoes Fed up getting shot down by flak or lockons? Well try doing the same ... it will teach you a lot. For example using lockons ... you will figure out that trees, buildings even the smallest rock, will breack the lockon cycle and force them to start from 0. Flak will teach you about range, leading ... the problem of predicting the movements of the enemy and therefore how to best survive it. You don't need to master this, just get a feeling ... at the very least, it will make you realise faster if you are up against a newbie that just stumbled upon an aa turret/gunner seat or a pro and might even teach you to appreciate some of your deaths for the skill your enemy needed to put into acomplishing it. (flak ... not lockons ... those are just easy mode^^) --- As a last pointer: If you are flying a reaver ... stop. The reaver is the worst esf to learn flying with. It handles like a brick, is the biggest target out there and has the least amount of tracers, while still having the same bullet drop as a mossie (just a slower rate of fire) If you want to get good in a reaver ... use a mosquito. Sounds unbalanced? Not realy, the reaver can do amazing stuff, just isn't easy to handle for beginners. A mosquito has the same bullet velocity on it's nose guns as the reaver but a way higher rate of fire. This means, you will get a lot more tracer rounds, which makes it easier to line up your shots. It also has larger clips and a larger amo pool ... again stuff that helps a new pilot out, since you won't have the experience needed to line up shots right on. And it is smaller, while beeing a lot more manouverable. It's thrusters last longer, just don't give the same amount of boost ... this means that some of the more crazier stuff later on will be a bit more tricky, but for a beginner the larger fuel tank makes it a lot more forginving when it comes to ab management. Once you mastered the mosquitos default gun and rotary ... hop back into a reaver and literaly shred people in seconds ... in the right hands the reaver is that great ... just not for a new pilot.
