Coyotes and Tomcats

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Sums it up. I actually read a post about a guy complaining Coyotes should be nerfed because he was sick of getting killed by groups of 8 noobs running around using them. Yeah, EIGHT vs. ONE and he was pissy he was dying. What they really need is an air only continent for these guys. In all honesty, that way they could balance the real game and let the skyknights have their fun too.

Then don't get close to an ESF running Coyotes...... That weapon is useless at range. If I can dodge them at range as a noob pilot, I'm sure it should be easy mode to a God-tier skyknight like yourself. Plus, the only people who run them do so because they can't aim with a nose gun, so if you stay at medium range they really can't touch you. If you insist on fighting up close, then don't play chicken over and over till you die.... Reverse maneuver around them as they pass so you never loose your bead. Meanwhile they'll pass, turn around, have to find you, then try to play chicken again, but they're dead before they can make a second pass. I haven't seen a Coyote user yet that doesn't do strafing runs.

And seriously, I read your other thread about ground AA farming ESFs, all while you refuse to run flares... what a joke. The absolute only people to ever die from AA are greedy pilots that stick around to eat a second AA missile or soak up another 2 seconds of flack. AA in this game doesn't kill decent pilots, it deters them. Solution? Don't be such a greedy farmer or Ganker of A2G ESFs.

Well if you think logically about game mechanics.

Try to forget your hate for people who are good at flying.

Try to remember that not all of us pilots want to farm the ground.

Ask yourself. Is it a good game mechanic for lock-on launchers that were designed to fight a2g ESf are ineffective vs said a2g esf and very very effective against A2A esf which they were NOT added to combat?

Do you think its a good game mechanic for an invisible infantry guy to be able to hit an aircraft for 42% damage with no chance of retaliation?

Do you think that a weapon that is designed to fight a2g farmers but is very bad against them should be left as it is?

An a2g farmer will fly in low, and if he gets locked he just afterburns over the horizon before the lock sticks.

On the other hand the A2A pilot is high above the ground, with no way of knowing some invisible guy is down there with a launcher that hits for 42% damage.

Even if you run flares, it only stops the lock for 5 secs. You think i never ran flares? Dogfights take much longer than 5 secs. Especially when they are between two good pilots. So by your logic, i should give up a 25% heal to delay 42% damage for 5 secs. Not to mention that if i manage to avoid getting close to the ground which is sometimes possible on esamir i might have runs where i dont get locked, but im always going to take damage.

We are talking about an ability that is very situational vs one that works for everything.

The current g2a lock system is no different than the old mana AV turrets that could hit targets at render range, and they didnt auto spot. That got nerfed because it was too strong. G2A locks are no different vs A2A pilots.

My solution is simple, make all locks work like the striker, the coyotes and the hyenas. Close range locking dumbfires. The Striker is far more effective vs A2G ESF than lock-ons are, and its completely useless against high flying ESF engaged in a2a combat which is exactly how it SHOULD work.

Firstly, I don't hate people who are good at flying. I'm trying to meet all the good A2A pilots from all the factions on my server and learn from them, at least the ones I respect. When someone kills me prepeatedly, outside of some cheap gank squad or waiting for me to run out of ammo before they move in, I frequently send them a message saying good job and sometimes switch to that faction to fly with them a bit. I've met some very cool people that way. Secondly, all AA weapons are exactly that, AA weapons. It's just stupid, absolutely biased and selfish to want a free pass against enemy AA because you're intended targets aren't ground based.

Render distances do suck. And I took a lot of "flack" for complaining about how effective Burster Maxes can be from spawnrooms. But still, those units are incredibly easy to beat with aircraft if they're not in a shield. Fly low and that AA launcher can't get a lock on you, at all. Fly high, eat the first missile to find out where he is, then kill him before he launches a second. Or land, rep, and then you know exactly where he is. Zoom in on the map and watch the little red missile indicator lead you to his exact position. Burster Maxes: kill their Engi on the first pass, then the Max on the next 1 or 2 passes. If his has more support than that, they're doing it right and you shouldn't be able to win.

If you're fighting close to the ground, in enemy territory? Absolutely!!! If you have to let your target get away so you can avoid death, then AA did it's job. Yes, you have to be a much better pilot than your target to win in such conditions, if you can't, then go get good in friendly territory. What part of "Combined Arms" don't you understand? This isn't a dog-fighting game.

That's a terrible argument and quite frankly I'm sick of seeing it used when people argue about coyotes. Among the many differences between ESFs and infantry, here are a few:

1: ESFs move about 20x faster than a sprinting infantry player. Up to 35x faster when afterburning.

2: Infantry players die extremely fast from almost any source of damage. ESFs do not (ESFs being so fast and able to fly makes it even worse)

3: ESFs are essentially immune to damage from almost any source on the ground while high in the air. Literally ALL sources of Ground-based AA are ineffective and easy to get away from. Ground-based AA is literally designed to be ineffective unless the pilot is dumb, bad, or greedy and flies super close to it. That's an inarguable fact. On the other hand, infantry dies instantly or near instantly to most sources of "AI".


So right from the get go, you can just stop by comparing ESFs to infantry, as if life as an ESF is so similar and dangerous. It isn't. If it's not enemy air, it's probably not killing you unless you're bad or greedy.

Lastly, if we're going to be intellectually honest about this hypothetical infantry gun that automatically tracks and hits; for it to be comparable to what coyotes actually do, said gun would only fire bullets in an extremely wide (almost random) spray pattern causing most bullets to miss. The effective range (lets say 40% acc) would only be about 6-8 meters at most and the bullets would only do 10 damage each. So a full magazine at 100% acc would not even remove half your shields.

Please stop using the disingenuous hypothetical homing bullet infantry gun agrument. Said gun, doing comparable damage to coyotes vs ESFs would be the worst and slowest tool in the game to kill infantry besides recon darts or something.


You wanna talk OP? Hornets, lolpods and AI noseguns. The relationship between said weapons and their intended targets is so much more massively imbalanced in the ESF's favor than coyotes are that it honestly pisses me off to even see balance discussion about coyotes while those other things remain unchanged and unchecked. How about making AI noseguns, lolpods, Zephyr, bulldogs, and other such things have the TTK against infantry of coyotes have against ESFs? I will gladly let you have coyote hit detection properties with coyote's effective range on all those weapons if they had the coyote's terrible TTK. Please. I would pay for membership again if this was a thing. Please? PLEASE? Come on! . . .Hey, where are you going?


That's what I thought.

I do agree coyotes are in a horrible place right now and need to be tweaked. At the moment you have pilots who can't aim zooming around in circles spraying them to great effect. This shouldn't be the case. I believe tomcats are in a good role now.

I believe the problem with air is not so much as other pilots shooting you down, it's the complete and utter saturation of flak and locks everywhere on the map. Flak needs to be looked at because as is it takes 1 or 2 skyguards hiding behind a platoon to completely DENY just about all air from the area and I won't even touch on flak MAXes and flak turrets at every single base. Try flying on indar (flakistan) for instance. On over half of the map every single base has AA turrets and players just pull skyguards and camp out due to the low flight ceiling that exists on that said half of the map. I would dare even say there are about 2 bases on indar that aren't in range of an AA turret camper.

I hate to break it to you but that's called preparation. If Air descends upon your forces when you don't have something ready to (try and) deal with it, you don't have a prayer.

Tomcats are good against Libs and Galaxies, almost. I think the max range cert (which brings them from crap, to slightly crap) should be standard and that line should be switched to reload speed. But they're nearly completely useless against ESF, and as a pure AA missile that's just unacceptable. I didn't try them before the patch but I hear they were pretty OP (doubt that a little) so maybe bring the kill count down to 4 from 5. Either that, or let them be dumb-fired, like a weaker Hornet.


As for base AA, I don't feel it's a problem in the slightest. It can't kill you unless you let it. If they're sacrificing all that AV capability to keep air away, then your ground has an easier time. Not to mention, you can still fly low, make a LOLpod or Hornet pass, repair and repeat. You just can't farm like every other fight. The problem I do have is with Spawnroom Burster Maxes. I made a thread about it and got all kinds of get good hate. So I bought bursters and live in spawnrooms now. I'm going to be the biggest pain in the *** until people start to recognize it's broken. Last night the air on Connery was saturated with Scythes again, so I just sat in my spawnroom and racked up kills and certs. Really only about 10 Scythes and 100 certs an hour, but that's with 1-2 deaths all night and completely shutting down their air game over those fights. I would like AA adjusted in general. Much less burst range in exchange for much tighter accuracy. Bring some skill to those weapons and let them be a little more effective against ground, as they normally don't get many air targets.

1. Tomcats are in my opinion useless. They should be more accesible for newbies by decreasing their lock-on time.
I can remember were i was a Noob and i really had problems to control my ESF wich means it was impossible to lock anything with them.

2. I agree with much posters here that Coyote are almost useless. They are slow ,deal low damage und have a huge reloadtime.
If the Reloadtime is reduced to an half they are ok.
You must think about one thing. you give up maneuverability for this rockets bcoz you cant use Fueltanks at the same time.

3. The HA Lockons should be Nerfed by range bcoz nothing is more annoying to get locked while you are in a Dogfight.
The enemy Pilot deserves the kill bcoz he was better than me and not the HA who just aim randomly in the air.
They should be there to prevent groundattacks from ESF´s and not to engange any ESF even they are harmless.
If the HA is sneaky enough they are nearly impossible to spot even you are using Heat-Vision.
From other side they are invulnerable while sitting in a Spawnroom.

4. Other annoying thing are the turret-campers on some continents like Indar or Esamir. They also should be there to defend their base an not engage any ESF. If i go in a Phalanxturret i make easy G2A-Kills. We Have Skyguards and Flakmaxes wich are fine.

Even for me as experienced Pilot is flying pain in the A** on huge fights. No wonder that air is almost dead except some Pro´s
Newbies have nearly no accees to the air especially while their ESF is not certed.

sorry for my Bad English but it is not my Native.

Kind Regards.
Chris.

These are not almost useless I don't think. If I go coyotes and rotary my TTK another esf is probably ~1 second not even joking here. I usually only resort to this when the enemy has a very big air presence and I end up being heavily outnumbered and I need to mop them up as fast as possible.

Most noobie pilots face rush you since they think the ESF is a jet plane instead of a hybrid and that just equates to a face load of coyote and the rotary. Even the needler works to great effect in combo with it. But I honestly wouldnt have a problem with them if they were more dodgeable instead of just spammable entitlement hits.

I do agree with your synposis of the HA locks and the turrets.
Also completely agree with adamts01 post about burster maxes in spawn rooms. They should not be able to fire within a certain distance to the spawn room.

Just another thread with poor pilots complaining about their inability to effectively use broken weapons. Well, besides Solj. o7

/grabspopcorn

I'm a terrible pilot, and I don't really have any place here, but I think that if a weapon's function is changed, certs should be refunded. But even that is asking a lot, so maybe refund reload speed/capacity.

I don't want to go so far as to make someone who can't even control their plane a threat, that would just be silly, and probably make the weapon too devastating in skilled hands. I honestly don't have a problem with lock on time, it gives good pilots plenty of time to get close and break the lock, and requires the shooter to have decent ability as a pilot. I think giving it's maximum cert range for free and dropping a kill down to 4 missiles with no fire suppression would put them ballpark where they need to be, while still giving noseguns the undisputed dps advantage.

You sound like the guy arguing that lock-ons should work on aircraft with only A2A weaponry.... Ask yourself this; why are you at an enemy base to begin with? You're hunting his teammates is why. He's protecting his airspace, nothing at all wrong with that. Who cares if he does it from the ground or air? Not to mention, AA is incredibly ineffective at even half render distance, you've got to be right up on that enemy base or flying straight at it to take any meaningful damage. In my opinion, bases a certain distance behind enemy lines should have limited AI targeting. Not good enough to where an Infiltrator can't do his dirtywork, but good enough to where it feels like a battlefield, not an empty server.

G2A missiles have a pretty short lock range as it is. You can pretty much only defend the airspace immediately surrounding the small base you're at. Sure, maybe the pilot did more work and deserves the kill, but the dead ESF should have known the risks associated with chasing his target low to the ground in enemy territory.

I'm decent at a2a. It's really just not worth it, all you guys claiming 2 or 3 seconds ttk is just ridiculous. Maybe 1 out of 10 targets flies in such a way that all shots land and you kill that fast. I don't even bother using the nose gun/lolpods anymore. I just ignore enemy air unless they are trying to kill me. Sometimes I still just ignore them. I can kill another vehicle or a couple more infantry and still bail before I get shot down.

A2G, 1 hour usually nets me 30-50 infantry and 5-10 vehicles. I might lose 5 or 6 ESF in that time mostly because I don't care that much and tank a lot more damage than I should. I blame the effectiveness of a2g. I'm pretty much guaranteed to kill my target faster than whatever is shooting at me can kill me except the 1hks. Which is just bizarre being in the fastest most maneuverable vehicle in the game. I run max composite and fire suppression most of the time but well use stealth if there are a huge amount of lockons.

oO

Sure he should ve known the risk, but esfs are not just at low altitude at risk to get locked.

I present to you indar, a continent where about 2/3rd of the map are at an altitude that even at the fleight ceiling you are lockable and for the areas/continents where this isn't always the case you have towers which always will put you at a high enough altitude to lock everything flying by.

Heck even on esamir there are surprisingly (given how flat it is) few spots where it's impossible to get locked at max altitude.


But honestly the issue with the "old" lockons isn't realy that they can lock onto you during a fight.
Sure it sucks, but the real dealbreaker is that if the targeted esf is in a fight during that time, there is no way to evade or guide the rocket into the ground.


Given that most people hate it when an esf lolpods them and they have the feeling they can't do anything about it (once it happened) one could argue that this is karma, but it's still shoddy game design.

Towers are towers, expect to get AA fire from them. In the desert you can fly high, on the rest of Indar you can fly low, with tons of trees, rocks and canyons. There's an absolute abundance of cover to break locks. Even if you do get pegged, a missile won't kill you and you'll be able to get away. And if you have that hard a time with lock-ons, just run flares, then you can outrun the problem even without fuel pods. I really have zero sympathy for ESFs in this game. They can pretty easily solo any other unit in the game and they aren't even the most expensive. What I've found that works almost every time is flying straight at cover that juts out of the ground (rock, tree, building) and dive behind it when the missile is about 50-100m away. It'll almost always smack it. But if you go around it'll go around. While it does suck getting locked-on during a fight, you're either over a battle or enemy territory in a MMO, and essentially in a 2v1 scenario against 2 players built to kill you, sorry, but you should lose. But yeah, I hate the mechanic, as the shooter and the target. I think they should have a much shorter lock-on window, a much much much smaller box to stay in, much faster velocity, and hardly any turning ability. That way you either have to shoot head on or wait to shoot as an ESF is flying away. Then the plane has a split second to bank. I think that would be a cool adjustment that would require skill on both ends.