Anti-air sucks and the devs will never do anything about it

*hugging my ranger*

Anti air sucks because its only good against air while aircraft get to be good against everything. Another total imbalance that will never be addressed is right.

Are you kidding me? It isn't good against air.

Good Liberators are pretty defenseless against good ESF pilots. ESF have the speed to stay between 400-500m and easily land hits, while the Liberator's only chance is to land a 1/100 Dalton shot at that range. Stupid pilots fly straight at the lib and get way too close, but stupid pilots shouldn't be part of a balance discussion. I honestly don't get many Lib kills as a solo ESF, because they tank so much damage, but I very rarely die to them.

You're still a bratty child, but that's a really good point. It's like the Coyote/Tomcat vs Nosegun debate. A good pilot with a nosegun will shred anyone with missiles, but it's better to get some damage compared to no damage as a worse player. So bads group up and spam rockets. Just like Lightnings should either get in a high skill vehicle or spam no-skill vehicles. Very good argument.

Skyguard, it is very difficult to get the XP. because flak is weak. and bad accuracy.Who will use it actively?
XP efficiency is very bad even if squad/group uses.
there is no choice but to intercept the ESF by ESF. and empire with a weak ESF has no hope.

His point was that it's hard to judge the overall efficiency of an ESF as it can use specialized (AA/AG) and all-purpose loadouts (average AA + average AG). It's obvious that a dedicated AA ESF will take down any other loadout.

And that's what CC is arguing about. ESF have the chance to use two different weapons that can have several purposes (Nosegun being itself a multi-purpose weapon even if better at AA than AG), so they can face any target/threat with a variable efficiency. Except for Sundies and MAXes, you use a single weapon for G2A. Using the Skyguard as an example (and being the most dedicated G2A weapon), for a similar cost, it can't do a thing against any other target than aircrafts, and it's not even toptier in this job, ESF are plain better at it.

Because they behave like heli-crafts instead of pure planes/jets ?

Applies for any unit in this game in his own field, thus not relevant.

Id like to see a cheap, simple AA deterrent given to every player. Its flak based and it doesn't do too much damage but its there if air is really being annoying

But id like to see a single shot style cannon(think decimator), that is dedicated anti-air and requires good aim to hit. This way you have options for both types of players, ones with extremely good aim, and ones with terrible aim/suffer from lag/play with 12-20 fps etc

So why not just use a Decimator (or default dumbfire, if you don't have the former)? Those things pack a near-fatal punch against ESFs and a powerful punch against Liberators and Valkyries.

Higher ammo capacity, longer effective range, more accurate, on a more mobile platform etc. I do see your reasoning though

sarcastic rant ahead but a hopefully enlightening conclusion at the end:

you mean like the base turrets, which are avaliable for free at every major outpost, cover each other from the nearby outposts oh and repair themselfs oh and can be placed in custom bases and even shoot on their own (the custom ones)?



Okay, fair enough maybe you are the attacker and can't be bothered to use the turrets in the base behind you and custom bases are for scrubs anyways.


I feel ya ...

Then how about the lockon launchers?
Avaliable for free to every heavy assault (free as in no nanite cost).


You don't like the lockon launchers?

Alright, then how about you jump into the sunderer or anyones mbt (given that they have even half a brain) and use their walkers?
Or even pull a harasser?


Sure the last ones aren't free, but given that with the exception of pulling an harasser someone else pays for em i think it counts.



Alright in all seriousness, i know i am a tiny bit overexagerating here ... but the point is, it's not like there aren't a ton of AA options out there already.
The issue is just that, they all have one giant pitfall in common.


All of them pay out less certs and kills per minute than, simply respawning and dieing until someone else clears up the air for you.


It is so strange that everyone agrees, that A2G is op as hell or at least a giant pain in the a** ... but you never see a full squad switching to heavies with lockon launchers to deal with it.

And the reason as i said, is not because the weapon choices you have cost so much or are so difficult to optain, it's just that even while getting lolpodded, your cert payout and more important your kills per minute are likley going to drop as soon as you chose to do something about that pesky esf/lib.


For all i care, dbg could hand out cert and nanite free AA options to every class in the game and people would still not use them.

This ^^^^

AA sucks in this game, and it will never be more than a deterrent. Buffing AA doesn't mean at all that AA will get more kills, it means that aircraft will expose themselves less or not at all. When it's all said and done, you have to be able to follow air to reliably kill it. That's why I saw keep AA levels about where they are, but buff those weapons in regards to the ground. That way they can keep on deterring air the way they do, but they're not stuck doing nothing once they chase the planes off. But obviously not buffed against ground to the point where in competed against ainti-armor loadouts, just to the point where AA isn't sitting in the back twiddling their fingers.. That's my new philosophy anyway.

It's so true. I saw it dozens of times. We defend the base and there is 3 or 4 enemy ESF. So what ppl do to deal with them? Nothing. They run to A, B or C point get rocketpoded and what they do? Nothing. They run A,B....
And then I wonder why I'm the only AA MAX there. After a minute or two there no ESF. Not cuz I killed them but I scared them off. You don't need whole squad. You need 2 or 3 AA MAX and there be dead zone to ESF.
Vehicle should be more powerful then one grunt soldier.
When I play I don't look if I do this I got lots of certs or if I do this I will get less certs. I just don't like to be farmed by one or two guys.

Lol this argument again.

1. No AA is already OP enough. People seem to hate being killed by things that haven't rendered or can't be seen by them yet this is ok for air for some odd reason. (I think heavy thick cloud cover on every map would work wonders on this.)

2. If air is really that OP why don't you come up here and reap the benefits. I bet you wouldn't last more than 15 sec in a hot zone. I think that should be a requirement first for people who whine about AA not being effective enough.

3. Ground is so easy a 5 year old can pick it up and play. Everything on ground is made to pander to for the most part morons. In every game you have forums full of the morons whining about things that are easily fixable if they had the brainpower/will to adapt.
Learn to pilot. It will challenge you more than the TV show are you smarter than a 5th grader.

The dedicated AA is currently crap. Neither MAXes nor skyguard are deadly enough for their trade-offs(like being useless against literally everything else while not being able to move that quickly from one hex to the other to follow the air).
Currently harrasser with ranger is deadly tho(fast, cheap and kills an esf in like 10 seconds)...not as fast as harrassers but even more deadly to encounter are busses with 2 rangers on top. Says it all if two vehicles that should fit other roles are actually right now beating dedicated AA by quite a large margin.

@SoljVS: Dude, it's not your job to stand in the air in a fight with 96+ enemies and hope to survive. In such hot zones it's fly in...unload rockets...fly out. You can't stand in the middle of such a fight with any other vehicle(let alone without a vehicle) either...

A hot zone is anywhere with more than 1 source of AA or more than 2 guys using locks lol. Or anywhere in render range of a base AA turret.

So you think you alone should survive two guys that have dedicated AA or against a freaking base? Well....great that you don't do balancing then.

AA is in an odd situation where it's underpowered vs A2G and too strong vs A2A fighters.
A2G can easily escape because they are naturally lower to the terrain and closer to cover, but A2A are typically higher and further from cover. I guess that's the problem with making the ESF too multi-role. They should have probably shifted the A2G part to valks but it's far too late now, both in the timing of the valks & esf's development.

Feel free to look at my stats since you care about that:
http://stats.dasanfall.com/ps2/player/Lodertria
http://stats.dasanfall.com/ps2/player/LayZboy

The reason the bus is so deadly, is because it's the attackers counterpart to manned base turrets.
Every base attack has at the very least one sunderer (and let's face it attacks with just one sundy hardly ever succeed) and usualy more than that.

Additionally each sundy is a hotspot for heavies that swap if willing could swap to lockon launchers.



So yeah, the sundy is deadly for a reason ... and arguably way to strong (vs esfs)





@Your lovly gem in regards to the skyguard ...
The skyguard is in a ****** state, not because it's not powerfull enough, but because it fills a role people either don't seem to understand or simply arent realy willing to fullfill.


What the skyguard lacks in burst dps, it makes up for in range and ease of use (use against air, not necessarly meaning that it's easy to survive in one, when tanks are on the field).


It simply is deadlocked ...

Add more damage/reduce spread and you are soon at a point where a single skyguard is guaranteed to kill every esf in sight, regardless of what the pilot tries. (something that happens already when 2-3 of them bunch together)

But if you were to increase it's damage and make it more precise, then flak would have to go and at this point it's a more expensive ranger mount that lacks the speed of an harrasser and the utility of a sunderer.


The only issue the skyguard realy has, is it's price ... (but again that seems mostly because of the lightning chasis)
It's simply to expensive for a vehicle that works as a suppression tool.


Then again, most people have only one metric in this game and that's kdr ... g2a is the only aspect in the game where you get rewarded for even just hitting your enemy.

And yet, since those ribbons/certs aren't an accepted epeen stat, noone hardly ever can be bothered to actually do it.

But somehow moaning on the forums about air is deemed the more effective solution i quess.

I think it's great that a crewed Sundy is too strong against ESF. The ESF is the only unit in the game that can without question best any other single player except possibly a Skyguard or possibly a Sundy. That's really it, the only two units that can beat an ESF with a single person. If you start talking multiple players then you can definitely say Sundy, AA Harasser and Battle Gal, but if you match those players with equal numbers of ESF players the ESF still wins, granted at a higher nanite cost. But to beat those ground units the ESF ***** itself against air. I think it mostly balances out pretty well.

What do you mean, "killed"? You can't even kill an aircraft if the battle starts with the aircraft landed on top of you, let alone at long-range. Also here's a nice conundrum: Aircraft players constantly moan about how hard it is to find G2A weapons, so how do you know you are being hit from outside render range or that you just can't find it?
Besides that even at a non-moving aircraft at 600m distance you have maybe a 1 in 7 chance to hit. That's for a full Skyguard clip 10 hits (and just so you know, the Skyguard is the second most accurate G2A weapon in the game besides the Walker). You need 35 hits at minimum to kill a vanilla ESF, more for every other aircraft and considering the amount of fire suppression and the fact that your target won't be sitting still for all that time the chance of even moderate damage is almost impossible, let alone an actual kill.

G2A isn't effective, that's why just the top 3 aircraft weapons score more aircraft kills than all G2A weapons put together.
The only "effectiveness" that G2A has is it's capability to deter enemy aircraft from a base. But that doesn't work well either. If you deter an aircraft, all you've done is move the problem to another base where there isn't as much G2A weapons to deter the aircraft. If there was a "correct" response to aircraft showing up then aircraft wouldn't be able to function in the entire game as enough G2A weapons would be pulled to destroy them as soon as they showed up.

So no matter how you look at it, the entire system fails. Not enough G2A weapons? Aircraft can farm without much risk of dying. Enough G2A weapons? Aircraft can't even help during the fight. This is a badly designed game mechanic, OP or not OP doesn't have anything to do with it anymore. It needs to be changed, and fast.
But if you do want to talk about OP or not OP... Then the G2A weapons are obviously not OP compared to their quarry. An aircraft that moves into a fight without enough G2A weapons can utterly annihilate all ground troops he encounters, and those ground troops can't really defend themselves. In the meantime a G2A weapon can be countered by just about anything, including the very aircraft it's designed to kill.

And here is where we hit a well of rotting feces. "But ground doesn't need skill!". I've already proven that aircraft need less skill when engaging ground units than ground units need in overall combat. That whole 3rd dimension to fly in only makes things easier for ground pounding. But ofcourse those pilots need to justify themselves at every turn they can. You are the moron here, thinking that ground is ultra-easy.

Learn to use G2A weapons effectively SoljVS, then come back and try to spout your nonsense again.