How does a damage nerf make something more "hit and run"?

It doesn't really matter that ESFs were "glass cannons" if the things that are supposed to be shooting at them, namely Skyguards, are loaded with cotton balls.

In other words, "glass cannon" is a relative term. And ESFs were simply not dying very much to AA, especially dedicated AA units like the Skyguard.

I think the nerf was very appropriate. Now a single ESF can no longer effectively engage and kill a single ground target... just like how a single source of AA could not effectively engage and kill a single ESF. It seems pretty fair to me. ESFs should have to group up in 2 or more to stand a reasonable chance to kill anything on the ground, just as how pilots have demanded that AA group up to take down a single aircraft.

....good?

Isn't that what you do when faced with fire from the ground? Plane takes some hits, flies away, reps in 3 seconds and laughs at them?

Surface-to-air has always required coordination or follow-up (or a really careless pilot) to get a kill. Asking air-to-ground to require a little coordination and giving the ground guys some chance to escape and repair doesn't seem like a lot to ask.

"Death from above" that you can't hope to do anything about is never much fun.

Little bit more of someone paying attention with the right weapon. Example, a lot of my hawk kills were simply spur of the moment shots at reasonablely distanced targets, since aircraft plus pilots counts as two kills I got me an aurax hawk.

I haven't played this game for 2 years (and I played it for 2 years before stopping due to ping issues). I came back just 4 days ago. Lolpodders still doing their thing. Nothing has changed about how fast they kill me or how they hover above a place and just unload.

You must have been playing a different game. The Planetside 2 I knew had a lot of AA options, and at the very least burster maxes and skyguards could easily engage and kill ESFs. Lately it was basically any vehicle that you could put a Ranger on.

The thermal nerf actually changed A LOT. If you didn't notice, you must be quite bad.

Must be nice to instantly self heal and have infantry personalized shields. Just saying, at least faction scientists have not had the bright idea of having recharging shields on tanks, except for NC for some reason.

Mathematically, it is difficult to impossible for a Skyguard to kill an ESF assuming the ESF isn't actively contributing to its own death.

A Skyguard does 60 damage per hit against a 3,000HP ESF, increased to 96 damage against an ESF from the damage type. It takes 32 hits to kill that ESF with 100% accuracy. As a Skyguard fires 8 rounds per second, a Skyguard firing at 100% accuracy needs 4 seconds to kill that ESF.

An ESF can easily travel at a minimum top speed of 200m/s, to a maximum of 369m/s. So in 4 seconds an ESF could be anywhere from 800m to 1,476m (probably have to use external fuel tanks) from the Skyguard (which assumes that the ESF was on top of the Skyguard when it opened fire, not already some distance from it).

100% accuracy from the Skyguard is also exceptionally unrealistic. Average Skyguard accuracy is a low 28.7%, while the most accurate Skyguarder in all of PS2 can only claim a 49.6% accuracy. Taking the accuracy of the most accurate Skyguard gunner, you would need 65 shots to get the 32 hits needed to kill an ESF, requiring 8.125 seconds.

In that 8.125 seconds the slowest of ESFs could probably get 1,625m away from the Skyguard.

The theoretical lack of Skyguard lethality is backed up in its statistical lack of ESF kills. From the best data we have available, only 3.3% of ESF deaths are caused by all three of the faction Skyguards. 6.04% of ESFs die from crashing into other vehicles, while 3.05% of ESF deaths come from crashing into friendly vehicles.

In other words, Skyguards are only marginally more dangerous to an ESF as friendly aircraft are! Yes, Skyguards are that terrible.

so I was right, you do play a different game. A mathematical one or what.

Please read the name of the weapon again: "Skyguard". It tells you everything you need to know. Especially the _guard_ part.
If aircraft could not run away from G2A, there would be no place for them in the game at all.

Sniper rifles don't let you run away if you get hit in the head. You use cover. Same for plane? I guess since hornets can kill a dude with one shot they have to go too?

No, it's not the same, and shouldn't be.

Why? Cuz its a plane? Or is it becuase you dont want to play the same instakill game the rest of us do?

Yes, it's a plane, so its mechanics and gameplay is different from ground vehicles and infantry. If it was the same, what would be the point of it?

You're right I don't want to play an instakill game, but unfortunately Planetside 2 went that way (not Planetside 1, by the way). That's for another discussion however.

I like friendly planes and I really don't have anything against them. Planes do have some of the strongest weapons in the game. Everything needs a counter of sorts and when the counters are pathetic the devs have few choices. Since they want to nerf air discretely they can either do as they did with thermal and hornets. Or outright and making AA op. So a lil nerf on planeside is better for pilots than a massive buff to AA. Good pilots still have their way with most infantry and if you play infantry for a few days you dont need thermal to know where the biggest concentration of infantry should be.

Hit&run can function in two ways:
1: You hit and destroy a target, then run away before their friends manage to regroup and retaliate.
2: You hit and damage a target, then run away to strike at it again in a short period of time.

In the old system Hornets could be used to hit and destroy a target, and then hang around because anything that retaliated would be a prime target to attack as well. This is in part a problem with how badly G2A weapons are designed, in that they aren't fun and that you can be 50 times as skillful as the aircraft, it still comes down to the skill of the pilot if you kill him or not. Additionally G2A weapons suffer from the fact that aircraft are few and far in between due to the screwy A2A system which discourages almost everyone to join the air-game and you've got a recipe for boredom, mixed in with dread when enemy ground targets try to attack the G2A weapon and isn't really capable of defending itself in any way, or even being targeted by the same air it's trying to destroy and getting murdered by for instance a Liberator without any real contest, and lastly the boredom of sitting around doing nothing when aircraft have buggered off and not knowing if the aircraft will return in the next second or in an hour, which is both equally possible.
Anyway, with the new system it takes a bit longer for Hornets to destroy a target. It's still more powerful than a Vanguard AP in both it's alpha damage and it's DPS, and since tank crews usually don't randomly jump out to repair unless they are completely safe there's more than enough time for a return trip in which you either kill the repairing crewmembers or just finish off the tank.

Hence, the reduction of Hornet damage means you need to focus more on hit&run rather than hover&murder.

Children didn't like their stock lightnings getting blown up by experienced pilots using a weapon in it's intended fashion. So DBG catered to the kids and nerfed it. They hate ESFs, don't pull them, they are useless.

If AA was effective in killing air before they ran away, this would change the game in two different ways:

1) Recon and intelligence gathering would be important. Instead of pilots flying in blind, it would be much more important for pilots to have information about what they're expecting to meet. This could be from having to fly circles around the base to draw fire, or from simply talking with ground crews.

2) Combined arms would be important. Pilots who worked by themselves without any reference to a ground team would die. That would be fine. But a pilot who could direct ground teams to destroy AA would be safe. That's an inherent relationship between air and ground... AA kills aircraft, aircraft kills tanks, and tanks kill AA.

Both of these changes would be great improvements for the game, tying air units to ground units. But the current situation where aircraft can zoom in, get a few kills, and escape while under fire simply makes it too easy for pilots. Upping AA lethality is exactly what the air game needs.

But to have AA be this weak is a unique role that no unit should be forced into. Imagine if it took 2-3 ESFs to kill a Lightning or else the Lightning could just roll away to repair! That's the situation the Skyguard finds itself in... essentially unable to kill awake pilots by themselves.

And it's very unfair.

Childish ESF pilots didn't like their aircraft being killed by Skyguards, so DBG catered to the kids and nerfed Skyguards right out of the gate, and then some later by removing flak explosions.

DBG hates Skyguards, don't pull them, they are useless.

You forgot to point out that most ESF run fire suppression. Giving them 3750 functional hp. It makes actual TTKs even worse.

It's really pointless to use mathematical proof or solid statistical evidence against pilots as they've shown above. They're immune to reason. You can show them exactly how terrible Skyguards are, and in 90% of cases all they'll return is "no it's not".

The remaining 10% have the gall to say, "Skyguards are supposed to be that terrible".

All they want is to kill stuff without getting killed, in absurd 1 v 32 situations. It's crazytalk.