Should we remove the Skyguard ?

Have you ever try to fly over a battlefield with one skyguard shooting and killing you in 2 second ?
ITs almost imposible to kill a Skyguard if you fly ESF....because ther is so may other threat.. coming from everywhere... thats ridiculous..


It should be remove as there is so many other threat to air....

If people whant to shoot air , they can can choose :
- A sunder with two anti air guns
-A Max with anti air gun
-HA with rocket luncher that can now lock faster than ever
- anti air tower
-Shoot With your gun (even with your pistols you can do damage to ESF)

Thats why in my opinion there is no need to have a lightning with skyguard gun...

It will be more fun for people who whant to pull ESf and there will still many other option to other who whant to shoot at ESF.....

Please renove the skyguard for making a better playing experience.

A Skyguard needs +/- 35 shells to kill an ESF, at 480RPM that takes 4.375 seconds with 100% hits. In practice due to the ridiculous COF it'll take most of the magazine. Even at 300m against a stationary target less than 1 in 3 shots will hit the ESF.

Here's a better question: Should we remove the ESF?

Any aircraft can escape from a Skyguard alive regardless of their loadout. Any ground unit wihout dedicated AA cannot escape and in all practicality cannot take cover, making it an almost automatic win unless there's AA nearby.

Ground based AA has many many downsides. It is nigh impossible to kill aircraft on your own due to lack of DPS, unless the aircraft pilot is dumb or greedy, this is why every single AA in the game is called a deterrent rather than a normal weappn that kills. The weapons are also almost useless against ground units, making you a sitting duck against almost everything else in the game. Add insult to injury that you are dedicated against the least available unit in the game and AA units are useless most of the time, as soon as you engage an aircraft it can just disengage alive and pick a fight with less AA. That is a choice that tanks and infantry do not have, as their counters are 50X more abundant and 99% always present.
But here you are, "oh my god theres a Skyguard, lets remove it because I feel threatened by it".

Also while a pistol can damage an aircraft it isnt effective.

The flak mechanic is the problem. Remove Skyguards and you'll be cursing Ranger Harassers and spawnroom Bursters. You're honestly better off giving up on air, like most, because it's the last thing the devs care about.

to answer the title:
absolutely N O T !!!

having a lacking esf experince is not limited to dealing with flakweapons but generaly how difficult it is to fly esf´s in the first place ..
meaning flightcontrols need to be made accessible ..

also for a single skyguard to kill a ESF you either have to have taken damage already or be static ..
a pod or hornet esf kills a skyguard MUCH quicker than the skyguard would kill the esf ..
you would need rather 2 skyguards min to deal with a mobile ESF pilot ..

the other thing we talked a lot about is giving ground skill based AA options ... autocannons, wireguided missiles podlike dumbfiremissiles maybe even coyotestyle ..
still doesn´t mean flak or rapidfire AA has to go
it should be the choice of the player when he goes for easy to use detterent weapons or difficult to use heavy damaging with actual killpotential weapons ...

and as said in above post ..
if it isn´t skyguards it will be another flakweapon that will ruin your airday .. then what? lets remove/nerf AA so esf pilots can farm everything easier? you get the better experience while everyone else get to suffer daring to leave a base or be out in the open without their own airsupport?

current ground to air requires multiple sources to quickly deal with single aircraft otherwise that aircraft takes damage, goes out of the battlefield, repairs and refuels to come back and repeat and is more likely to get kills vs the sources trying to take it down ...

now you may say APcannons and dumbfire rocketlaunchers deal with esf´s ... yea AP tanks are very limited in their pitch so they need an angle or higher elevation ... dumbfire rocketlaunchers are both slow and have high projectile drop ...

Speaking as a long time SG driver on all three factions it's fair to say more get away than are killed. By a metric bucket load....

I wonder if the same can be said for pilots engaging ground targets

I have always found Skyguard useless post nerf years ago.
At one time it was decent and a fair counter to Harassers.

the first rule of esf is do not fly over aa...

Yesterday, Indar, Ceres Hydroponics. 2 Skyguards and a 1/3 Walker Harasser sit in front of the vehicle spawn. A Valkyrie and ESF show up, both with hornets (or the Valk equivalent). They annihilated the 2 Skyguards while the Harasser legs it after the first missiles hit it. The ESF flew behind the Valkyrie so that there was no way to get flak into it and reduce the DPS.

Then, because this is PS2 and everything is balanced but aircraft are more balanced than others, they proceeded to annihilate infantry, because while a Skyguard and Walker Harasser are extremely limited in what ground targets they can effectively engage, Aircraft aren't restricted by such notions!

Now you can ofcourse say that teamwork rules all (and how refreshing it is to see more teamwork done than "all on the same target", and even more refreshing that this came from lone-wolf aircraft). And you are right! So why didn't the 3 AA units working together get a similar chance to do teamwork as the 2 aircraft? For all we know the AA units could have been twice as skilled as the aircraft players, but just not given the opportunity to actually excercise that skill because of the limitations of the AA they have available.

Sorry but if have AA i simply get rid of anything but libs (libs are definetely "more balanced" than anything else ).

Can i suggest that maybe the aim of AA users wasn't perfect ?

Yes it is true that the AA skygaurd is a completly braindead and op role...in my opinion it should be nerfed by making it a general role instead of only AA, and also the same way it can destroy air, the air should destroy the skyguard...like there is absolutely no counter to the skyguard, just an escape.

The skyguard or lighteneing should have it’s price and size of the tank increased. Completly busted tank!! I don’t know how the devs cannot notice this, do they not play the game??

If they are dying to hornets as a skyguard they an't skilled fam.
We shouldn't balance around lemons, or we end up with CAI again and that really helped the game ey.

Right? Using a weapon platform that requires you to keep a los on target and fly fairly straight and 3+ barrages. Those 3 should have 100% dropped those esf without breaking a sweat.

I wouldnt have said it if they had been dummies, also even if they were, these aircraft were practically on top of them. The Valk and ESF had an easy time getting on top before the AA could engage them due to terrain and the buildings on the area. The health and damage resistances, especially the lower armor of the Valkyrie protect it. With 1575 damage per salvo and superior fire suppression its an easy time for the aircraft to beat them.

Ofcourse it helped that these AA units were attacking other aircraft before and likely had to reload in the meantime. But the fact remains, the aircraft won because they had the option to do teamwork, and the aircraft have superior capabilities in both escaping and engaging other units as well.

Remove lock-on instead, you have to aim when using a skyguard and you can't put the skyguard in the spawnroom...

In m Opinion the skyguard is a very good way to, at least, try to keep the air a little bit cleaner. Before the Skyguard it was way to ez to maintain air priority and by that way to control the whole area.
And btw...if the pilots work together..even two skyguards are pretty fast down..so i dont think its a big problem

My lock down Burster Max begs to differ.

I don't think you should remove the Skyguard. You have to remember they are mounted onto a Tank, and a Tank can't go everywhere. Just don't fly over them and you will be fine, or put something between you and it when you are flying to farm infantry. The thing is, I don't think an ESF should ever try to kill a tank. All it takes is 1 hit from them and you are dead, especially if you get too close. Those dedicated tank mains are nothing to mess around with.

So Esf shoul not battle again tanks and should not fly over a battles ?
mmm nice im going to fly over the desert where there is nobody, watching the sunset , clouds...mmm fresh air!

That is not what I said. You can fly over a tank all you want, but expect to get blown up while you are fighting infantry. You can fly over a skyguard tank all you want, but expect to get blown up while you are fighting another ESF. You can fly over a battle all you want, but you have to be careful.

Isn't that exactly the situation skyguards suffer all the time? If you got a lot of air around, you are dead. If you got ground vehicles around, you are dead. If you got few air around and no vehicles then you can drive the air away...and you sit there without targets and wait for the next 15 minutes.
Compared to that the situation for ESFs is heaven...