[Suggestion] ESF Balance

Your A2A proposals are either wacky or wouldn't work with this game's render limitations, and are entirely off topic from ESF balance. If you want to necro your last post about aircraft controls we can go over it there.

But say you do fix controls to your liking, the Reaver is still a bigger target, and if its easier to aim with, so would be the Scythe and Mossy. Unless we get a generic NS fighter, NC have to accept they simply need to land their hits.

So here's an interesting thing to consider. Considering stock nose guns the Reaver has about 12.6% more dps than the Mossy and about 8% more dps than the Scythe. Going off your pixel charts, the Reaver from the front at 14925 pixels is almost 70% larger than the Scythe at 8798 pixels, and about 38% larger than the Mossy at 10811 pixels. Balance between dps and size doesn't seem to hold water, but there really are so many things to consider. The Reaver's boost advantage can't be overstated. When bounching up and down in a hover fight you can tap the boost on ascend and basically not get hit in the Reaver. The Scythe and Mossy can still be tracked mid-boost. The other thing is with these crappy controls it's much easier to take good shots when you have them than tracking your target and applying steady dps. The Reaver's higher dps lets pilots really take advantage of moments when they get them. Mossy pilots have to be on point with their tracking. When watching good Reaver pilots do their thing, you can tell their burst game is on point.

Looking at the top, and pick the center most point to aim, the Scythe has about the same wiggle room for error as the Reaver, while there's only wiggle room in one direction for the Mossy, which is why it's so evasive. But, when everything is boosting in a reverse maneuver, the Reaver is still the hardest to hit.

Considering all of this, the Reaver REALLY needs its fuel pods in dog fights, and sucks balls running any wing weapons. One of the adjustments I've been arguing for for a while is increasing the Reaver's fuel capacity and recharge speed slightly while wing mounts are equipped, but not its base rate, as it's already scary enough with fuel pods.

Anway, it's too easy to focus on pixels and ignore the incredible strengths that real Reaver pilots miss when they fly other factions.

I disagree with your statement about top profile but I respect your opinion. The top profile can easily be neglected by any decent pilot. But yes the banshee i.guess is the best a2g. I don't use it much because I can't be near all those effects without laging lol. You know flak explosions, and the bashee. Just to much at times especially near big fights

Why wouldn't they work? Especially why would the render limitations be the problem it's not like I want the aircraft to teleport to render range or anything? What's even wacky about my idea's? We could have omni-directional afterburners. The devs actually had a normal mouse aircraft control ready but decided not to release it "because they wanted players to try and learn this one" and the other idea's I had are specific to enhancing the differences between airframes and changing how effective normal aircraft maneuvers are.

Or make sure that being a bigger target is offset by other advantages? The higher DPS is already a step forwards for example. The goal is that each ESF has advantages and disadvantages but the final result is that they are more or less equal to someone of equal skill across all skill levels.

There are definitely reasons why the Reaver isn't instantly the worst ESF. I don't even know enough to say that it simply is the worst. But looking at it from the numbers I have the Reavers incredible hitbox size needs an absolutely enormous advantage as a counterweight. It might even be one of those extremes where to balance it out you have to make it OP as hell. Better to see if we could simply reduce the size of the Reaver a bit?

At what point do people actually fire at each other? From everything I've seen the general rule of thumb is "fire, afterburn during the reload to avoid damage, fire". Ofcourse this changes as you won't be firing much on a target speeding out of your view anyway and people don't run out of ammo at the same time. The point is: How useful is it to be hard to hit during the Reverse Maneuver, which is already meant to be hard to hit, compared to be much easier to hit when you are engaging the enemy with your weapon?

So the Reaver has less versatility than the other two. This does not immediately mean "disadvantage" but it's not exactly the best scenario.

This is another way to look at it. I'll post this overly circulated picture from earlier. http://i.imgur.com/w3s6j.jpg
Imagine where you'd actually aim at each ESF. The thickest part of the Scythe gives you more wiggle room along the length and width, while the Mossy only gives you room for error along its length. The Reaver is just screwed. Just from personal experience Reavers are always easy to hit (While not boosting), and Scythes are easier to hit from the top than Mossies. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm just trying to figure out for myself why that is.

I don't want to get off topic with flight controls. I'm happy to talk about it if you find one of your old threads.

As for afterburner use... While you're trading blows, everyone alternates control/space, but if you tap your afterburners about half a second after you hit space you get a much more substantial and unpredictable ascend speed, and in a Reaver that speed is almost double what the other aircraft can do. It throws their lead entirely off and it's basically spray and pray from your opponent. It's also much easier for a Reaver to land hits while boosting in a reverse maneuver than it is to hit that Reaver. And that's the big advantage to running fuel pods, especially quick recharge. You can be squirrely while you reload, and also boost and be a hard target while you're shooting.

I started flying NC and noticed a substantial improvement when I switched to TR, and another improvement when I started flying the Scythe. I had front to tickets to the Buff The Reaver concert. So I feel for new NC pilots. It all depends on balancing theory. Do you balance from the top down or bottom up? I don't want to see the Reaver lose its unique abilities, so the only solution I could get behind is an NS fighter, which we should have for NSO anyway. That would be a fun project to get behind. Making it easier to fly than ESF but different enough as to not obsolete them, yet still competitive in duels.

https://ibb.co/ncCR9J5
The above picture is where you aim at if attacking from above.
The below is just general look.
https://ibb.co/q0BqCPg
So? Again. And the scythe hitbox is the easiest to negate.
The most common order of esf are
Scythe > reaver > mossie.
The mossie underperforms. Yea more damage per clip sure but still worse off.