Either remove them or the better option is to alter them into skillful* weapons that can actually kill their targets. At its core a deterrent weapon will never be enjoyable in a non-milsim game. There are only two options: 1: it is effective and the thing it counters cannot operate in the area at all, which isnt fun for what it counters and isnt fun for the weapon user as they cannot do anything but switch weapons once they've succeeded. 2: it is ineffective and the thing it counters can freely kill what it likes, being only limited in how fast they can repair up and return to killing. Deterrent style weapons need to be eradicated from the game. They have no place and never have. *skillful does not mean "only useable by veterans". It can require as much skill as regular tank vs tank combat or infantry vs infantry combat.
Having Anti-aircraft weapons that pay justice to that term would be cool for once, Liberators and Galaxies are pretty much invincible without half a squadron shooting at them with AA
i would agree with this ... i´d rather deterence weapons like the skyguard/ranger/burster/walker be simply effective than just thrown out .. as for skill(tm) weapons ... as i have posted coutless times .. ADD missilelauncher turrets to vehicle as those are aleady burst frontloaded damage weapons, just take the turrets the valkyrie has and put them on vehicles ... done .. DoT weapons like the afforementioned could be changed by decreasing the magazine by half or 2/3 but adjust dmgoutput and projectilevelocity/accuracy similar to ESF noseguns actualy .... and for gods sake make them capable to defend against vehicle, again defend not attack ...
The issue with deterrence weapons is that the game doesn't reward this gameplay. The game reward system is far too "kill" focussed - no matter how well you deter, if you don't get a kill, you get very little reward.
Gee I wonder, maybe it would be any weapon that does not have copious amounts of skill-reducing mechanics? Could that fit the bill? Or is that too simple? So weapons that dont have fire-and-forget lock-ons with a large lock-on angle. Weapons that dont have a flak/coyote/striker auto-track range that lets you miss by several meters and still score a hit. Weapons that dont use spray&pray like the Walker, Skyguard and Burster in order to increase hit potential. Simple examples of such weapons: - Somewhat modified A2A noseguns (I mean we get literally told these are the pinnacle of skill to use against aircraft, what better option is there? The modification is to make sure it doesnt mow down hundreds of infantry too easily and to make it accurate enough despite not being able to follow aircraft). - an auto-gun like the Saron or Viper. Several hits should surely be worthy of a kill. A small flak range (<1m) could help make hits easier without making it too easy. Flak range also lets you fine tune the damage it does against aircraft and vehicles/infantry. - maintain-lock weapons with a small lock-on angle. But can lock after a shot is fired or when the lock is broken. - new flak projectiles that shoot a shotgun pattern of projectiles forwards when in range, meaning that a shot off to the side of aircraft will deal less damage than one aimed at the center and rewarding skill. Since a weapon capable of hitting ESF would have no problem hitting a Galaxy there needs to be two fire modes for each weapon. One with slower projectiles and less/no flak to make it harder to hit larger aircraft but still rewarding by increasing the damage output, one with higher velocity/more flak range would deal less damage.
That'd be weaker than flak on larger aircraft, so unless you only really want to kill ESF and Valks this would just be a downgrade. Even then at 200m damage starts dropping which is quite a small range in aircraft terms, allowing the ESFs to just escape anyway, which is what people always cry about. I thought you wanted to remove skill-less mechanics yet you are keeping flak? An actual interesting idea. This would ultimately depend on how much damage it does, since current lock-ons do way too much damage for the extremely low amount of input required. Depends on how the shotgun burst works. If it targets the aricraft and releases in that direction it'd be way too strong. If it shotguns from point of origin it might be ok, though I imagine it'd feel a bit weird to use. Oh. You want to keep the skill-less flak anyway. Well then.
And this is why I dont want to repost the idea's I've posted in half the threads already for you: you nitpick them and you deliberately dont understand them. For example in the last alinea I point out two different fire modes for each gun. In the ESF A2A nosegun's case this would likely be a simple change in velocity for example. For focks sake I want skillful weapons, that doesnt mean flak mechanics cannot exist! Compared to the 5 to 8m flak detonation range a <1m flak range (SMALLER THAN 1M) would just be a small boost in accuracy but still require more of the player's skill. See? Nitpicking. You dont even respond to the idea of the auto-gun style weapon, just pick on one thing and blow it out of proportion. See what you can do if you dont hyperbole the hell out of the idea's? Also maybe you havent noticed but you basically give most of your own answer: current lock ons deal "too much" damage for too little input. Well I just increased the input and made it harder to lock on to targets by reducing the lock-on angle (in other words, aim closer to the center of the aircraft). Naturally the ability to lock after a shot would be useless if the lock on time was as long as currently, so that lock on time would need to be shortened. If it shotguns straight at the aircraft then your aim wouldnt matter and it would be just RNG depending on the size of the spread. So the shotgun spread would fly on in the direction the shell was flying in. Also this would be a more skillful version of flak, but still a skill reducing agent. Just like PPA's larger projectiles, more AOE on anti-infantry weapons and higher velocity ammo does. Its not automatically a bad thing, its just a mechanic that doesnt need to be so absolutely massive that it becomes like current flak. Fock off again. A flak projectile with 1m (or 0.5 or 0.2) wouldnt be skill-less. It would just remove the shots that are so incredibly close but still miss and make it a tiny bit easier to hit, not be a world-altering difference like current flak. DONT HYPERBOLE.
Why - resistances can be tweaked at a weapon/aircraft level to counteract and balance this. What you say would be true only if the damage model was fixed across the board - but in PS2 it isn't.
A play style exists which you don't personally enjoy? Yeah, better delete that. How dare it exist in a multi-role sandbox game?
It's not about the playstyle, it's about the effectiveness compared to everything else. If there is a mechanic that generates masses of kills without a way to fight back it's not balanced
The playstyle exists and isnt balanced or rewarding to play most of the time as the playstyle is self-defeating. That is the core issue, its self defeating. It either works and puts itself and its target out of a job or it doesnt work and its pointless. Worse is that it is a unique detriment that only affects one specific group of weapons designed to combat a specific group of vehicles with the STATED AND EXPRESS intent to force everyone to play aircraft (in other words, they deliberately made the weapons unplayable in order to get people to fly). So that needs to change. Even if you want to keep the self-defeating "play style", which is a charitable name for it, adding properly rewarding playstyles that fit the rest of the game is a MUST.
what is a playstyle worth that is utterly ineffective at what it is supposed to do and hasn´t seen any propper support in years? while i personaly would like to keep the quote on quote "deterent"style weapons there is no question it either needs to be considerably buffed or reworked in execution so to fit in in comparison with all other available tools and options ... if an option is ineffective in its role compared to other tools that may even overlap into the role of said option then it indeed has no place into the given toolset and is at worst a trap that significantly lowers the potential effectiveness/capability of its user .. why would you chose to make yourself considerably less potent like that? just take suppression LMGs such as the EM1 and Polaris as example ... they may have a tactical role while their initial inclusion in practice indeed may have supressed infantry from advancing, the player who suppressed the enemy (with little to no damage and no kills) didn´t realy get anything out of it rewardvise and there were much more effective options that overlapped in that role of chokepoint holding, thus these needed tweaking to be worth using and have been so .. of course there is the main difference that the platform the option is used on fights against the same platform and is subjected to the same factors and circumstances at least most of the time with rather little diviation ... which is not the case with vehicles vs aircraft, both platforms are distinctly different .. in which case one can indeed argue that weither or not both of these plattforms get the same weapon with same stats in order to be on "equal" footing or one of the platforms gets an option that counterbalances the default advantages of the other platform (be that "flak" or proximity locks, or higher projectile velocity vs the mobilty of aircraft) ... fact of the matter is current AA options do too little consistent damage to be worth it ..
I see you're still at it. Good luck. I think we had this exact conversation when I first started 7 or 8 years ago. How time flies.
