The velocity for anti air is far too low. So low in fact that in some cases its practically worthless. from ww2 they had AA guns with a velocity of 790ish. At this point in time we have guns from 790 to 1100 that are designated for anti air. Are you telling me that in the future we somehow produced weapons that are less effective than ones from the second world war on earth? Ranger is 325 which I find unacceptable. We need to fix the anti air issue.
Their velocities are lower to keep the game fairer. There are masses of players and often incredibly long sightlines and you can be exceptionally accurate with your anti-air fire, considerably more so than a WW2 gunner could 80 years ago. It's the same reason all velocities in this game are noticably lower—like how tank cannons only fire shells at 200-300m/s where in reality those shells would be fired at speeds exceeding 1km/s.
As Aysom already stated theese values exist for a fair gameplay. If we want to be closer to reallife we need to assume that Auraxis is pretty much identical to Earth. But lorewise, theese values may be explained by differences compared to our planet: Auraxis may most certainly have a different mass, slightly different atmosphear density and also the gravitational fields of the nearby planet(s) probably interfier with physical behaviour of objects.
While I agree G2A is often far too weak, the issue is not the velocity but the damage. Several G2A platforms are worthless at actually killing air. Lowering their range but increasing their damage would be ideal.
learn to lead your shots. personally i dont use the skyguard, i use flak cannon harasser. you can easily delete any ESF cringe out of the sky with a flak harrasser, as well as follow them to their landing point. x2 scope optics, don't run reload, max out your magazine size, and speed chassis. youll then easily delete all aircraft in just 1 clip with extended magazine. its fun driving behind enemy lines waiting for the a2g nerds to land and heal and flak them.
In the long history of PS2, nothing has been nerfed as much and as often as air has. Salty groundlings who just want to play farmville QQ until the devs cave.
Been there, done that with harasser. Ranger is pretty solid and is not hard to learn, but having to lead so far all the time is kind of ridiculous and just hammers the point home that velocity is a problem. You'll also very likely only get bad ESFs with ranger harasser, while liberators can just completely delete you if they choose. Corsair's AA gun for example is absolute hell to hit with at anything outside of medium range; and a skilled pilot can just dance around it at close range since the velocity is so slow. The AA option on Chimera is inexcusably bad, as is the odd one on Javelin(though, you're fighting an uphill battle even trying to fight ESFs with such a fragile vehicle anyways) Skyguard is not the proper threat it should be; even despite it being the overall best AA vehicle choice i'd argue it's velocity could use an increase as well, but it is not as needed as the corsair/chimera/javelin options which need a 2-3x increase. Outside of skyguard you have dual burster MAXes which have been directly nerfed from the revival change. Walkers are just a joke and should not ever be used if your intent is solely to fight air, imo. In the same way that an answer to big groups of armor is air, there should be an answer to big groups of air. Simply increasing velocity where it's needed alone would solve the issue. I'd argue another thing you could do is massively increase damage at certain close to somewhat medium range thresholds, to really make planes think again about trying to swoop what is meant to be their direct counter, on top of changing falloff damage to be further off. A very large part of why it is complained about so much is due to the fact that learning to fly in this game is extremely prohibitive, given the inherent jank involved with flying. I'd absolutely pull my own ESFs to try and combat others if i could fly worth a damn at all, and i've actively tried to learn after watching many videos and changing lots of keybinds, etc. I'd be lying if i said that all the AA being shot at me did not seem like a lot; but i'd argue that it's easy to say that skilled pilots aren't exactly being truthful about how one-sided air can really be. All AA base turrets in the game are trash tbh. They need their range as a whole increased imo; too often i see galaxies at the top of the skybox just completely out of their range. But yeah, their damage isn't that great either. I'm not sure i'd want to say their damage needs to be increase too, though..
Just looked up the velocity of my fav AA gun, the Walker: 1000m/s And: In WW2 there was no flight ceiling at 1000m. They also did not not manage to get hit by multiple bullets and keep on fighting back then. They had no miracle med-kits nor self-healing shields. One hit to the leg ended the battle for a soldier. And after dying they never redeployed. The balance decisions in PS2 are not about realism or about what realism could look like in a far future on a different planet. They are made for GAMEPLAY balance. The Ranger is easy to use in short range encounters. No skill needed to take out a skyknight with 10000 hours in his ESF. Now try to make a guess what would happen if a pilot flies at the skyceiling and some noob is able to hit him constantly with a Ranger. GG?
