Skyguard, are they a joke? i'm serious!

so, i got sick of all this air spam, i tried using heavyA, but they get spawn camped, so i thought i would play as an inf, sneak to the vech term and own them with the skyguard...

I shot 400 rounds at the lib, it did less than 8% damage.... when they got bored of shooting them they instantly killed me..

The skyguard bullet range is totally and utterly fffiiinngg pathetic, it has ZERO distance, next to no damage, and the flak aoe is about as large as a small pizza. IM not amused..

So i try a max... they fair alittle better, but die even faster with no support, and they still do no damage, but they atleast seem to have the range and the flak aoe.

i tried my mates account since he has the anti air rocket.. OH my god wtf... its totally worthless.. firstly it takes more shots then you have to kill anything, second you are normally dead before you can even get a lock and thirdly if you do enough damage they just fly off repair and come back..


This game has no viable AA OPTIONS

Yep

Yeah the skyguard needs a serious buff in terms of its projectile speed. A dual burster max will considerably out-range and out-damage a skyguard by a large margin. It has been tested and proven.

Its not the skyguards or the burster MAX's fault. Liberators are just plain way to tanky. Use those on a ESF though, and you will send us flying away with our tail between our legs. AA might not get alot of kills, but they certainly tell any ESF that they are not welcome, and to clear out ASAP.

I'm sorry that you wasted money or certs on a skyguard.

The Skyguard flak has been nerfed to uselessness.

The flight time on the flak is too slow, the detonation area is too small and they are only good at point defense when enemy aircraft are literally in your face.

The AA-MAX does alot better and I use it frequently. The shells fly faster, the flak has wider AOE so it you can lead targets more accurately and actually hit. It's vastly superior to the Skyguard. If you want AA, pull a Sunderer, drive around... when you find enemy aircraft, deploy sunderer, jump out, pull AA MAX... start farming.

Skyguard = waste.

your not suppost to be able to solo an esf on foot , and as a flier the aa does a high amount of damage already , you say you fired 400 rounds at a lib ? hmmmmm i'm not sure about that but as soon as a sg fires at my scythe if i don't start to evade i die same with all AA .

AA is a defensive deterant its not supposed to be a killing mechanizm

Ultimately making AA better means making aircraft inaccessable to new players, and that is evidently not SOEs gameplan.

You will not get many kills with AA weapons of any sort. You are more of a deterrent than anything.

Ranking assists, improving the XP specifically for air kill assists, and making crashes/deaths while burning/red hp bar count as kills would do more to help AA fun factor. They are effective and do decent damage once you get good at leading targets.

I spawn an ESF where i can so i fly a lot, and i HATE that skyguards. If sommeone sits in a skyguard and u dont see him and start to hover, he just ***** your screen. I instantly need to turn arround and getvmy ESf out of range.

Shure ,if i backoff fast enough he cant kill me alone, but i cant secure that area aslong as hes still there.

and to be hornest, thats what skyguards made for. they are not made so u own that Lib by urself...... If you got 2-3 skyguards watching over a tank platoon, they are quite save, at least from hovering ESFs, the just can dive in, shoot a mag, then return to base.

I did drive it by myself and it feels like u do nothing, but fly an ESF and get shot by one or two of them.... They are ok like they are.

And the AA rocket for HA is fine to, 2-3 hits and a ESF goes down. If you would oneshot any ESF, wheres the fun flying thes fighters ??? And like i said, ur not supposed to kill a lib on your own, try 3 friends shooting with AA miss, and ull get that lib down with ease, cause hes just slow as hell.

Skyguards are pretty ****. On the plus side, you can be almost certain they will be buffed, so don't regret your purchase just yet.

Don't knock bursterMAX though, they are very effective. Especially in groups.

The only real problem right now is that no one wants to buy AA weapons, the return on investment is just terrible. A huge problem right now is the AA base turrets, they die within 1 volley of A2G Rockets or 2 shots from a liberator. Not to mention repairing them takes forever, while it takes 2 seconds for them to die.

The main problem with ground AA is that it's all or nothing.

You either have full zone denial, in which you get no kills and no one plays air...

... or you have air able to easily escape you, in which you still won't get kills because they'll run off while burning away.

Either way, you lose, and the only person who's winning is your own team's ESF who gets to pick off the kills on the perimeter and use you for cover.


... oh and why is the BMAX the best AA platform again?

why no one mentions the Walker (secondary Turret for the MBT)
I'm not sure if they changed something since Release but in Beta this AA Turret was completly useless......
Sometimes i think it's even worse than the standard Basilisk Gun against Air. (range/dmg ratio)

Skyguard Lightnings get 1 shot by the Liberator if he has that ******* cannon against tank. And you need to stand still, because otherwise you can't hit them for ****. You can't even kill light aircraft with an entire magazine of the Skyguard anymore.


AA Ground forces are seriously ****** right now. They need to improve them quickly.

Not really. There are three, not two, viable states for AA:

1) Too Strong: Once an aircraft is seen, it is dead: at any altitudes at any speed.
2) Too Weak: An aircraft can ignore AA at any altitude at any speed while doing anything.
3) Just Right: Unless an aircraft flies high, flies smart or flies fast, it is vulnerable to AA.

Before the beta it was 1. Now it is 2. How did it come to that? SOE considered all the possible fixes for AA: reduced range, reduced damage, reduced Flak proximity, reduced accuracy, increased Aircraft armour and increased rocket pod damage. Any two or even three of those could have fixed the situation for the better. Instead SOE just threw them all into the pot, hoping it would fix it, then wondered why AA is suddenly useless and not even deterring aircraft.

The "It is hard to achieve balance" is a ******** argument. It just requires some actual thought while ignoring the whiners that will ensue with any eventual fix. .

Let me get this straight:

Groundforces are not supposed to solo ESF, but ESF is supposed to Solo whole Squads (and sometimes Platoons) of Groundforces. Did i get that right?

Well... the AA-turrets are quite powerful against Air!
I infiltrated an enemy base and kept hacking their turrets to destroy the other ones for easy XP
(since hacking 25 and destroying said turret with hacked turret is 100XP in about the same time, while hacking doesn't give you any more XP after doing it a few times...)
Then I saw a Liberator and hacked AA to shoot him down. I kept hitting him nonstop at close range and it didn't take long for him to loose a third of the HP while he kept circling 'n stuff. Then he shot the turret till it almost died, I fled and hacked another turret.
This time he kept his distance and it was almost impossible to hit him and the hits barely did any damage. This time he shot the turret to half health and he at some point ended up at half health, too and just flew away.
I think I overheated 3 or 4 times inbetween. Then I went for a scythe at close range and almost managed to kill it with 2 overheats. He fled and the 2nd overheat didn't let e finish him.

Apparently he came back and I destroyed him with yet another turret, he kept going straight for me using his gun and when he died I still had more than 50% HP left...

At some point (new full HP AA-turret) I suddenly died in a hail of explosions. Must've been a rocketpod I didn't see coming, since I'm stationary, super squishy and can't watch 5-8 directions at the same time, plus it is hard to keep track of enemies if they can outspeed your turn-speed.


Well... this actually enables you to get a positive KD!
Try to sneak into a very peaceful enemy base with infil hack some AAs and if you use the element of surprise perfectly, you're lucky that he has no rocket pod, he is a bad pilot and does no complicated dodges and is not a Liberator, you might actually get some kills.
And if you happen to have low air-traffic, you can always hack AV-turrets and kill of some of the other AV and AI(nfantry) turrets and even some AA you don't need for some quick 1000 XP.

Oh and if you're lucky you stumble across a sunderer route! I happened to see some sunderers and hacked the AVs at the gates then killed like 5 sunderers or so... (that's why don't decide on killing the gate AV-turrets too early and maybe even pre-hack them for quick situational flexibility!)

This way you can quickly decimate... no vigintilate (twenty) their Air forces...
Oh and if you see a tank zerg passing by, FORGET THE AA!!! Hack some AV-turrets and farm some quick 3k XP, since tanks are alot slower, squishier and WAAAY less dangerous. If they manage to destroy the turret just exit quickly and use the next one. Unlike fighters they have no way to instantly kill your or accidentially kill you when you exit.

Sometimes I wonder how obvious crap like this get past QA, or the designers hand for that matter. Were they asleep when they coded this? Did they not realize what they were doing?

If #3 were possible, then whiners wouldn't exist.

The problem is that 'smart' and 'fast' are not objective measurements, and there are varying levels of skill for flyers and AA players. Current AA is either 1, 2, or 3 depending on the player at the moment.

Sounds right. Because one of them costs resources, it's a force multiplier.

I like how BF1942 handled it, an AA turret and a plane would exactly cancel out given equal skill. Of course AA turrets are a bit more precious compared to aircraft in this game so maybe they should be closer to 2x or 3x an equivalent plane. Depending on how you want to do it, are turrets more effective or is portable AA more effective?

Turrets are predictable, they are something pilots can consciously avoid, so they should probably be OP compared to air, making them a prime target for ground forces. Whereas portable AA should probably be more suited only for harassing and whittling down enemy air at a shorter range.

There should definitely be a ceiling above which you are safe from AA, but at the same time also cannot effectively engage ground.

Good balance is no more difficult than simple logic.