Upcoming adjustments to Air vs Ground balance

Some folks do not understand what Sidegrade means.

If base weapon is good against Infantry and Armour, then the sidegrade would be great against one or the other (or even air) and pretty much useless against anything else. An Upgrade is what the Crow and Hawk are currently over the Shrike. (And if other factions have other names, I really don't care) Not sure I understand the Deci's place. Hard hitting and slow is what the Shrike is now...

>I'm< trolling? You're the one that took a simple, relevant analogy and started trying to twist it into absurdity. Make some sort of relevant point about why removing dumb fire from lock on is in any way appropriate and not just some half-baked idea that got tossed into the balance changes or G.T.F.O. So far the following have already been shot down:

1. G2A rockets were never intended to be dumb fired (always worked that way until now, fire modes indicate dumb firing intended)
2. Lock on range and reload compensate for lack of dumb firing (isn't actually a meaningful buff)
3. G2A needed a drawback for being able to lock onto air (already had much reduced damage)
4. You can just resupply at a terminal to switch (the time that takes, even with as frequent as they are, will cripple the HA)

Want to come up with something else?
This change is nonsensical.

I'm glad that this is being addressed, but there are two things that I feel need to be changed that aren't minor tweaks:

1. Ground firepower as a deterrent is fine, but only on non-specialized units. A tank deterring an aircraft with its top gun so it can go on doing tank stuff I can live with, a Skyguard deterring an aircraft and then having nothing to do that actually gives XP is just bunk though.

2. Air to Air battles are much too easy to completely lock down for one side. Once you win a decisive victory it's much too hard for the other side to get back into the fight because there is no cheap air unit with no cooldown. If you lose a tank battle you can fall back to infantry to keep fighting, but if you lose an air battle you can't do anything to get back in there quickly.

hate to burst you bubble but,
1. the A30 walker is also on the liberator which is AMAZING now thank god.
2. they only nerfed splash radius of rocket pods
3. i have thermal optics i can see you perfectly threw the smoke and hit you directly with a rocket.
4. were not noobs, you don't see me calling you a noob for spamming lock on missiles now do you.

If anything this is a small boost for pilots,

There will be a hell of a lot less infantry running around with G2A launchers now and they will only be pulled in times of extreme rocket pod camping instead of being the default goto AV weapon for all Heavies, coupled with the fact that I cant imagine anyone who doesn't already have them thinking they are worth the purchase now.

Dual burster max spanked careless ESF before the change and were ineffective against the rest before this change and will remain so after it, the only real difference is horrible/careless pilots will die half a second quicker the rest will just have to repair one more bar of damage after they have AB'd to friendly territory before finding a safer place to farm.

The Skyguard is staying as useless as ever and is free xp to any esf.

The Walker will allow Liberators to mount a defence against the rubbish pilots who sit behind it plinking away, the decent pilots wont notice the change since they swoop in and either spam rockets for a quick kill or attack from blind spots where the rear gun won't trouble them anyway.

The Rocket pod radius reduction will make ZERO difference to anyone even remotely competant, who the hell cannot manage to put rockets with 1.5 metres of their target? I mean really?

In conclusion none of these changes will make a blind bit of difference to any decent rocket farmer, much less infantry will have the means to trouble you, the skyguard is still poo, The dual burster is slightly more effective but you were avoiding them to begin with right?

How is this supposed to be a step towards balance again?

I was getting xp. Even though I didn't outright destroy a lot of those aircraft, I did significantly damage them and ended up sharing XP with others that finished the job for me. But that's the way a defence should work. Many pikes sticking out of the formation, so to speak. In any case, XP for defense pretty much sucks compared to attacking, so the AA as is doesn't get singled out because of that. I'm just saying it was fun and it was effective at accomplishing faction goals.

3m = 9ft 107⁄64in That's not insignificant.

If you implant this you need to make 2 fire modes for the AV and AA Launchers.
One dumb fire mode and one lock on mode.

I think Higby's view is flawed anyway. Most air pilots don't want to take on high threat air targets, they want to hit on nice soft ground targets that can hardly fight back and fly away without getting too much damage.
The game mechanics lend themselves to the rocket spam mentality and players know what they are more likely to get XP doing.
A pilot killing other planes is far less likely to get xp than say a guy who just spammed 9 troops on the ground.

Not until you adjust rewards for various actions are you going to get this dream system that you want. Air need to get more xp for killing air targets and less for killing infantry. This will shift the mind set from mindless spamming to actually considering an air to air load out.

Also while ground based players are shelling out for arguably expensive ineffective G2A weapons, the air pilots are paying only 1000SC to get weapons that kill ground targets rather easily and slow moving air targets such as liberators and galaxies. I don't think this balances out at all. It is epically flawed.

The thing that I don't think SoE has ever understood about planetside is player psychology, while yeah the air to air thing sounds good on paper, they have the carrot that's hanging on the stick in the wrong location for what they want to achieve.

I'm not saying it's a stupid argument because it's invalid. I'm saying it's a stupid argument because what you're holding forth about is bloody obvious, and the equivalent of saying that someone is well within their rights to crash their car into a telephone pole. Yes, you CAN. But you SHOULDN'T.

Seeing as how I don't use lock-on missiles, you wouldn't be able to call me a noob
You got nerfed in more way then one bud, now with the flak armor buff you will see a lot less kills.

Do you personally think putting a rocket volley within 1.5 metres of a stationary or slow moving target (such as infantry) is difficult?
Honest question.

Who told you that we wanted our money to be wasted? Maybe they will buff AA, maybe. Looking how biased they are, or at least some of them I doubt it will be significant, and made weapon we paid money for useless crap, and lure another thing to pay money again.
Whole AA "deter" air is plain stupid, and smells fishy. Looks like somebody decision making playing as a pilot. Otherwise fair decision would be if AA "deter" air, then ESF would "deter" ground.

Two things:
1. Store purchases will be governed by a terms of service agreement, not an end user license agreement.

2. Just because an agreement can contain terms that aren't enforceable does not mean the agreement is unenforceable. When you hit " I accept " you agreed that SOE could make changes to your purchases. Doesn't matter if you're in Europe or the US you won't be able to challenge that.

That's not what the change does. It's per rocket. 9 feet to hit Vs. 3.

Yeah we all know how balanced the vanu are. But yeah one guy certing air isn't the majority of an aircraft server pop. Which is essentially what Higby wants.

So, nothing about the mechanics of the lock-on AA missile?

Because if an ESF flies straight towards the rocket launcher, it will miss at the moment. You have to let the rocket loose on an ESF's tail, or you'll miss...

It isn't fast enough. You the speed of the g2a rocket was very fast and straight, which is why it is being nerfed to REQUIRE a lock-on to shoot, it was a better hip-fire rocket than the normal rocket.
Doesn't really matter anyways though, engineers with repair tool 6 can out-heal 2 heavy assaults with normal hip-fire rockets.

You're too easy. By the second retort, it was obvious sarcasm. Besides, the original point was an obtuse attempt to point out that it's ridiculous to get worked up over $7. People are using EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! over it.

If you think $7 is "walkin' around" money, you probably shouldn't be wasting time and capital on things like video games. Most of the people on this thread are most likely MMO veterans and, most likely, have experienced game balancing updates, for ill or not, in other games. To expect that your $7 was buying something written in granite is as ridiculous as arguing about french fries.