AJW's(Air Justice Warriors) are truely amusing.

ESFs are squishy. It's literally instant death when you enter any battle 24-48 or higher. The cumulative effects of Swarm, Annihilator, and ES A2G Lock Ons (which are free) are already lethal. Add to that the readily available and random Turrets or Ground Vehicle mounted gun. Even worse, when a Skyguard or Dual Burster Max enters the mix say goodbye to Air.

Right, and if you're lucky you'll break that lockon in time. If in that time a single ESF gets on your tail, he can easily take you out in your weakened state, playing with fire and taking ground damage doesn't come penalty free. This is why most good pilots fly high and rarely even engage ground targets.

Both with counter-weapons equipped? You will not kill a halfway competent skyguard with hornets before he kills you, if that's what you're suggesting...

Except that literally every vehicle in the game right down to a flash has fire suppression, making it a pointless argument

ESFs are flying around at virtually the same speeds as a World War I bi-wing fighter plane, funnily enough. It's all relative to the map size, though.

Hah, that's a good one. I hear this all the time from non-pilots. In fact if you ever fly for a long period of time you will in fact be shot down by tank guns much more often than you might believe, and despite what you think no, you will not be able to just juke all the AA you come across by running away from it. In a fantasy world yes but realistically it just won't happen, good players surprise you at places you don't expect and you will go down sometimes, and I am talking about flying up to 400-500 meters.

Yes, I do have such audacity to make that claim. Basically, if you force him away, what business is it of yours what he does on the other side of the map? For all you know he could be off attacking the third faction, indirectly helping you win the alert. You have beaten him back from your teammates, good job.

You can only be responsible for what takes place in your own area of influence, what happens across the map is beyond your control and beside the point.

And to that end, AA currently sweeps the skies above it clean of traffic, and it only takes a few units of well-placed AA to ward off an entire squad of ESFs, making it highly efficient.

Tank guns are a major reason that a number of pilots play it safe and stay above 150m. Which is silly, because the best and most skillful piloting can only be had when done under the imminent threat of running into a radio mast or canyon wall.

However, the fire suppression on air craft is different. In a ground vehicle, its not as effective, because there is less chance for you to dodge or run away, because you're bound in a 2-axis environment. With aircraft, you have more ability to dodge and negate some damage, giving FS more chance to recover a significant amount of health, particularly if you use terrain to your advantage, which gives you a greater window for escaping from dangerous situations.

While ground vehicles such as harassers and flashes can also do this, its often more efficient to hop out of them and use FS as an incidental to get yourself into cover. With ground vehicles, there's also a lot more things shooting at you, as the default HA launcher is AV, you have random mines, AV mana turrets, and of course, the LA who will chase you with drifters because he sees you're smoking. Then of course, there's the explosive crossbows.....

As to the AA question, the best advantage you can secure as skyguard is surprise. This means, counter-intuitively, not shooting at everything in render range and creating an air denial zone. You want to the ESF. You can do this in a few different ways:

1) Stealth and position. Setup off of a point about 50-150m, in shadow if you can, with one angle obstructed (Such as tucked in behind a cliff). This obstruction should advantageous, but should not completely block your line of sight to the likely approaches. This will let you engage hornet snipers, while offering some protection against lawn-mowers (Liberators with tank busters that are at low angles).

2) If you must be seen by an overwhelming air force, be seen as something else. Lets say you're the single skyguard and your radar picks up a bunch of ESFs coming in fast. Signal your team, and then make yourself scarce. If its over five ESFs, especially with a lib, they are going to get cocky and try to spam you out if they know you are there. If you let them get a shot or two off and start their runs, you can open up on them and make them panic if you've picked your shots.

If air is approaching against your supporting armor (I.E. coming towards you) keep an eye on the sky, but pretend to be something else (I.E. a regular lightning, because they won't be able to tell from farther out what your barrel looks like. But your shot pattern WILL give you away. Spinning your turret around wildly constantly scanning the sky is good general practice, but ESFs.Libs zone in on that behavior.

3) Displacement + Vehicle Stelath is evil. The chief countermeasure that air has against a skyguard is that they can out-manuever it. They have to know its there in order to do that. Denying them the ability to predict where you will be allows you to pick the moment that you engage, and not be constantly shooting at them from max range. After major air attacks, or even getting kill and deterrence, change your position. This is particularly true for liberators, who will mark your position after their first pass and come back for you. I've actually killed liberators by displacing into locations that maximized my firing time on their return pass.

4) Don't panic. You have 6 ESFs over-head. You're all alone. The worst thing you can do is panic and wail endlessly at everything or only one target. Instead, prioritize. Pick a target, plaster it for a few seconds, then switch. If you paste it enough, it will break off or try to reposition. Switch to his buddy, keep them moving, particularly if they're using hornets.


That said, Skiggird is not efficient.

It is functionally worthless against all ground targets, has little defensive value against ground, and lacks stopping power against most heavy air threats. It is a thankless job that results in it being incidentally pulled on demand, usually after the threat has appeared and done its damage. This leads to few people getting practiced and skilled in it, Again, I submit that a huge portion of the issue people have with AA is that they are not aware of it. They feel its OP because they flew it an armor column with two skyguards or over a point, and they didn't ask their team-mates if AA was active or where it was. They then get totally wrecked by it because it ambushes them.

Dumb question.. but since I've seen it mentioned in a few threads, but does anyone realize that Fire Suppression is 25% heal on ESFs and 12.5% on every other vehicle?

I'm not calling for a nerf to FS.. but can anyone justify why a ESF needs the 2x FS compared to every other vehicle? Shouldn't it be the same? I use FS on my Harasser and I wonder why shouldn't it also be 25%? Course that would make IR Smoke pretty useless... I wonder if that's partly why Flares isn't as useful.

Flare off one missile, or tank two and heal back to full. That's not much of a choice. I can't be the only one who's noticed this.

I guess you could call this a **** of sextillion barrels.

AJW's are a fascinating species.

New Pilots?


REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I think I remember our original outfit leader saying something about members of prey shooting down players that ether used A2AM's or Coyotes.

Hate to say it, but if you use the term 'skyknight' in a derogatory way, or you dont like people who prefer an air game that is based on skill then you are probably bad.

The good players are these so called 'skyknights' who are so called because they dont like mechanics that wouldnt be acceptable in any other aspect of the game.

You hate the skyknights because you cant beat them. Maybe you just dont have the skill. I doubt it though, because skill is easily gained through practice.

It is more likely that you lack the fortitude to be good at anything. You lack the discipline to do well in any endeavor where hard work and perserverence win the day.

And you rail about the injustice of the inequity of skill that is perpetrated and perpetuated by yourselves.

Shining example of what I talked about.

I swear if I see one more SJW/anti-SJW fad comment or thread on a forum.. do the people that use that term to demean someone realize that they are actually exactly the thing that they think they dislike? lol

People will generally demean others as a cheap argument, the whole "SJW/Anti-SJW" thing is appalling but that doesn't really change the fact the air game is much more elitist than those on the ground. But then again, it is a game, there are toxic people all over the place.

I don't think you processed this or the SJW comparison correctly.

"I'm going to handwave the problems of the Airgame toxicity, because everything is toxic"

I'm sorry I don't recall saying those words... if this is the way you feel about my position then there is little more I can do here. You can't reduce the toxicity of the air game without completely changing it's roles, namely that of the ESF which should remain true to it's name as a fighter, not an omni-weapon capable of being loaded for any target. Two changes can be made to do just that, 1) Remove rocket/photon pods and hornets from ESFs(Preferably give them to another aircraft such as Valkyrie), 2) Slightly buff nose guns against ground vehicles, nothing major of course.

The role of an ESF should be to deal with enemy aircraft... this is why it's called a Fighter, as well as small G2A capabilities with either nose guns or coyotes, both requiring much more skill than the weapons being removed.

Seriously though, why cry about air?

I never wanted to fly airplanes. I wanted to snipe people cause i was new to the game and i like stealth classes and i played NC and thats what nc stealthers do lol.

I spent all my time trying to snipe, but found myself constantly getting farmed by tanks.

I knew that ESF with rocket pods could kill tanks, so i bought some station cash and got some rocket pods to kill the tanks who were totally out of control farming back then.

9 times out of 10 i never even got to deliver my rockets to the tanks because some 'skyknight' would one clip me.

Flying was strange to me. I didnt have the proper sensitivities, or keyboard configuration and my brain wasnt used to the extra keys required for pitching.

I didnt know how to do the reverse maneuver and it took me a long time to learn because i didnt know about third person view for the longest time. I was watching videos thinking devs made them until finally i realized i could do it too.

I used to tell my friends that flying an ESF was just a fancy way to commit suicide. And i believed that. But i knew that if others could do it, then i too could learn. I was actually intrigued and excited by the difficulty. By how flying was like playing an entirely different game.

I died. And i died. I think i probly got shot down every time by the time i had 3 days flight time in my reaver. I never won. Then someone told me to turn off mouse acceleration and to adjust my sensitivity and i started doing better.

After a while i got to the point where i could hold my own up there and the long hard road to get there made it so much more worthwhile.

Nothing worth having comes easy.

No

Let me ask this question.

Why shouldn't a Lightning be just as hard to learn?

Think back to the first time you took out a Lightning. It may have been difficult. You may have found what you thought was a decent spot but took a C4 from above. You might have hit a mine. But I'll wager you were at least by your second or third attempt able to get a kill or two. Maybe even luckier and got a decent kill streak.

Several years ago I did what you did. I had a little better time with it, however. I knew 3rd person view was a thing. I had an outfit that I could ask questions about and wingmen to run with. For a while I thought ESFs were fine. Once you learn them you've got it and others simply just need to take the time and effort.

But then I had a buddy of mine try flying. He used to main LA for a while and one of his biggest peeves was ESFs picking him off the roof tops. So he figured he'd give it a try. He experienced what most experience. Getting one clipped by better pilots and not understanding how or why.

So I took him into the VR and for about an hour, explained and let him practice the various maneuvers. The reverse maneuver, the 180 maneuver, hovering, and getting the most out of your speed (tilting down, slightly to one side, and use vertical thrust to squeeze every kph you can).

Then he asked when he should pull the ESF. This question is a bit more complex, as our playstyle at the time was to do one of two things:

1. We'd run what we call DerpOPs. Basically goof off to some degree, but in a manner that either ticked off the enemy, or made us look bigger than we were. The idea was to take a 3-6 man squad and get a platoon thrown at us. This way we could tie down a force 8-12 times our number and help our faction during an alert.

2. Run with a fast paced, highly organized squad or platoon to make a push against larger forces and still take the base.

There was no answer. The ESF simply wasn't useful for what we did. Its functions didn't match what we were doing. So after an hour of training, we decided to see what could be done. Between ground AA and experienced pilots. The attempts were futile. Then we went back to running squad ops.

Its then he decided to pull a Galaxy. To make a long story short. He took the Galaxy without any training. Self taught and even came up with maneuvers of his own. Before long his Galaxy was fully certed to be an effective BattleGal and Skywhale. The difference between the ESF and the Galaxy is that we were able to get results from it right off the bat.

Its at that point I started questioning the point of even learning a ESF. I understand that the ESF when used correctly can be a VERY effective tool in the right hands. The problem I have with it is you will never see a time where you can get a large or new force into using it. Its far to specialized, and too involved for the common player. More so than any Infantry Class or Vehicle, air or ground in the game.

The results from the ESF do NOT match the effort it takes to even have a rudimentary mastery (aka getting more kills than deaths). But every other vehicle in the game is quite different. You can literally pull and go for most of them (some require a cert investment more so than others). But the ESF requires hours of practice, and frustrating bouts of attritionous trial and error. All before you start seeing meaningful results.

I've never seen a situation where having such training actually produces results over the frustration required to go through with it. Some of the top outfits only ever take out the ESF for suicidal runs against a Sundy (which anyone could really do), or as a off-peak time joke run.

When I ran with Recursion for example, we'd take out the ESFs to do skirmishes with Future Crew. It didn't make a difference who won those. They were 'just for fun'. It didn't help take any bases, nor did it help take an alert.

When fighting against crack outfits. I've never felt stalled or blocked by their use of elite ESF pilots. I've experienced them using ESFs before, but easily dispatched them with Bursters or Lockons, or even Skyguards. Thats if they were pesky enough to warrant it. Most times you just keep your head down and in cover till they get bored and go elsewhere.

There are times when ESFs can make or break a base situation. But those are usually at bases that allow for it. Bases with outdoor control points. Of which there is a handful of bases like this. But if you can tough through it. Usually its off to another 4-5 bases down the lattice before having to worry about it again. And chances are you can take a base with an outdoor point before the ESFs even show up.

With all that said. ESFs are more work than their worth. I'm saying this as someone who wasn't bad in one. From someone who helped practice with them. Someone who helped train others in their use. And from a point of view of facing against them as opponents try to futilely use them against me.

I personally think the controls should be simplified and made more intuitive. Then the vehicle buffed, and bases designed around the new controls/capabilities to make them an actual threat.

This isn't a desire to have an easy mode flying farming vehicle. Even with my proposed changes, I will likely not engage in their use. But this is so that I can have adequate air support options available from friendlies, and have a challenge from the sky when I'm on the ground from my enemy. Unlike my fellow ground pounders, I'm capable of looking up and predicting and anticipating attacks and maneuvers from a three dimensional environment.

To put it shortly, currently ESFs provide little benefit. They also provide a boring adversary that is easily dispatched in their current state.