[Suggestion] Buff G2A

Hi,

from all parts of the game, G2A is the
- least rewarding
- most frustrating
- pointless
one atm.

It has to be buffed in terms of
- effectiveness
- XP-gain


For example lock-on launchers.
If you're not a TR and have access to the glorious OP Striker, you never gonna kill anyone or anything.
Seriously when I fly, the last thing that will hit me is a lock-on launcher.
Also, it's very easy to kill them when they're aiming at you and don't move.

The best thing that will happen is a tiny little Air-Deterrence bonus every 2 Minutes or an Aircraft kill with bailed pilots once in an hour.

Another example are Burster-MAXs. They're so cute when they try to shoot down your ESF. Just 2 Hits by your Hornets, 3 Hits of an Airhammer, a short burst of your Banshee or not even a Magazine of your AA Nosegun or Rocket Pods and they're dead.

AA Phalanxes are a joke. Any good pilot knows them all. They're stationary, they can't move to get an angle, just... decoration.

Skyguards. Maybe having a good, but too low surprise effect on ESFs. Their TTK on a Lib is long enough for a single-manned Lib to kill you before it's smoking.

ESF/Liberator. The best AA toys in the game. You can follow and fight Aircrafts, also you can actually kill bailing pilots. When you want to do G2A, forget it and pull an aircraft.



How to fix this insanity?

Pretty easy, buff G2A weapons in terms of damage output and increase the xp-gain for G2A work.

- Lock-on launchers should do at least 70% damage on ESFs per shot or magazine (swarm)

- Flak weapons (Skyguard, AA Turret, Walker, Ranger, Burster) should have a 50% higher DPS, also an increased bullet velocity

- Liberators and maybe Galaxy's health or resistance values have to be reduced to be actually killable with G2A weapons

- Air-Deterrence bonus should be increased to 200 XP per tick, also a bonus of 500xp per Aircraft killed using G2A would be ecouraging


Now, discuss.

No.

Well, your name says everything.

So I agree that A2G should be a lot more rewarding than it is, but this can be fixed without buffing and nerfing anything. However flak weapons could get a tighter CoF which will help a lot.

G2A should not do 70% of an ESF's health as that would probably destroy the ESF airgame completely and thats just by reducing the amount of G2A rockets to kill an ESF by one.

You have to see it from the other perspective. A pilot can't possibly locate most AA units before they open fire, so they need the ability to escape from at least a single AA source after taking fire. In retrospect, I think the game should have been designed so that ESFs would have to make dangerously close strafing runs to kill ground targets, but instead of flak and lock-ons, ground units would have to fight back mainly with skill-based, lethal AA options like dumbfires.

G2A is not designed to kill aircraft. It is designed to discourage aircraft from attacking. When multiple AA sources combine, it becomes much more threatening. 2 Skyguards can kill a Liberator without reloading. 2 G2A rockets at the same time can take an ESF to burning, a few small arms shots and it will go down.

The way I see it, if you want to take out aircraft solo, get in an aircraft. Liberators go down remarkably quickly to another Liberator, and an ESF can render plink with the stock nosegun and A2A pods for pretty much free Liberator kills. ESF's may be harder, but a stealth rotary nosegun that AB's up to unsuspecting ESF's kills about as fast as a Racer Lib putting it's TB up the tailpipe of another Liberator.

Now, if multiple AA sources coordinate, then you can kill air from the ground with ease.

If it really is Aircraft's job to take down ground targets, then air deterrents should not be extremely powerful. I don't know how often you look up, but if you observe the sky in a very large fight you will notice a startling lack of aircraft as long as the fight is even. As it currently stands, once a fight gets large enough, aircraft won't even come near it because it will pretty much spell instant death because of all the combined AA sources.

Now perhaps if AA sources could deter aircraft better without just instantly killing them, then it would be a little different. Flak already does this to some degree by completely blinding pilots and gunners caught in the explosions. I think it would be cool if flak caused aircraft guns to wobble around as well.

As for G2A Launchers, they are less effective for good reason. They perform reasonably well as a G2G launcher, doing nearly the same damage as the stock, and they can lock on. You don't have to lead G2A launchers like flak. They can still 1-shot infantry and 2-shot MAX units. In exchange for ease of access and being less situational, G2A Launchers are also the least effective in deterring. If, perhaps, G2A Launchers did less then annihilator damage to tanks, then a buff for them would be justified. But right now, most HA's just carry around a G2A Launcher because they are so universally applicable, which means there is almost always some AA source no matter where you go.

BUT, I am all for improving the air deterrence reward. Making it tick more often would be better then a larger tick reward, because that would mean you have to hit less for the same reward. This means that pot shots at an ESF 200 meters away might still be rewarding. Also, kill assists should not only be more rewarding but last longer for aircraft, as often an aircraft might be destroyed some time later by someone else doing minuscule damage, but you get the short end of the stick because you happened to shoot first and shoot the most, but only send it running with it's tailgun between it's landing gear.

Phalanx turrets aren't garbage. They are actually one of the most annoying AA sources in this game. You only think they are bad because they are killed often, but that actually means they are doing their job. Whenever I fly Liberator, my first priority on the ground is Skyguards, only shortly followed by AA Turrets. The Tank Buster can't 1-clip them anymore, meaning they can survive quite a bit of punishment. I don't even think a full clip point blank followed by a Dalton shell does the trick. Combine this with the awful explosion FX completely consuming your entire game, it makes it one one hell of a fight to take out a turret that is manned.

And let's not forget that they are free. You don't have to spend a single cert or a single nanite on one of those. All you have to do is stick your repair gun in one for 10 seconds and boom, free dual burster MAX.

And speaking of Bursters, Bursters! They actually do decent damage, but they are mobile which is the primary advantage of Bursters. You can fire them from inside your spawn room, and air cannot do any damage to you. You can run from building to building, peek out of windows and doorways, and generally make yourself a major nuisance. Plus, all the ways that ESF's kill Bursters is from the various AI/AV options for ESF's. And the MAX is both an infantry and a vehicle. Of course if you stand out in the open and spam bursters from 600 meters away you are going to get taken out. But don't act like that's the aircraft's fault. You have a pair of legs. Use them.

It really boils down to the fact that these are all soft counters to aircraft. If you want to kill them, either take flight yourself and go on the offensive, or gather enough allies with AA to turn that soft deterrence bubble into a steel hard no fly zone.

Honestly the big issue is force multipliers air gets hit the hardest by thees one person against 1 air even if hes using the supposed hard counter of AA lock ons and bursters hes not likely to kill that ESF its like shooting a nerf gun at the aircraft and hoping enough darts get stuck to his window that he crashes into something. But on the other side of a coin you get 3 or 4 people with it and everything within range is dead. So theres this huge disparity between the power of an aircraft in a smaller fight at non prime time hours and prime time battles.

In exchange, making aircraft waepons more lethal at the same itme, adn that soundspretty much liek the prefect ESF system.

PSm sirry firt bad spelling, holding head back because bloody nose.

The only thing I would like changed is G2A lock breaking.

At the moment, if something else flies between you and your target, or there is some sort of twig or antenna, you have to start the lock again from the beginning. On a target with maxed Stealth this is up to 3.5 seconds. If we could get it so you only lose lock for the duration of the obscuration. For example, you are 2.2 seconds into a lock (with 0.3 seconds remaining), then another target flies in front for 0.5 seconds. When you reacquire the target you are now down to 1.7 seconds (so 0.8 seconds left to lock). The blocking does have an effect, but it is not so brutally effective.

While some pilots would not like this change, I would hope that a more consistent performance on G2A locks might even out the performance more. Currently there are some sitautions where they are total area denial, and others where they're a joke (and you're better off trying your luck with a deci).

If G2A locks have their performance in non-ideal situations buffed, then we could potentially see buffs to their countermeasures, for example lowering the cooldown on Flares by 5 seconds, and making Fire Suppression reduce damage taken from lock ons while active.

To make g2a more rewarding we'd have to increase the accessibility of aircraft as a playstyle. Flying should be accessible to people who aren't extremely skilled at it. G2A also isn't very effective except against ESFs, which are supposed to be the main aircraft. To make g2a more rewarding, we need to increase the number of people in ESFs which means stopping new pilots from just getting farmed by other ESFs and by Liberators. I suggested a plan a bit ago to accomplish this, that being the installment of clouds. These obstacles would let new pilots hide and evade other, more experienced ones. Right now, the air game on all continents except kind of Hossin is a much smaller battle than anything on the ground, because planes can cover ground much more quickly. You can have 96+ infantry or ground vehicles in a hex, but if you have two opposing aircraft in a hex, neither can live while the other survives. This needs to be changed, such as through more interesting skies, with clouds or possibly some floating alien planet-esk features.

NONONONONONO


Straight out buffing the damage of all AA is the worst thing you can do! AA needs a buff, it sorely needs a buff, but straight up DPS increase in any way would kill the airgame. As much as I hate the lobsided terrible mess they made of the airgame, it needs to be there.

The problem with current AA is that it has skill-reducing mechanics, flak and lock-ons to be precise. Because of this it's mightily easy to hit aircraft. They used two methods to make sure aircraft weren't auto-killed simply because they got within X distance of AA: slow muzzle velocity and a maximum DPS that allows all aircraft to escape no matter what... Unless you have multiple AA sources.
Buffing AA damage or DPS would mean that aircraft can be killed simply because they got close, and the skill-ceiling for AA isn't very high.

What's the solution? Increase the skill-ceiling for AA, then make it more lethal. Reduce the flak range at which it explodes near aircraft from 4m to 0,5m, tighten up the COF and either increase ROF or damage so it becomes lethal... If you can aim well enough. Added bonus is that AA gets a secondary role as AI, which it sorely needs.
Preferably MBT's get a big-aircraft AA gun. Think a Viper-style canon without bullet drop but a relatively slow muzzle velocity and no flak. ESF can easily dodge it's shots, even Liberators stand a chance to dodge, but once you get hit by this gun you are going to wish you weren't as it is going to do enough damage against aircraft to out-perform a TankBuster in CQC, just to balance things out a bit.
As for Lock-Ons, you can change them from fire-and-forget missiles to required-lock missiles. Reduce the range at which you acquire a lock so you need to aim closer to the aircraft, reduce the lock-on time to 0,2 seconds or so and allow missiles to re-acquire should a lock be lost. That way you can fire a missile beforehand and lock afterwards, aircraft can dodge your aim and break a lock, and aircraft would be safe the moment they escape your LOS.

I think I've replied to this already above.

uhhhhhhhhhhhh I didn't say that.

Exactly, which is the entire issue. Hello?

How about we just design ESF weapons to "discourage" aircraft from attacking infantry and ground spamming? Would you guys be cool with that?

Some of you have spent so much time with your butts in a cockpit, it's obvious you've lost all perspective.

70% Damage on ESF. Serious ?
Every sucker plays Heavy and have a Lockon i even cant engange in most cases if i play a huge battles and you want them buffed ?
No offense but i really think this : "What drugs are in your coffee ? Did you see the fluffy pink unicorn today ?"
I guess you want it easy much as possible. If you get F...... while using Light-PPA on your Scythe then you want them nerfed.

Playing as a heavy and never a pilot i honestly wouldnt want to say buff G2A or nerf air.
Playing as a G2A HA is very frustrating, lockon launchers take an age to lockon, all the while getting broken by wafts of dust. Then when you do get a round off it plants straight into a rock or tree.
Should it actually get to the aircraft it does little damage and the plane flys off and repairs, comes back and kills you.

a lot of locations are also very lockon unfreindly.
I play a lot with the skyguard to, but Only greedy players or noobs ever go down to it. Any half decent pilot just breaks off and flys away while i reload.

But if asked how to improve it without ruining it for the pilots (some of which are truely awesome - such as the guy in a scythe who decapatated me on a biolab pad when id just hit him head on with a RPG!) I really wouldnt know.

You can lockdown a whole hex with 1 burster arm. Scare them off or destroy them one at a time, or give them a few shots each to scare them all off.

Use 2 burster arms if needed. Then there's the other people usually shooting at them as well.

I think g2a is alright, especially as pilots often cannot hang around to retaliate, let alone even acknowledge where they are getting shot from.

I use a burster arm and mercy for esfs or dual bursters for galaxies and libs. Mercy may seem odd but it's fun and seems to hit at the same lead distance as burster a fair amount of time.

Give infantry and ground vehicles the ability to burrow as an equivalent to burning away.

Sorry, still had your post name copied

Hey look a ****** player