[Suggestion] ESF Pilot response review to anti air updates

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by MyBroodmother, Jun 25, 2022.

  1. MonnyMoony


    Yep - I suggested something like that a few years ago - it would keep the air deterrence aspect of bursters at range - but would allow them to be much more effective at close quarters (i.e. when an ESF hovers outside a spawn room door, Bansheeing with impunity).

    I also suggested maybe giving buster rounds a hard cap - but where the shells explode in a cloud of smoke at a certain distance, allowing burster maxes to lay down a cloud of obscuring soft cover for ground units. That would force air units to engage at closer distances, rather than sitting behind a hill half a mile away lolpodding.
    • Up x 1
  2. Demigan

    I also like the idea of having an airburst version of flak. Flak is the WWII shell which sends shrapnel made from the casing and pre-positioned metals in every direction, modern airburst shells send specially made sub-munitions in a shotgun patten in front of it, increasing hit chances and giving the sub-munitions more power like penetrating and exploding afterwards.
    If the airburst munition uses flak detonation range and you are at the edge of the aircraft, most if not all sub-munitions miss. Aim full center and your damage goes up beyond regular flak

    I think that as an alternate fire mode it could work, but I wouldnt want burster MAX's to have similar range restrictions as as current Aspis AA turrets.
    • Up x 1
  3. MonnyMoony

    Maybe an alternative ammo type for busters - airburst smoke screening ammo.
  4. Demigan

    The smoke would need to last quite some time and block spots or it might protect the aircraft. An aircraft would just fire at the same positions as before or use Q-spotting to score kills despite the smoke while the smoke flakkers are basically signalling "stay behind this to be safe". That is also why I think it needs to be a toggle: place smoke, then lay down flak through that smoke in order to truly keep aircraft at bay.
    Maybe you could change it from smoke to an opaque hardlight screen? Blocks vision, blocks spots and spot-dorito's, could provide limited protections against A2G craft that need to first destroy them before being able to hit what is beneath, flying through could destroy the hardlight barrier and deal some damage to the aircraft.

    Perhaps you could make a system to set the maximum distance yourself?
    - Leftclick just fires flak until max range where they create a smoke plume (or until they meet an aircraft ofcourse)
    - rightclick sets the distance based on the last leftclick fired projectile, making it explode. Holding rightclick afterwards will fire flak at the set range until you set a new one, giving you the option to fire at max range and at the set range at any time you like.
    -For MAX's you could use the grenade key to set the distance. Hit it once to set the maximum distance based on the last projectile fired, hit it again to reset.
    - you could easily create an air mine version as well that leaves flak airmines which detonate when aircraft pass. Especially handy when setting mines at a spot where an aircraft keeps popping up or in regular air approaches. A maximum limit would naturally apply to not lag the game to death and prevent OHK shenanigans. It would be nice if you can give an aircraft a big punch with a load of flak mines when they pass and then finish them off.
    • Up x 1
  5. Exileant

    :confused: Sooooooo, you missed the part where I said A.A. was then faced with a new problem thanks to the range of the turrets being reduced (Relatively weak A.A. that no longer has numbers to really do much against Liberators on its own.) This kind of thing happens when one fails to read.:D Hahaha!

    o_O It may have ticked things for you, but I assure you it beat the brakes of of E.S.F.s for those of us who knew how to aim them. Pummel.... Because that was exactly what happened to me when I used to Liberate and it is what I DID and still do in one.

    What you call "annoyance" was what I called losing 25% of my Liberators health and 35% of my E.S.F.s health back then before I could even get close enough to SEE a ground target I wanted to attack, which only got worse as you closed in on it and another turret joined in. :confused: By the time you got to the target, you were sitting on 50% of you life if you were a GREAT pilot. If you were EXCEPTIONAL, you got your kill within 2 seconds of your first fired shot, and were on your way to cover, at that point your Plane is now screaming at you because you are at 35% and ALL turrets are pointed at you, and only if you were being watched by an Angel Of The LORD were you fast enough to calculate your angle of decent while maintaining all of your speed and still be able to stop to land soft enough RIGHT behind the base, so you could get out and heal your plane, because you were never going to be fast to make it over that hill or mountain the less experienced would SWEAR they could. This made it next to impossible to survive a rush down passed the first swoop, UNLESS you were the first plane there, PERIOD!

    :) People would simply sit in A.A. turrets and wait for the battle to get to an Amp Station to make absolutely SURE they had one because they were good 2-3 bases over. When I started off they netted me plenty of certs because I pummeled anything that I could see, and they died. :D Usually they would be getting attacked by something over there, and my added damage would cause them to start running and because I was so far away they thought it was ground ground flak starting in on them at that location and they would almost always run in my direction, right into my maw.

    o_O This is Ex-ACTLY what I am talking about, you type a metric ton while having no idea what you are talking about because you try to lean on stats that you often misunderstood or so commit so fully to them, to you there is no possible way you are wrong, which makes nearly everything you say a lie, whether you know it or not. :p Hahahaha! My niche in this game is A.A. the Ranger it is my 3rd most used weapon, the leading weapon for my Vehicle Destruction, and the highest weapon PERIOD that I have done damage with. According to your super late to update Fisu to the tune of: 6,799,836. You have zero kills with your Ranger, why? Because the Ranger is weaker than the Skyguard.

    ;) To put this in perspective, Your closest A.A. turret to match me is the actual Skyguard, which can actively prevent damage to the platform my moving or pivoting the actual vehicle unlike anything a Ranger is on, and have spent almost 3 times longer in something stronger than what I use and yet are only 367,572 damage points ahead of me. I am even less than 100 kills from beating your score and this is comparing your main to a character I started seriously playing less than a year ago. On my former V.S. main, I spent only 1 hour and 5 minutes total on my ranger and still dropped 22 Aircraft. :D So we can pull out the scale and multiply my numbers by the day to see how many kills and how much damage I would have done with the amount of time you have spent in an A.A. turret, then by how long you have been using that character, or you can simply do better research before you type.
    o_O We cannot have a nice game because you cry about things that are FINE, like a nerd with a loud glass knife, or a truck that can cloak and has NO usable pilot weapon other than to risk getting stuck on EVERYTHING to run you over... in order to misdirect from the things that are out of hand, like N.C.s 2 hit kill weapons that can simply be sprayed and kill everything around it, Liberators that can be seat swapped between the 3 stations instantly giving it nigh immortality for those with the will to learn its quarks, and the fact that N.S.O. is STILL incomplete, and has a fighter that cannot challenge, or run from ANY rival E.S.F.... AT ALL.

    :( No, my friend. You and people like you are the cause of this game sucking.
    • Up x 1
  6. Demigan

    Like the reading skills you show when you accuse me of saying things in threads I never even participated in?

    If you read my reply you may have noticed that I was talking about the old flak turret before it was nerfed even further. This is what happens when you fail to read eh?

    Also you proclaim that the stationary turret with less RPM, less damage per shot and less ammo capacity than the Skyguard somehow "pummels" Liberators? You do realize you are talking to someone who was in the top percentiles when it came to destroying aircraft with the Skyguard?

    We cant have nice things because apologists like you who pretend everything is fine.
  7. Exileant

    :( True, but at this point, I am TIRED of them screwing around with what already exists. That is part of the reason why the game is so stagnant. Tweaking guns is fine and all but it is far better to make a physical counter, that way people have a choice and once they get killed by their Kryponite, they have an option to seek their vengeance AND, new WEAPOOOOOOONS.... :eek: The game needs new methods of play.... I am tired of seeing the same old, same old...... I need more, and the more that I need, needs to be EFFECTIVE....
    • Up x 1
  8. The Shozaku

    Reading the salty responses to my previous statement... clearly just a skill issue.

    I play Anti-Air all the time, even more so as of late. I absolutely dumpster A2G. The best argument you could possibly have is that I know how to fight them due to me being a skilled pilot myself. Beyond that... if you can't kill an A2G ESF, then just git gud.

    All of this is just sad really.
  9. Demigan

    Oh suuure! You mean the weapon you barely touched?

    Lets imagine for a moment that what you say is true, and we do have to imagine it since it doesnt touch reality. Then the skill required to use these weapons would be too high for the average person and the weapon still needs changing.

    Keep in mind ofcourse we are talking about a weapon with a skill ceiling so low you have to crawl underneath and still bump your head.

    If the Shozaku characters I found are an indication, you barely touched it and werent very effective either.

    Do enlighten us! What should we do to improve? There's already tons of info on how we view and use it, but you seem to be awefully lacking in the information department. Like most pilots its just a "well I can use them, trust me" and similarly 100% of the pilots I could find a character for had barely touched it (or not even touched it at all) and they all sucked at G2A. So why would you be any different?

    Most definitely. A sad excuse with just a "git gud" argument, for a weapon that is notorious for having a caved in skillceiling. I mean you are just giving away that you dont know anything about them if you say its a skill issue with weapons that by design cannot improve their effectiveness much.
  10. Somentine

    The best argument would be to bring some stats to back what you're saying up. Specifically, "I play Anti-Air all the time" and " I absolutely dumpster A2G".
  11. The Shozaku


    You're absolutely right. I both could and should do this... and I would... if I wasn't tired of doing it. After 5k hours, 1k of it in an esf and 1k in a dervish, I'm just tired of trying to help people in this game. I genuinely believe skill based match making has skewed so many people's understanding of how good they are at games...

    So I'll leave you with this:

    This is what I do

    This is what everyone else is doing

    Notice how I land my shots while they are constantly under leading, even though I was flying relatively straight as well? ...

    If you want more, Shozaku on Youtube and Gfycat. Plenty of clips and videos.
    • Up x 1
  12. The Shozaku

    And yet I have thousands of hours of evidence that people still miss...

    I'll give you one simple reason why most people miss with the sky guard... projectiles appear to de-render prior to actually stopping, thus by their very nature, most people underlead.

    You have no idea who I am because you thought looking up my stats was going to help you xD

    I play the game socially and I experiment. I also don't have a need for Anti-Air often as I'm one of the literal pilots everyone in here is complaining about. The average aa main is so bad at what should be the lowest skill weapons, yet I see people struggle to kill things with literal lock on launchers... like how bad do you have to be to not be useful with those things?

    If it makes you feel any better, I think pilots who complain about anti-air are just as low skilled as the anti-air they are complaining about. All of you need to git gud.
    • Up x 1
  13. Demigan

    You really double down on your ignorance dont you?

    1: Skyguards have this thing called "Cone Of Fire". It means that even accurate fire will send shots off-target and also that it will send shots on-target even if you arent leading it properly. This means that the lead point is in effect MASSIVE and that your hit% doesnt increase as long as the aircraft remains 100% within the COF of the lead point... which is also the problem as the flak is relatively slow and even medium course corrections can get you far away from the lead point and massive COF.

    2: you dont even know why lock ons suck do you? The time it takes to fire all shots needed to down even the weakest aircraft is enough to cruise out of render range, and these weapons have a far shorter range than render range. On top of that most launchers will be at the spawn as there's rarely time to notice and engage aircraft if you are fighting regularly, so its both easy to avoid and easy to murder the heck out of lock-ons.
    And that is not even mentiining the bugs (missiles leave the launcher at an intercept angle so diving aircraft can force missiles to self-destruct on the environment) and bad design (any twig or person passing in front resets the lock and you have to basically do a tiny strafe dance in the open waiting to get shot while the missile locks and you can fire).

    3: if it makes you feel any better, you arent the first person to try this. Dont double down on stuff you dont know anything off. It exposes you for the fraud you are.
    I do have to agree on one thing though: pilots in general arent half as good as they think they are. Rarely able to perform even the most basic A2G maneuvers by simple virtue of not having needed them for 99% of the game. You will not be the exception, despite most pilots thinking they are that special snowflake that is the only one marching correctly.
  14. The Shozaku



    Fraud this, fraud that. Everything you come at me with is a compounding logical fallacy. You attack my character based false conclusions derived from false premises. Your first counter point literally describes an entire concept agreeing with me that people should just git gud at leading...

    I've given up on arguing with people like this as its a clear demonstration that they have no intention of being open minded.

    BUT... I'll give you one chance... I will explain a bit and link you to some clips I went out just now to film all for you.

    As for why COF is barely relevant is due to the flak range of 5m. With a COF of 1.5 deg, if your target is an infinitely small, zero size point in space, you would still hit 75% of your shots at 300m... aka, no target is smaller than 10m in diameter. This means ESF's are 3 times larger than they actually are when shot at by flak.

    Clips: I even included some where I had poor lead, just so you had context. Using a 3x Zoom.

    Flak at 600m (ground eats 1/3 of it)
    Random 45s Clip of Aircraft
    COF Being Irrelevant followed by bad leading
    Near Render Distance Lib
    Bad Leading
    • Up x 1
  15. Demigan

    No I used your own words to prove thay you dont know what you are talking about. Like not knowing about the COF if flak (which your video's actually underscore) and thinking that lock-ons can just kill aircraft. An ESF at 200km/h cruise can waltz into lock on range, ram the wielder and be about 50 to 100m farther before a second shot can even be contemplated due to the lock on time and reload speed.

    The premise that you are factually wrong about flak, small-arms, lock-ons and your idea of G2A in general?

    Your reading comprehension is bad too. It quite literally tells you that leading is made easier on targets flying in a single direction but made impossible if they start changing direction. That is the opposite of git gud.

    WOOHOOWOOHOOO *HIPOCRITE ALERT*


    1: you have poor lead in all of them.
    2: your first video has other targets nearby and also misses most of the shots, on a stationary target. Whoop whoop we have many aircraft in the game that are stationary ofcourse! It does show perfectly how flak is thrown in every direction in order to hit the aircraft.
    3: your second video is of you killing 1 aircraft that does not respond in any way and assisting an allied aircraft in a kill on a Lib that likewise does not attempt to do anything about getting shot.
    4: the rest shows similar scenes of bad leading and especially why COF is relevant. You miss most of your shots on a Dervish showing its pancake side man! You proclaimed you were good at this and others bad! Jeez talk about showing you dont know what you are talking about.

    I'm sure I've ruined my "one chance" by pointing out the ridiculous mistakes in your rethoric but it will naturally be my fault somehow, because I'm supposedly the one who attacks people's characters based on false conclusions right? And you absolutely dont by pretending anything I say is misguided somehow despite you giving literal proof to the contrary.
  16. The Shozaku


    You have indeed ruined it. You've narrowed yourself down into 1 of the 2 possible groups. You're the narcissist. You believe that your time is so important that you should be rewarded a kill just because you used Anti-Air. Fun fact... you're not. You aren't worthy of any kills simply because you pulled an unskilled weapon. Even the most garbage A2G pilots put more time and effort into learning to fly than you did to learning to kill them.

    If you want to kill someone who has more practice in something than you with something low skill... we go full circle... you need to git gud. :\
  17. Somentine

    Not to be entirely contradictory, but this doesn't really show anything? If I was trying to say killing a max is super easy by showing a clip of me shooting at one half afk auto-running into a wall and then showed a clip of me dodging sub 20% acc BR5s, I suspect you would say something similar.

    Also, posting sessions or stats would be a lot easier than making clips, no?

    And a small note, hours don't mean anything. There are people with thousands of hours who haven't improved an iota, and some who I am pretty sure have even regressed.
    • Up x 2
  18. Demigan

    Again, how much of a hipocrite can you get? You are the narcissist who thinks he's oh so good and plays up his skill in G2A and when we see a cherry-picked scene you dont even realize you arent doing very well.
    You had this whole idea about how I made false assumptions about character, yet you say I just want low skill G2A to kill despite me correcting you already. Here's my literal first post in this thread:

    You really are clueless arent you? I mean you quite literally cannot git gud with G2A weapons, that is their entire design. That is what we've been telling you. The skill ceiling is too low.

    With another great example of why you are a hipocrite that doesnt know what he's talking about.
  19. Demigan


    Geez what kind of comparisons is this?

    The first video is you firing on an ESF that quite literally does nothing but fly down, quite literally crashing into the ground without changing direction or speed. The owner had jumped out hadnt he? Thats why the clip stops just after the vehicle kill message. The second is you flying a Dervish in various directions at range giving you the time to get out of the lead point and making it harder to judge where they need to aim, you know like we pointed out several times to you?

    As Somentine said, the difference between what you are firing at is massive.
    • Up x 1
  20. JibbaJabba

    LOOOOOOLLL
    And then you give a clip of you "expertly" leading your shots against someone flying in a straight line who makes no attempt to evade and isn't firing back. Oh gosh, professor, is that how we do it?

    Sorry boys, I was wrong.

    G2A and A2G are perfectly balanced. We all just suck and didn't know we had to lead our targets or burst.

    Carry on.

    I'll be over in this corner not knowing how every gun on the entire planet across multiple video games works....
    • Up x 2