I'm pretty much a Skyguard driver exclusively. I know I don't get kills or certs, even after the patch, but that's fine; I'm happy to play a supporting role. I damage planes enough for someone else to finish off and my friendly pilots like it when I push someone off them during a dogfight. And I just like playing the role; it's why I came back for PS2. First of all, thank you not only for the patch, but also for not waiting till 1/30 to do it. There was fairly wide consensus that G2A was broken, and this was a good first attempt that did not seem to over-react. In fact, it seems to be a tiny tweak that has made little difference to my SG playing (and by that I mean a little good and perhaps a little bad, as explained below). I am looking forward to getting more XP for damage in the 1/30 patch, since it's a little hard to spend three weeks going from BR27 to 28. (And for all the "L2P"-types, please bring your ESF near me for a good time; I know how to play this weps system, and have more than 50 hours in it.) The new patch: *"smoothed" my turret rotation. I have no idea what this means. My turret worked fine before. I have a nice high-dpi mouse (Razer Abyssus) and turned the vehicle mouse sensitivity up to 100, and it was ok most of the time. Now it's pretty jerky, but I'll figure out how to compensate. *increased damage against infantry. Doesn't seem like much of a change. I could kill infantry before, and in some cases dueled HA from afar. Was in a long pitched infantry battle for a bit just now, and didn't really notice much difference in shooting at infantry pouring out of a building (of course, I was pretty far away). I mostly still get points for spotting, not killing, infantry anyway. I was able to contrast it to yesterday, pre-patch, when a team of four infantry and I dueled for a good 30 mins, my drawing them out of their base into the surrounding desert, and racing around, madly breaking their locks until they were out of rockets, then closing in for a plinking contest. Neither of us could much kill the others, but it was fun nonetheless. Didn't have that today; just the usual mass spawn and mass fire. No infantry kills in an hour, despite trying. *increased flak burst damage. The biggest difference seemed to be that my targets (again, I shoot from far, far away, but I'm very good at targeting) didn't seem to give me the usual feedback (red Xs for hits), but their health went down. I did down more than my usual number of ESFs; I usually killed about one every 10 mins before. Now it was twice or three times that, but hard to tell because I was working with a good group of my own friendly air. And it was a target-rich environment, so I could switch to a weakened one often. I'm thinking it's more likely that the decrease in ESF armor was responsible for the increased kills, for the reasons in the next paragraph (despite the higher ESF damage, Libs harder to damage). *took away the direct damage and left only flak damage. I didn't even know I had this. Not sure how it, or the change in it, affected my play. I was a good enough shot that I probably got a decent number of direct damage hits, especially on both diving ESFs and hovering Libs. I think this may be part of the change in not registering hits. But I used to use those red Xs to tell me when my leading was correct. This is most difficult with ESFs, which don't normally fly straight and level. It's like a defensive back in football when the receiver makes a cut; you have to adjust on the fly (pun intended) and often over-correct or correct too late. Most people use the tracers, but I use the red X hit marks (which are often far removed from the actual placement of the target, either because of the slow projectiles, or lag on some air players). I couldn't tell if this change made any difference in my kill rate for ESFs, but the loss of direct damage seems to have lessened my ability to kill Liberators (which was small before and now I don't seem to make much difference to them, which is a big downgrade). Perhaps I'll adjust to that again in time. But the main reason I took up the Skyguard was because I was so frustrated by the Libs; I learned to drive them off before they killed me, at least half the time. Not sure that will be the same. My concern is that the lack of direct damage on Libs is not balanced by the 20% increase in flak damage. I'll have to keep a watch on that. So contrary to the immediate complaints from some posters, I think the Skyguard portion of this patch was very small, and decidedly mixed. The fundamental issue making the SG hard to play (slow projectile velocity leading to amazingly long target leads) remains.
