Flak and Lockons everywhere, flying is not fun anymore

Yes yes, I know, the 100th threat on the issue that AA is OP but I just need to vent.

Flying an ESF is useless these days since Burster Maxes are ridiculously overpowered. By the time you turn around after realizing that one is shooting you, half your health is already gone. Sure the ESF might get away but what's the point? That area is now a no-fly zone. The Pilot can watch everyone else play while getting bored himself.

Addtionally, who had the brilliant idea to put that much AA power on a friggin' max? Even if you manage to find him (provided that the tracers actually render and you manage to spot him while running for your life), the max is just going to quickly hide in a building. Evene if, somehow, a combined effort of multiple aircraft does manage to kill him...surprise, he'll be revived by a medic in a measly 2 seconds. No point in even trying. Why can maxes be revived again?

Combined arms then, huh? Let your ground troops beat down the max and keep him down! Well, since their range is just ludicrously large and with it their complete lockdown of airspace, there's no combined arms-ing that. The max will be waaaaay behind the battle lines, well protected, easy to hide and revive.He will only be killed when the battle is already won (and sometimes not even then, he'll just be inside the spawn and shooting through the shields).

Add to all that ridiculousness the extreme easiness of lock-on missiles and air is utterly useless in any battle that matters. Particularly the Striker has worsened the problem signiicantly. It's just way, WAY too strong against aircraft. As soon as a Lock warning appears on your screen (which may also be a ridiculous distance away from TR territory), you better flare and high tail it, otherwise say bye to 80% of your health and hi to certain death. Such an idiotic weapon has completely skewed the balance between the ESFs. Even less participating in battles with the TR now.

Anyway, rant over.
In conclusion:

- Severely reduce the effectiveness of dual burster maxes at range. Reduce damage at range to a tickle (300m max range). That should move them more to the front line.

- Always show maxes on the minimap (like vehicles). Give them a Vehicle Stealth equivalent as a defense cert.

- Improve the skyguard. A skyguard can be seen better, its tracers render more reliably and it stays dead once it has been overpowered.

- On that note, put a cooldown timer on reviving maxes. Something like a 30 second wait time. The timer increases every time you die. That makes overpowering maxes of all kinds an actual achievement.

- Change the Striker to fly-by-wire. Lockons are stupid, cater to the stupid and are no fun for either side. That would also change the absolute necessity for Reavers and Scythes to equip flares. The other utility options might see some use for NC and VS again.

- Also, reduce flare cooldown so that fully certed it's only a 7-10 second cooldown. Right now, even fully certed you still spend all of your time running from lockons (especially Strikers). Make the hefty cert investment actually worth it.

- Reduce flak hitboxes for ESFs. Make it actually necessary to aim well as a flak user instead of just pointing in the general direction of an aircraft.

I still find flying fun.

Flying is one of the only remaining fun and skillful means of playing the game.

You'd be surprised to know just how many of your suggestions are already in play regarding bursters and AA in general.

It was less fun to step outside and get rocket-podded every time you spawned. Hence, current AA.

Of course many ESF pilots seem to have adapted to the current state of the game and do quite well. Perhaps the fault lies with you, OP.

But you won't see it that way, no. You want to nerf paper, but you think scissors is fine.

Because you hoverpodded. Big mistake and the main flaw leading to this thread.

It depends on numbers. A single MAX definitely does not create a no-fly zone. More MAX can be countered by... more air! Surprise!

Air can just boost behind the next hill. Why do you expect to always kill AA when you see it? Shouldn't they be able to evade attacks too, just like you can?

That's the only point I can agree to. Reviving MAX is kinda unfair.

The rest of your thread relies on the assumption that you as air should be invulnerable. Those days are over. THANK GOD.

Striker sucks, nuff said. fly down, it will lead you and hit the ground.

Oh, burster maxes are stupid OP tho. anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.

Most infantry prefer infantry fights, I know, crazy. Armor usually seeks armor fights.
If they focus on these things, they're ESF food.

The AA is a reactionary thing, not that a bunch of people log onto a game to play AA hit markers for little XP.

Oh, Lolpodding ESF are stupid OP tho. anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.

Now let's see. We counter one OP thing with another OP thing and BADABOOM - balanced.

Burster maxes are supposed to counter air and so they seem "OP" to air, however that same ESF/Lib/Gal is tremendously OP to those infantry on the ground that cant do jack back to them. Flying isnt supposed to be godlike easy - im not even that great at it and I can still be effective with lolpods even with a burster or two around. So you cant hover for 20 seconds and spam 5 kills. Oh noes.

The one change to the max that they should make is make them not resserectable.

Otherwise I agree with the OP on the point that the skyguard needs a buff to its primary cannon - its pretty trash. I would also recommend that lockon rockets lose some of their effectiveness, give them a 250m range just like the Phoenix. The whole fly two hexes away from the original shooter and still get hit is a little extreme. Max the range out at like 250 or 300m and have the rocket self destruct. Flak really doesnt need a change, it already tapers off quite a deal at range and the accuracy on it is greatly reduced at range too - but maxes should and continue to have an effective AA presence - much moreso than standard infantry with ESRLs or Hawks/Annhis ect.

But that's where you are wrong. My dual burster arms have a stupidly low amount of actual kills, but when I use them my score goes through the roof. The combined scores of my burster arms are exceeding the scores of guns that have literally 100x more kills than. Burster Max is a support role.

I think all flak projectiles should be slowed down so they require more leading, it's just a little TOO easy to use right now. It is effective and it should be, but the user shouldn't get that powerful effect for such little effort. Just implement some change(s) that make flak actually require some skill to use, it's by far one of the easiest roles to perform in the game and the payoff is enormous.

In terms of things that are easy in this game, I'd say spamming flak is up there with "throw down ammo as an engineer" or "play a splatmax in a Bio Lab" in terms of simplicity.

I agree. Since the Striker came out, I've only used an ESF when I couldn't deploy where I wanted.

The A2G rockets are the main reason that the whole air/ground/MAX balancing act is fubar. They'd need to be uber-nerfed or removed entirely for AA to return to a reasonable level. (I'm all for it, by the way.)

My 2 cents:
Reduce Flak damage, nerf the crap out of the lolpods, and increase A2A missle damage against Liberators and Galaxys. Problem(s) solved.

IMO, the state of AA is more or less fine if you take it for what it's worth. I'd like to see nothing else happen besides maybe Burster/Skyguard/AA Phalanx shots despawn after 500m or so. There's no reason these should have air denial effect 1 or 2 facilities over, but localized they should decide air presence.

My squad has a dedicated pilot, still.


That is right, a guy who parks his plane outside of bases, and chases off local liberator attacks, spams his rotary (Uses afterburner fuel tanks, willingly,) at ground vehicles harassing us, and occasionally gets into a dogfight with another ESF.


Notably, very few enemy planes are lost to my skyguards and grounders, most are lost focusing them and being mowed down by a rotary cannon when they try to flee.




Here is some advice from him:
1. Get a ground support team: AA nests are not something you want to attack.
-- Speak to them in voice, communicate your needs, and make use of their AA Resources to get enemies off your tail.

2. Learn to hide your planes on the ground: Here you have cover, and are hard to spot.

3. Failing this, fly in packs. Discipline. A lone fighter dies quite easily, a squadron of fighters in tight formation is brutally hard to kill, especially with a liberator in front to absorb 200+ flack shells.

4. Play AA in your free time. Stay in touch with your enemies capabilities. When he is on timer wait for flying his plane, he is a Burster max shooting them down. He hasn't really been lost to flack for a long time, because of this. He has the discipline to park, and wait for the ground team to engage the base before flying in and attacking.

- Change the Striker to fly-by-wire and add extra rocket velocity while adding in a secondary dumbfire mode.

I've looked at your stats page. This is all completely made up, dude...

Except dual burster maxes are OP and Pods aren't?

I don't have pods on my main.

Also, lol at the guy who said "helpless infantry"
Lock ons/small arms/dumbfires if you're hovering.
you can kill an esf in like 3 or 4 reloads of an assault rifle, everyone just friggin shoot.

Besides, theres no way an esf will be able to hover and pod if a burster max is within 500m.

1s TTK on tanks isn't OP? One or two infantry kills per clip of rockets isn't OP? If there's no AA, that's easily doable.
Rocket pods are OP and are effective against ANYTHING in the game, while AA is only effective against one thing. Air. It's called anti-air for a reason. A burster MAX can't do much else.

I'm pretty sure the range on the striker is around 300m, lol.
If you're an esf pilot and you get killed by a lone striker, you are bad, you should feel bad, land your reaver, cry me a river, kill yourself.