Ground AA is boring and unrewarding

Dito, my common HA launcher is the ASP-30 Grounder. Air lock-on and dumbfire. 2 Hits for MAX´s, 1 for non-HA and engi turrent, dont need more.

True, guess they will never find a balance between 1-man-AA user and AA in zergs but could at least reward the effort for watching the sky, not only the pure dmg to aircrafts.

First, i was talking about infantry (no ressources) vs vehicule (ressources) balance.

To what you said about bursters maxxes, you are thinking of "1v1" and should not.

Let's imagine a good 96+ fight. We have 3 bursters maxxes + 2 engies and they have 5 ESF.
Do you think the ESF wins? no they'll die instantly before they could even stike the maxxes.

The only real way they can do that is some sort of mantained or guided lock (latter being unlikely given that is the Strikers new stick), and frankly the current weapons would need a significant AA DPS boost to function remotely decently with a mechanic like that.

Actually, I agree with that frustration. Trying to defend being merely an annoyance is hard to stomach from the point of view of wanting to get people to do things that they enjoy, because you are directly impacting the piloting experience. I maintain my regard for the current system, however, because I believe the alternate options (that people usually present) make G2A AA either unwieldly or insufferable.

Actually, Flak Burst (Flak Explosion on the resistance table) at 10m is the same as Flak Burst at 200m. The damage drop noted on the stat sheet is the direct damage of each Burster round striking a non-Air target (or a friendly Air target). When the projectile gets close to an enemy Air target, the profile causes a Flak Burst which causes the bulk of the actual damage. In fact, in a previous update, the physical bullet stops existing when the Flak Burster is generated. In as far as AA work is concerned, direct damage is almost a non-issue. As far as I am aware, the game uses the indirect damage of the weapon as the base Flak Burst damage.
It doesn'ty damage other heavily armored Vehicles, you are correct about that.

In as far as the MAX is concerned, you at least have two AV-type weapon options. Do look into them, as they are quite decent against armor.

Hmm, I could think of a couple more ways.

1. The better your aim the shorter the time to acquire lock. Keeping your crosshair fixed on the aircraft would improve the rate of locking-on, rewarding skilled aimers with better opportunities for doing damage and higher ROF.

2. Timed firing. Pulling the trigger too early would cancel the progress towards acquiring lock, requiring trigger discipline. The 250 cert G2A lockons would not dumbfire if the trigger is pulled during locking on.

It's easy to get pre-occupied with individual targets doing AA work and miss more obvious targets. That's one of the reasons you should AA alone cautiously. Don't laugh off Hornets either. As the distinct AV missile for ESFs, their direct damage is potent against MAXes.

I also like pulling my Burster MAX. I find "air deterence" can be even more rewarding, experience points wise, than killing peeps (but then at 0.17KPM I don't kill a lot of peeps).

Balancing AA over a large scale is very very hard. It needs to be somewhat effective at at least scaring away air in a small scale. Or we are back at libs ruling Auraxis again. But if you balance AA around one or two people being able to force a couple of aircrafts to at least bring their A game to get anything done, then you will have a complete no flight zone when you bring 20 of the same weapons. So unless they start scaling damage output with number of uses, then it is an impossible equation to solve for all scales.

Same holds for AV as well. Planetside is a complete pain in the behind from a design and balance stand point. It is a very ambitious project and I don't think many players appreciate the full scale of the problems the devs are facing. They made it even harder for themselves by doing asymmetric balance between three factions. I am quite impressed that it works as well as it does.

I'm not sure 1) is really an issue, I never have any trouble keeping even a full speed ESF dead center, and a good tactic now is already to wait until it is close for a quicker lock and less evasion chance.

2) is actually a very significant nerf, as even fewer people would take an AARL if it couldn't be dumbfired (one of the reasons the Pheonix is so rarely carried).




The only way I could really see them doing it is with a Flak cannon (like 1 burster arm), but that would really need to be a new NS weapon. Although even there with the burster and the skyguard the skill ceiling isn't particularly high, as both are more limited by their CoF and range drop off than aim (so long as anyones aim is at least reasonable).

You can't buff Flak without changing how it is working.

Actually Flak is balanced around CoF, with the same damage at all ranges. The only way to buff it up without blowing up aircraft at render distance is more damage bigger CoF, reducing effecitv range and increasing DPS close range.

Mate, I have to predict a highly maneuverable aircraft's position up to 2 seconds ahead of time so I can get my weak bullets to constantly hit them for 6 seconds. It takes some skill and is mind numbingly boring and ineffective on top of that. Most common Skyguard errors are not being able to hit the target because either:
-Your target is too far away, making COF an issue
-your target is moving faster/slower than you anticipated
- your target switches vectors

Best way to kill an ESF from a Skyguard is to pretend you aren't there until they are close enough that they can't escape. That is hardly a deterrent if I have to wait for them to be within 200m to guarantee that they won't come back.

It's not bad exp I think, if there's enough Air, also Burster MAXs are definately one of the few ways in PS2 a single player can have a genuine big influence of a base defence...... at least until someone Deci's you in the back while you were driving off the Libs and ESFs that were previously keeping everyone from the cap point because "you weren't heading to the capture point!1111".

200m is the range where you should be effectiv.

I don't want to be taken down in 5s from a skyguard 500m away.

Same thing goes for MBT, i'm not complaining that i can't hit a strafing mag 300m away because of slow shell velocity.

200m is incredibly short considering vehicles render at 600m. Its 6 seconds to kill an ESF. Its absolutely atrocious trying to kill something unless the pilot is bad. You can hit magriders strafing 300m away. they only stafe a few meters in a second and that is easy to compensate for with just about any AP shell.

I highly doubt you're an MLG pro with perfect hitscan tracking aim. You probably just get the feeling you're tracking perfectly because it maintains lock even if you don't.

What? I didn't say it couldn't be dumbfired. I said it wouldn't dumbfire IF locking onto something.

Reading a lot of this talk about a sky guard or a burster it is interesting how it seems to discount things like Multiple HA with pickins or multiple bursters or sky guards.

While it is often that alone I see many planes slip away smoking badly, but if I get 2-3 HA with launchers with me or a second burster user or a second sky guard...it becomes The Unfriendly Skies to almost all air.

I've been in battles where an armor push got stalled hard and then pushed back from no one doing AA really, me and two other people got in dual burster maxes back near the spawn room and just started focus firing any ESFs or libs or gals we saw and started RAKING in the xp and kills.

Other times I've pulled burster alone and I'll get some damage xp but hardly any kills, it comes down to more people needing to be willing to do the aa and it may be something with needing to incentivize it more for players to want to.

As far as thoughts on air, IMO only infiltrator and light assault should be able to fly, but this ain't PS1 anymore.

That's what i said.

From a 1v1 perspectiv, AA is not rewarding but it scales so ******* well than a 3 burster + couple heavy lock on just obliterate any aircraft that dare showing off

Well many things are kind of "meh" solo in the game, it is built on a group based battle.

If it was MENT to be solo focused the TTK on most things wouldn't be so low comparatively (we would go back to Planetside 1 speeds of killing).

A bump in air damage xp might be nice to make more people want to do AA but aa is fairly good.

It is true that ground AA may be boring (something I personally can't quite empathize with), but being air with a low skill level is even more unrewarding and boring as one's time would better be served elsewhere.

Seeing as lock-on launchers are free, easy to use and deal 43% of an ESF's health, making infantry (not MAX) AA more powerful is out of the question. But I do agree that it is hugely unrewarding when compared to how helpful to the overall battle it is; it's like blowing up a Suny and getting zero XP for it. As a frequent ESF pilot myself I can assure you that lock-ons do their job pretty well, but the problem is that currently the game does not reward them doing their job; I get locked, fly away, get hit, so I now need to land, repair etc... This is proper air deterrence, and yet the lock-on user only gets, like, 25 XP for it. You should get much more XP for air deterrence considering just how important it is.