You give up your hover-frame, and the ability to hover and engadge ground targets. Meaning you can only slow down to land. You now also take 30 percent more damage from flak. However you get a 40 percent speed boost. Your ESF can no longer hover with impunity, now you have to strafe. Here u go , take my lock on.
To remain true to the Planetside franchise, ESFs must be able to hover. They have always been VTOL aircraft. That said, they are the vehicle with the most escapability from lock-on weapons so they have no place to complain about it. The argument that air to air battles cannot happen is silly; just go to youtube and you will find dogfights all over the place.
When they remove rocketpods, and make ESF nose gun ammo only damage aircraft, then I'll give up my lock-on launcher. I want ESF to be strictly fighter escort for libs, defending libs from other aircraft. Let libs be the ones to attack ground targets.
Then i also want ESFs to be invulnerable to Flak, small arms fire, AP rounds, anything but other air targets. If i can't engage you, then you can't engage me.
Hah, Libs are worse than rocketpodders. At least rocketpodders guns are fixed and so they can't just reverse maneuver the whole time. Melt them when they come in for a run. Libs with a marginally competent crew is a much harder proposition to take out from the ground.
A2G rockets need to be removed, and ESF's made simpler to fly with none of this reverse manoeuvre and other gravity/physics defying nonsense. Then make them tougher. They're just a total oddity in the game as it stands.
Rocket pods should just have no splash. Make them the anti-tank/anti-lib/galaxy weapon. Nose guns can be the A2A OR AI engagement tools (depending on the nose gun's role and the pilots accuracy.) Lock-ons can have a terrible turn rate, making the effect more about aim correction than actual tracking. Flares only work so often though. Meanwhile, all dumb-fires deserve greater velocities and no drop. Really, the lock-ons are there because small-arms typically are unreliable and ineffective at the distance ESF tend to engage ground targets and dumb fire rockets against aircraft have a ridiculously high skill wall as to be simply unreliable, especially the default launcher. My character tosses grenades further, faster with ease. Of course, I'll also take turning the Striker into a 8-10 round rocklet rifle/launcher that happens to double as a pseudo man-portable flak cannon. That sounds like a hell of a lot more fun than aim > wait > fire > aim...
No as long as ground can do damage to air, air should do damage to ground targets. I am not as pilot, I play primarily infantry btw What I would like however is for pods to be made into AP rockets. More damage is done against armor however there is no splash so they have to direct hit infantry
I think the pods do enough damage against armour as is, and I use them religiously. One clip into the rear and boom, dead-anything-that-isnt-a-shield-VG. And getting direct hits on infantry with pods is pretty rare, assuming you're not just hovering like a lame duck, probably one or two rockets per clip if your aim is good.
So the pilot is compelled to use their nose gun to farm infantry... specifically the AI nose guns, which are designed to bring them in nice and close (read: well within small arms range,) though a really good pilot can get much more mileage out of the rotaries. The biggest beef with ESF is their omnipotence. With a non-AI nosegun and the old rocket pods, they could engage anything and escape from most dangers with ease (except AP shells, but that's their own fault.) In the old days, the only real danger to an ESF was another ESF, and there was a considerable lack of willing A2A pilots when A2G was so much more lucrative. I can get behind SOE wanting aircraft to be the primary counter to aircraft (just as I imagine they'd like tanks to primarily counter tanks) but they keep confusing their vision of fun, cool, and expectant realism with the cold hard concept of balance. If rocket pods from the very beginning were only good at engaging tanks, we wouldn't see the abundance of AA that we do today, and the air game probably could have evolved into something less shallow and full of whiny elitists. The air game is in the $#!%%& state it's in because release rocket pods were THE farming implement of the time, and the game suffered for the wreckless abuse of these tools both in the short term AND the long term. Flak at the time was an okay deterrent - as it always should have been - but because at the time ESF didn't really have to dedicate a whole lot of time to rocket spamming a trooper or cluster of them to score the kill, they never had to hang around long enough for flak to ever really be a danger... and then came the buff to flak.
So basically when we pose no threat to anything other than ourselves. I guess the only thing we will kill will be liberators? Alright, i'll give up my rocket launcher when tanks shoot bubbles
