[Radical Suggestion] Nerf Skyknightside

Fly an ESF, generally you're running at 50% health in any fight larger than 12-24 with AA in it's current form. If you make it any stronger, ESFs will be running at 75% HP through most of their flight, or worse they'll get immolated as soon as they touch the fringes of a larger fight. I acknowledge your fears as a valk pilot, and they're very valid, but the issue with AA isn't a systemic one, it's an issue with the playerbase.

You want AA to be more effective? Make it more rewarding. It's plenty effective as it is, it's just that people don't use them, mainly due to the low rewards. I can agree with making AA more effective against ground targets, but that should be able to be achieved via resist values without affecting air too much. The lock ons don't need shorter lock times, if anything they need to have longer locks and be capable of doing more damage, but pilots need to be able to dodge, break, or ground them without being lucky enough to have a building/mountain in between the source and their aircraft. That way, the users of the lockons have more damage capability, but it's also more engaging for the pilot being locked.

The majority of pilots don't dislike locks just because they lock on, they dislike them because they're stale, skill-less, and not engaging to deal with. Having used them myself, they're also stale, skill-less and not engaging to fire. It's a dull mechanic from both ends.

See, my issue with the AA v. Aircraft debate is that most of the proponents of a stronger AA either lack the airtime to get an accurate feel for the balance of it, or if they don't lack the flight time, they lack the time in AA platforms. You need to be able to see both sides of the coin, and I have. I've seen how powerful AA can be from both sides. I've seen half a platoon's worth of ESFs get completely shredded by semi-focused AA from the seat of a skyguard, and I've been completely destroyed as soon as I come around a mountain because there was semi-focused AA there.

You know what I haven't seen? A swarm of ESFs taking on semi-focused AA and winning. That leads me to the conclusion that AA is plenty powerful, but not rewarding enough for people to specialize until they have no other choice. That is the issue.

Good on you. It's nice to see someone playing a varied game rather than just one thing. I wish more people would play both sides. Can't really get an accurate feel of balance if you don't.

Pilots who hate AA, are not doing A2A

Not true.

I am primarily an A2A pilot and I'm constantly being pelted by AA and G2A locks when I am not even trying to hit ground targets.

What some people may not know is... if you tick off "Skyknights" looking to have fun fighting other aircraft they WILL switch loadouts or planes (change to Lib) and come looking for you, your friend, and your little dog too.

the thing is it doesn't matter what loadout you have to us you are a fast traveling speck over our airspace and we want you dead, we can't exactly see the loadout you are using even before considering your altitude or speed, if you kill our people's A2A craft you are opening the door to A2G spam whether you want to inflict it on ground players or not.

I get shot down more by AA when I'm focusing on enemy air, as I'm no longer flying low and using cover to hide from the guys down below. I'm trying to out fly or get the drop on the enemy aircraft.

If I'm playing A2G, I will take great pains to not get shot down, because I generally only A2G to stall an enemy zerg, to work on directives, or because I'm bored of waiting for more enemy ESFs.

This post is so brutally honest... I'm a skyknight personally but, reading your post... I just had to tell you how much I loved the honesty in there.
If you ever need help flying or anything, knock me up; honest people who aren't self-centered and can see the bigger picture are the kind of players I like. Anyways, if you need help with anything, hit me up. I'll do my best to help you out.

Just reading a few of your posts... my heart is bleeding out to you. After a thousand and a hundred post, you still have the strength to try to reason. And you do this in an honest way that is both nearly unbiased (if any) and that takes into account the bigger picture.
I have no words to convey how happy reading your post has made me. You're like a ray of sunlight in an ocean of madness. Seriously, don't know how you can keep at it. I've already mostly given up on this forum.

You say that like you were able to solo lib and land daltons on anything else but the ground and the sky. I'd love to see a video of you solo-libbing. Or even just daltoning; for some reason I feel like if you leave it uncut, it'd be a lot of dying and swearing with very little results.

My reply was mostly tongue in cheek in regards to the previous poster saying only those that do A2G are bothered by AA. Though I have encountered what I consider stupid AA play when flying several hexes away from the fight. They take pot shots and only attract the attention of annoyed pilots. That is how your Skyguard gets two hornets up it's tail pipe...

To be clear, I wasn't advocating for lock-ons. Those points were mostly there to illustrate what I think others generally argue about when it comes to AA vs. Air.

But I do agree with the need to do both. I've found working as a Valk and as a Skyguard has dramatically improved my abilities. I now actively plan where skyguards are likely to be, which shortens my evasion time. And to your point, having focused AA can work intensely against Air. But a lot of it is smart tactics. Let me give you two recent examples that will contrast this:

Example: I was helping a platooon build a base last night on Connery. The VS were continually attacking, often with air-swarms. I pulled skyguard and spent about the next 30 minutes continually engaging air targets and escorting ANTs. People would come by in Scythes and Libbies, and I would shoot at 3 or 4 of them, get a kill, then displace. I kept looking for innovative spots that I knew the Libbies and Gals would have to fly over iif they wanted to attack.

Sure enough, I'm sitting on this ridge directly east of this base (It was north of Jaeger's FIst), and had setup a spot with a 340 degree FOV. I'm there for about 3 minutes, when suddenly, 4 Galaxies pop into view about 300m from me, meaning they had about 600-700m to go to the base. Their flight path was perfect for doing a surprise pop over landing into our base, as that ridge blocked the base's view looking east, giving a Valley that can be used for pop-ups, They were using their 4 accompanying scythes and a libby to cover themselves.

None of them reached the ground alive, because I called (HEAVY AIR EAST-SE MIDLOW, 4 GALS) it out, and my other skyguard, 5 AA Turrets and a few heavies all looked up and started tracking.

By the time they had passed over head, I had pulled two of the gals down to 75% by prioritizing (They were at 75m and coming straight on - no evasion). The missiles came in and nuked one, the other skyguard started wailing on the scythes (Which turned out to be have C4 LAs), and the AA turrets pounded out the other gals. Overall, it was a well-executed air assault. But it got wrecked. Because ultimately, they didn't do any concerted effort to get the AA taken down before they showed up.

End result? There was a C4 LA who might've tagged someone with a brick of C4. One of the Galaxies got within 5m of the ground under the skyshield before exploding and killing all 6 people on board. But I'm unable to kill the C4 LAs.

Example on the other end: Also from last night, I was in a different platoon assaulting The Crown (Funky land-bridge campfest base) and our toon leader wanted to do an air assault on it. I know the crown can be pretty defensible if you know what you're doing, given its open fields of fire, and that Gals rarely take advantage of pop-up opportunities at the crown.

So I hop in my Scout Radar Valk and take off immediately, arriving about 30-45 seconds before the main force. Sure enough, they've got a sundy and a skyguard, with 3 vanguards, camping on the A point, which was our Toon objective. This had the potential to be very, very bad.

So I mapped out and called out what I was seeing, and then immediately destroyed the sundy and the skyguard. I dove down into the canyon, did 3/4 circuit to throw them off, and then popped up north of them and flew 10m over the targets, supermanning out and ditching the Valkyrie (Which for bonus points, continued on and killed an infil. I don't know how). and proceeded to use my tank mines (Mine Carrier is super OP, by the way) to blow the Skyguard and the sundy. Platoon arrives, wrecks A, and we end up locking them in the tower and taking the Crown. Total cost? 400 certs (Valk + Mines).

But this is only because I (Not to brag) had specced into skyguard and taken the time to learn it. I knew he couldn't react to me in time, and that his angle was bad vs. pop-ups. Most people, I find, do not spec into skyguard, because, to your point, they have no incentive to. I feel that this because its an opportunity cost, and they feel they can earn more certs being a heavy.

So I agree that Skyguard vs. Air is pretty acceptable and good at the moment, except for certain situations, but I hadn't thought about playing with the resist values, tbh. That's something to look at. My bottom line is that when I can't kill a guy unless I'm 10m away, or even intercept phoenixes with 4 barrels of 40mm, this becomes frustrating.

You smooth talker you...

Cool story. No really! It's exactly my experience in the air and on the ground as AA. It's not underpowered, it's just that you can't be a lone wolf when handling AA. The game needs more people willing to cooperate and bite the XP bullet to do AA work, although they shouldn't have to take an XP hit in order to do so

I'm glad you're able to see both sides of the argument. I may have quoted you in my posts, but I wasn't really targeting you specifically, sorry if it came off that way. Thank you for being reasonable and actually doing some AA work. Its mindboggling how many people will just gnash their teeth and wail about how underpowered AA is when in reality it's not even close to underpowered (with the exception of a lone, unsupported skyguard, but thats as it should be), they just don't want to be bothered to stop their farm to play strategically.

Funny thing about a2a combat ... you are locked in a fight that you usually cannot easily disengage from and most of the time you are out in the open.
A2A fights usually are not at the low altitude that groundpounding is done, which means you are very very vulnerable to flak and lockons.

And ofc the people on the ground have no way of knowing what kind of esf you are flying and unleash their missile formed rage at the lovly target that presents itself.
This goes so far that, i ve seen people prioritise me in my esf over the guy that is actually lolpodding them ... because well i am easier to hit during a fight and the other guy might fire back^^


Now, i know someone will claim that you just have to stay on the outside/outer edge of the fight, but well the groundpounders that you are hunting (and that people like you hate with such passion) usually i don't know, tend to be exactly where the fight is.

Why would I need a video? We all have the statistics that show that the Dalton is a perfectly serviceable A2A weapons that outperforms the Skyguard.

Air Kills Per Hour
NC Dalton- 10.61
NC Skyguard- 5.58

The Dalton is almost twice as effective as the Skyguard, based on the performance of all players across all servers.

I find it odd that you would somehow value the short performance of a single individual as stronger evidence than the collective performance of everyone who has played PS2 for the past month.

I was wondering when the cherrypicking would start...

You're drawing an incorrect conclusion from out-of-context stats... Yet again.

If you're going to post KPH, you need to post the amount of time spent in each platform, as well as the number of them pulled (if it's available).

The Dalton is a heavily used weapon. Yes, it's good against aircraft... With a fantastically accurate gunner. However, it's pulled by almost every lib that takes to the sky, so it's automatically going to have higher KPH simply due to the fact that there are more of them around.

The Skyguard OTOH; It's usage is likely well below that of the Dalton which is immediately going to skew the statistics. Add in the lesser XP gain and your precious stats are in an even worse disarray.

If you gave everyone spitballs for bullets except for every 100th guy (whom you give an actual weapon to), the spitballs will have a higher KPH.

Uhhh... not sure if you actually understand how KPH is calculated by the Oracle.

It uses hours of use... which means that if more people use it then the "less" effective that weapon is. A simple equation of total kills divided by total hours of usage.

Say you have 300 kills made by 10 people in a single hour. This means that there were actually 10 hours of usage. So that would yield a KPH of 30. This means that a single person getting 30 kills would have the same KPH effectiveness... population is already taken into account.

You're probably incorrectly thinking that it means "how many kills did the weapon get between 1PM and 2PM"... that's not how KPH numbers work. And it's why KPH is one of the more reliable statistics to use.

Completely wrong no matter how you dice it. There are more Skyguarders spending more time in those Skyguards than Dalton gunners. Not like your original critisism meant anything anyway (except your apparent lack of understanding on how the statistics work), but congrats on getting absolutely everything incorrect in a single post!

Skyguard
Uniques- 3,350
Hours- 391.7

Dalton
Uniques- 512
Hours- 146.6

Because that's a flawed assessment. Any wacko with a skyguard uses a skyguard. But very few people use a dalton. And people that do use it on a regular basis are usually the people who are extremely good with it. So the stats are extremely biased. Not only that, but dalton is also biased because of solo-libbing.

If you look at my dalton stats, I think I get about 1 kill every minute or so. That's because of solo-libbing partly. I spend very little time in the dalton, just enough to shoot once or twice. Skyguard stays in skyguard.

You should think about it a little bit longer before you try to post biased stats. I think my previous post remains true, and those stats just became even more meaningless than they were.

Oh hey! Qualified stats, I'm impressed. I didn't think you had it in you

I get the distinct impression that I understand statistics in general better than yourself, blunder aside, simply because I'm willing to admit that they don't tell the entire story, and are flat out incapable of doing so.

Sure, I didn't know how they calculated KPH. That is due to a misnomer. KPH shouldn't be calculated that way, it should be an average (or a flat sum, but an average would be more useful) of the number of kills per literal hour, regardless of playtime. It should be called Kills Per Hour Played, not just KPH. Conflating the two is misleading.

Regardless of the misnomer, stats do not show the entire picture, and they never will. For instance, does your precious oracle account for abandoned skyguards (which add 5 minutes of playtime for each while accruing no kills)? What about the skyguards that sit in the middle of nowhere, actively tanking the KPH of the entire platform? (and trust me, there are plenty of those). What about those that AFK somewhere in a playerbase, or sit a base or two back just waiting for a stray to happen by? How about accounting for tankbuster assists on all of those dalton kills? How many of those dalton kills were on ESFs, how many were on Galaxies and Libs? How about the fact that it's almost impossible to AFK in a lib anywhere other than warpgate whereas a skyguard can find a quiet base and park it in relative safety? Oh right, it doesn't account for any of that, and apparently, neither do you.

Also, Skyguards are only one source of AA. Add in lock-ons, Bursters, other ESFs, Titan-APs, anyone with small arms (for ESFs) and the whole equation looks to be much more in favor of the AA side of things, but what do I know? I'm just the guy that has to run from all that madness.

It's quite clear that most people here just want pilots locked out of any fight larger than a 2v2, combined arms be damned. The funny part is that when everyone stops flying because AA got buffed (and most will since they're going to be locked out of anything reasonably sized fight), you'll probably still come on here holding KPH as an all-telling indicator of how "bad" AA is when the root of the problem lies elsewhere (in this hypothetical, the root would be a lack of targets).

When a pilot (and a competent one at that) is outright telling you that he fears AA in it's current form, maybe you should unplug your ears and listen. It's no wonder that pilots fled this site in droves, it's a goddamn echo chamber here. Either way, I'm done trying to reason with this forum. Sisyphean tasks aren't a hobby of mine. It's going to be really engaging for the AA platforms when they have nothing to shoot at

Hey, I remember Liberator pilots telling me that solo-Libbing wasn't a thing, because if it were a thing then it would make the Liberator highly unbalanced.

The stats are very clear. The Dalton outperforms the Skyguard at least 2:1 in terms of A2A effectiveness, largely for two reasons. First, it does a whole lot more damage. Second, it is mounted on a platform that can mostly keep up with air targets and thus has a much longer engagement window.

You can try ot ignore the wealth of statistics, but keeping your head underground won't make the air units in PS2 any less OP.

No... I'm pretty sure you just don't know very much about what you're trying to talk about. I highly suggest you go back and read the literature before you venture into the subject again. Because...

1) Empty Skyguard = doesn't count as usage
2) Skyguards occupied but not killing = usage
3) Kill = kill, both from TB or SAM assists
4) Aircraft = aircraft

I mean those are such basic questions... do you really even need to ask them? Not only that, but they barely affect the outcome of the stats in any meaningful way.

Face it, the Dalton needs serious A2A nerfs at the very least. The Liberator probably should completely lose the ability to turn belly up and should handle along the lines of a current Galaxy. The Dalton should gain more gravity for its shells to prevent it from shooting upwards.

Along the same lines, there is clear and inarguable evidence that Skyguards need buffs so that they are at least as much a threat to aircraft as Daltons are. A 2x buff is probably necessary, and can be tuned from there.

I have always felt that the Dalton in A2A role is extremely frustrating, but I've not seen a way to reduce its effectiveness vs. Air without making it less effective vs. tanks. The increasing shell gravity might be acceptable, but needs further study.

I do not support the general "Buff skyguard by 2x" idea. I feel the primary problem is that of ground ineffectiveness, which results in a lack of cert generation from running skyguard is due to high down times and intermittent kill generation. This disincentivizes people from getting experience in the skyguard and thus, creates a skill gap between skyguarders and aircraft. Proper AA work is also heavily driven by tactics and team-work, both of which require some experience in the skyguard to develop and refine. This requires time, which given its intermittent cert generation, causes people to spend their time earning certs more effectively in other classes. When you aren't shooting at aircraft, you're basically either waiting for aircraft, or having to take absurd risks in the vehicleto get kills, as you have to close range dramatically in order to reliably get kills vs. infantry, and even AV Harassers are often a toss-up..

This creates a skill floor which causes people to create "AA IS UP. BUFF AA" threads, because they feel as if they can't make any progress in the platform.

Again, my proposal stands:
%20-35 RoF boost
+20 magazine size
Add a magazine size certs

Alternative: Revisit damage resists for flak for infantry, harassers, and flashes.

Try telling that to the 50 or so pilots my Skyguard either shot down or made their underwear brown this last week. The hilarious ones are when they panic and go out of control then try to recover but can't and hit the ground. That never gets old LOL.

A tip to pilots - don't take on a SG on your own you'll lose 9/10