Redesign to Air Mechanics and AA.

SOE, don't move this one please. No one reads the Vehicle discussion forums. Wish I could've got more opinions before it was moved.

Just my thoughts.

AA: Burster MAX becomes a deterrent. Sustained fire at a target causes it to severely shake. Growing in magnitude over time. 1 second of sustained "disturbance" to a air target gives you 50 XP. It would also have a terrible COF. But the detonation range would be greatly increased. And when you do score a direct hit, it deals considerable damage. Pretty much 1/7 of a ESF's health. And after about 5 seconds of sustained fire, the pilot would then begin to experience loss of control/sluggishness. Just say that the Burster fire EMP rounds.

ESFs: They now have to further specialize. Equipping rocket pods removes your afterburners, and instead gives you extra armor. This would effectively turn you into a Ground Attack aircraft with weakened A2A capabilities. ESFs who only equip a primary and A2A pods or external tanks keep their afterburners, but their armor remains the same.

Bonus Weapon for ESFs!
A secondary weapon that brings your afterburners to a low fuel level, but makes up for it in firepower.
Dual Cannons/Basilisks on both sides of your ESF. These would be a sustained DPS weapon, meaning that it would be least effective when hovering, because you have to shoot at a target for a long period of time, leaving you vulnerable against AA fire. So it would encourage strafing runs.

It would be a 500 cert weapon with 3 types of ammunition, 2 costing 100 certs.

Incendiary: These would be more efffective against Air targets, but less so against ground.
Armor-Piercing: These would be more effective against Ground, but less so against Air.
Omni-Purpose: Your default ammunition, effective against all targets.

Or you could allow pilots to create their own mixes for 150 certs!
Such as I-AP-I-T
So that would be Incendiary-Armor-Piecing-Incendiary-Tracer
So that would be slightly more effective against Air than Ground.

This would turn you into a true A-10 Warthog.
It would take 3 passes or more to kill a CREWED MBT.

Bonus Weapon for Ground AA

Heavy Flak Cannon: Only available as a Phlanx turret and on lightnings.

Fires as slow as a Phlanx Anti-Armor cannon. No drop. Deals decent damage. Such as 1/10 of an ESF's health. Has a large detonation range, but damage is lowered the farther away the round detonates.

Values can obviously be changed by your suggestions.

More Clarification
-Rocket Pods clip reduced to half it's current size.
-Make it take 3 passes or more to put a CREWED MBT on fire.
-Can't add much more.
-And by Crewed I mean a 3 seater MBT with a driver, and 2 gunners.

And I may have played a bit too much War Thunder, if you've noticed...

Why the **** the game ended up like this
AA was meant to be a soft counter, deterring air. And air was meant to be the counter to air. But the reason rocket podders prevailed in December was because there wasn't enough specialization. When another ESF with a not so skilled pilot rolled up to take him out, the rocket podder just whipped out his rotary and destroyed him. So the problem was that one ESF loadout could take out anything with a skilled enough pilot. And with Libs, all they needed was the restriction to dropping bombs horizontally, and a damage reduction to the tailgun. Then a pilot who's not pro could take them out. All the "pro" pilots were too busy owning Air and Ground, Day and Night.

Some opinions from AA MAXes, and pilots are very welcome here.

DISCUSS.

AA is fine. Excited for the buffs to AA maxes and the new anti-hover rockets. It'll keep the rookies out of the way.

Screw fixing the game, give me a thumbs down button for the forums.

AA and Air are probably at the best state they will ever be in. If SOE tries to re balance AA and Air again, they will jump from one extreme to another, and nobody wants that again.

You're applying even more damage capabilities to AA and Air? That's the problem to begin with. Without any AA presence Air is insanely powerful, and with AA presence Air is completely countered. That's the main problem.

AA needs to be stuck at point defense rather than area denial, Air needs to be less effective against ground so that even without AA it takes time to do a lot of damage. Encourage for A2A to take out the true ground hammers like liberators and battle galaxies.

The state of air being useless whenever any semblance of AA shows up, or ground getting shredded without AA? Not my idea of balanced. Also, bursters locking down the airspace over bases while sitting pretty inside spawn shields? I see no problem here, move along.

The entire reason Air was seen as OP in December was because the hard counter was an A2A ESF. And there was one loadout that destroyed all. Rotary and Rocket Pods. Grounds appears, pod it. Air appears, whip out your rotary. Due to this, skilled pilots were pretty much invulnerable. A fix for this would be to allow a not skilled pilot in an A2A ESF to take out a skilled pilot in an A2G ESF. And also limit Libs to shooting downwards, so that even a "noob" pilot has a chance to take them down.

AA should simply be a deterrent, not the main means of killing Air.

And what do you mean more damage capabilities. Just more specialization for ESFs to clearly define them as an A2A ESF or A2G. And Burster MAXes would just deter Aircraft. After about 5-7 seconds of continuous fire, the pilot experiences sluggishness and loss of control intermittently. And only Lightnings and Base Turrets would be the true AA. Capable of killing Air.

Doesn't seem like an extreme increase in damage capabilities to me.

It wouldn't be useless.
Air would actually be in a better state than it is now.
The root of the AA vs Air problem came from lack of specialization.

When you have at least 10 hours of flight time in an ESF, come back here.
Being completly denied access to battles by a MAX that only costs 100 resources, can change it's loadout, is revivable, repairable, and that is an extremely small target does not seem balanced to me.

MAXes should've never been given the main counter to Air. They should just be a deterrent.

Are you talking to me? I have hundreds of hours of flight time.

The last one got moved for a reason Bolticus.

There seems to be a very small, very vocal and very very pissy minority on this board that can't talk about anything other than how much they hate AA and how it works as intended. I don't get why, and it most certainly isn't the accomplished pilots (meaning the entire leaderboard) but the sort who seem to want air to be a sort of ease of use point farming option. Stop flying high, straight and only attacking AA over and over again.

AA and air is fine except 2 things:
a) range of AA MAX's, not dmg. Fix: nerf range to 200-300 - buff skyguard.
b) the dmg of lolpods vs tanks. fix: make lolpods, always hit toparmor.

^ This.

ESFs should have never been hovering ground attack aircraft, they should have been fighter aircraft to offset the Liberators/Galaxies.

The "accomplished" pilots are just hovering around spawn rooms in small battles.
Think about it, have you you ever seen an ESF in a large battle make even a small difference. By the time the find a target, they're under heavy flak fire.

All I'm saying is that the current mechanics are broken, and the problems came from lack of specialization.

I already made my own (overlooked) suggestion on what to do about that:

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...-a-unique-priority-on-spotted-targets.121396/

Probably because it wasn't a buff or a nerf, which seems to be the only language this board can communicate in on these matters.

So you want to make something I payed 7 dollars for, DO NO DAMAGE and literally only shake their screen. So I can pull my AA max and shake an ESF's screen up rofl while the dozen others rocket pod me to death. No, awful idea.

I've got 10+ hours flying a scythe. An ESF should not be a solo death machine sorry, ESF's should HAVE to group together and coordinate with each other to do damage even to kill a max and his infantry support. ESF's shouldn't be sitting above bases farming infantry that are running around on the ground, they should be killing other air/armor or work together to take focus fire difficult targets like clusters of infantry with AA dug in.

No, this isn't dogfighting sim 2213

There is a small minority on here. There is a large majority that dont bother posting on this particular forum. There is a larger group here who drive tanks though. So there you go

You should not have to be a pro pilot to stay alive and participate in battles. No more than you should have to be a pro tank driver.

Sure I can avoid most of the time AA. And I can do this by flying around where no one is.

Things will be changing with AA. Its coming. It has to. Because now you rarely find a small base with one person who does not pull an AA max.

I flew around for ever yesterday avoiding burster a d trying to find something to kill. AA is everywhere now.

For a while I said screw it. And played no no cert one burster max. Killed several esf and one lib just hiding in the rocks with no way of healing.

Two esf tried to take me out directly, one died. The other ran off. Finally a tank and infantry found me.

This is one max with one burster. Talk about a noob tube!!

Oh I forgot. I saw an esf way off. It finally disappeared and I shot where I saw it last. Red ex's started popping up! LOL. I was still hitting him out of sight!

What a complete joke.