Restore balance and sanity to air power

I fly ESF's
I dont mind the lock ons, Now that the lock on warning is working.... more ... reliably..sometimes.
And I love my rocketpods both for attacking the ground AND attacking Air. By far more effective then A2A.
So personally, I would not like this change.
Realistically, it aint never going to happen. SOE will not refund anything. Thus removal of a weapon system is not going to happen.

There have been a lot of suggestions and ideas regarding air balance. The only problem is with the way this game is designed. They've sold people weapons with real cash, so they can't really remove them completely or change them completely. This is why you haven't seen a lot of necessary changes done to ESF's and other things. I would love for them to do some serious revamps to this game, and refund people certs & sc. The problem is they won't, or I should say I highly doubt they will. SOE has surprised me in the past so there's a slim possibility they'll do the right things, but the chances are slim.

My ideas to air v ground balance points towards how BF: Bad Company 2 has it. I get that people don't want to turn this into a Battlefield game, but it already is a Battlefield game, except that it has worse balance compared to Bad Company 2. Planetside 2 follows BF3's air v ground balance, and it's badly balanced compared to its predecessor BC2. Air should've never been hard counters to infantry, air should've never given superiority over anything and everything. Air should've never been given rocket pod & HE to spam onto infantry. This game's balance is whacked because it tries to be a game of its own, but it's also trying to reinvent the wheels so to speak. The balance was met in other games before, but Planetside 2 devs wanted a crack at their own vision and it really hasn't worked out well.

In Bad Company 2 it goes something like:

Black hawk helicopters have 2 mounted anti infantry machine guns, they also serve as transport, and people riding in them could also shoot out using their own guns. They are deadly against infantry if you have a good pilot & good gunners, but they are also vulnerable because of their slower flight speed and low maneuverability. Infantry could shoot at the pilot, passengers, and gunners, because they are visible. They could also shoot guided rockets at it. They do have a lock-on rocket in the game, but it requires a tracer dart first, which eliminates the possibility of long range lock-on spam from safety like we see today in Planetside 2.

Then they have anti-armor attack helicopters, which is designed to be hard counters to armored vehicles and aircraft, including the black hawk helicopters.

To translate that into Planetside 2, it should be that:

-ESF gets rocket pods taken away, and they get armor piercing rounds to be hard counters to vehicles & other aircraft. They still get to have machine guns if they want to risk flying down low to shoot at infantry. But ESF should've been air controllers, something that counters air more than anything else. This will give people the dogfights they want, and will give ESF's a role. A2A missiles should stay, but lock-ons should take longer, and good skilled pilots should have no problem at all shaking a lock-on attempt. Not to mention flare is there if someone can't shake it.

-Liberators get HE rounds taken away, and they get the best anti tank rounds against ground vehicles. And I do mean deadly armor piercing rounds, those that destroy tank columns if tanks are exposed and no anti air are setup.

-Galaxies become Planetside 2's version of Black Hawk helicopters, used for both transport, and machine gun counters to ground infantry. You have to always balance a pro with a con, so since galaxies already do fly slow, they already have the negatives and low maneuverability like the helicopters in BC2.

-Skyguards should be tweaked to work as well as AA MAX's, but better, more ammo and more rounds. They're attached to vehicles, so they should have more rounds.

-Infantry lock-on rockets gets a new requirement, lock-ons only work if a vehicle/aircraft has a tracer dart on it. This will ensure no more long range bs spam like we see with annihilators. Someone, somebody, has to get close enough to dart a tank before you can lock-on spam. Someone has to be skilled enough to dart an aircraft, and remember if ESF goes low to gun for infantry, they risk getting darted, galaxies flying slow risk getting darted. Liberators don't get darted due to high altitude, but they are no longer anti infantry with their HE spam, so that's ok, they're just anti vehicles. Infantry rockets also get new guided missiles, much like the new engineer AV turret. This will add skill to the game, and less lock-on spam.


With this design you should have the sky filled with aircrafts fighting. ESF's will be required to protect Liberators from other ESF's. Liberators will be required to destroy that large tank column attempting to roll over your defense. Galaxies will be used more often for transport and infantry gunning. Infantry will get to have more infantry fun, and they get to spam less lock-on rockets.

I only suggested it back when flak was virtually worthless. At this point, we've gone far in the wrong direction by handing out AA weaponry like candy and made made G2A missile too good.

Maybe you just plain out suck

Yea, because you have to suck to be killed by rocket pods since an individual on the ground has so much defence against a spam of explosives from something it's much harder for them to kill and it almost impossible to run from unless very close to cover... oh wait.

I swear this community has the biggest collection of see no evil hear no evil apologists and straight up ***** idiots out of any game community out there, but w/e, keep swinging that e-**** about, everybody is very impressed I'm sure.

So you want infantry to be all but immune to ESF? lol with Triple A being under every rock in the game,rockets need to be buffed, not removed. It is insulting to be called a weapon when you can drop 16 missiles within a foot of a soldier an he ignores them, as balanced.The Splash damage is laughably insulting.

You must really suck