[Suggestion] this game would be objectively more fun for a majority players if A2G ESF's were toned down.

Yeah, clearly this is going nowhere.

Just keep rolling off on your own if that makes you happy.

Thats a really absurd post Flag.

You don't take several factors into effect.
1. Terrain - Maneuvering to increase TTK increasing likelyhood of allied ESF or someone to assist or atleast moving towards viable cover
- some places and paths to hard cover eliminating his chance to kill you
- Hills to nose up your tank and return fire
- Freaking egg set her ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
2. Skill
-making the right moves, understanding there weapons and limitations, quickly identifying where the target is, identifying what your being attacked with, Knowing weapon cooldowns to hop out of tank and repair. Timing vangaurd shield to effectively block a volley then repair. Anchoring where your badonkadonk isn't exposed. Strafing with magrider in and out of cover. The list goes on.

3. TTK
- A lot of ESF's won't bother attacking you over squishy infantry being that it's easier, SPM, less ammo consumed, and less exposure time.

4. positioning of tank
-I have avoided a lot of deaths just by minimizing all there shots away from my precious bum bum.
- If there coming in fast and close I've fried a few on my old character from them flying past me and me shoving me shell in there afterbum bum!
- You should always be conscientious of your surroundings such as enemy warpgates and where you are in relation to such. Even in an ESF most don't take the long way around. Your gunner understanding this and spotting before ESF fires is a must.

5. repair
- YOU have the option to repair and even double repair if done right The ESF does not. If it's viable at current locations try close in on a tree for some repair tree dancing. I have out repaired there ammo capacity before and its hilarious. (on old characters long deleted)
5. ESF loadout You totally ignored this in your post as most emotional responders dew.
- There are NEGATIVES i say I say boy listen to me here chicken hawk NEGATIVES for loadin on dem there hornets. Like any other esf with tomcats, coyotes, and even enemy hornets. You have to somewhat be still to guide hornets. IF your sitting still you can be popped by an enemy ESF near instantly if he happens to guide hornets at you or even a rotary followed up by coyotes is the END of his trolling you.
6. ESF downtime
- ESF's have a lot more downtime repairing. Usually a pass will not only expend small ammo supply (not empty of course) if your damaged you need to fly quiet far to repair safely or risk landing to soon and being popped by another stalking air vehicle.


Come to think of it on my TR character I might try tanking as heavy with engy gunner and Striker the esf. Anyways side thought.

So in your cute little world everyone in anything should be able to 1v1 with a 50% outcome of victory!

TL DR Daggon right An ESF should pop your soloing tank a$$

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I just found this in another thread.

Tanks kill ESF more than ESF kill tanks. I think i already said that, but here is the proof.

What's your point? The only reason tanks are killing ESFs is because they either got really lucky or they are farming ground while hovering.

Oh for sure, teamwork > anything else. I was just pointing out that "A" skyguard with an MBT doesn't even mean deterrence. And like I said, no few of my kills have been KS's from friendly air.

That being said, you can't always say "everyone should be organized at all times", because the game gives you minimal tools for doing so. The instant they went with SL and PL to call all the shots, they pretty much made teamwork + enjoying the gameplay a crapshoot based on the competence and activity of the leaders.

By way of example, I quit squad after squad the other night because nobody in a leadership position seemed to give a sh8 about doing more than updating waypoints. I couldn't even get replies to voice or text questions about where we should be, what we should be doing, etc. And chasing the SL around didn't do anything either, they were all just zerging. (And one particular set of ppl always found in leadership can't shut up about their personal gameplay / outfit politics / geeking out over game stuff long enough to even update the WPs regularly, let alone do something intelligent with the 30+ ppl in the platoon. Jeez.)

IMO, SOE screwed up by letting random schmoes have charge of the gameplay experience of 11-44 other people via leadership. That's a really big impact on how much fun you have in the game. They needed to do something more innovative, something that lets players have more choice in what goes down during their game session, but still gets organized action going.

*****, those are Montages. That **** doesn't happen every time they fire.

Actually, it literally does. To quote the Meriam-Webster dictionary:

If Skyguards deterred pilots, then pilots would chose not to enter into an area where a Skyguard was present. That would be deterrence happening, likely because the pilots knew that if they did enter into an area with Skyguards, they would have an almost certain chance of exploding.

But in PS2 Skyguards don't even act as a deterrence, because pilots will regularly fly in zones with Skyguards in them, or even engage the Skyguard directly.

The Skyguard is not meant to kill air.

The Skyguard fails as a deterrent to air.

The Skyguard is pitiful in an anti-infantry or anti-armor role.

The Skyguard simply is garbage.

80% of the playerbase is zerging and aren't really playing the game as it was intended. Since its an 'off' way of playing I don't see the point in encouraging it. Players can play how they wish. But they should reap the benefits and consequences for doing so.

In actuality, ESFs are weak in the actual game. They're useless for taking and defending bases in most cases. The only time they are useful is when the control points are exposed or outside. There is only a dozen out of 300 bases across four continents that meet this criteria. That means more than 90% of the time, you can't use ESFs to aid in base defense or capture.

Here's how you deal with them:



Get in the buildings and on the control points (gets you certs too). You will make ESF's utterly pointless.

This is BS. Any ESF who engages a skyguard player who isn't an idiot or asleep long enough to actually try to kill said skyguard is gonna die.
Any decent ESF pilot immediately runs when they find out that that lightning they were gonna kill isn't a C75 Viper infantry farmer but a skyguard.
If you try to fly in a zone with a skyguard you have to take measures to prevent him form seing oyou untill you attack some infantry (the only thing you can kill quickly enough so he doesn't smoke your a.s.s.) and then run like hell. Engaging a skyguard is suicide.

In my experience ESFs rarely kill my Skyguard... but they certainly will trade fire with me. Nonetheless the point still stands. Skyguards ought to more or less instantly vaporize any aircraft, from ESFs to Galaxies, that enter into their effective zone if they are to be true deterrents. Since ESFs will still stick around to fire off a few more shots, they certainly aren't deterred.

I never really understood why ESFs tend to do that. They stay at rather long range and pelt me with their nose cannon. Doesn't do much, but then again my Skyguard cannons don't do very much back to them at those ranges. It's a weird certain stand-off engagement, but I really don't sense any urgency from the ESF pilots. Often times they'll even come back for seconds.

Really? Let's name them:
Ranger, Walker, Basilisk (weaker than Vulcan, which is next), Vulcan (extreme CQC only, and the amount of actual aircraft kills shows that it's not exactly good either way), Saron (same as Vulcan but weaker), Kobalt (even weaker than Vulcan and Saron)...
And that's it! 2 actual AA secondaries, and some that can be utilized but their stats show that they can't do anything unless in groups. So you get 6 AA secondaries, 4 of which I've been lenient on and called them "AA" just because they score more than 0,01 aircraft kills per unique.
But sure! Show me how these secondary options "punish" an ESF that tries to solo you, please do. If you don't know how it's simple: go away from a battle and park somewhere where you will be spotted by aircraft, you can decide yourself if you have cover or not. Then you go ahead and "punish" aircraft with your secondaries. Take a blockade sunderer if you intent on keeping on the move while doing this, and a deploy shield sunderer if you intent on sticking on one place, those should be your best options when using secondaries.

And this is fair because...? ESF can take on dozens of enemy types simply because 95% of the loadouts don't contain a single shred of AA, and the loadouts that do have very low power. So ESF aren't toast when they go off alone, but vehicles are? Where in your right mind is this fair?
It would be fair if the ESF was specifically fitted to deal with only vehicles, but currently they can engage infantry and aircraft just as well with most of their loadouts.

Have you looked up into the sky at any point in planetside? While flying, did you ever look to see how many were flying solo, and how many stuck to groups? An incredible portion of the players fly solo.
"overextending" is part of the game and a serious threat for aircraft, but funnily you don't name AA as the reason why it'd dangerous, but other aircraft. Could this be because AA isn't a real threat? Also, overextending happens when you go to far into enemy territory. You can't call getting killed by a ganksquad near your warpgate or in the middle of your empire overextending on your part. Overextending, as it's name suggests, is that you go too far away to get help when you are engaged. So any target near the border is close enough to both your and your enemy forces, and is attackable without overextending as you can quickly return to your own forces. Now what targets would be vulnerable to such attacks... could it be any ground vehicle that tries to flank? or any vehicle at all that isn't protected by AA primaries? Or any small battle for that matter?

Yeah, very cute. You do realize that all ground vehicles suffer the same "problem"? As in, ESF can avoid walls, mountains etc to fire into a base, where most vehicles can't even enter large portions of a base?
You also realize that you just advocated that infantry are not supposed to be outside in any scenario because they will be killed by air?
You also realize that infantry can use cover against ground vehicles when outside? things like ridges, rocks, tree's etc? And that aircraft circumvent these?
You also realize that to get into a building, infantry needs to travel to the building first? As they usually spawn in a spawnbunker and need to travel to the point for instance? or the vehicle terminal?

I can go on and on, but this is no argument that helps a game become balanced. This is basically an ESF player telling everyone that yes, aircraft are completely overpowered, but there's a solution! don't play the game! stick indoors! There, now that I've given a solution aircraft don't need any changing! Even though the solution I gave makes no sense whatsoever as other vehicles have more limitations and less power to bring to the fight.

Around in circles we go.

Yes all vehicles suffer this problem. But this is a topic on ESFs so I didn't discuss other vehicles, I've done that in another thread already. And yes I make no secret that I advocate that infantry have no place in open ground. In fact I'll advocate that NOTHING has a place in open ground. There's no objectives out there. The only reason people go there is because 1. They are a zergling going to the next base or 2. A cert farming looking to get certs off zerglings.

Vehicles over all have no place in the game currently except that they are big, look cool, do damage, and can farm certs off of clueless or uncaring players. Fortunately for the casual player looking to have a little fun, kick back, get blazed out on a legal or illegal substance, and farm certs, there is no shortage of zerglings and other casual players for them to play around with.

But I don't see any point in more balancing around casual play. It roughly works how it should and they should focus on getting more serious endgame content for those players who wish to coordinate and kick butt in bases. The casuals have plenty of stuff they can do. They have Thousands and Thousands worth of certs to spend on stuff.

More serious and competitive players really don't have much. They have two vehicles they can use, and a handful of leadership abilities. That's it.

If you want to see how I'd fix it so vehicles can matter, I have a post here: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...but-maxes-are-fine.211436/page-2#post-3068290

Basically it shows changes I believe all vehicles and bases will need in order to see a rebalance of such vehicles. Basically vehicles need a role in bases (as you agreed that they don't) before they can be rebalanced. Balance them in open field combat and we'll have to do it all over again if bases get a revamp.

To put it shortly, I want the relationship vehicles have with bases fixed before seeing any balance changes happen to them. I'm not disagreeing or agreeing with anyone on their effectiveness in open ground.

No, in % they might kill more, but how many vehicles are pulled compared to the amount of ESF are pulled? WIth 1% vehicle kills the ESF could still kill more vehicles than if the ground vehicles killed 10% of the ESF. So you've proven nothing with it.

Aside from that, we can look as to why the Titan is the best killer. That person says "it's the highest tank canon that get's vehicle kills", and suddenly it's classified as AA? Imagine if it was the 3rd best killer but only killed 0,91% of all aircraft, would it have been AA? Ofcourse not!
And why is the titan AP such a good killer? Well, it can OHK ESF, and ESF allow it. I'm responsible for quite a lot of aircraft kills with my titan, and they all represent a nice target by slowing to a crawl, or just hovering, and hanging there. They even stick around if my shell flies inches from their face, waiting for the next one. I wouldn't call the Titan an AA weapon, I would say that the ESF farmers feel too safe to avoid the Titan AP. The other MBT's will also get hits, but due to not being able to OHK, they can rarely land that second shot, as then the ESF starts moving. If the Titan suffered something similar, you would see that it can only get one hit, and no more.

Also, those stats are missing a ton of data. Where are the Coyote missiles, that get more kills than the Titan? Where is the Mustang AH, which also get's more aircraft kills? Where is the Tomcat, the ranger, walker, basilisk, annihilator? These are just the weapons that score better than the Titan (although some walker variants on the Sunderer for instance score lower), then there's a ton of weapons that score lower but still kill air.

I dont' think these stats are in any way accurate. In fact i know they are. Just look at the "monthly vehicle deaths" here: http://ps2oraclestats.com/monthly-vehicle-deaths/ and check the VS and TR ESF death rate. You'll see that the Mustang get's between 4 and 4,5% of the ESF kills of both factions, instead of the 2,95% that your "source" claims.

When you look at all the death sources, you can even see that the aircraft nosecannons (Mustang+Vortek) get slightly more kills than all NC AA sources combined, including the Titan. In fact, you have a minimum of 2x the chance to ram a friendly than being killed by a skyguard, and a 3,5x higher chance to ram a hostile. And the skyguard ranks the highest killer.

If you are wondering why the Coyote missiles for instance don't show up on this chart, even though they get more kills per life than the Titan, it's because the Coyotes are less used and despite being better at AA score a lower total kills.
Now if you had been a proper nut like me, you would have checked your sources instead of saying 'these stats agree with me, they must be good'.

Except for the last part I agree with you. ESF run a big risk going into heavy AA territory, but the same counts for vehicles. So why should that be removed?
On the other hand, they should be able to do something. In come the skillful AA to replace current AA. You still run a big risk, but since the danger now depends on both the pilot and the AA user you won't be locked out by "aim in general direction, fire" weapons. that many perceive as unjust. A skillful pilot can still kill AA, but it will feel more fair for both sides. And an AA can kill an ESF before the ESF kills him every time, if he has the skill for it, making that feel much fairer than "oh god, a lock-on has been fired and I'm low health, now I'm basically screwed", or "that flak will hit me anyway as there's no skill involved to fire it in my general direction" (except at long ranges).

Planetside 2 is based on an MMO world. Instead of loading a base, having a battle and then loading the next base you can decide where and how you fight. In many area's there's battles that appear in the middle of open ground to stop enemies from approaching, and theres a whole game to explore with flanking tactics, approach and deploy maneuvers, circumvention of enemy forces and taking their base behind their back etc. This requires the open field to be traversable, and that fights can happen balanced in the same open field.

Most people will disagree with you on the premise that tanks are inside-base weapons. They will in fact state that the ground vehicle's use stops or is greatly diminished at the gate, as infantry needs to take over. Tanks their biggest function is to traverse the open terrain quickly and blow up anything that stops the Sunderer from deploying. Or as defenders, they are there to blow up the enemy sunderer and any vehicles that help it get there. Sunderers are the primary way of attacking, as infantry will respawn often when taking a base, and they are the only one's that can take points.

Therefore I think it's safe to say that the open field battles have to be balanced. This includes all unit types from vehicles to infantry to aircraft to turrets who stick out towards that same open field.

]

Allright. You are right that many people ignore the negatives of the thing they want to nerf, if only to make their point look stronger. So adding some background information is laudable.

I am getting the feeling I can talk to you more now . Maybe you could let Hover-unloading stick into the game, but players who are still able to do something like that will get a big disadvantage in for instance speed. So they have drawbacks to being able to do that kind of thing.

It's an option, but I don't think there's a lot of people that would agree with it. You could perhaps get this done by reducing turnratio's when hovering, so aiming becomes much harder, and escaping as well. When you need speed to start turning while you are first aiming down, you have a serious threat for ramming the ground.

Great idea's. You could let the cover-smoke be detonatable by the owner, so he can decide the height at which it explodes. Would be a handy LA weapon for instance to hide from aircraft.
For the reduced damage, I was hoping my skillful flak idea would be good. At longer ranges you can potentially still deal tons of damage, but whenever an aircraft starts moving and maneuvering you will need a lot of leading and foresight to keep hitting them, especially when they keep changing direction. In CQC when they hover you can get in close and annihilate them as you can easily hit everything until they get farther away. This would be similar to an AV tank surprising enemies from behind.

I've proposed actual bombs in the past, so I'm all for it. It would definitely make ESF a nicer platform to see flying I think, despite the power they could wield. A more skillful approach that's not hovering around is what I would like best.

I wholeheartedly agree.

There is rarely just 1 ESF. The first time I bought the skyguard I used them to defend 2 prowlers pounding a tower. The enemy air presence was totally removed from the area, and I got so bored that I was hoping for more enemy air.

About killing, you have to lead the ESF into an ambush, like how I lured a valkerie to flying low over a mountain and the blasted him with my skyguard from the other side of the mountain.

Sounds like you got lucky and fought idiots, good ESF pilots would pound you from extreme range so you only tickle them, and if a lib turns up.. well that shredder kills tanks in 3 seconds flat and takes 3 full clips of the skyguard to kill (assuming you hit almost every shot) SO all 3 of you would have died in seconds.

I think this is a major problem, idiots can grab an ESF then hover 20m from a skyguard and people think "oh look its balanced" but then you get a lib that slaughteres tons of tanks without ever being threatened and you realise its not even slightly balanced