Started playing a 2 days ago. As a new player Ive noticed a nice cert points grinding via finding snowmen on ice continent. Spawned an aircraft, found few snowmen... got shredded by vanu br100. Spawned another one.. found none, got shredded by the same guy with help of his 2 buddies (guess what br100). And what's up with dozens of enemy air units hovering over one base, like 20-30 of them. Ok, time for anti air. Spawned a skygard, got shredded by like 10 vanu planes at the same time. So how to play this game, how it suppose to be enjoyable? What am i doing wrong? Right now i removed my character, and thinking about giving it another chance... It's 2012 game, now its 2015 - is it that it became "elite only" no place for newbies? Or just flying model is that complicated to master?
if you spawn a ESF as newbie you got farmed ... play as a engie or medic and you earn tons of certs many br100 esf junkies wait for someone to shredd dont give up ... with the certs come exp and equip ...
These BR100 pilots have like 2400 hours of playtime in, they are going to pwn you over and over, get used to it. Ground to Air AA is only a deterrent, if they have multiple air units you are just food to them. 1 skyguard can't even solo 1 enemy small plane, keep that in mind. This is working as intended as per SOE.. If you see enemy air, and you are not a pilot, running for cover in a building is your best option.
The flight model in this game is complicated to master, especially when it comes to fighting other Air units. Ground-based Anti-Air such as the Skyguard or Bursters operate on a deterrence model whereby destruction of the target Air unit is entirely based on the dogged behavior of the pilot ignoring you. Your real goal is to drive them away. After a certain saturation of Air in a region, it takes a sufficiently more complicated anti-Air detail to keep them under control. Dual Burster MAX when in a well-defended base, and near a place of reactive cover (hugging the spawn/teleport toom is always good) in the instances of Air retaliation. Be certain to have a buddy Engineer ("pocket Engineer"), unless you have well-ranked Nanite Auto Repair Armor to switch your Flak out for while you wait in the spawn to get back up to full health. Use Skyguards in armor columns, though try to hang back, not truly "behind" the column but within its mid-rear ranks. You have very little capacity to deal with anything other than Air, and want to stay buffered from enemy Armor.
50% column A, 50% column B. The flight mechanics are so fiddly and borked that only the truly die hard stick with it to a point they can overcome the bad design decisions and bugs "gameplay features" required to not get your *** handed to you in 10 seconds. Get an AtA missile pod and use that. The Skyknights HATE it as it levels the playing field xD
A2A lockons definitely are a must for starting out in the air, as it lets you get more flight time in real combat so you actually have enough time to rack up some much needed flight experience. But for a newbie, stick to ground game infantry. You'll get pasted for the first week or so, then you'll start to pick up on how to fight. Your main goal to start with should be getting your first few hundred certs for infantry armor slots, abilities, and weapon attachments. After that, it's learning to spot and aim for the chest of enemies. Once you're used to finding the enemies and consistently hitting them (at least 50-60% of your rounds going into them every time), then it's time to move on to learning to burst fire and aim for the head. Aiming for the head is tricky. Between velocity, CoF bloom, and recoil, this will take some time, but by the end of it you'll be shredding enemies fairly consistently.
You can be like me, and cert up aircraft for the express purpose of making it easier to ram the sky junkies. I get max enjoyment doing this multiple times in a row to the same person. I have yet to come across someone who can avoid my superior kamikaze skills. You have no idea how mad those sky junkies get when you ruin their skylord roleplaying.
The airgame has been broken since launch, but because there's a group of "elite" air jockeys around that can scream very, very loudly some weird stuff about "groundsplaining" and "combined arms" while they solo entire bases the Developers for some reason never corrected it. So here's the status quo: ESF (Empire Specific Fighter) can solo just about any vehicle 1v1, except for the Skyguard or a walker Sunderer. The Walker Sunderer mainly because it's got a ton of health to stay alive, and the Skyguard is killable if you surprise it or had someone else deal a ton of damage beforehand. all ground-based AA is a deterrent. This means that any aircraft that immidiately reacts to AA can always survive, unless the AA is spammed by several people. Even then they stand a good chance of surviving. So in a 2 ESF vs 1 Skyguard scenario, which is more likely than 2 Skyguards vs 1 ESF, the 2 ESF can kill you, albeit with the loss of one of them if he takes too long with his attack run. In the meantime the ESF can also attack other ESF or tanks with great force. But every AA unit trades in tremendous power to deal with the aircraft, and are sitting ducks against any ground threat or multiple ESF. So aircraft are broken as hell, we need an actual AA killer weapon. But since the airjockeys immidiately jump on it and say "more flak? Oh noes!" while the idea's given have nothing to do with flak anymore they are discarded.
This smells like an alt trolling to me. Just started playing a few days ago, but has a Skyguard? Is able to fly well enough to hunt for snowmen after playing for 2 days? Yeah maybe, but sounds fishy to me. But just in case he's not a troll....If you're hunting snowmen to grind out XP, you are already doing things wrong. Not only can you make loads of XP as a medic, but you also aren't playing the actual game by farming snowmen. That's just something SOE threw in there to give people who have been playing forever something new to do. And the air isn't full of elites. They are there, but most people are still learning things. But regardless of their skill level, if you are grossly outnumbered, you are probably gonna die.
skyknights will still pwn u in 1v1 dog fights. Its best used when enemy plane is already engaged if you are new to flying. Youve only been playing 2 days...how good can one be at any game in 2 days.
and also defies most physics models.... (and not in the good way like tribes). OP needs to join an Outfit that's dedicated to vehicles. That's the best possible solution for now.... (what Server/Faction Reiborn?) 2 Skyguards working in Tandem can and will start taking down multiple skyknights (except for metalfig who should have been forced to retire a long long time ago). Now that won't do much against a full Composite TankBuster rook + dalton bishop without 100+ hours of practice time & tank upgrades. But it's still a great way to exceed the 10k SPH ceiling for F2P players.... That first day.... oh lawwrdy.... I was Burster MAX the whole time and I exceeded 60k SPH... PINATAS AS FAR AS THE EYE COULD SEE
There are a lot of problems with the airgame, but the quirky flight model isn't actually one of them. If they took out hovemode, which creates the quirkiness people are complaining about, BR100s would still be wrecking newbies while whining about A2A lock-ons, gank squads would still dominate the sky, and infantry would still cry about how aircraft are overpowered. In my opinion, the biggest problem with the airgame is that there's no such thing as a safe fight to practice in. You can be learning to provide air support in a small TR/NC fight, or dueling against one Mosquito of your level, then 20 Scythes swarm in from halfway across the map--2km from any VS territory--and ruin your learning experience. Basically, the continents are much too small to support fast-moving aircraft in a way that doesn't throw every single ESF into one giant deathmatch.
Posting to say your Signature GIF is awesome, Air Force One is a legendary movie. I managed to click **** ****** fekkin post before even finishing my post, I was that excited and enthralled, the thought of Harrison Ford beating the crap out of Terrorists, oh mah gherd.
Basically, assume that everyone in this game will be using the cheesiest tactics possible. Especially the older players. Especially the knobs that like to play dedicated ESF. They are going to be traveling in swarms, specifically looking for individuals. From a ground AA perspective the way to deal with these players is to look for large fights where ESFs are trying to farm infantry kills. In most cases there are only a handful of lanes they can use to safely approach the base and fly away from it. Once you've ID'd their exit lanes, park yourself in a gully or behind a rock with a nice view of the sky in a stealth'd skyguard and wait. As they fly out they will likely be at around 50% health and you can actually stick a kill on them. After you've taken out a couple they will get wise and you'll have to move. If you can get a heavy with an AA launcher to accompany you, so much the better. Remember that flak weapons are carefully tuned NOT to kill air knobs unless they make a gross mistake. Keep in mind that ground AA in every form is pretty damn gimpy, 1v1 an ESF can fly head-on at a burster MAX and kill it. 1v1 a tank buster Lib can do the same thing to a skyguard. When these things happen, -and they will, see first sentence- try and mob up with some other players for protection -if nothing else it reduces the odds the knob will target you. Successfully using an ESF for AA duty requires some practice, but its primarily about man power or the certs invested. Don't bother until you have a serious pile of certs to throw at it or get a couple of bro's to fly with. You're not going to be competitive with older players using maxed equipment in 1v1.
A2A Pods all day every day. It makes it FAIR. I ussually get atleast one ESF Kill per ESF Death when I use pods.
currently the default most effective playstyle in this game is aircraft. but hey, they're fine with making droves of new players leave in frustration and killing planetside 2.
Yeah I know.... he was indeed gone a good while and I was enjoying it. ...no offense to him. But quite a few old nemesis bullies uncontestable notorious farmers showed back up again this past week. Probably most likely only because there was was extra down-time for everyone over the holidays. Meh, with luck they'll all get bored again and let the rest of us derpers get back to Derpside2 again.
