Why is there no hard counter to Air atm?

Another one of these threads.. Skyguard is not useless. Just ask others how they are using it successfully..
It does not need a projectile speed increase and it does not need a splash radius increase..

I have absolutely no problems with my Skyguard.. plenty of players make the Skyguard work every day.
you just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Then you say that you hardly ever fly... well, then you can not make a comment about the Mosquito, since you obviously don't know anything about it.

You should try to come onto this Forum with questions of how to improve your game playing..

If you come on here with these false statements and how little experience you have and it all *** ticks ** you off..
Not a great start to garner any kind of support or sympathy..

Why don't you try it again, with some real specific questions... ?

Yeah you can get instakilled as infantry if you stand still or move predictably. Whats your point?

Probably because everyone and their mums would pull it at the first sign of air because everyone hates those scumbags. Air would be relegated to finding fights before it got set up, and once every fight has one they can't do anything.

As much as I would enjoy an airless planetside for awhile, it would hurt the game having a whole section of it being literally useless.

That it will always annoy people, I'd guess.

It even annoys Air as the billion A2A lock-on threads attest.

it's in good stand. just not enough varied ways to kill them.
remember when air was ridiculously op against grounds in 2013?

Air can be powerful under certain circumstances in smaller battles and in the hands of skilled pilots. Only the most skilled pilots are able to operate in large battles to some effect and survive, that is pounding infantry and vehicles. While you are dealing with the flak, lockons, base turrets, AP canons, heat canons, small arms and dumb fires you are also dealing with enemy ESF's, AA Libs and Galaxy's.

If you don't fly or find controls difficult you can always jump in to the random warpgate Liberator as a gunner and see how long you last. You may be shocked.

I have a running bet that someone will make an anti-air thread at least once a week. I haven't lost yet.

If you get sniped, or shot out of the air by a tank cannon, you deserved it. What snipers do most of all is keep peoples heads down, and punish those who don't stay mobile and seek cover.
As for tank cannons, I'm a terrible pilot, but even I know better than to fly in a simple, predictable path when MBTs are nearby.

This....Quoted for truth. This is about 80% of the problem. Most problem are easily avoidable when one actually tries to think about what they are doing instead of just getting angry at dying. Tactics > any weapon in game.

Well it was pretty absurd that air is the hard counter to air to begin with!

Games are usually not balanced when you need the same category of unit to fight that unit. That's not a game of rock-paper-scissors... that's a game of rock-rock-rock.

That it isnt absolutely gamebreaking if something is that strong

The A2A nosegun doesn't carry enough ammo to make it worth it, and the A2A secondaries make it harder to avoiding being rammed or daltoned by a lib. The default nosegun works much better because you can carry more ammo and stay further away, but you're definitely going to be killed by some libs until you learn how to dodge them. I see it every day, skilled lib crews eat inexperienced ESFs for breakfast. It's risky business going at a lib by yourself in a mossie, and it should be. You shouldn't be able to easily solo kill a 2-3 man lib crew.

I have to disagree with the opinion that 'there is no counter to air'
I believe hat this thought process stems from the fact that pilots will spend hours upon hours practicing their craft and then someone thinks that they can once-in-a-while get into a turret or skyguard or max (burster) and be able to just slaughter air.
There is skill to using a burster Max and learning to lead shots, the same with a skyguard.
Trust me, my friend is amazing with the max and I can't kill anything.
I suggest that the game is balanced but there is a huge discrepancy between people who fly all the time and those who get pissed off when they are killed and say, "hey this thing says anti-air so I should have god mode".
-Arenblade...and yes I love to fly.

This is really not an issue of "learn to play". It's just that given the hard-coded limitations of the Skyguard cannon (low velocity, large CoF) there's just not much you can do with it.

Consider the "best" Skyguarder across all factions and servers, OtakuWizard. He or she manages to get 19.7 vehicle kills per hour with a 43.7% accuracy rate. Or the "best" Skyguarder by accuracy, Gumbs. 48.9% accuracy and 14.4 vehicle kills per hour.

I mean getting almost one vehicle kill every three minutes is nothing to sneeze at... until you note how well the Dalton can do.

The highest Dalton gunners (who aren't hacking and getting thousands of vehicle kills per hour) come in at 79.1. And their accuracy rate? 23.573%.

In other words you can be far less accurate with a Dalton and yet get far more vehicle kills with it.

That's the problem of the Skyguard. No matter how good you are, there is a very low ceiling of what you can do with it. You can lead, but because of slow projectile velocity it is easy for the aircraft to change heading before you hit. You can predict directions, but your CoF is so large that many of your shots will miss.

This is why the Skyguard needs buffs, so it can actually destroy aircraft within the much shorter engagement window before the aircraft flees the area. Or it can destroy aircraft that decide to directly confront the Skyguard, such as a Liberator.

Now I'm imagining two heavy assaults standing in front of each other with resist shield on chugging medkits because thats just the new meta.

There is enough counter to air, but from my experience, people use it too rarely. To me it happens way too often that you have like 50 people and not a single one brings a serious AA gun. I guess that's because the other weapons are just more fun to use.

There's a reason why people don't pull AA much. a niche weapon should be effective in it's designed role and sacrifice ability in other roles in exchange. except AA gives up it's AI and AV power for poor ability to kill aircraft.

planetside 2 is a killing game and yet AA is a deterrence weapon without lethality to back it up. you deter tanks, infantry with sniper fire and AV yes so they can retreat, but you can also deter them by killing them. that is the problem with AA it's poor damage makes it rarely anything more then a mild annoyance.

If you deter a MBT by destorying it you have kept that player from participating in a battle with a tank for a couple of minutes or more (depending on their resources), when you deter an ESF or lib by pelting it with a pellet gun it's out of a fight less then a minute.

Still fighting in another hex where AA isn't present or is weak with the time they are spending alive longer then anything else accumulating resources so by the time they are killed they can just pull another one.

meanwhile the AA operator now has a useless weapon or vehicle because there is no air around and they've wasted the same or more resources then the enemy air cost, while the air is farming certs away in another hex and if by luck you do kill one you get poor XP for it compared to the amount the air can print out on a regular basis.

This is a game meant for killing and gaining certs to get more equipment anything designed without proper killing potential against their intended targets is broken.

No one pulls a burster MAX cause one on one the ESF still wins forcing the MAX to stay near spawn room shields, and bad pilots just relocate to another base. So it is basically 450 resources wasted...

The fix: Make CLOSE RANGE flak much more dangerous. No one is asking for one burster MAX to clear the skies, but flying in low over a base should be straight out deadly if a competent burster MAX or skyguard is defending it.

Current AA solutions use to be super effective. AA launchers could lock on to planes from much further and could even navigate round mountains and obstacles to guarantee hits every time. Twin burster maxes would shred ESF with ease and especially so in groups.


But after the nerfs they're more friendly towards air forces and isn't as effective against ESF. Namely not many people use them. I rarely see dual welding burster maxes any more. Hell, even i rarely take an AA launcher namely most pilots are smart enough to simply fly higher than lockon range and just spam shells. So dealing with liberators can be a real nightmare sometimes.

But that said, A2G took a nerf as well. Rocket pods took a battering and i see less of it. So it all balances out. Sort of.

There are no (non-Air) hard counters to Air, the Devs wanted it this way and it is this way.

All ground based AA, no matter how good you are with it, is only area-denial.



If a pilot gets killed by AA Lock-ons, AA MAXs or Skyguards it is down to:

1) them doing something wrong - this is generally the case as in most cases Air always has the concious option to withdraw alive against ground based AA.

2) just being unlucky: i.e. you take a Lock-on hit and your escape route just happens to be right over a very alert pair of Skyguards - that is just life, you die in PS2, even as Air.



You can be as good as you can be with whatever type of AA, and if you get kills with it, it will be down to 1) or 2) in the end, of course being as good as you can be with AA does increase your chance of 1) or 2) being relevent.