With pod AV being reduced, can we buff Hornet Velocity or give it a dumbfire option?

Reposted from reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/27mcmg/with_esf_pods_receiving_reduced_vehicle_damage/

ESF pods are going to do less damage towards armor than they do now in an upcoming patch.
I think everyone ran pods even VS armor because A). More ammo is more forgiving. B) More DPS and most importantly C) The ability to quickly unleash damage, and then maneuver/AB away.

The damage is fine on Hornets I think, and it's easy enough to hit armor, but what makes hornets extremely hard to pull off is being forced to fly in a straight line until the missile hits.

Let's be honest here, an ESF flying straight within 300-350m of 2 heavies, a skyguard* or one burster MAX has, (depending on loadouts), a 1 to 3 second window to afterburner the **** out of there or face wanton abandon and death.

When armor is pulled there is usually a bit more than just that one tank or sundy, usually more than a few sources of anti air are within that 300m or so that will light up your exact position with tracers, and your straight, usually slow flying ESF is the perfect XP pinata.

Pilots need to be able to launch hornets towards a given enemy armor and be able to get out quickly after they are launched. Yet, because hornets are guided towards the crosshair, there is no way to maneuver the ESF without throwing your missiles wildly off track.

A few ideas to fix this: (I'd prefer B or C)

A) Make them a bit faster dumbfire version of what they are currently and reduce the damage slightly. Basically a longer range, slightly faster AV version of pods. Less risk, less reward.
B). Simply increasing the velocity or adding accelerating velocity(the longer it flies, the faster it travels)
C). The option to cut the guidance and leave the missiles going straight ahead (with some drop of course, to make sniping difficult) (credit to MrIDoK)
D). Change it to a lock on variant to ground vehicles, Tomcats, but A2G. Reduce reload time, range, and/or damage accordingly.

TL;DR Hornets take too long to get to a target, and make the pilot a fish in a barrel. With pods AV being reduced, hornets deserve a proper AV niche, which I don't think it is capable of currently.

Meh they are going from the larger rocket to the smaller rockets in this image


http://zandernerf.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/nerf_titan_08.jpg


Shooting Styrofoam is still shooting Styrofoam.... worthless

Eh, ESFs still 1-shot a tank from behind (full rocket mag plus about half your rotary.) Rocketpods definitely aren't weak right now.

The problem has always been a lack of forced specialization to ESFs. (You can take the best G2A (rocketpods) while taking the best A2A (nosegun))

Many solutions exist that get ESFs there, but nerfing rocketpods without providing a G2A nosegun at the same time would be a bad move. Tanks can already fight off ESFs if they take a Walker and maintain awareness of what's behind them so they don't get rear-ended.

My personal favorite was a more involved solution that addressed both ESFs and Libs:

• ESF and Lib weapons get a "weight" value.
• Higher weight weapons decrease agility and increase your momentum.
• But higher weight weapons are also the best against heavily-armored targets. (Progressively better armor piercing the heavier they are.)

So by simply taking TankBuster and Dalton on the same Lib, you'd be muchless agile and awful against air, but still amazing against heavy ground targets. Meanwhile a player who only took a light nosegun with afterburners would actually be a little more agile than current ESFs, but would be poorly equipped to handle heavily-armored foes.

One entirely different solution (without the weight concept) would be to provide a heavy nosegun for ESFs so that when they combine that with rocketpods they achieve the current levels of G2A dominance, but that heavy nosegun is noticeably worse against agile targets (it would basically be a lighter version of the Tank Buster, with better AV damage than other noseguns but slow projectiles, bad accuracy, and heavy drop.) So this method requires you to fill both slots with G2A weapons to be good at G2A. So that'd be your G2A loadout. For a generalist loadout, nosegun+rocket would still exist and be reasonably good against everything but no longer the best at G2A. For A2A, we already have nosegun+coyotes (afterburners are okay too), so that's already in a good spot.

So it only requires a solid G2A nosegun and ESFs are in a great spot after this change. Til then, they'll probably be a bit lacking.

I would like it if Hornets inherited the ESF's velocity.

Its not that strong in practice. I have probably been killed by an ESF using pods on me once in 3-6 months. There is a boat load (as in WAY TO MUCH) of AA and AV weapons in the game, pretty much now if you kill anything with pods they were already quite hurt.

I also think you meant A2G not G2A


Well you kind of have the same base impression as me on how ESFs and libs should work in your solution, but realistically...
The Lib should have the same armor pool (maybe just a tad more) then an ESF. It's size should be a reflection of the super heavy weapons it houses, and the engines needed to sustain flight with the weight of those guns and extra players inside to control them.
The Gal should be the punching bag of the sky, and a Lib shouldn't be flying without an escort anyway.

With their current armor +Guns + engine size..... Libs should be moving as slow as gals if not slower.

If libs were changed to be like the above, it would pave the way for a few AA nerfs.


As far as weapons, Libs should be the A2G platform. With more focus on Anti Tank, but should never be stronger then say an MBT at killing other MBTs given the AP loadout. The lib should have no A2A capability

Where as the ESF should be the A2A platform and any A2G options (AT and AI) should be merely deterrent

The Gal should be the super slow, heavy armor, transport but with medium weapons platforms that perform more as a deterrent to Air and ground

If it was more like that, AA could be reduced greatly, and (lockons should be removed from the game neway)


The Libs should be directly countered by ESFs, hence why they should also be escorted by ESFs. Ground based AA (or G2A) should be light to medium deterrent ONLY to aircraft.


Also since everyone has a different definition of "deterrent". I believe in PS2 if a weapon is a "deterrent" instead of a "counter", means it should be easy to use (and possibly large splash radius) but low damage

While a lot of what we're saying is similar, I disagree with this part.

There's not really a good reason ESFs shouldn't be a viable A2G platform as long as they sacrifice sufficient A2A capability. I think there's even room for an A2A-specced Lib to exist, as long as it's only slightly better than if those two players were in A2A ESFs.

It makes the game far more interesting if you see an ESF and don't know whether it's kitted A2A, A2G or generalist, than a game where ESFs are always A2A by their nature. And I think there's room for that same type of thing with libs too.

Yup, all it needs.

It'd be cool if the ESFs got like a Dive Bomb.

I'd like it if you had to press and hold the fire button to guide the missiles. If you let go then the missiles continue their current trajectory, just like a dumbfire missile. Or just make them heatseeking like coyotes but only to ground vehicles/max's ^^

Didn't they say they don't want ESFs performing A2G work? Or AV work, at least?

Hornets would be so awesome if they were dumbfire.

With their current speed you either have to faceplant into whatever you're trying to hit, or you have to slow down so much that anyone can shoot you down without really trying.

Well if they don't, it's kind of stupid on their part to include rocket pods and hornet missiles in the first place, or were we supposed to be shooting other planes with those?

No, I meant they said this just recently. Like "we were wrong to give ESF A2G capability" or something. Okay, gonna go search that.
Here it is:

So apparently they want ESFs to be AA and AI?.. or something