34 replies to this topic

[LMG]

SpiritFoxMY, on 11 January 2018 - 12:06 PM, said:

The solution, of course, should be for the non-turners to pick off other things outside the deathball while the light fighters duke it out, but with the exceptions of GAAs and the new bombers, they cannot push caps by themselves fast enough to force the deathball to respond; usually one side has won and the other in the process for being picked apart piecemeal before a HF or MR can successfully flip a cap and so they too become prey for the roving bands of light fighters. 

 

So there needs to be something to force the deathball apart - GAAs are one part of that, but because they fly in low, they are just as vulnerable to being swarmed as any other airplane and they're too slow to flip caps rapidly enough to force a deathball to disband. Bombers are potentially part of the solution by forcing the fight up to altitude where the deathball has a hard time maintaining itself. Certain light fighters suddenly become competitive again but their low hitpoints means that they are more likely to be of use keeping heavy fighters away from bombers but most importantly, the deathball fragments as a result of the varying max altitudes of the various participants and the light fighters are forced to engage in more even fights with their other hanger mates.

 

While I agree that GAAs at low-mid tiers can't really travel around as efficiently, there's nothing as scary as a GAA in the right place at the right time. While I can't go capture all the map at once, I can at least capture key areas one at a time, forcing the enemy team to either respond to it or let me get the rest. This is especially true on maps with two Command Centers or a bunch of Garrisons, where the fight becomes a race of capture and recapture. That said, the only proper way to force a deathball to disband with this strategy is making GAAs take more than one competent aircraft to shoot down, which I don't think many would like (WG included, as they did nerf bombkilling in the past )

Edited by LMG, 11 January 2018 - 06:42 PM.

[S4pp3REffecT]

Generally it's accurate, however situationally and case by case totally wrong.

If a HF does BnZ properly can counter just about anything.

Also there isn't just one type of Light Fighter, as planes such as 109s are more BnZ, if they tried to dogfight a Japanese fight - they would lose.

Still good basic concept

[mnbv_fockewulfe]

SpiritFoxMY, on 11 January 2018 - 05:06 PM, said:

 

They aren't hard counters though, which is what the OP is talking about. 

 

I personally subscribe to the Deathball Theory of Runaway Imbalance which is just a really fancy way of saying I think light fighters in dense clumps have an oversize ability to affect the battle simply because they can rapidly track targets and shift between multiple bandits in a manner that other airplanes cannot, hence a faster killing and, by extension, faster capping of targeted zones. Once that deathball breaks up, the game becomes much more even as the individual airplanes can battle it out on each other's individual strengths - the lower average speeds of light fighters becomes an issue as they can no longer rapidly clear each others' tails or swiftly gang up on a target while HFs and MRs can now use their speed to disengage-reengage without having to worry about being ganked by a million zeroes at once.  

 

The thing is, because deathballs are so efficient at capping, there's every incentive for light fighters to dive headlong into the scrum, creating a piece of whirling death for everyone else. But in such a scenario, as soon as one side starts losing, it snowballs RAPIDLY out of control as the team that wins the deathball is now all clumped up (and thus able to mutually support) while the losing team streams back piecemeal. So there's every incentive for players to try to win a deathball. But that simply puts the slow turners at a disadvantage as they cannot use their own massive advantages to great effect. 

 

The solution, of course, should be for the non-turners to pick off other things outside the deathball while the light fighters duke it out, but with the exceptions of GAAs and the new bombers, they cannot push caps by themselves fast enough to force the deathball to respond; usually one side has won and the other in the process for being picked apart piecemeal before a HF or MR can successfully flip a cap and so they too become prey for the roving bands of light fighters. 

 

So there needs to be something to force the deathball apart - GAAs are one part of that, but because they fly in low, they are just as vulnerable to being swarmed as any other airplane and they're too slow to flip caps rapidly enough to force a deathball to disband. Bombers are potentially part of the solution by forcing the fight up to altitude where the deathball has a hard time maintaining itself. Certain light fighters suddenly become competitive again but their low hitpoints means that they are more likely to be of use keeping heavy fighters away from bombers but most importantly, the deathball fragments as a result of the varying max altitudes of the various participants and the light fighters are forced to engage in more even fights with their other hanger mates.

 

That's the theory at any rate. I'm sleepy and half drunk so... also none of what I said is original, so there's that as well.

 

This^^^

The chart is not mentioned to be situational, but rather a repensentation of the meta. The large scale.

And I agree, things get a little different t8 and up.

[Hurk]

tail guns on heavy fighters need to be more punishing to lights that stay on said tail. after all, hes receiving bullets at a much higher velocity than hes dishing them out. 

[LMG]

Hurk, on 11 January 2018 - 09:33 PM, said:

tail guns on heavy fighters need to be more punishing to lights that stay on said tail. after all, hes receiving bullets at a much higher velocity than hes dishing them out. 

 

Same could be said about low-mid tier GAAs. Their tailguns don't get scary until tier VII, which means one decent fighter can shoot them down unless they have a skilled reargunner

[SpiritFoxMY]

Hurk, on 12 January 2018 - 02:33 AM, said:

tail guns on heavy fighters need to be more punishing to lights that stay on said tail. after all, hes receiving bullets at a much higher velocity than hes dishing them out. 

 

German heavies lose their tailguns at 7, Brits at 5. Americans never get tailguns. I disagree to this on grounds that a well executed boom is devastating and a competent zoom makes you extremely difficult to kill. No need to punish a light that tries to engage you any more than the game already does. At the same time, apart from the Brokenfighter, tailgunners are really only of use in a narrow arc directly behind the HF, so all increasing their damage will do is make a well flown HFs even more frustrating to kill while doing nothing to increase their ToT to help break up a deathball

 

LMG, on 12 January 2018 - 03:06 AM, said:

 

Same could be said about low-mid tier GAAs. Their tailguns don't get scary until tier VII, which means one decent fighter can shoot them down unless they have a skilled reargunner

 

I'm of two minds here but overall I'm again not a fan of making GAAs harder to kill. I'd personally prefer to increase the lethality of a GAA's defensive gunner at the cost of reduced overall HP. That way, an interceptor is justly punished for a bad approach while engaging the GAA doesn't feel like chipping at an iron ingot with a toothpick.

 

The reason for both of the above is basically in service of breaking up Deathballs by offering incentives for LFs to stray out alone or in small groups. Making a HF nigh unkillable outside a swarm of LFs doesn't encourage an LF to sweep the map alone - it encourages him to stay in a pack. Having GAAs feel like they take forever to kill is a strong disincentive for an LF to divert from the swarms of easy kills in a deathball.

 

For that matter, tone down the AA - again, overly powerful AA is another incentive for an LF to stay in a swarm - to disperse the damage coming their way.

Edited by SpiritFoxMY, 12 January 2018 - 10:15 AM.

[vcharng]

SpiritFoxMY, on 12 January 2018 - 10:13 AM, said:

 

I'm of two minds here but overall I'm again not a fan of making GAAs harder to kill. I'd personally prefer to increase the lethality of a GAA's defensive gunner at the cost of reduced overall HP. That way, an interceptor is justly punished for a bad approach while engaging the GAA doesn't feel like chipping at an iron ingot with a toothpick.

 

The reason for both of the above is basically in service of breaking up Deathballs by offering incentives for LFs to stray out alone or in small groups. Making a HF nigh unkillable outside a swarm of LFs doesn't encourage an LF to sweep the map alone - it encourages him to stay in a pack. Having GAAs feel like they take forever to kill is a strong disincentive for an LF to divert from the swarms of easy kills in a deathball.

 

For that matter, tone down the AA - again, overly powerful AA is another incentive for an LF to stay in a swarm - to disperse the damage coming their way.

It would probably be wiser to think about the possibility that GAA meets a non-GAA in one-on-one (human) games. Making GAAs more lethal and less survivable would mean the non-GAA player will simply chase the GAA player all over the map, and most definitely destroying the GAA player's gaming experience, if not also most definitely win the game as well.

The same applies to when the only higher-tier human player on one side is a GAA and the other is a fighter, the GAA player's teammates will have difficulty protecting him against a higher-tier fighter, if not entirely giving up and try to win by other means. With these situations coming into place, we will lose a considerable amount of GAA players, especially at higher tiers, due to the extremely unpleasant experiences flying GAAs, such as constantly being hunted down, being given up by teammates, and an unacceptable number of sorties and amount of time spent waiting for respawns.

[LMG]

vcharng, on 12 January 2018 - 06:23 AM, said:

It would probably be wiser to think about the possibility that GAA meets a non-GAA in one-on-one (human) games. Making GAAs more lethal and less survivable would mean the non-GAA player will simply chase the GAA player all over the map, and most definitely destroying the GAA player's gaming experience, if not also most definitely win the game as well.

The same applies to when the only higher-tier human player on one side is a GAA and the other is a fighter, the GAA player's teammates will have difficulty protecting him against a higher-tier fighter, if not entirely giving up and try to win by other means. With these situations coming into place, we will lose a considerable amount of GAA players, especially at higher tiers, due to the extremely unpleasant experiences flying GAAs, such as constantly being hunted down, being given up by teammates, and an unacceptable number of sorties and amount of time spent waiting for respawns.

 

Wait, teamwork while flying on a GAA? Protection while taking sectors? What kind of sorcery is that!?

[vcharng]

LMG, on 12 January 2018 - 02:12 PM, said:

 

Wait, teamwork while flying on a GAA? Protection while taking sectors? What kind of sorcery is that!?

 

Like I mentioned before, those belong to the "give 'em something else to shoot at" level of teamwork.

But in those situations even that would prove difficult.

[LMG]

vcharng, on 12 January 2018 - 09:25 AM, said:

Like I mentioned before, those belong to the "give 'em something else to shoot at" level of teamwork.

But in those situations even that would prove difficult.

 

Sadly that doesn't really happen often for GAAs. Usually when a fighter comes with me, they're trying to play GAA themselves. In fact, I've grown paranoid and prefer to stay on my own or with a flight ally than with the fighters on my team. One dead ally over a sector can mean it takes another 2-3 minutes to capture it, depending on the sector. I've actually lost games because someone on my team died over a sector at the start of the battle (and I have done the dying a few times in the past, some of them being a result of not loading into the game on time and smashing into terrain ). Anyways, I have an interesting theory about a hidden meta after playing with the Hurricane II I got from a lootbox, and that's that GAAs could actually be the ones that control the flow of the game instead 

[SpiritFoxMY]

vcharng, on 12 January 2018 - 11:23 AM, said:

It would probably be wiser to think about the possibility that GAA meets a non-GAA in one-on-one (human) games. Making GAAs more lethal and less survivable would mean the non-GAA player will simply chase the GAA player all over the map, and most definitely destroying the GAA player's gaming experience, if not also most definitely win the game as well.

The same applies to when the only higher-tier human player on one side is a GAA and the other is a fighter, the GAA player's teammates will have difficulty protecting him against a higher-tier fighter, if not entirely giving up and try to win by other means. With these situations coming into place, we will lose a considerable amount of GAA players, especially at higher tiers, due to the extremely unpleasant experiences flying GAAs, such as constantly being hunted down, being given up by teammates, and an unacceptable number of sorties and amount of time spent waiting for respawns.

 

The idea of more lethal defensive gunners is so that the GAA can theoretically better defend himself by shooting down his pursuer first (or at least damaging him enough in a burst or two to scare him away) before the guy can chip down his hitpoints. If necessary improve the overall performance of the GAAs by a smidge to counteract the loss of absolute HP.

 

Why I'm putting this idea forward is kill economy - how much time it takes for a player to score a kill. Right now, GAAs have very low kill-economy because it takes so much time to blow through all that HP. In the time it takes to kill a single GAA, I can slaughter two, three, maybe even four enemy LFs and MRs in an LF. Given that air-to-air kills are more valuable than ground kills, and thinning out the herd of LFs increases the chances of my team's success in a deathball dramatically, GAAs simply aren't tempting targets. The only reason someone shoots at a GAA is because a) the GAA is close to capping the base, b) is almost dead from air defenses anyway or c) its the only target in sight. 

 

At the same time, the extra HP doesn't go very far in allowing the GAA to survive in totality: its a more "Stay on target" situation as you press on desperately trying to kill your targets before your opponent kills you. What I'm suggesting is to balance out the GAA's defensive lethality with lower vitality that will allow a GAA pilot the chance to fight it out with an attacking fighter with a reasonable chance of winning while at the same time offering a tempting target that the LF pilot can hope to pick off quickly enough that he/she won't be sacrificing too many other kills to do so. Maybe cut their total HP by 25%, increase defensive fire range and burst length by a similar amount and give them a little bit more maneuverability in the horizontal. Heck, allow GAAs to repair up to 75% of their HP even outside Airbase caps even.

 

Something like that at any rate.

 

Edited by SpiritFoxMY, 12 January 2018 - 02:52 PM.

[SpiritFoxMY]

I must rush to add that I am not blaming GAAs for the predominance of LFs in the current meta. Rather my comments about GAAs are part of a much larger conversation around WoWp's battlefield economics as they currently stand, which militate towards the effectiveness of LFs and how changes in the overall combat environment can impact said economies to produce a dissipative effect on the LF Deathball that's the source of LF dominance.

Edited by SpiritFoxMY, 12 January 2018 - 03:02 PM.

[LMG]

SpiritFoxMY, on 12 January 2018 - 09:50 AM, said:

The idea of more lethal defensive gunners is so that the GAA can theoretically better defend himself by shooting down his pursuer first (or at least damaging him enough in a burst or two to scare him away) before the guy can chip down his hitpoints. If necessary improve the overall performance of the GAAs by a smidge to counteract the loss of absolute HP.

 

Why I'm putting this idea forward is kill economy - how much time it takes for a player to score a kill. Right now, GAAs have very low kill-economy because it takes so much time to blow through all that HP. In the time it takes to kill a single GAA, I can slaughter two, three, maybe even four enemy LFs and MRs in an LF. Given that air-to-air kills are more valuable than ground kills, and thinning out the herd of LFs increases the chances of my team's success in a deathball dramatically, GAAs simply aren't tempting targets. The only reason someone shoots at a GAA is because a) the GAA is close to capping the base, b) is almost dead from air defenses anyway or c) its the only target in sight. 

 

At the same time, the extra HP doesn't go very far in allowing the GAA to survive in totality: its a more "Stay on target" situation as you press on desperately trying to kill your targets before your opponent kills you. What I'm suggesting is to balance out the GAA's defensive lethality with lower vitality that will allow a GAA pilot the chance to fight it out with an attacking fighter with a reasonable chance of winning while at the same time offering a tempting target that the LF pilot can hope to pick off quickly enough that he/she won't be sacrificing too many other kills to do so. Maybe cut their total HP by 25%, increase defensive fire range and burst length by a similar amount and give them a little bit more maneuverability in the horizontal. Heck, allow GAAs to repair up to 75% of their HP even outside Airbase caps even.

 

Something like that at any rate.

 

Actually, GAAs make use of every single hit point they get atm. The tailgunner isn't worth a damn if the GAA is going to die in a quick burst anyways. It's more noticeable on tier VII GAAs, where you output a lot of damage but can't take much yourself. Your tailgunner WILL leave a dent on whatever's chasing you, but you can at best take on one full health fighter per sortie, and after that you're left with barely any health to be useful anymore. And that's not taking into consideration the amount of damage you can take while trying to capture sectors on your own; I've had times where the Air Defense Aircraft chip away over half of my health before I get to destroy two ground targets, let alone the AA guns (which is why I prefer long-range cannons, as I can shoot the AA before they start shooting me). Moving from tier VII to tier VIII on the soviet line was such a change for me because my aircraft suddenly has enough health to deal with same-tier threats. However, when dealing with a higher tier aircraft I still melt, even on my IL-20 

[vcharng]

SpiritFoxMY, on 12 January 2018 - 02:50 PM, said:

 

The idea of more lethal defensive gunners 

 

Oh, I thought you were talking about being more lethal "to the ground targets".

So I misunderstood, it seems.

I just shot down two bot LFs with my rear gun on my 1102B a couple of hours ago, and then I crashed into the mountain as I wasn't flying, but was controlling the rear gun manually.

So I would say that your proposal may prove useful, but just like what LMG said, the GAAs need their HP as much as their rear gun as their defense, and such a large scale changing may need a lot of testing and adjustments.

[mnbv_fockewulfe]

SpiritFoxMY, on 12 January 2018 - 02:50 PM, said:

 

The idea of more lethal defensive gunners is so that the GAA can theoretically better defend himself by shooting down his pursuer first (or at least damaging him enough in a burst or two to scare him away) before the guy can chip down his hitpoints. If necessary improve the overall performance of the GAAs by a smidge to counteract the loss of absolute HP.

 

Why I'm putting this idea forward is kill economy - how much time it takes for a player to score a kill. Right now, GAAs have very low kill-economy because it takes so much time to blow through all that HP. In the time it takes to kill a single GAA, I can slaughter two, three, maybe even four enemy LFs and MRs in an LF. Given that air-to-air kills are more valuable than ground kills, and thinning out the herd of LFs increases the chances of my team's success in a deathball dramatically, GAAs simply aren't tempting targets. The only reason someone shoots at a GAA is because a) the GAA is close to capping the base, b) is almost dead from air defenses anyway or c) its the only target in sight.

 

At the same time, the extra HP doesn't go very far in allowing the GAA to survive in totality: its a more "Stay on target" situation as you press on desperately trying to kill your targets before your opponent kills you. What I'm suggesting is to balance out the GAA's defensive lethality with lower vitality that will allow a GAA pilot the chance to fight it out with an attacking fighter with a reasonable chance of winning while at the same time offering a tempting target that the LF pilot can hope to pick off quickly enough that he/she won't be sacrificing too many other kills to do so. Maybe cut their total HP by 25%, increase defensive fire range and burst length by a similar amount and give them a little bit more maneuverability in the horizontal. Heck, allow GAAs to repair up to 75% of their HP even outside Airbase caps even.

 

Something like that at any rate.

 

 

 

I really like the idea of TGs being punishing if you make improper approach.

I would say, increase the alpha damage of TGs, but decrease the tracking accuracy.

I'm not saying increase dispersion, the circle of probability of where the bullets will hit, but decrease the ability of the TG to lead the target.

You'll get hit less often, but the few bullets that hit will do more damage. This way, it isn't like you're constantly losing health. As it stands, it feels like you're likely of surviving a TG depends on how long you stay in the firing arc. The constant damage from laser like accuracy is, odd.

And no, TGs aren't a particular problem of mine.

Spoiler