Depends on what role you want to fill. The Blackbolt/Novadive is a general all purpose scout. It can fill most roles based on what components you have loaded. (For example - typical utility scout would be sab probe, communication sensors, sensor beacon. A dogfighter/objective capture would use rocket pods, targeting telemetry, and maybe dampening sensors). The Sting/Flashfire is a straight up dogfighter. It gets cluster missiles, burst and quad lasers, the sensors are replaced with a shield reactor. More specialized, but better at what it does. All purpose? Quad lasers and cluster missiles. Short range burst? (What I like to call gunship killer) Burst lasers, rocket pods, blaster overcharge, bypass. It doesn't really sound like you want to specialize in hunting gunships, but I kind of like having multiple fighters for different purposes. Unless your time is limited, it really doesn't hurt to get both ships leveled up.

What for? They're already penalizing themself and their team enough by taking them out of the match for 15-30 seconds. All that does is punish the newbies who fly into things all the time. 1) While I agree that barrel roll on a gunship is a bit much, it's too late to do that. As soon as they start arbitrarily removing components from ships you may as well just throw in the towel since they can arbitrarily mess with your favorite ship and loadout at any time. The problem is more that barrel roll itself is too good no matter what ship you use with it. It could use a range reduction or cooldown increase for how useful it is. 3) Strikes are about versatility, not raw power. You can change their loadouts and switch to adapt to multiple situations, where as scouts tend to be very locked into a role (short range dogfighter, objective capture, scouting etc. etc.) 6) They're adding something in the patch, but probably won't help if the afker just moves to an objective and sits there. I've honestly gotten confused by all the talk about them, because I never really see them.

Unfortunately, bombers are going to be very good at abusing the tactic, too. Especially since they don't even need to stick their noses out of their perch to attack people. My main concern with bombers is they appear to be a very low skill unit.

I haven't had any problem with my space missions. I'm still working toward Hyperspace Legend, so tend to run several missions a day.

The problem is that it flat out doesn't exist. To the best of my knowledge, there is no keybind section for space missions unless it is buried somewhere weirdly unintuitive. I went looking for it one time on the vain hope that I could either unhinge proton torpedoes from normal missiles, or at least see if holding a prot lock would be easier with a keyboard button instead of a mouse button. No luck. Only solution that 'might' work is to reset all keybinds to default, but that would be very annoying if you have a lot of custom keybinds set up just the way you want them.

Yeah, I would have liked to see a combined column because of how misleading the kill auto-sort is. But we'll finally be able to actually document what earned what requisition, and it should hopefully help avoid another round of 'They're stealing my kills!' posts. Actually this is a nice little out of combat tweak for more spatially challenged players like myself. I use the minimap to navigate a fair amount, and if I'm turned upside down nine times out of ten I start going the wrong direction. I think my record was taking about forty five seconds to get going in the right direction once. In the middle of a fight, I couldn't care less what direction I'm facing (well for maneuvering yes navigating no), but once I leave a fight and try to head to my next objective, this is a nice thing to have. Shoot, how did I miss seeing that? Sweet. Though I imagine squad/team players such as yourself will get a lot more use out of it than I would. I imagine Death/Black squadron games will start resembling some kind of hive mind now instead of merely a locust swarm. It will probably make it similar to defend as B in the ground map. Though probably gives gunships more of an opportunity than that one. Not sure I care for the change either. That was supposed to be the point to C. Near immunity to being sniped.

You should have access to your gunship on the 14th. Still no official word on whether you have to purchase your first gunship or not. (Though I suspect not, since first gunship was free to the current owners). And until we have more people queuing or a cross-server system, there's only so much that can be done about the matchmaking. Hopefully at the preferred launch next week and full launch next month more people will add in so newbies aren't thrown up against as much with the experienced pilots with upgraded ships.

To go back to the original question... no I don't think there is a point to Ion missile. If it had a range between concussion/proton, or a much shorter lockon time it might work better. As it stands, by the time you get a successful lock, you've likely blasted the target's shields off anyway at which point you should have been using concussions. The star guard handles this much better since you can shoot shields off with ion blasters while you're locking your missile.

They'll have access to them. Not sure if they need to purchase their first gunship with fleet req or not. Guess we'll find out next week. And yes, while gear makes some difference, it's more like a level 40 picking a fight with a level 50. If the level 40 knows what they are doing(moreso than the level 50 who may have coasted to that level), it is possible for them to win. I probably underestimate the value of upgrades a lot of time, but in most cases skill trumps gear in almost any case in GSF. And honestly? I'm not sure how well matchmaking will work unless they implement some kind of cross server queuing. I'm torn on that. While it is a more balanced experience against premades, I'll probably miss seeing a lot of familiar allies/opponents during matches.

Burst with armor pen and shield damage. I'd run double shield pierce/damage since shields annoy me, but my scout doubles as an objective capture, so I like having additional anti-turret offense. The lasers aren't bad, but I'm not used to fighting opponents that stay still, so I like having the damage coming in bigger chunks when I get them in my sights.

Then create it. Announce it on server forums, get some people to help you pass the word around on server. Maybe mention it before fights begins in the ops channel.

During prime time probably, yeah. It's a bit more balanced early morning or very late night. I imagine a lot of people queue sparingly during the heavy hours because facing full groups of premades is either an exercise in frustration (Republic) or boredom (Imperial). Fighting two or three of them is fun since it really forces you to up your game. Facing 4-6+ is an exercise in futility.

Wheras I prefer not to be involved in a curb stomp battle. It's nice when the imperials put up a good fight. One sided matches tend to be pretty boring, and I can't really practice my skills very much if we just roll over our opponents.

Was that a part of beta or something? Haven't seen a whisper about that.

This month. Preferred and later subscribers get their gunships on Jan 14th. Wish I could remember where it was stated, but it was pretty unambiguous. What we can't answer is if people will have to purchase their gunship first. My guess is we get the first one free, then have to use fleet req/cartel coins to buy any further models.

Keep in mind that F1 not only increases your weapon regeneration rate, it also slightly increases your damage magnitude. Even if you don't need the weapon power, it rarely hurts to change to F1 while you snipe, then change back when you scoot. (Unless you're really hurting for engine power). And I would suggest starting to learn the ins and outs of your ion cannon. The sheer utility - particularly once fully upgraded is incredible. It isn't about damage. It's about hosing opponent shield, weapon, and engine power pools. A neat tactic if you have the AoE upgrade is to aim it at a turret. The AoE blast usually is close enough to hit any satellite humpers.

Yes, they are incredible weapons in short range encounters where you can anticipate you won't be able to hold sustained fire on an opponent. If you're in the habit of mid range encounters with decent periods you can stay on target they're far less useful.

It still fairly accurately describes your feelings about the matter though. It's a matter of perception and yes, while they are an outlier being the only pure long range fighter, doesn't mean they don't belong or the game wasn't designed for them. And until you can adapt to them, they're going to continue to make you unhappy.

Considering gunships were in pretty much from the beginning... I would say yes, the game was in fact designed to accomodate sniping! And you know what? A lot of people are having lots of fun either by being gunship hunters, or by adjusting fighting tactics to anticipate the presence of gunships on the field of battle. Let me ask you this, if you were dogfighting against someone, and strike fighters repeatedly added into the fight and killed you, would you be asking for them to be removed? No, probably not. Gunships just stand out because of their range and their damage comes in larger chunks so they 'feel' more dangerous. Unless there is a lucky crit involved, I can kill something more quickly on my scout than I can a gunship. I need about 4.5-6 seconds (1.5-2 full charge rail shots) to kill something on my gunship, but can wipe the floor with a ship in about 3 seconds on a scout if I can focus them.

I popped my head into the server to see what the fuss is about. I had the honor of getting curbstomped by Shadowfist and then Toe. Well, at least I helped Toe accidentally suicide against a satellite once, so that's something! I'm thinking I may stick around...

Much like the Ion Rail cannon, ion blasters are most effective when maxed out and can be used for utility as much as razing enemy shields. When I'm flying strike, though (not often), I make use of them because shields are my biggest annoyance. I bring out my strike for close-satellite dog fighting, and all that circling around and ducking behind things gives plenty of time to regenerate shields, and I prefer to take shields out as quickly as possible before switching to heavy weapons for the kill.

I would equate the stories almost the same, with a slight edge toward Sith Warrior. Sith warrior felt a lot more dynamic and more like your choices actually mattered at all. It's the only character that has one of their companions change dynamically based on your decisions. The resolution to the story kind of fell on its face though. Guardian is a pretty solid story all the way through, if not particularly interesting. The resolution was really good, though the leadup to it was kind of anticlimactic (Wait, he's vulnerable now? But we didn't DO anything!)

Out of curiosity, how is relative faction balance on Pot5 for GSF? I play on Ebon Hawk, but a lot of the GSF players I respect here on the forums seem to be Pot5.

Unfortunately that won't help him because gunships only use secondary fire button to enter/exit snipe mode. He'd have to rebind his primary fire key - and that would likely be far more trouble than it is worth.

So you're saying you were beaten by two ships instead of one? How exactly would the scenario have been different if a scout or strike fighter came up behind you while you were dogfighting and took you out?