Plot twist.

Streaming on TEH - http://twitch.tv/aimbotrenegade

Scrab, Tom, Nemarus, Moon-King, Drako, Tolgid, Lmeyya, Stacie vs. Me, alex, tsukuyomi, verain, xi'ao, phil, sriia, rhint.... Scouts win. (Note - using names I can recall at a moments notice. I bet you could swap players and still see the results the same) Opportunity cost of missing for a gunship is huge deficit Cost of barrel roll is more than a 3rd of the total engine power pool for gunships Tracking penalties on rails is massive Can't fire anywhere close to normal dps using lasers Can't keep up with the acout's engine consumption rates and regen Can't be as evasive Can't be as mobile or agile Have a 3x longer time to kill than a scout ....... These are facts. The scout doesn't have component or engine issues. They aren't stationary when firing. The are the cause of my accuracy dipping from 80% to 60% even with wingman active. They can fly in a not straight line on approach and be missed 9/10 times. They have an accuracy buff, an evasion dispel / evasion buff, and a crit and magnitude buff up for 50% of the game time, in addition to having a copilot ability for more accuracy. If I miss 1 shot on an approaching scout, i'm done. That's the biggest factor - missing for me means a lot more than missing for you

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=739827 We had an 11 page discussion on scouts vs gunships, starting from a 2-1 and going to a 2 on 2. Pay attention to where KuciWalker starts on the second page. The discussion has been had, and since the 2.6 nerfs, battle scouts certainly have the edge. Nova bolts aren't as much of a threat, but are still capable when they aren't fading.

I'm down to group for dailies at least - usually hop over to shadowlands around 7:30-8

You forgot strike fighters in the meta! Oh, BW did too.....

Contact BW. They will move your toon. Else, log on when the user who's stronghold you were in when they logged off, is on. That also should fix the problem

Neither Tom nor myself will actually be able to attend. I had a loss in the family, and Tom has to get his braces put on to match his new bow-tie (red w/ white polka dots). Super sucks, but I guess it has to super suck to be super serious :/ I haven't spoken to Scrab's for a while, but we'll try to catch the next one.

You were okay before you continued typing.... This is just wrong. New players can't be expected to be effective participants in high level matches, so we'll omit that bit about novice level, since I often don't base the meta off those who're just beginning. That said, you want to balance GSF for newbs? Don't have new players play against vets. Solve the actual problem by fixing what's broken, not citing cries for OP. The TTK for a scout is under 1 second depending the build. The TTK for a GS is a minimum of 3 seconds (2.7s with talent), and that requires a 16% crit on a scout, or DO. Even if the gunship hahas DO, a scout with DO is capable of killing faster (charge time). A GOOD scout, like the kind at the more advanced level, will not be approaching GSs on a straight approach. They're corkscrewing, coming from many angles and dodging by the sheer mobility of the scout. They then are within 4000m and light you up with quads and pods, popping targetting telemetry for good measure, cuz crits for kicks. Against a gunship wall, a scout isn't going to be a good choice, especially if there are drones and mines, just like if there is a team of nothing but acouts, a bomber squad with gunships is a good counter. Highest damage in the game comes from scouts. They don't have to be stationary to fire. Their engine components work more frequently and use lless energy through boost. They have the highest natural evasion in the game. The can close the gap of 15000 without being hit in the time it takes to charge 1 railgun. They can be outfitted to have the fastest turning in the game. They can naturally just change directi ok ns to have infinite missile breaks, assuming no spam. At the highest level of 1v1 duels between GS and Scout, scouts win more. Tom and I had a match on Jung'Ma. He accounted for 8 or my 9 deaths. I think I accounted for MAYBE 6? Teams weren't even a consideration because we met in open space. Even though Tom isn't running an evasion build, the amount of rails I shot at him and missed is maddening, but it's because he's not flying in a straight line. He's manuevering and dodging, and getting an average damage of 70k. The highest GS average is 57k at the moment. That's what happens when the opportunity cost for missing is higher on a GS than it is on a scout. Especially since the engine nerf along with the ion nerfs, the meta has been favoring scouts for a while now. Edit: 4 stings vs 4 GSs still lend advantage to the sting in terms of overall potential, with the pilot skill being the determining factor. Our Actuary, someone who's job it is to work with number and statistics, percentages, calculatikns, comparisons, etc. was one of the best Gunship pilots in the game. Since they nerfs GS, his math indicates that the Scout has the highest potential for damage as well as killing probability. These are the opinions that shape my beliefs - if the dude was that good in a GS and he switched to scout because he can identifidentify mathematically that there is a correlation between winning and having higher stats, and flying a flashfire, then it's probably right. Judging by the records threads too, i'd say so. Scouts have top dps and top overall damage. The bomber ball / gs wall is a tactic to be countered with counter tactics. Scouts dont have much of a place when your opposition field that team

The scout is optomized perfectly to be a killing machine early. An accuracy + crit talent that also dispels evasion, a missile break + evasion adder, a missile break that also lines you up head on, the natural evasion, and the copilot ability. Couple the best offensive combination for devastation with the ability to not have to be stationary when firing, you have the best hunter in the game. The only bit about being OP is that it's currently the only build that is THAT optomized. The ships aren't OP - RNG is.

.bump for relevance

So this is gonna be a long an adruous process, sifting through all the alts. Will throw one of these up whenever queue pops are slow For GUNSHIP (Quarrel) Status Quo - Reprisal - Jung'Ma - 89% Win % (100 Games) Status Quo - Reprisal - Jung'Ma - 7.73 KD (100 Games) Status Quo - Reprisal - Jung'Ma - 13.08 Avg Kills Per Battle (100 Games) Status Quo - Reprisal - Jung'Ma - 57163 Avg Damage Per Battle (100 Games) These numbers were higher, but as I was going to finish my last 3 games, I realized I was solo queue'd against a Penumbral premade (JM's impside GSF guild, including Tom). Reinforces the point about performing better as a team than a solo queue for certain stats, while solo queuing offers the opportunity for improving other stats.

This may be a result of the matchmaking system (It works?!?! ). How many matches have you played there? We've been on Shadowlands a lot and have had excellent queue times. I believe matchmaker prevents players under a certain amount of games (10 maybe?) from queuing into 12v12 matches which would mean that your rotation would get skipped if there are 24 people queuing, in addition to maybe other limiting factors. Drako's right though - type /who, press enter, and type denon mesas shipyards to see who's currently playing. The time of day that you're queuing is important too. so keep that in mind. Good Luck!

Ya know, that's actually a very insightful way of thinking. Huh. Thanks haha

A while back, Tom, Scrab, Pylan, and myself all went to pot5 and wrecked the server in stock ships (vs imps as we were pubs) and never even reaches he'd level 10 before vowing to not return under these conditions. This was at least 4 months ago though - are you saying that competition AS WELL AS queue times have improved?

Hey, I along with several other top tier aces play GSF every day for several hours a day. We are the voice of people who want to see you do well with this amazing game mode, but the devs need to meet us halfway here. My suggestion to improve GSF population (without cross server, because that should be the end goal, if not just having all queues regardless of server location be able to queue against each other, pending latency boundries). I've done the work of asking players who play GSF and players who don't, what would make them more likely to play and stick with GSF. The difficult part (identifying what your customers want) for you. STOP having the veterans queue against the new players. A lot of the older guys playing this game help new people, but the amount of time I spend trying to even have them give the game another chance is really bad. I know you want the GSF to have more of a grind, but it really hurts the novices who only get enough requisition in 1 game to level 1 thing up to pretty reasonable standard (since the devs bolstered the intro quest). Unfortunately, they don't know what to spend points in, so a new player will throw 5k into Rapid Fire Lasers on a scout, not realizing it's the worst weapon in the game. The new player doesn't have the patience to play again knowing that they can't actually kill anything. I encountered this exact situation before on multiple occassions, most recently last night. You can't assume that everyone is going to have the patience to get blasted to bits, feel like they suck and aren't contributing, and expect them to reque. This is your first hurdle. Give the stock load out on scouts LLCs, and overall refine the progression so that getting slaughtered on the first match doesn't prevent the player from wanting to reque (note that the vets play stock ships and win a large majority of the time, even against better geared newer players because we played enough to know what we're doing). Also, bolster a player under 25 games with a +25% damage boost and +25 percent shields. Giving new players bombers would also give a novice a chance to sit and get comfortable with the environment, plus prevents blow out matches in games where it's 8 vets in bombers against 8 2 ship new pilots with rapid fire laser scouts (hint - the game will not be fun for the new players and they won't que again). The aces want you to do whatever you can to increase player pool size and new player experience. It sucks having to make GSF alts on every server just to play with the small percentage of the community that plays. By having ONE, larger player pool, chances are that aces won't be in all of the same matches and the novices will be paired against more people closer to their level. The vets are fun - end game balance could always be tweaked, but you need to retain pilots. I can already think of more ways for the cartel market to reach GSFers, but only after you get the new guys in and queuing up. No one wants to be farmed or feel like they have no chance. Legacy or Faction wide hangars would also reduce the amount of effort having to be expended to level ships on multiple servers to bypass the lack of cross server. It would also help new pilots with accessing the game. If I can GSF with my ops toon, i'd que on him for GSF too if they shared a hangar, but since we cant, I have to chose "Am I running an op or am I running GSF". Since when was an MMO about locking you choice one aspect of the game? A PVE and PVE can carry both sets of gear. You don't have that luxury with GSF

An intentional way to bolster stats is to wait until a ship is mastered before flying it. I'm hoping my future GS will be legendary mwuahaha. Also, interesting to note other correlations - an increase in total damage may not reflect in a higher KD (Especially with ion). Playing for KD on the other hand may force damage to be lower because you're playing less risky encounters more often than pure dps output. Intent of play is what really seperation that. Maybe we'll be able to draw conclusions about the general GSF population by looking at individuals performance and applying patterns to the total population, i.e. this ship is best for raw damage, and here's why, beyond just the general build reasons because math would support it. Really liking the in depth analytics

Says your offline? MAKE MY TRAIN RIDE EXCITING, DAMMIT!! Since Drako is slacking, imma stream. http://twitch.tv/aimbotrenegade ^_~

Since none of us have egos here, I don't think anyone is going to feel slighted I largely posted that because it may not be obvious to the solo queuers why their win percentage drops (an equal number of close-skilled aces will effectively reduce their contributions) and in the event of having more aces than your opposition, chances are you'll win more often. In THIS case, it was an example of what I just wrote above, but also it goes against the standard of thought where a team full of goods vs a team full of bads will have to share the overall damage dealt more. The inferences we can draw from these records and the records that exist as fringe cases are truly interesting and lead to a bunch of underlying information / contributing factors. If only we got to the point where we have so many of these records that we can come up with almost certain outcomes and strategies from the beginning of the match, beyond just simple name recognition and ship count.

It's worth pointing out that even after multiple games of scrab vs Tom and I, scrab flies properly and RELENTLESSLY FOCUSES GSs, to the point where the GS has to devote an ample amount of awareness just to be aware of the intense focus while trying to get pop shots. In matches like this one, if one player is being contained, it gives the other player the freedom to get the score. Had Tom been more focused on peeling (which his build isn't designed for), his stats would've rapidly deteriorated. In matches where it's a 2-1, by isolating 1 pilot on each side, the team with two pilots still has someone else who can dish out the damage. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to figure out a way to manage super serious domination success

The change definitely changes the dynamics of engagements. It's certainly an interesting decision not to fix it

Does that happen even? The aces know who each other are, and if some scrub randomly throws up data showing he got 169k damage in a Rycer (and no one admits that they are an ace under a pseudo-name) then I think it's also pretty evident that the stats are false. No one is going to maniplate data for this - those that don't manipulate data are able to outperform others just by sheer performance and ability. Who lied to you in the past about video game records, especially when they call for the effort of manipulating screenshot that serve no purpose other than education. Of course most of these stats will be inflated when you're in a group, but other stats fall (see Drak's comment about premade vs. Solo que). Solo queues should get a chance to see how much they're hurting their factions's performance, all for the individualist's approach. Then those people want to call for nerfs and complain about an uneven playing field despite it being open to all. Threads like this provide something to shoot for after every other metric has been achieved (and again, this thread also serves a great purpose showing the self-gimp for some stats in percentages or overall numbers, but increases in others. Pro tip - wins go down in solo q).

Regen drain still at 100%

Two people have 100% win rate, but 1 person ssolo queues 107 games while the other queues as Apocalypse Bringer with 109 games. Who is first? Also, can we have a total games category? Screens must be shown for all servers used to pad the nums I only ask because I wrote Use Cases when I redesigned my former college's Grad School Acceptance program and we had to literally state EVERY possible situation and explain the outcome / reasons why. Btw, drinking Makers Mark gives you more accuracy, for all these stat folks. Caution though, you need a min of 5 shots to see results.

With all these strats, we actually haven't mentioned the biggest thing - destroy the bomer before they get there. Now realistically, if the entire enemy team swarms b, focus on clearing the node but make sure SOMEONE is pressuring the bombers, particularly with ion rails if you have them. This is actually a super important because by disrupting the bomber's ability to get situated, you're able to catch them in a position they DON'T want to be in. Again, solo play vs bombers is much more difficult, but even after getting bomber trolled, I think they're still a good addition to the meta (and I once felt this way too, primarily because you need so much coordination to take down a bomber squad). Use the force (VOIP) and you'll also benefit