My first post - Is about Starfighter PvP

[DamascusAdontise]

Maybe I'm not getting my real point across. I've been known to to that from time to time.

 

In PvP arenas, I know at the VERY LEAST I will be in the top 3 dmg/kills (if not #1 the majority of the time) which yields a very good amount of exp and rewards. So even if my team loses, do I really care? Nope.

 

In Starfighter I am probably in the bottom 3 probably 75% of the time. When we do have what looks to be more of an even match I'll be somewhere in the middle. NEVER been in the top 3, at all, ever.

 

It's a complete flip from Ground to Starfighter. Now I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts if you put me in a fully upgrade gunship or starfighter that my numbers would change immensely.

 

And that's my point. Ground PvP feels very much like gear does not matter at all (keep in mind I haven't hit 55 PvP yet) and Starfighter feels the exact opposite heavily relying on Ships and upgrades. This makes me not want to log into Starfighter at all. I get dailies done and quit.

 

Hey there man, really want to help out. Can you provide what ship(s) and build(s) your using, there are huge differences between the stock components, and whats available. Part of your issue could be "build" relted. GSF is a lot to digest, especially the builds (components and crew)

 

Tactics are equally important.

 

As a few quick tips. You can manage your power with the F keys (default) this is extremely important to succeeding, switching to weapon energy pool (F1) grants additional blaster effectiveness, as do the other settings which boost shield and engine effectiveness respectively. If your not micro managing these your doing it wrong, I switch A LOT =)

 

Weapons have optimum ranges:

 

Burst Laser (close range 0-2000 optimal)

 

Quad Laser (medium range 2000-4000 optimal)

 

Heavy Laser (long range 3000-5000 optimal)

 

These are all general estimates (I might be off a bit on some

 

Also: Missile breaks (certain engine abilities and some system abilities) are very important to have, distortion fields last upgrade tier has the best missile break in the game.

 

Anyways this is just a few tidbits, if we knew more about your build and playstyle I could probably help =)

 

(gear is not near as important in ground PvP, @ 55 entry level in PvP there is literally nothing you can do to a geared opponent. In GSF a bone stock ship can decimate a fully upgraded ship, assuming its piloted well. The build is important, but the skill to use it properly is far more important - IMO its like this Skill > Group > Components)

Edited May 9, 2014 by DamascusAdontise

[Verain]

In PvP arenas, I know at the VERY LEAST I will be in the top 3 dmg/kills (if not #1 the majority of the time) which yields a very good amount of exp and rewards. So even if my team loses, do I really care? Nope.

 

And I bet you know how to play in arena!

 

In Starfighter I am probably in the bottom 3 probably 75% of the time. When we do have what looks to be more of an even match I'll be somewhere in the middle. NEVER been in the top 3, at all, ever.

 

I have topped kills, assists, and damage in an absolute stock ship. I have flown with other pilots who have done the same in the ship YOU fly (the Starguard/Rycer). Absolutely stock.

 

The difference here is that the folks I'm talking about are experienced.

 

It's a complete flip from Ground to Starfighter.

 

Yes, because while you are experienced in arena- and have probably buttressed that with pvp whilst leveling, and in similar games such as Rift or WoW- GSF is new to you.

 

Now I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts if you put me in a fully upgrade gunship or starfighter that my numbers would change immensely.

 

They'd go up for sure. You'll be harder to kill, and do more damage. But it isn't the difference.

 

And that's my point. Ground PvP feels very much like gear does not matter at all (keep in mind I haven't hit 55 PvP yet) and Starfighter feels the exact opposite heavily relying on Ships and upgrades. This makes me not want to log into Starfighter at all. I get dailies done and quit.

 

You aren't good at GSF. It isn't arena.

 

Your claim- that you are good at the game but can't play because you have no gear- has SOME merit. The gear difference should probably be smaller. But it's not why you are getting owned. The stuff you posted doesn't describe anything that happens in the game. I can't even begin to guess which situations you are describing. You said you got "two shot". Ok, what shots? Who shot you? You said you hit some guy 20 times or something. Really? How much damage did each shot do? Were you just assuming you were hitting because you have total faith in your awesome aiming skill which hasn't been used anywhere else in SWTOR, or did you see one digit numbers pop up? Did you think to ask what could cause that?

 

 

If you want to have a serious discussion, tell us what's happening and we can explain. If you just want to throw your hands up and decide that the problem couldn't have anything to do with you, then I can put you on a stock ship next to ana and drako and see you show off your leet skills compared to them. Same gear, mind you.

Edited May 9, 2014 by Verain

[Kuciwalker]

All of us were bad at the start.

 

Speak for yourself?

[Kuciwalker]

THIS IS WHAT I THINK OF WHEN I SEE PLASMA - ORANGE / YELLOWS

 

That's pretty red dude.

[Verain]

Speak for yourself?

 

If you want to believe you didn't skill up over time, go right ahead.

[Kuciwalker]

It's a complete flip from Ground to Starfighter. Now I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts if you put me in a fully upgrade gunship or starfighter that my numbers would change immensely.

 

Nope.

[Kuciwalker]

If you want to believe you didn't skill up over time, go right ahead.

 

I came in off of hundreds of hours of flight time in Freelancer.

[tommmsunb]

I came in off of hundreds of hours of flight time in Freelancer.

 

This basically.

[Ryuku-sama]

This basically.

 

Okay... Lets say that us simple mortal who didn't play freelancer or some other flight sim/space sim before did skill up in december/on PTS....

[Pilgrim_Grey]

Nope.

 

I'm guessing you today could beat you on your day 1 of GSF. Even if you were all awesome and stuff on your day 1.

[Kuciwalker]

His thesis wasn't simply that we got better; his thesis was that we started out bad.

[Ramalina]

Yeah, so the analogy I'm gonna use here is that the OP thinks that because someone knows how to drive a car to the grocery story just down the street, they should be able to hop in an 18 foot dinghy and sail across the North Atlantic in mid-winter navigating with a compass, sextant, and a watch. Different skill sets. Just like a person that can sail a little sailboat across dangerous seas isn't guaranteed to know how to back the car out of the driveway without hitting a tree, mailbox, or fire hydrant.

 

Skillsets you need for GSF success:

 

Understand MMORPG mechanics by reading tooltips and patchnotes. Pretty much the only skill that transfers well from ground PvP. Things like figuring out that the way to deal with evasion is by adding accuracy, or by using guided missiles.

 

Understanding how to make a ship build that works, and what it works for. You need the first skillset to do this, but by itself it is not enough. You can sort of substitute following a guide to get a decent build, but the thing is, builds interact strongly with task and with flying style. A non-GSF example is that if you build a Caterpillar bulldozer it's great for earthmoving, but if you try to win the Daytona 500 with it you'll find that the guys in stock cars can crash, rebuild their cars, and still finish hours or maybe even days ahead of you. GSF is a bit worse in some ways, as not only will it let you try to race a dozer, it'll even let you do the equivalent of mounting the blade off of a Cat-D6 on the front of a stock car. You have to know how to make a decent build, and you have to know what flight style(s) will work well in combination with that build.

 

Understanding the rudiments of air combat maneuvering, and flying well enough to benefit from that. GSF has an incredibly dumbed down flight model, and if it were a better model (whether it were a space flight model, atmospheric flight model, or unified aerospace model) the people with real piloting experience or lots of time in high fidelity sims would have an obscenely large advantage. Thankfully for new GSF players most of the dangerous tricks a skilled pilot could pull simply aren't possible in GSF. Even so, if you are completely clueless about how air combat works you will get slaughtered every single game until you learn enough to be only mostly clueless about how air combat works. You can learn this by reading (which is tricky unless you know all the many places where GSF breaks the rules of real air combat), by trial and error, or by watching better pilots either in game or on videos posted to the internet.

 

Mastering the FPS/Arcade style mouse over control interface It's a bit weird, but if you spend time playing you do eventually get used to it. You may never really like it, but you won't be at a disadvantage to anyone else either.

 

There may be other core GSF skillsets that I'm missing (leaving out teamwork), but of the 4 that come readily to my mind, ground PvP prepares you for about 1.5 of the 4 skills, and they're the least important ones when it comes to actually flying after you've selected a ship build. Unless you have plenty of experience from other areas (like flight sims) that help you master those core skills, you're going to do poorly until you reach at least a basic level of competency in them.

 

Whoops, oh yeah, forgot a huge one. 3D situational awareness. Not easy to learn for beginners, and lacking it is probably the number one cause of new pilot deaths in GSF. Whether it's not realizing that a hard turn left is a bad idea because an asteroid is in the way, or not noticing the fighter that spent 6 seconds lining up for a perfect shot with both missiles and blasters until the missile hits you, a lack of situational awareness of the entire sphere of space around your ship out to a distance of about 15 km pretty much guarantees that you'll die a lot in GSF.

 

Overall, for MMORPG PvP content GSF is amazingly well balanced and though there is a distinct gearing advantage it only takes 4-6 games with subscriber and daily/weekly bonus requisition to afford the components you need to have a sporting chance of surviving attacks from a fully upgraded ship. Getting enough requisition to seriously improve your firepower on the other hand, takes long enough that skill increase is likely to overtake gear upgrades at some point before you've fully upgraded a ship.

 

I'm tired and this whole thing is poorly written, but the above is the general outline of the basics you need to learn if you want to start getting impressive scores in GSF matches. Ground PvP skill isn't bad, but it's about as useful for winning GSF matches as a lawnmower is for towing water-skiers.

[DamascusAdontise]

Maybe I'm not getting my real point across. I've been known to to that from time to time.

 

In PvP arenas, I know at the VERY LEAST I will be in the top 3 dmg/kills (if not #1 the majority of the time) which yields a very good amount of exp and rewards. So even if my team loses, do I really care? Nope.

 

In Starfighter I am probably in the bottom 3 probably 75% of the time. When we do have what looks to be more of an even match I'll be somewhere in the middle. NEVER been in the top 3, at all, ever.

 

It's a complete flip from Ground to Starfighter. Now I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts if you put me in a fully upgrade gunship or starfighter that my numbers would change immensely.

 

And that's my point. Ground PvP feels very much like gear does not matter at all (keep in mind I haven't hit 55 PvP yet) and Starfighter feels the exact opposite heavily relying on Ships and upgrades. This makes me not want to log into Starfighter at all. I get dailies done and quit.

 

Please post your build, including component unlocks and crew. Failure to do this is an admission that your not interested in understanding or getting better at this game. This is the last time I will ask (and consequently the last time I will be checking this thread)

 

I have a sneaking suspicion that gear and tactics are related to your success, if we knew what they were we might be able to help.

[SammyGStatus]

When the OP said

It's a complete flip from Ground to Starfighter. Now I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts if you put me in a fully upgrade gunship or starfighter that my numbers would change immensely.

 

It struck me as extremely arrogant (And if you heard our guild chat, you'd know we are masters of arrogance... IN OUR AREA OF EXPERTISE ONLY!!!!). THESE ARE NOT THE SAME GAME TYPES AT ALL. Giving the dude a mastered ship would be like handing a fully automatic weapon to a child. Sure, they may know that pulling the trigger fires, and he/she may even hit something once in a while, but put that child in a shooting contest with someone using a worse model of the same gun and that person WITH EXPERIENCE will always outperform the child. This is why the vets still top every category in stock ships, so the entire premise is just.... wrong.

 

While I agree posting his build will help, he's going to continually be defeated until he learns humility. Skill > upgrades, and being aware of what's going on is the only way he'll get it. It's not "If I put my time into learning how to GSF properly and build my ship correctly, I'll get better and eventually place in the top 3". It's "I DESERVE to be good. Give me the mastered ship before I learn how to fly so I can take down the elites". L2P instead of QQing about gear. We've earned our spots - earn yours and know that the people who've played this since launch don't appreciate your sense of entitlement.

Edited May 10, 2014 by SammyGStatus

[Verain]

You hit the crux of why I initially did not take him seriously, and only once the rest of you were determined to offer aid did I bother elaborating.

 

The fact of the matter is, like any whiner, he tries to put the blame somewhere else- in this case, gear. Requisition matters, and I think a decent number of this board would like to see it thinned out a bit. But having seen aces top kills, assists, and damage in an absolutely stock ship, I know that his problem isn't gear- it's skill.