winpersec Posted February 21, 2023 Share Posted February 21, 2023 On 2/19/2023 at 9:33 PM, Ramalina said: Also, because I am at times a mischievous imp, I have a challenge for you Dayshadow, take a low skill gunship that's any build you please of a Jurgoran or Condor, and in a TDM match get a TDM scoreboard result of better than: 20 kills, 15 assists, less than 5 deaths, 120000+ damage, and 74% or better accuracy. Then come back here and tell us how many games it took you to learn to use an easy mode gunship that well. It can be a lopsided farm game where your team stomps, that's ok. For extra credit, keep playing and tell us how many more games it takes for you to build your easy mode skills to the point where you can still post those numbers in a TDM where your team loses by at least 15 points. At that point you should be a fairly well known gunship ace, and people will take what you say about gunships seriously even if what you're saying seems odd at first glance. Took me around 500 matches to start playing like this. Probably I'm a slow learner. Just to add some statistics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ramalina Posted February 21, 2023 Share Posted February 21, 2023 (edited) Hey, major change in tone, thank you. So I'll engage, with the respect you asked for, and that your new politeness merits. On 2/19/2023 at 1:36 PM, Dayshadow said: If you're not good, there is a risk in every ship. The issue is good people can also play easy mode ships. And there is no serious risk equal to the ease of kills for a good pilot. I can jump into a gunship and pop people with impunity. Yes, good players do play all the ships. That's why we're consistently telling you that you are wrong about this. There is risk in every ship at every skill level. However, less skilled players are not that much of a risk to higher skill players, independent of ship type. The people you can pop with impunity when you jump into a gunship are not highly skilled players. We can say this for certain, because if they were highly skilled they would have enough situational awareness to neutralize your gunship as a threat to them even if they don't engage your gunship. I do this all the time in Domination games. I'm say, in a scout, defending a satellite, that's fairly open like Shipyards B or any sat in Denon, and there's a gunship at 14000 meters. Am I worried? No. By tradition you complicate missile locks by chasing each other around the sat in circles, but you don't have to do that to break LOS. With the projections on top, and one set of the fins, you can deny LOS just as effectively using only 1/3 of the perimeter of the satellite. So it takes a minimum of 2 gunships working together to threaten a single ship defending a satellite, if that ship knows how to fly defensively at a high level. Personally, I usually don't get worried for my safety on a sat until there are at least 3 gunships looking at me. If I go off the sat to hunt the gunships, it's not to protect myself from them, it's to kill them or chase them off because they're being effective at massacring my teammates who don't know how to defend themselves. This principle applies in TDMs too. You can always rely on somebody on the opposite team to get more than 12000 meters from their gunship coverage. So using distance alone, you can score kills all match long without ever being threatened at all by a gunship. Use cover to LOS while closing distance, then a bit of boost and turning for the final stretch, and you can be on top of a gunship with nearly zero risk of getting hit by a railgun shot. A top notch gunship pilot will recognize if you're doing this and run. While they're running, they're not shooting you or any of your teammates with a railgun. With the right build, good engine management, and proper use of cover you can keep a gunship tied up for a whole match without ever really needing to shoot at them. The mere threat of prospective shots will force them to flee. If you're doing this in a strike or scout, you can probably at least fire a few missiles at targets of opportunity as you're doing this, which is probably more than the gunship will manage. It's extraordinarily rare to see high skill scout players in game anymore, but a true scout ace who decides that they're going to try to shut down a gunship ace, is probably going to be able to shut down the gunship ace fairly easily, and get 10 to 20 miscellaneous kills while they're doing it. The reverse is not true. A gunship ace that goes after a scout ace is either just going to drive the scout into using cover all the time, or annoy them into deciding to spend the rest of the game going after the gunship. At high skills the balance of power here slightly disfavors the gunship. This is down to ship design. Scouts and strikes can maneuver defensively, and use their primary means of doing damage at the same time. They are meant to operate under offensive pressure from other ships. Gunships cannot maneuver defensively while using railguns, which are their primary means of doing damage. They have to choose offense or defense, they can't really have both at the same time. The result is that they are extremely vulnerable to other ships while trying to do offensive tasks, and unable to do significant damage while on defense. They need to be left alone and have breathing space to do their work. Deny them that space and time, and they don't function well. Scouts and strikes have exactly the set of tools needed to deny gunships space and time very effectively. If they fail to deny gunships space and time though, gunships have the perfect toolset to punish them (brutally) for that failure. On 2/19/2023 at 1:58 PM, Dayshadow said: I'm not saying you can't beat a gunship, but the idea that it's game over in secs does not line up with my experience. I have survived plenty of attacks by strikers/scouts. Nothing I've proposed would reduce the variety. The available evidence indicates that at high skill levels ship choice really doesn't matter for ability to pop low skilled players who aren't paying attention with impunity. The records for single match kills by one player are about 40 kills for gunships, scouts, strikes, and yes, even bombers. The DPS of a scout with Light Lasers, Rocket Pods, and Targeting Telemetry active is more than twice what a gunship can put out with a railgun. When it come to killing ships that are not flying defensively, gunships are not necessarily the best choice. The target will die faster to a high DPS scout build than it would have to a gunship. It takes more work and skill on the scout pilot's part yes, but the payoff is absurdly high peak DPS output. Ship class balance is at play here. Yes, railguns threaten a scout before it can shoot at a gunship, but if the scout knows how to deal with that threat and close to short range it can take a gunship from full health to dead in less time than it takes to charge a full railgun shot. That's actually wildly unbalanced in favor of the scout, which is exactly why gunships can move, have blasters, and have missiles. It's so that a skilled scout pilot has to do more than just counter the railgun to kill the gunship. It also has to dogfight a bit. It's a dogfight that massively favors the scout, but it means that more then one skill (avoiding railgun hits), is needed for the kill. Getting close to a gunship doesn't automatically mean a win for the other ship any more than having more range on a railgun than on a laser cannon automatically means that the railgun wins. They have contextual range based advantages, and player skill in maneuver and resource management is used to change their personal context. That interplay of advantage and counter-advantage is what creates both ship class balance and depth of gameplay strategy. On 2/19/2023 at 1:58 PM, Dayshadow said: But that is a far cry from anything I'm saying fundamentally breaking gunships. You'd just have to play them more cautiously. It's worth noting that there's a component that supports exactly the sort of stationary playstyle you're advocating for. Two actually. No skilled player that I know of uses them, because they are among the worst components in the game. Fortress shield and rotational thrusters. Fortress shield forces a gunship to pretty much stay stationary if they want to have a functioning shield. The staying still portion works, the shield portion doesn't. Shield piercing is a thing so a stationary gunship ends up being pretty much a free kill to anything with piercing, and a lot of the most popular weapons have piercing, plus there's the Bypass crew skill. Even without piercing though, DPS is so high in GSF that if you give enough raw health to face tank it, you end up with a ship that's basically a NiM raid boss in space. The balance scheme doesn't work in that case because even a fairly foolish player is still a lot smarter than SWTOR's NPC ai scripts are. Where would a player park one or more near invincible railgun platforms? In a stack covering spawn points maybe? Rotational thrusters is supposed to be more or less a partial, single shot, aimbot/aim-assist for gunships. Similar problem, either it works so badly it's broken, or it works so well it's broken. The area of performance where it might be balanced is so small that it just isn't really a viable game mechanic. On 2/19/2023 at 1:36 PM, Dayshadow said: And gunships can use missiles at "close range". Not just lasers. You can switch back and forth on the fly. They are like any other ship at close range. It's just that they don't have the best fuel efficiency and require better fuel management. Against lesser skilled players who travel in a relatively straight line (don't make hard turns), you can even rail them at close range. . . . I have no issue dogfighting in a gunship. Now, if you're facing multiple enemies, it is tougher to avoid missile locks due to sheer number of people trying to lock you (that goes for any ship). But in a limited engagement I can definitely take on a striker or scout. Or at least fly around in a stalemate until another teammate shows up or they give up. If in a debris field, I can usually outmaneuver the average player. If the player is top tier it really doesn't matter if I'm in a striker or gunship. They'll beat me regardless. I'm hardly top tier. Individual components behave the same way, yes, but the ship build as a system does not. A competitive ship has a component set where there are interactions between how the components work that reinforce their mutual strengths. For example stacking evasion by combining Light weight armor, Distortion Field, and base Scout evasion, is a more powerful defensive combination than having Reinforced armor, Directional Shield, and base Scout evasion. Evasion * evasion * evasion beats hull points + shield points + evasion, if you're working from an equivalent stats budget. Once you take out the railgun, gunships don't combine really well as a system in that way. They're moderately worse than strikes were before 5.5 in that respect, and strikes back then were maybe 20% to 30% weaker than any other ship class. If you're beating people in a dogfight using a gunship, I promise you it's not because the gunship is a good ship for dogfighting. I say that as someone, who for years, had all my Condor and Jurgoran ships configured as BLC + Interdiction Missile + Cluster Missile because I thought that "budget battlecout" was a more fun playstyle than sniping. Against an equal skill pilot, the gunship build that is best at dogfighting, is going to consistently lose even against pre-5.5 strikes. A gunship is equivalent to an artilleryman with a howizter and a pistol. At long range they're dangerous, and at very close range they do still have a usable weapon. However, if there's an infantryman at 150 meters with an assault rifle, the artilleryman is in big trouble, despite having two guns that could be fired plus the option of running, none of them put the artilleryman at a combat advantage against the infantryman in that context. The gunship is the same way at close range, it has tools, but none of them give it a combat advantage relative to strikes or scouts at that range, but their tools do give them an advantage relative to the gunship. That's why gunship play at high levels of skill is at least as much a matter of map awareness and energy management so that the gunship can stay at ranges favoring railguns as it is about good shooting skills with railgun. On 2/19/2023 at 1:36 PM, Dayshadow said: You get no warning that a railgun shot is pointed at you so players don't have anything to react to. And where you can delay a missile impact until an engine ability is ready, that's not an option for a rail shot. It's unlikely you're going to actively evade me unless you see me. Even then you don't immediately know what I'm pointed at. My very presence demands you react even if unnecessarily, possibly to the detriment of your objectives. I snipe while moving all the time. I hardly ever stand still, but most people do. And if stationary, which is the common thing to do, you have shield abilities to pad you if someone does shoot at you. I can also snipe at close range. I especially find it good when chasing people hugging collidable objects. It's very rare that I miss with a railgun. I was about to say I never miss other than a target simple going out of range or behind something before it's ready, but I'm not sure. It's seldom enough that I can't recall the last time. . . . I'm hardly top tier. At a certain skill level you don't really need a warning that a missile or railgun is going to be fired at you. You know that Gunships will be equipping railguns, and that strikes will be equipping long range missiles or torpedoes, and you use map awareness and maneuver around LOS objects as your primary defense. Engine and Shield cooldowns are not primary defenses at high levels of play. They are backups for when you've made a mistake, or assists that increase the chance of success when you are deliberately neglecting defensive flying to achieve an offensive or objectives related goal. You use the mini-map to see where hostile targets are, and either mouseover and memory of the starting lineup, knowledge of specific players' ship preferences, mouseover of unselected targets and visual identification, or tab or targeted target selection, or some combination of all of the above to build a picture in your mind of which opponents are flying what sorts of ships and where they are relative to you and defensively exploitable terrain. With enough practice this can become partly subconscious. I have times when I "feel" safe from a gunship. Obviously I'm not a Jedi, I'm not using the force to sense danger, but even though I'm focusing on something else my brain is processing the mini-map and the terrain I'm seeing, and combining it with memory of the map to figure out that there's still a satellite or chunk of terrain between me and a gunship I spotted earlier. There's this sense of sort of a "railgun shadow" and if I get out of position I start to feel nervous. It's just my brain doing crude geometry very fast as a background task, and interpreting that as "feel." Sort of like how people with enough experience can drive on "autopilot" while paying more attention to a conversation with a passenger than to what they're doing with their car. There's the same issue in that if you don't actually look consciously sometimes you can get hit with a nasty surprise that you would have spotted if paying specific attention. It's the learning process. While still learning you have to focus on what you're learning in order to learn, but once learned well enough you can sort of do things by memory, and focus attention on something else at the same time. If you never miss railgun shots, while moving, at close targets, that are skimming LOS obstacles, then either you are top tier, or you need to be taking more railgun shots. Edited February 21, 2023 by Ramalina 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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