60-100k damage, 60-70% hit ratio and 15-20+ kills in matches

[Saeten]

How is this possible without hacking? Auto-aim, scripted rotation (autoclicking), etc.? I've seen a few players get so high on these with over 15-20 kills and hit % over 60-70%. I don't understand the builds or other settings that enable this.  I have fully upgraded ships with recommended crew and abilities/components. I just can't get over 10-12 kills and 30-40% accuracy. I hate to think that there is hacking, but my mind just goes there.

I guess I should ask for guidance instead of accusing, but I would love someone to explain how they do it   Hard to give away tricks of the trade, but I would love to see some rationale for the high achievers to disprove hacking.

https://imgur.com/kfGU9x9

[DakhathKilrathi]

As someone who does this routinely, I'd be happy to help! It really doesn't take hacking or cheating. Just understanding how the game works and being able to aim is more than enough to manage the sort of numbers you're talking about. 

I can also direct you at a few resources. There are some guides in this forum (including mine, though it needs ship specific tips still) and available in the community Discord server, linked in my signature. 

A few of us also post videos! I've been a little lax on doing that, but here's one if you would like to see first-hand how it's done: https://youtu.be/QYQhLP3GTEw

https://www.youtube.com/@philipwilliams7947 and https://www.youtube.com/@remusqui862 post videos far more routinely than I do, and they also play really well. 

If you would like for me to analyze a match video or two for you and offer second-by-second breakdowns of what you could improve as well as what you're doing right, I'm also happy to do that. 

Edit: In general, though? Stop focusing a target who is running from you. Break off and shoot someone who is otherwise engaged. Time you aren't shooting is time you aren't doing damage. Focus less on the damage total at the end and more on the DPS you are doing, as I find that DPS is a better measure of effective time on target in general. You can see the DPS by hovering over the damage totals at the end. For an average player anywhere between 50 - 100 DPS is pretty good. 100 - 150 is a solid game. 130+ is the standard I hold myself to these days (though I? don't always hit it), and anything under 100 is what I consider a bad game on my part. 

This comes with the disclaimer that DPS is not going to be an effective measure in all games and some scenarios will require you to play more cautiously. Those are not bad games, just different games. But if you pay attention to my own video I linked up there, you can see several times where I break off and shoot someone else rather than waste my powerups on chasing someone in circles when I can't hope to hit them that way. 

Some builds can do this, but the one I'm playing there does not, so I don't try in that video. Play to the strengths of the build you are in, and have multiple options for different situations available on your bar. 

Edit 2: Oh, and powerups help. All of them, but especially the Damage Overcharge (red) one. 

Edited May 18, 2023 by DakhathKilrathi

[Saeten]

Solid post. Many many thanks. The first vid you posted was incredible. Seems chill too. You definitely have a lot of control and use a lot of advantages. I think i counted you had 4-5 damage boosts. But, the main points I got were:

1. Switch targets to the ones you can hit

2. don't chase those running from you (for the most part)
3.  use the environment as much as possible (turns, put stuff between you and attacker)

4. slip off and get more powerups, then return to fight. I think you hit 9-10 powerups during the match.

5. steal kills from other players (j/k you know you got the kill shots on a lot that were already damaged). but that is the game.
6. use your ships abilities (upgrade components and make sure crew is properly assigned).  The swap between heavy and quads is important on that ship. didn't use many protorps as I try to. But that seems a bit of chasing instead of focusing on targetin and using the cannons.

I think my issue is more of targeting to shoot. I'm not as adept and chill as you are in the video. Might be control on my part. could be my 12 yr old potato computer

The third vid link was awesome.  Hilarious and helpful. Snarky and the sarcasm at self-destructors was funny!
https://youtu.be/Z8-8cGo4rdw

 

Edited May 18, 2023 by Saeten
updated link

[DakhathKilrathi]

36 minutes ago, Saeten said:

Solid post. Many many thanks. The first vid you posted was incredible. Seems chill too. You definitely have a lot of control and use a lot of advantages. I think i counted you had 4-5 damage boosts. But, the main points I got were:

1. Switch targets to the ones you can hit

2. don't chase those running from you (for the most part)
3.  use the environment as much as possible (turns, put stuff between you and attacker)

4. slip off and get more powerups, then return to fight. I think you hit 9-10 powerups during the match.

5. steal kills from other players (j/k you know you got the kill shots on a lot that were already damaged). but that is the game.
6. use your ships abilities (upgrade components and make sure crew is properly assigned).  The swap between heavy and quads is important on that ship. didn't use many protorps as I try to. But that seems a bit of chasing instead of focusing on targetin and using the cannons.

I think my issue is more of targeting to shoot. I'm not as adept and chill as you are in the video. Might be control on my part. could be my 12 yr old potato computer

The third vid link was awesome.  Hilarious and helpful. Snarky and the sarcasm at self-destructors was funny!

Seems like you got most of the main points and even a couple I forgot to mention! Pretty much, yeah. In my video I'm playing a build that can't really do turn battles, so I don't try to. If you were in a build that could you could try that, though if your computer is pretty old you're better off playing at range. When I had an old potato I did really well in a gunship because 20 FPS is not quite so punishing in a gunship. 

I actually don't use protorps at all, though. I think they work better for most players, but it doesn't match up well with my playstyle so I ditched them for concussion missiles. 

But then, most of my kills come from blasters, not missiles. I would like to clarify I linked to channels rather than specific videos for the second pair of links; those two post all the time.

Edited May 18, 2023 by DakhathKilrathi

[Saeten]

4 minutes ago, DakhathKilrathi said:

 I would like to clarify I linked to channels rather than specific videos for the second pair of links; those two post all the time.

No worries. The first that came up for Remusqui was GSF for dummies. hilarious.  https://youtu.be/Z8-8cGo4rdw

[Ramalina]

18 hours ago, Saeten said:

How is this possible without hacking? Auto-aim, scripted rotation (autoclicking), etc.? I've seen a few players get so high on these with over 15-20 kills and hit % over 60-70%. I don't understand the builds or other settings that enable this.  I have fully upgraded ships with recommended crew and abilities/components. I just can't get over 10-12 kills and 30-40% accuracy. I hate to think that there is hacking, but my mind just goes there.

I guess I should ask for guidance instead of accusing, but I would love someone to explain how they do it   Hard to give away tricks of the trade, but I would love to see some rationale for the high achievers to disprove hacking.

https://imgur.com/kfGU9x9

A bunch more stuff:

It depends on the ship.   There are achievements for 65% and 75% accuracy, so the Devs certainly thought this was reasonable.   It is.  At least it is if you're only using railguns from a gunship.   For myself, if my accuracy with railguns is below 75% I'm not really happy with my shooting.  I'm almost always not happy with my shooting with railguns.  Truly top level gunship aces can routinely get low to mid 80s for accuracy.   A really excellent battlescout can hit the 50s to high 60s with Burst Laser Cannon and Cluster Missiles on a pretty regular basis.  Step into a normal strike fighter or scout with RFLs and high accuracy might look more like 40-55%.

 

Flying style plays a role.  People who start out in gunships and BLC battlescouts tend to be conservative with when they try to shoot.   Each shot takes a huge chunk of the energy pool, so there's a strong incentive to only shoot if there's a good chance of hitting.    So that means things like making sure the range is ideal, making sure the target is centered in the firing arc, making sure the target isn't moving across your screen so fast that it's hard to keep the reticle aligned, making sure that the target doesn't have distortion field or targeting telemetry buffs or engine powerups active, and using the Wingman crew skill (+20 accuracy) before shooting.   Contrast that with a strike or scout running a RFL build, where you have the energy efficiency and rate of fire so that it makes sense to just mash the trigger and hose down the target because you're never going to run out of energy and so landing a lucky low probability shot is pure profit.   Both approaches can work, if paired with the right ship build, so you can see similar kills/assists/damage between different pilots with one posting 70% accuracy and another posting maybe 33%.   That said, more accuracy is always better than less, and regardless of build and style if accuracy is below 35% and you're not deliberately being silly in flying style then your gunnery skills probably need work.

 

You can also cheese accuracy numbers if you want to.  Ion railgunning satellite turrets, mines and drones; spending most of a Domination match popping enemy turrets; only doing damage with missiles or torpedoes; or only doing damage with mines and drones can all get you 90-100% accuracy numbers, and sometimes pretty decent damage, but it's what I'd call fluff damage and most of the time isn't nearly as useful to your team as normal play with much lower scoreboard numbers would be.

 

The individual match conditions play a huge role.   Posting really high numbers is usually partly a symptom of a very lopsided game, or at least a game where a high skill player is not being put under much pressure by other skilled players.   There are a small handful of players that are basically unstoppable, but for the vast majority of people considered aces in GSF, having one or two people focus on putting constant pressure on them can reduce offensive output by 50-75%.   The people doing the pressuring need to have some defensive flying skills, because otherwise they're just free kills not pressure, and they need to have the offensive skills to kill a non-defending target in 5-10 seconds.   They don't need to actually kill the high skill pilot, but they need to keep the ace busy with surviving instead of rampaging through weaker pilots.   

 

Traditionally non-competitive games are called farm games, and ships flown by people with no defensive or offensive skills may be called food ships (you just gobble them right up).    Any build of any ship flown by a highly skilled pilot can post the sorts of numbers you're talking about, or even higher, in a match where it's ace vs food.    Think 12 baby pigs that fell off of a ship vs a 5.5 meter long great white shark.  Is the shark hacking if its score is 12-0 after just a few minutes?   Defenseless targets don't do well against apex predators.   The scores you see in games where most or all of the players are highly skilled are usually much more modest.   On a Super Serious event, if enough skilled players show up, it's not that unusual for the highest score to be something like 9 kills and mid 40k s damage.   Skilled offensive play is countered pretty solidly by skilled defensive play, and if everyone is a skilled defender sky high offensive scores are really difficult to achieve.   Games with a lot of skilled players on both sides are exceptionally rare these days though, so if there's a good player in a match they can usually post high numbers because there are plenty of easy targets and no one to stop them.

    There's also a tactical consideration if there's just one or two good players on each side.  Since skilled vs. skilled play is difficult and not as productive per time unit, a sensible strategy is often for the high skilled players on each side to be aware of each other as threats, but mostly to focus on trying to utterly crush the opposing food ships faster than your side's food ships get utterly crushed.   Which leads to high scores on both sides, and whichever team wins the "crushing noobs" race usually wins the match.   The balance really depends on how lacking in skill there rest of your team is.   If they're competent but not great, then pressuring the other team's high skill players can really let the rest of the team be active, successful, and win the match.  If the rest of the team is completely hopeless, then being the fastest most ruthless noob-crusher is usually the only chance of victory, and generally leads to high scores.

 

Sometimes really close games can also produce high scores.   In domination if it's a 1 sat vs 2 sat game, and you're defending a sat that's just barely holding against really intense pressure from the other team, sometimes you can rack up enormous numbers because there's just a constant stream of opponents to shoot.   It's a much more fun way to post high scores than a farm game, but sadly these sorts of game aren't all that common right now.

 

By the way, if you're getting at least 30% accuracy (50% if railguns), and 6-10 kills in most games, then you're probably a fairly solid competent GSF player, and generally speaking an asset to your team.  The tail end of the distribution in terms of skill can warp your perception of what normal is.   I hover right at the very bottom of the ace skill range, and I don't really like gunship play or consider myself good at them, but last night I had a TDM where I posted  15 kills 15 assists, 0 deaths, 77.6 k damage, and 73% accuracy, and ended the match feeling like I had flown really poorly and should have done a lot better.   Mind you, these are pretty good numbers by my standards, but it still felt bad.   Of course I'm using some of the best aces ever to have played GSF as comparison, people where 30+ kills per match was normal.  Probably not reasonable as a standard of comparison, but as long as you use that sort of thing more as a goal to strive for than something that you get mad about not achieving it should be ok I think.

 

A tip for making progress: aside from looking at guides and other community made educational material on how to be skilled at GSF, work on one skill at a time.   So for example, with railgun, fly a bunch of matches where the only thing you worry about is making sure the target is very close to perfectly centered before you shoot.   Focus on what you're improving, don't worry about the rest.  That should help you get rapid progress on a specific skill, and once it starts feeling a lot easier to do that specific skill, add in the next thing you want to work on.   I find that generally works better than trying to work on everything at the same time.

 

A gem for covering fundamental GSF skills, not 100% up to date, but while specific stats on components have changed the fundamental skills have not.

https://www.youtube.com/@GSFSchool

 

Edited May 19, 2023 by Ramalina

[Stradlin]

On 5/18/2023 at 10:42 PM, Saeten said:

How is this possible without hacking? Auto-aim, scripted rotation (autoclicking), etc.? I've seen a few players get so high on these with over 15-20 kills and hit % over 60-70%. I don't understand the builds or other settings that enable this.  I have fully upgraded ships with recommended crew and abilities/components. I just can't get over 10-12 kills and 30-40% accuracy. I hate to think that there is hacking, but my mind just goes there.

I guess I should ask for guidance instead of accusing, but I would love someone to explain how they do it   Hard to give away tricks of the trade, but I would love to see some rationale for the high achievers to disprove hacking.

https://imgur.com/kfGU9x9

 

 

Some people are very good at Starfighter. It isn't unusual to manage 20+ kills if you know what you doing. I'm nowhere near the absolute  top and score 15-20 kills in regular basis.

 

Accuracy depends on the ship,too.  60% accuracy  is very impressive  with a machinegun, much less so with a scoped sniper. Gunship with a 5x accuracy is prolly doing something wrong.

If you were to find 15-20 people who have played 1000 or more matches of GSF and asked them "how often do you feel your side has won or lost a match due to hacking?" you'd not hear (m)any answers besides "none". Does it happen? Maybe, but it must be extremely rare and irrelevant. GSF has its share of problems, but hacking and hackers isn't among them. Remote slicers though........ . . .

 

Biggest issue with GSF atm are various form of win traders, afkers and the like. Ie players have created the issue, rather than game engine or its vunlerabilities.

BW is pretty determined to ignore GSF year after another, which is even more of a biggest issue!

 

 

I highly recommend this tutorial video series for basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6xHNu_dXVA&ab_channel=GSFSchool

(Edit, I  see  Ramalina posted this already!)

It is very good watching even if you are moderately experienced  and feel like  you know the basics already. Pretty sure it takes at least 500 matches til you reach a stage where you learn nothing new from watching that video series.

Besides that(and this is subjective) I highly recommend Rycer or Quell(Starguard and Pike on Rep side) as your first ship. Extremely powerul and more importantly, very new player friendly. Heavy laser cannons are great at teaching ins and outs of aiming to you. That is how GSF "clicked" for me personally way back when.

 

 

Edited May 20, 2023 by Stradlin

[Ramalina]

Oh, I think we all forgot to mention:  For TDM matches people have published maps of the Damage Overcharge "super spawn" locations.   These are power up nodes that always spawn a DO powerup, as opposed to other nodes that spawn a random power up type.   If you memorize the DO spawn points you can see if there is a power up at those spots by looking at the mini-map.   If you see one, go over and scoop it up, or in chat mention it if there are team members that are much closer to it and it's in danger of getting scooped up by the enemy team.   Top end players have the DO spawns memorized for all maps and actively scan for new DO spawns for the entire duration of the match.   It can be worth a 30% or more increase in output if you get several DOs over a match.

 

Kuat and Lost shipyards https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FQAI25EL.jpg&tbnid=rWF1ZkUR-jZmIM&vet=12ahUKEwjiip_mkYT_AhUHM1kFHRfPDnoQMygBegUIARCzAQ..i&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fswtorista.com%2Farticles%2Fswtor-galactic-starfighter-guide%2F&docid=dVNJ3hJEVUZ6jM&w=900&h=1200&q=SWTOR GSF DO map&client=firefox-b-1-d&ved=2ahUKEwjiip_mkYT_AhUHM1kFHRfPDnoQMygBegUIARCzAQ

 

And Iokath https://imgur.com/a/zchJPHC

Edited May 20, 2023 by Ramalina

[MarkFranz]

On 5/18/2023 at 10:42 PM, Saeten said:

How is this possible without hacking? Auto-aim, scripted rotation (autoclicking), etc.? I've seen a few players get so high on these with over 15-20 kills and hit % over 60-70%. I don't understand the builds or other settings that enable this.  I have fully upgraded ships with recommended crew and abilities/components. I just can't get over 10-12 kills and 30-40% accuracy. I hate to think that there is hacking, but my mind just goes there.

I guess I should ask for guidance instead of accusing, but I would love someone to explain how they do it   Hard to give away tricks of the trade, but I would love to see some rationale for the high achievers to disprove hacking.

https://imgur.com/kfGU9x9

Idk about hit% and damage, but on kills, i have answer - Dustmaker. Dustmaker can do stable 10+ kills in expirienced hands. And if enemy is not good, it's TDM and you luckly with damage busts then 15-20 is not big problem.

Edited May 24, 2023 by MarkFranz

[DakhathKilrathi]

5 hours ago, MarkFranz said:

Idk about hit% and damage, but on kills, i have answer - Dustmaker. Dustmaker can do stable 10+ kills in expirienced hands. And if enemy is not good, it's TDM and you luckly with damage busts then 15-20 is not big problem.

That might be the worst ship in the game, but you're not wrong that it's possible if you know how to play it. 

[Deadria]

my advise.....the one thing you can do to increase your damage is learn how to strafe......you will stay on target easier, turn faster, and over all stay alive longer while getting alot more dmg out. https://youtu.be/Uz3m8lyjxxw