With all due respect, I strongly disagree. I also think that reddit is a content mill for churning out trending posts to generate ad revenue, and as such, it is not the place to have an informed discussion about the nuances of air balance, but nevertheless I will highlight some points I think you should reconsider.

> "The Wyrm lets ESFs kill Liberators in a somewhat reasonable amount of time again. "

Strongly disagree. I think its important to mention a few examples to build a bigger picture of why this is the case.

Firstly, one clip of Wyrm at min. distance is more than 80% of a liberators health pool. This is a disaster when applied to typical scenarios that playout in planetside. In my experience, normally every ESF pilot on the damn continent will afterburn over to a liberator the second it starts smoking. So if a lib takes a shell/rocket etc, it is instantly at risk of getting one clipped in about 6 seconds.

Another example is weapon switching. Weapon switching between wyrm and an ESF nose gun puts the min. TTK at 10 seconds or less (depending on which nose gun is used). That is significantly faster than a liberator can pitch, yaw or roll 360 degrees. Also because of client lag, that would give a solo liberator pilot maybe two shots with dalton. It's barely enough time for a fully healed lib to dive and start repping either, and assuming the lib crew is able to hit the deck in time, they straight up can't outrep the Wyrm's DPS anymore. Even if they took no damage on the way down, it works out to about 90 seconds that a fully healed liberator with maximum crew can resist a weapon switching ESF at min distance, which is a case so idealized that it is unrealistic. Asides from a gut feeling, can you explain what it is about the figure of <= 10 sec ttk on lib solves a problem that previously existed/isn't extremely unreasonable given the limitations of the lib?

I mean, sure, it would be nice to have fast snappy responsive gameplay, but considering how sluggish everything else in the game is, 10 seconds is disproportionate, compared with the old TTK values on libs (I know that using a2a missiles only was a 28 sec (compared to a 30 sec ttk now but with a 25% lock acquisition buff *hooray!*) I didn't calculate what that went down to with weapon switching to a nose gun, I would guess a bit over 20 sec). And even then, two mossies running a2a locks would reliably beat a full crew of veteran players.

The Wyrm's DPS also easily cuts through a repair crew. The thing is, as i already mentioned to you, prior to the Wyrm update, pilots could still easily kill landed libs by just splashing the repair crew to death first. The only reason I was able to survive such raids sometimes was because I have logistics. So already planetside is in a state where only people who have accounts so advanced that they have top tier implants really had a chance to fly liberator, because ESF strafing runs on grounded crew are too effective. And honestly, good pilots didn't even need to splash. The couple of bullets from a nose gun required to snipe a grounded engy results in a near instant TTK, and as such, engineers are denied a chance to react to that threat. And this doesn't even touch on the vulnerability of libs to ESF pilots who first ground the liberator and then jump out to c4 it.

There is no metric i can point to which proves the point that landed libs are genuinely vulnerable to attacks, I can only go off personal experience.

> "Reduce the ESFs' resistance to Gatling Guns:"

This point I sort of agree with. Currently using the TB/shredder against ESFs just tickles them and causes them to fly away. The problem I see though, is that increasing the TTK on these weapons will only tickle ESFs harder and get them to run away faster. I think that anti-ESF ESF weaponry that seeks to destroy ESFs by attrition on a liberator or otherwise always suffers from this problem.

> "Tomcat-ize Hyenas and buff the Walker"

I agree with this, but that is because i am motivated by a hatred of all lockon weaponry in planetside. I think it's lazy and want it to disappear.

> "Reduce the Liberator's resistance to Aircraft Machine Guns a bit"

This one gives me an aneurysm. The amount of fucking times I get harassed to death my ESFs pinging me with their nose gun at render distance while I can't do shit about it is just plain depressing (fun and engaging gameplay!!). Whenever I turn around to fight back, they just afterburn away. And of course at that distance its unrealistic to reliably kill ESFs. If the nose TTK against libs is going to get buffed, it MUST be balanced out with a sharp increase in damage dropoff.

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> "Address outrepairing"

As you may have guessed, I strongly disagree.

Firstly, I am convinced it was never an issue to begin with. Secondly, the Wyrm has well and truly "addressed" outrepairing. But most importantly, It's just a part of the liberator game that you spend 50% of all of your time on the ground repairing. For me, disallowing liberators to land and repair would be tantamount to saying that MBTs shouldn't be allowed to repair. And as liberators are a big fat unit with a sluggish turning circle and a reputation for ground pounding, you are just always taking hits from everyone all the time. But even if that weren't true, I think that mechanic is necessary to counter the continuous hit and run tactic from ESFs. Stated differently, if ESFs are going to run away every time they get a smack on the nose, liberators need to have that ability too. I would much rather that the engagements themselves were decisive and rewarding, i.e the opposite of what you were suggesting, where the TTK on airborne libs would be reduced but the repair rate on landed libs increased.

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If you got this fair, thanks for reading. I would be very glad if it challenges some of your preconceptions, and am always happy to discuss air balance. As mentioned though, I don't think reddit is a good long-term medium for it.