I don’t care if I never become a PvP god, I just want to have some fun and challenge myself, and be able to put up a decent fight. Looking at YouTube videos, dogfighting-in-space against skilled PvPers seems like an art form, and more dynamic and interesting than fighting only NPC bad-guys with a multi cannon+laser combo. I haven’t used my lateral thrusters for much besides taking off and landing (and occasionally placing seismic charges on asteroids), haven’t done much FA-off flying, and stink at PAs and rail guns. Rails and PAs are fun and satisfying and sound pretty when they connect, so I like using them. How long would you guess it takes to become halfway decent at PvP? What about to become adept? And are there any good YouTube channels that provide help and strategy for new PvPers?
I consider myself "halfway decent", at least by console scrub standards. My "approximate time played" stat is 7W 2D 16h 27M. Granted, some of that was AFK long range passenger missions.
So ~1000 hours playtime.
I am moderate-at-best in FA-off and rail aim which means a "fullway decent" PvP'er will boom me, especially since I am using a gamepad (signif disadvantage for aiming rails IMO).
If that had been actual fighting time, I'd be better. Probably 3/4th (or more) of those hours is nonsense like engineering grind (which is a prerequisite for competitive PvP), thousands of jumps, and also my unfortunate dabble in powerplay.
You can by all means find a PG or something that does stuff like "no engineering viper only" fights. That would eliminate grindwall at expense of, you wouldn't be doing "real" PvP.
Personally, I found CMDR Truesilver's tutorials the most helpful, and google for ryan_m's guide to build. Dorvarich wrote a nice guide too but I don't know if it's public.
Good luck.
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Also to address specific points in your post.
If you aren't using lats and verts you will never be halfway decent, no matter how much you practice. The first thing I did when I decided to try to become halfway decent was make my own bizarre custom gamepad mapping on PS4 that let me have full control over lats/verts. Without lats and verts anyone who knows how to use lats and verts will beat you.
You mention core mining. Try it in a new way. For the surface spots, instead of lining up and shooting them while standing still, try to fire them while circle-strafing the roid. I truly think the abrasion blaster has one of the hardest firing dynamics in the game (delay of a rail, leading target via slow velocity of PA, crappy reticle like dumbfire) but no one realizes this because they just shoot them while standing still so of course that's easy (well that and the 'roids don't shoot back...). But if you can hit a deposit while side strafing at 50% throttle from a medium ship, that's good practice.
You need to at least not "stink" at PAs. You really can't even dip your toe in the water until you can hit with PAs. Start with them, they are easier to learn than rails (IMO) and also more important.
If you aren't using lats and verts you will never be halfway decent, no matter how much you practice. The first thing I did when I decided to try to become halfway decent was make my own bizarre custom gamepad mapping on PS4 that let me have full control over lats/verts. Without lats and verts anyone who knows how to use lats and verts will beat you.
You mention core mining. Try it in a new way. For the surface spots, instead of lining up and shooting them while standing still, try to fire them while circle-strafing the roid. I truly think the abrasion blaster has one of the hardest firing dynamics in the game (delay of a rail, leading target via slow velocity of PA, crappy reticle like dumbfire) but no one realizes this because they just shoot them while standing still so of course that's easy (well that and the 'roids don't shoot back...). But if you can hit a deposit while side strafing at 50% throttle from a medium ship, that's good practice.
You need to at least not "stink" at PAs. You really can't even dip your toe in the water until you can hit with PAs. Start with them, they are easier to learn than rails (IMO) and also more important.
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Deleted member 115407
D
You should stop by GCI. Folks there will not only give you outfitting and flying advice, they'll eval your PvP videos, etc.
https://discord.gg/2khfM24
https://discord.gg/2khfM24
I am a few k hrs in and still garbage....sucks to suck I guess..
Truthfully don’t worry about being good just have fun! It will come eventually
All depends on the pilot, man.
Some people catch on faster than others.
Only way to really find out is to get out there and fight.
Some people catch on faster than others.
Only way to really find out is to get out there and fight.
~100 hours of PvP playtime and you'll be somewhat of a challenge to most of the PvP community.
TheMegaTurnip
Banned
It's all going to be dependent on your drive and ability to absorb infomation, for instance watching fights back, and understanding where you went wrong, is often just as useful as the in fight experience as you can analyse what happened much more effectively, thus learning how to avoid the same mistakes/win in similar situation.
Then there is the numbers game. People who are very competative also have very min/maxed ships. Working with Coriolis or EDSY will give you a far deeper understanding of how the weapons will work on your ship, how to juggle loadouts when limited by power or weight etc, to understand how mass values effect your ships performance and see the numbers for each ships strengths and weaknesses.
Also it is advisable to spend at least a modicum of time in as many ships as possible. The numbers are certainly worth knowing when it comes to building ships, but having in flight experience witha multitude of vessels will allow you to pick up where the limits in handling are, thus further increasing your effectiveness against that ship.
It's not a fast road, I also think some have forgotten the journey to the "GitGud". But once you've pulled up 100+ million spent on munitions, you should be relatively proficient.
Then there is the numbers game. People who are very competative also have very min/maxed ships. Working with Coriolis or EDSY will give you a far deeper understanding of how the weapons will work on your ship, how to juggle loadouts when limited by power or weight etc, to understand how mass values effect your ships performance and see the numbers for each ships strengths and weaknesses.
Also it is advisable to spend at least a modicum of time in as many ships as possible. The numbers are certainly worth knowing when it comes to building ships, but having in flight experience witha multitude of vessels will allow you to pick up where the limits in handling are, thus further increasing your effectiveness against that ship.
It's not a fast road, I also think some have forgotten the journey to the "GitGud". But once you've pulled up 100+ million spent on munitions, you should be relatively proficient.
Excuse me, could you please give an example where did you see "dogfighting" in PvP?.. I would like to see that also, what I've seen so far is const boosting with faoff... which is not a dogfighting as for me.
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TheMegaTurnip
Banned
Boosting is nessasary to maintain superior positioning.
I think someone needs FA off practice
TheMegaTurnip
Banned
Also worth noting that "boost dragging" is a tactic many PvPers employ to further increase thier time at top speed and can improve your turn rates a huge amount.
Being able to redirect your boost via the lateral and vertical thrusters increases your moveset by a vast amount. Boost is not only for forward momentum, a good percentage of said boost will be diverted to whichever thrusters you are firing at the time, allowing you to reposition quicker, not to mention increasing your potential for target aquisition.
As Feros has said, go to a RES and orbit the asteroids until you have a hang for the flight dynamics.
As for starting to dip your toes in with manuveing in FA off in combat. Equip a small ship with fixed weapons and try to kill T9's/T7's in the RES. Once you feel comfotable with larger, softer targets, work your way down in size class for opponents until you can eyeball Eagles and Vipers with your fixed guns (PAs or Cannons are best for this practice). If you become really comfortable, try stepping it up a gear and chasing the SLF's spawned by 'Condas and the like. The latter training being the advanced version.
The more familiarity you have with the flight model on the ship you are flying the more you will understand moving in three dimensions. It's often an understated fact that being good with your manuvering thrusters will increase the TTK on your ship a hundred times more than strong shields or hull could ever do.
Boosting is nessasary to maintain superior positioning.
I think someone needs FA off practice
Nah, thank you, I tried. Watched videos, explanations.
I do understand that with faoff you can accelerate in any direction with faon forward speed. But that still does not make much sense, especially if your forward speed is slow.
I am OK with position tactics but prefer orbiting around Anaconda in my eagle/sidewinder/vulture in faon. All those faoff expert battles look like floating whales for me.
And I've never seen in those tutorials ships like Type-9, Anacondas not even ASPX, they used ships which are good without faoff also. That's what I'm talking about:
I do not use boost to change my speed during combat. Only to get to target which is out of range of my weapons faster. I have as much pips on engine as possible to maintain maneurability and not for permanent boosting. I use faster ships instead and accelerating/decelerating to "randomize" my velocity vector for enemy.
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TheMegaTurnip
Banned
When in FA off you try to use your inertia as much as your thrusters otherwise you end up stalling out or drifting backwars, given that it has massively increased lateral and dorsal thruster performance as a caveat you would want to use that extra push to fly in arcs to keep the reticule movement random, again, also leading to faster target aquisition because you are moving the whole ship to the target reticule, not just the nose. Not to mention being far less consious effort than to pull forward and back on the throttle constantly to avoid shots when trying to close distance on a target that might not be the one shooting you.
The thing you need to pay attention to in those videos is not how it looks directly out the veiwfinder, but the dust that is going past the ship and the direction it is following. (Admittedly this is kind of hard with poop youtube rendering 1080 is more or less required) Thats where you'll see the difference in FA pilots videos, Just because thier nose is'nt swinging violently towards the target or they are'nt on and off the throttle constantly does'nt mean they are'nt causing thier reticule to bounce around alll over the place. In fact being able to make your flight seem deceptively smooth for someone watching onboard, whilst effectively dodging shots and landing them is an art thats very difficult to perfect.
You should be using the ship to it's full limit, meaning permaboost and all. It sounds like you run with a relatively fixed pip setup as I can tell you from my own extended experience in small ships, that you cannot orbit even a large ship in PvP effectively without boosting, because they will leverage thier enourmous distributor and put distance on you in such a way that allows the weight of their ship to carry them at a higher constant speed, and therefore distance, than a small ship is capable of, even with it's massively higher top speed. Simply put, the small ship runs out of puff very much quicker because it has less mass to keep it moving, the lack of inertia as a result, kicks in far quicker. Hence how even a Corvette can boost twice, if not three times further than an Eagle. At lower speed granted, but there is far less inconsistency in pace.
This in turn leads to a very large gap between you and your opponent, easily giving them enough time to about turn and get guns on target.
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Achilles7
Banned
Very illuminating; 'reminds me of an answer supplied in the 'Questions' section relating to a product on Amazon (butt plugs...if you must know) that I read recently:
"I didn't buy this item, so I don't know"
Hmmm!
Yeah pretty much. No-one can know how long it's going to take someone else to get good, to be fair.
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How does one get a firm grasp on the stats and numbers, and how changes affect the rest of the ship? PvP ships are pretty technical builds, and a lot of times if I pick someone's brain, I end up feeling more confused afterward, like I've just been brain-dumped on. And in the past I've been in the middle of a 3-way argument, and that doesn't really help me. Then on top of the build, there are flight characteristics and weaknesses/strengths of certain ships that people geek-out on as well. How do I get-good in that aspect?
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TheMegaTurnip
Banned
INCOMING WALL OF TEXT. Sorry. Got a bit carried away
Well the numbers game is kind of self explanatory. EDSY is more accurate, however Coriolis is a lot simpler. both will provide you with the means to see what values are changed by which modules.
One of the most important things you should bear in mind when understanding how ships fly, is the Optimal/Minimum/Maximum mass statistic on your Thrusters, This dictates how much of an increase in performance you can obtain via different total mass values on your ship. The Minimum stat is the weight at which you are obtaining maximum performance possible from the thruster units, Optimal is essentially the target you want to be aiming for as you will get, as it says, Optimal performance. When over Optimal Mass you begin to incur a penalty to overall thruster performance, and the closer you are to Maximum Mass you will be incurring the biggest possible penalty to your ship, if you are to exceed this number, the thrusters will no longer be able to manuver the ship effectively. All of these things affect your Pitch/Yaw/Roll Axis (This is one of the chief contributary reasons for new explorers faceplanting planets. IE: The ship sits too close to the maximum mass stat resulting in hugely inefficient thrusters)
Another set of stats you want to pay close attention are your MJ vs Resistances and Total HP to hull vs Resistances.
Typically PvPers build ships defenses in two main ways.
You have capacity builds, which rely mostly on pure MJ, but often with fairly decent resistances to back it up. IE: Your typical "Meta" FDL runs a Prismo with mostly Heavy duty Skill boosters, with maybe a single thermal to keep up the lower resistance. Typically they also run a Reinforced Shield generator to offer up the maximum capacity. This build has proven to be so effective due to pure hitpoint overinflation, allowing it to both ram, and tank a stupidly large amount of damage whilst being far more effective vs Plasma weaponry. Plasmas dealing 60% Raw damage with a 20/20 spit to Therm'/Kinetic. So having the extra MJ is self explanatory.
Then there are resistance builds. Typically these are Bi-weave ships either relying on very fast shield regen and damage reduction (Generally over 50% resistence across the board) to make the relatively limited number of MJ go far further. These are more advisable in smaller ships, due to thier typically higher shield regeneration, though they can be very effective on ships like the Chieftan and FDS. Typically both those ships have thier shields back after less than 40 seconds, less than 25 in the FDS. Typically these builds are very difficult to kill without applying constant pressure, so tend to be favoured by pilots who have a higher skill ceiling in evasion, but the FDS is a strange exception here. Typically this form of shielding is far more effective vs tracking weaponry due to them being entirely resistance based. These shield setups typically use a Thermal shield generator with a pair of resistance aug' boosters, maybe with a heavy duty one to back up the lower capacity.
You can find hybrids of these two setups, where some have tried to find the optimal balance between plasma resistance and your general weaponry. Some of these are also hugely effective, however a large majority have sacrificed too much from both and have ended up with something very sub par.
For armour again they are pretty similar to the shields. A mixture of good resistances and high capacity is much easier to achieve here due to the HRP's not requiring any power. Always advisable to make sure your optionals for PvP consist of nothing apart from MRPS/HRPS/SCBS/Interdictor, do not stray from this as you will have a hugely comprimisied defense upon shield drop, which you can almost guarantee your opponent will not have.
But here is arguably where you will be adding the majority of weight to your ship so pay close attention to how close you are to that Optimal mass.
This is far more important on smaller vessels where you have to abide by much finer tolerances. It becomes less essential to montior in the medium size class due to the mass curves on the thruster being so much higher. They will still play a part, however the difference in performance is much more negligable.
Basically the numbers game is about getting the best bang for buck you can with the limits of the ships. This is why some ships appear to be much more powerful than others. Simply because they have less limitations.
As for flight characteristics, that is something you really have to experience yourself. finding a ship you are comfortable in is the first stage, learn to fly that effectively and know where it's handling limits are. Then it's always a good idea to spend time in other vessels to learn how they handle and where thier limits are. Thus inturn improving you long term ability to fight against them.
The best way to go about familiarising yourself with ships is simply to go to a RES or CZ and shoot at the AI. Theres very little risk and it's a good way to know where you stand with certain ships before jumping into PvP. Aside from players actually being able to fly however, the biggest thing to take note of is that the pressure applied from a whole squad of AI is still not even remotely comparable to the kind of pressure a lone player can put you under.
Having the ability in your chosen vessel to control the fight cannot be understated. If you let your opponent find a rythum there is a good chance you'll get annihilated. Being able to break thier rythum with out of place turns and regualr vector changes are the best way to put someone off.
Also worth noting that different ships are cabale of vastly different manuvers. Ffor instance the Chieftan has very powerful lateral and dorsal thrust like an FDL, however due to the thrust acceleration output being far lower, they find thier evasion via rotation as opposed to being able to slide sideways in widening or narrowing barrel rolls like an FDL would.
the best bit of advice I was ever given though is to just throw yourself into it. You're gonna die. Alot, but don't let it annoy you, even if they won't publicly admit it, even the PvP "Gods" were scrublets once. They just don't like to be reminded.
Put the time and effort in, you could be the guy that gives them that unsightly reminder.
Another thing worth bearing in mind is DPS, PSD, Heat generation, and distributor draw and how they all relate to one another. DPS, is pretty self explanatory, but is no use if you hae emptied your capacitors in mere seconds, PSD (Per Shot Damage) typically involves less DPS and is usually used to describe PA's and Cannons.
When you fire a weapon and it removes energy from the capacitor you will notice the more that is drained, the greater the heat production, this means even though things like OC lasers seem quite appealing in DPS terms (For a weapon with unlimited ammo), in actual practice, due to distributor draw, they can not only be out of puff in mere seconds, but also generate a large amount of heat. Whereas due to the low heat and draw of kinetic weaponry, OC is a much safer bet.
You want to find a nice balance between DPS or PSD (PSD weaponry yields significantly better results, however you have to land them which can prove challenging when not well versed with fixed weapons) ,and distributor draw, whilst making sure your heat does'nt spike to high. Good pip management can aleiviate this somewhat , but not totally.
Guess that leads me onto the actual practical side of "Gitting Gud".
If you are new to FA off combat, equip a relatively tanky ship with some fixed weapons and go to the local anarchy HAZRES. Spend your time flying around asteroids using as many different thrusters as possible, remember your boost can be dragged through all of your thruster units, regardless of where they are on the ship, thus allowing you to separate your targeting from your flight path (True 3D flight).
Then when you have a feel for the ship, go and shoot at the T9's/T7's, being large slow targets they give plenty of opportunity to practice positioning and aiming, as you graduly get more confident, go down in size/up in difficulty. The prior to improve aim, the latter to improve movement.
If you can wrok to the point where you can eyeball Eagles and Vipers from maximum relative velocity between you and them, you are starting to get the hand of it, again just remember player ships are a great deal faster than the AI and will still take some more adjustment.
The advanced version of this tutorial would be to go and shoot the big vessels a few times until they deploy a fighter, thats your target. Try to kill the SLF whilst being shot at by the rest of its wing/its mothership and this will give you a small amount of basic experirnce against a difficult target, and with the pressure of several ships to "motivate" you into getting it done quickly.
If you have friends who also want to learn with you, make sure you fight one another on a regular basis, not only will this be more effective than fighting the AI and give you a better feeling for true PvP, but hopefully you will both be at a similar experience level meaning there is less chance of being put off due to harsh defeats.
o7 GLHF
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