Defensive + Offensive Targets

[Red Fox Four]

First off - Love wings!

Now to improve it.

I like that we can assist a wingman by simply clicking a button to target your targets(wingman) target.

However,

Everytime you do this you un-target your wingman and have to re-target him again. This gets a bit tedious when you are bounty hunting at a nav beacon, RES or doing conflict zones. It ends up being lots of button clicking or nagging at Voice Attack. It usually goes like this:

Target Wingman
Assist
Target Wingman
Assist
Target Wingman
Assist
Target Wingman
Assist
x100 during conflict zones especially.

In (some) MMO's they use Defensive and Offensive targets.

The idea here is that you set your Defensive target to your tank, then you assist tank and it will set your Offensive target to the enemy he is fighting.

When you cast spells or use abilities any beneficial abilities, such as heals and buffs, will land on your Defensive target (ie. the tank) but any Offensive abilities (such as attacks, fireballs etc) will land on your Offensive target (the mob your tank is trying to kill).

For Elite the same idea can be employed. Call it Defensive target, Wing Assist or whatever, but whoever you set as the "Defensive" target will remain targetted the whole time. This way everyone in the Wing can agree on who selects the targets for focus fire, and everyone will then set that person as their "Defensive" target. Anytime he engages enemy ships, everyone will simply use the "Assist Defensive Target" (ie. Assist Wingman) and set their Offensive target to the ship he wants to focus fire.

This will make dogfighting much smoother, reduces the amount of key pressing and/or nagging on Voice Attack, and it will keeping the Wing focused on the same target.

As it is now I noticed people have a tendency to stop assisting after a long run in conflict zones or bounty hunting and start going after their own targets rather than constantly:

Target Wingman
Assist
Target Wingman
Assist
Target Wingman
Assist

You get the idea.

The concept of Defensive and Offensive targets worked very nicely in the MMO's where it was implemented and it improved the gameplay quite a lot by removing repetitive keypressing.

Thanks.

 

[Arsen Cross]

This could be helpful.

In the interim I discovered that you can use modifier keys with joysticks, such as Control, Alt, Right Alt, and Right Control. So what I did was bound Control+POV Left, Up, Right to target my wingmen and Control+POV Down to target the currently targeted wingmans target. It speeds up the process for me immensely and it's become an instant gesture for me.

If you use a HOTAS (I use a Logitech G13 and Cyborg V.1) you can just use that HOTAS' software to bind the modifier key of your choice to a button on your joystick essentially giving you multi-mode buttons on the fly. It's actually pretty cool.