I'd like to hear what everyone's thoughts are on wing fighting tactics. Most will do a full wing focus on the strongest or easiest to kill member of the other side, but I've found that's not always optimal.
Some questions to start discussion:
- How do you choose the first primary target? Are specific builds more or less likely to receive a focus?
- When you're being focused, how do you avoid damage?
- How do you handle fighting an asymmetric fight (3v4, 2v4, 2v3)?
You're on a helpful roll ryan. Never knew this subforum section existed tbh.
You know as well as I do that the focus plan always shifts otherwise you become predictable. There are so many rock/paper/scissor variables that it's hard to say it happens one way. If fighting a wing you know you can trounce, it's a trophy game. If it's RNG vs. SDC than it's a weird equation of RPS and opportunism. Very dependent on the individuals on their loadouts. Like, if I'm running the 5 rail FDL - I expect to be focused first. Likewise if I see Melon in a hitscan alpha heavy rig - he dies first. It's just stupid to leave an asset like that who will fa on pepper you, and their loadouts usually aren't good evasively so you can shut them out. That's why the SDC 3 PA 2 rail conformity is so dangerous, hard to decide on a focus and you all have heavy passover aim alpha which is conducive to firing evasively while under focus. But right now, as the meta stands - I say rail heavy builds should die first if you remove the variables of skill.
Given all those variables though, it's nice to look at how things worked in the League. Our general strategy was heavy on alpha switches to catch off pips and break someone. Standard plan would be to fire enough to give them time to call focus, pip into eng/weaps - then everyone line up on the real target. Often we'd just have one of the little rigs create a false focus call and then the other 3 would lay into the primary. If there was a secondary threat, one of the smalls with rails, usually me, would maintain pressure on on the ship that needed to maintain weap pips to function. In that regard we usually tried to negate a medium with a small. But you guys won, so don't need to explain the pips game to you heh. And we often, in one case to a fault, would switch primary once it was clear one guy could finish the job. I called this prematurely against the French and it bit me in the .
It's honestly all over the place. The most common strategy is to bring full focus on the obvious target and get a numbers advantage - dps/effect threat + evasive disparity + opportunism (he just hit a rock or someone calls 1 ring on shields) + dps type (as I said, I find good pilots function better under wing focus with passover aim alpha and worse with hitscan). But in a real fight against a good wing we almost always have one guy peeling as needed, or one guy trying to nullify a logical asset from their side. Having at least one rover also means there's a guy ready to call out an opportunity since he's not tunneled on a single target. I've seen our wing and yours very effectively completely split focus with logical shifts of opportunity.
Too many variables. If I'm running a pen heavy small and you have pelu in a FAS then I'm on nullification mode with him while the wing tries to break the primary. If I'm running the only feedback than I'm on an fdl or whatever is most logical. It goes all over the place, but if you give me the wing composition then I can tell you with some specificity what's going to happen. Too damn much to type in order to cover that.
Looking at SDC, you guys tend to do your own thing individually because your communication is good enough to call out opportunities and your skillbase is high enough to trust that everyone will make good decisions individually. It's when we're doing GCI training events like 8v8s that it's super structured focus plans.
