What do you think are the hardest ships to fly? I've heard the TIE Phantom described as pretty challenging, and I know arc-dodging with some ships can be very demanding as well. What are the ships you find most difficult to fly to their full potential?

HWK-290 is pretty challenging, the pretty awesome abilities combined with it's 5 health, and terrible dial, it really is tough to utilize..

The lambda shuttle again is a challenging ship to fly because of the bargain of a point cost you can field one at, but again the terrible dial makes it a great challenge to utilize to its full potential.

Generic phantoms.

There's 3 things that can make a ship more difficult to fly.

1) No repositioning abilities

2) Only have a primary firing arc (no aux arcs or turrets)

3) Bad dial

Based on that, the lambda is likely the hardest ship to fly in the game. It can't reposition without upgrades, only has a primary firing arc, and has the worst dial in the game.

Conversely (and not surprising) you could say the jumpmaster is the easiest ship in the game to fly since it has native barrel roll, a turret, and a great dial.

The Quadjumper. FFG really gutted the little bugger's dial (I understand why, but I think they went a little too far- it's too easy for the opponent to stay safe).

1 minute ago, Elavion said:

The Quadjumper. FFG really gutted the little bugger's dial (I understand why, but I think they went a little too far- it's too easy for the opponent to stay safe).

I don't think I've ever even seen one of these in play...

12 minutes ago, Malabor said:

I don't think I've ever even seen one of these in play...

I love the ship, but it really is bad. I could deal with the fact that it's borderline useless against large ships, but with a handful of exceptions it's pretty awful against small bases as well. The amount of my opponents who dodged the spacetug tractor array without even thinking about it simply because it has no speed 1 banks is painfully close to the amount of opponents I've actually tried to use it against

The Lambda really requires you to become skilled at self-bumping to be effective and control their speed. Plus, they're the only ship in the game without a white turn, which is especially painful on an arced ship.

As for the Quadjumper: Unkar Plutt with a spacetug is surprisingly legit as a pilot. The other Quadjumpers aren't great, but Unkar is an annoying little punk for his points.

5 minutes ago, PhantomFO said:

The Lambda really requires you to become skilled at self-bumping to be effective and control their speed. Plus, they're the only ship in the game without a white turn, which is especially painful on an arced ship.

As for the Quadjumper: Unkar Plutt with a spacetug is surprisingly legit as a pilot. The other Quadjumpers aren't great, but Unkar is an annoying little punk for his points.

I've had good success with the quad. My go to is the gunrunner with tug and pattern analyzer. Unkar crew is nice if you have an extra point. I've never really had trouble decimating small ships with it to the point that people hard target that 20 point ship first to avoid having their small ships flung into things. Worse against large bases certainly but -1 agility makes many of them sweat a little as is.

As for hard to fly I think tie strikers with adaptive ailerons are pretty tricky (other than duchess obviously).

I would think the USS Nimitz. Getting those up on the air is really hard to do.

T65 X-wings. Everything about them is just a little too weak. Dial has nothing special on it whatsoever, no trick on there. Too fragile to joust, not nimble enough and no re-pos to dodge, just a plain arc. There are good astromechs but none that really makes you go WOW when equiped on the X-wing.

Initially I was really surprised that anyone is, in good conscience, saying anything other than the Lambda.

It speaks volumes that Electronic Baffle is often considered for its system slot: that you would consider it, on occasion, beneficial to do a damage to yourself for the privilege of being able to do 90 degree turns on consecutive rounds.

Everyone knows about the self-bumping slow roll, now, too, thanks to the recent prevalence of Palp shuttles. Again, for there to be such a universally standard way of flying them speaks to how pathetically limited their options are.

Although, referring back to the OP, the question was "what is hardest to fly to full potential", not "what has the least potential". So I guess the Lambda, which presents the absolute floor in terms of dial quality in the game, is actually pretty easy to fly to its full potential.

I guess in light of that interpretation I'd say my opinion is that it's probably hardest to fly the Aggressor to its full potential, because it has so many options (so its potential is quite high) but is still arc locked (so making mistakes really matters a lot). It is always tempting to do those sloops, but it doesn't want to get stressed (no 90 degree turns are green thus you can easily get trapped), so it can be very challenging to know the right time to do a red to keep arc vs bug out without regard for arc, or maybe try a surprise 1 speed maneuver. Given that making a mistake means not having a shot with half of your list's firepower, the pressure is pretty high. I think this is a contributing factor towards why brobots aren't seen too frequently these days.

I'm really surprised that nobody is saying Striker or Echo.

Generally I'm surprised that many answers go towards a bad dial. While that definitely is hard to fly, I think flying a very nimle ship well is even harder. Having limited options is frustrating, but choosing the wrong option out of too many is even worse.

What do you mean by "difficult to fly"? Do you mean

"difficult to utilize it in such a way that it is "good"" or

"requires a lot of skill to reach its full potential"

to my thinking, the hawk and the lambda are very easy to fly. There are so few options on their dial and action bar that there are limited choices to make. Setting the dial on my lambda rarely takes more than a second or two because there are so few options and it's pretty obvious what the ship needs to do.

Echo, on the other hand, practically requires a phd in non-Euclidean geometry to try and figure out where he CAN end up, much less which of the 90,000 options is the optimal choice. Easily the hardest pilot in the game to fly.

The T-65 X-Wing, as it is still the most worthless ship to attempt to field

The T65 is easy. Even a farm boy can fly it.

5 minutes ago, Zeoinx said:

The T-65 X-Wing, as it is still the most worthless ship to attempt to field

A guy from my FLGS begs to differ by flying four of them

Any scum ship with a cloaking device.

I'm going to say Guri with Cloaking Device, the StarViper Mk II title, and Advanced Sensors. Not only does your opponent have no clue where you're going to be, you don't either!

But in seriousness, trying to play a ridiculous arc dodger with that setup at PS5 is very difficult. Instead of just reacting to your opponent, you have to be very good at anticipating where your higher PS opponent (say Fenn Rau) is going to be, make sure you're in a position where they can't get away, and also be in a place where you won't get procketed off the board. All while trying to anticipate where your ship is going to land between a decloak and curved BR.

3 hours ago, superdave said:

What do you think are the hardest ships to fly? I've heard the TIE Phantom described as pretty challenging, and I know arc-dodging with some ships can be very demanding as well. What are the ships you find most difficult to fly to their full potential?

The Lambda, certainly, but also the YV-666. Breaking it free soon enough to get it back into the fight before the game ends is possible but tricky. I've also seen it do wonders in the hands of someone using Bossk and missiles on it, which only fire toward the standard, forward arc. That's impressive.

If you aren't saying Echo, than you've never tried Echo.

TLT Y-Wings and "PWTs" (Falcon, etc).

Because you can't do it without someone ******* about how they're "easy mode".

This topic is kinda vague, do you mean trickiest to master or how difficult it is to win a game with them?

5 hours ago, Forgottenlore said:

Echo, on the other hand, practically requires a phd in non-Euclidean geometry to try and figure out where he CAN end up, much less which of the 90,000 options is the optimal choice. Easily the hardest pilot in the game to fly.

It is easy to see the most difficult ship to fly if you're only looking at maneuvering choices - Echo with Advanced sensors, engine upgrade and PTL can be pretty much anywhere he want to, whenever he wants it. I don't know the maths, but you've got probably 30'000 different options for movement (assuming six barrel roll positions). Obviously he has flaws, but he is the only pilot in the game to be able to end up behind his starting position, facing the opposite way, without stress.

5 minutes ago, Astech said:

Echo with Advanced sensors, engine upgrade and PTL can be pretty much anywhere he want to, whenever he wants it. I don't know the maths, but you've got probably 30'000 different options for movement (assuming six barrel roll positions). Obviously he has flaws, but he is the only pilot in the game to be able to end up behind his starting position, facing the opposite way, without stress.

Although it is looking like the star viper with the new title may be able to give him a run for his money.