Dogfight PVP For Imps now

I pretty much only play Dogfight, largely on Empire. There's no good answer. Double rocket X-Wings with Overloaded Shields win basically every joust and it's too tanky to get strafed by surprise in one run by any Imperial ship without instantly ping-ponging out the way. If you're close enough, you can get it with a surprise Overcharged Rotary, but I can rarely kill them (with basically 100% accuracy) before they move.  In a joust, the Overcharged Rotary won't get through both the Barrage and Ion Rockets AND the X-Wing's primary laser fire, so the X-Wing will likely fly away unscathed - literally happened to me earlier, thanks Pascooliyo. Maybe the Bomber's Charge Beam would help win the joust, but I doubt it, and I doubt any high-tier X-Wings pilots are gonna stare that in the face for very long, then you're at the X-W's mercy. TIE Defenders don't even have access to Ion Rockets so they can't hope to outmaneuver an X-W while putting out the same double rocket DPS and getting through their Overloaded Shield.

I use the standard TIE Fighter the least of any ship in the game, but I have used it with double rocket loadouts with various hulls and engines to try to work out a counter to double rocket X-Wings. It didn't work for me. Maybe it works for other people. I rarely use the Reaper for Dogfight, but I don't imagine it's a hard counter to any Republic ship like the Y- and B-Wing are to the Defender.

Target Jammed A-Wings are a thousand times harder to hit than Target Jammed Interceptors thanks to their tiny hitbox and, again, Overloaded Shields mitigate a stupid amount of damage that the TIE-Int cannot hope to replicate. Most seem to bring Rapid Fire tho', so I try to put distance between myself and them, then dead drift and chip away at them while their lasers aren't even in range - drifting makes it much harder for them to use their Barrage/Ion Rockets and they're pretty squishy, especially compared to X-Wings. The Defender's my best answer to A-Wings, but Bombers work well too.

With their final server-side update, the Y-Wing is probably the permanent king of Dogfight now. Boost Kit and the Ion aux makes the ship stupid easy to use, just ping-pong around and wait for your opponent to get disabled. Again, with Overloaded Shields they've literally inverted the Fleet Battle Defender problem to a Dogfight Y-Wing problem - you can't hit it and if you do hit it you'll barely scratch it before it starts another infinite death loop while waiting for its Ion to cool down the rest of the way.

I used to use APS exclusively in the Defender, but no longer. Now I run Anti-Starfighter Missile to bait countermeasures and Ion Missile to hopefully disable them so I can get the kill. Or, joust them and Ion Missile them when you're super close when they don't have time for countermeasures, but X- and Y-Wings that I can't kill basically always force me into a Bomber with Multi-Lock Missiles and a Golo. Multi-Lock feints them into using their countermeasures, Golo to finish them after ripping into them with the Rotary Cannon. Works well on hard-to-hit A-Wings, too. Still, high-tier Pubs are abusing the * out of ping-ponging with the Jet Engine and Boost Kit in X- and Y-Wings, making them particularly hard to hit with a Rotary Cannon, while mitigating primary and secondary damage with Overloaded Shields, and the Ion aux in the Y-Wing basically means the ship does the work for you. Plenty of Pubs still fly A-Wing, but so many are moving on to the X- and Y- now that they see how busted they are in Dogfight.

I've seen a few decent Empire players come out on top. I've seen one or two drift Interceptors like they have infinite momentum, but I've seen significantly more players do the same with A-, X- and Y-Wings, and the only counter to these arguments I've ever heard is "Empire always wins in Fleet Battle," which isn't relevant in a conversation about Dogfight, and "you need to learn how to power shunt," as if tapping - or double-tapping - a button at the right moment is the difficult part of this game. If you fly an unshielded TIE consistently, you know how to Power Shunt. Timing isn't that hard to figure out. Randos to randos, Republic generally wins.

Just my take tho'. Maybe someone else experiences the exact opposite.