From my coop play, the best defense is being a hero character yourself and popping a special move. That and focus fire from your allies. Short of being a force user yourself that’s about it. Chewbacca with his middle ability does some good damage if you get headshots. Especially when the ability is upgraded.
I’ve also had success as the enforcer super droid when playing first order. No heat generation + increased rate of fire = delicious. I can keep up with hero characters with that dude.
It’s the shadows. Max shadows in DX12 = crashes. There are some files you can fiddle with to fix it for awhile, but the next patch or driver upgrade will make it start all over again.
I prefer turning down the shadows a couple of notches and then playing DX12 otherwise maxed out to DX11 with full shadows.
Personal preference.
Imma heading to try that! 
Ack! I keep missing the seshs cause I’m a bit injured. I should be loitering in the Discord tonight if anyone’s going to be on.
Great sesh tonight guys! SWB2 is one of those games that’s easily approachable in terms of control layout and fun shooting dynamics, but hard to master because the variety of EVERYTHING seems INSANE to me at this point! 
I’ve only played the MP vs bots in coop or solo, not counting the SP campaign, so I don’t know what it’s like H2H, but I know it took me a relatively long period of time to get where I felt like I was living more than 30 seconds per life. Maybe 20 hours or more?
I can often go an entire match and die less than 5x now, while at the start it was spawn, die, repeat every minute or faster.
Of course, in SW Squadrons I still tend to blow up in under a minute…Don’t have much over 10 hrs there yet.
I don’t think I’ll bother with true mp. Co-op is fun. It’d be nice if coop had some starfighter battles though.
Yes! I’ve NEVER flown the fighters in SWBF2 because of that. Only what you can do solo or in coop.