I’ve been spading a ton of low tier attackers/bombers lately and I’ve come to a very strong conclusion. They don’t fit in the game in any meaningful way regarding their capability to impact matches, and some are directly just not very usable at all besides hoping you are left alone by enemy players who get distracted by your teammates while you shoot artillery/pillboxes (referring to attackers). I think gaijin needs to either:
A. (Preferred) Expand the gamemode to incorporate more meaningful objectives that actually impact the match. Currently, you physically cannot win games on most maps (if not all) by bombing bases or taking out ground targets. The ticket pools are too large and the tickets subtracted by taking bases or by attacking ground targets take too few tickets away from these massive pools.
They should: Spread ground targets out across the map to force the enemy to search harder to find you rather than everything being congested into small areas making your location predictable. They should also make the ticket impact much greater per individual base or ground target. Your team destroying 4 bases + say, 20-30 ground targets should result in a victory and not just 20% of the enemy ticket bar being depleted.
or B. Simply reduce most bombers/attackers by 0.3 to 0.7br so they fit into more competitive brackets where their performance isn’t so drastically worse than the competition so they stand better chances of defending themselves.
As far as attackers go:
A common experience I have in something like an IL-2 or any other similar strike aircraft is wanting to strike the ground targets (as you would imagine is their intended role) and coming across two outcomes. Either I approach the battlefield early and try to get early strikes on the ground targets and end up becoming food to the first lawn mower p51 or bf109 that shows up; or I patiently wait for an opportunity later in the game to do so, which simply becomes a game of hoping my team is better than theirs so we end up outnumbering them despite my lack of input as a team member.
Common aircraft that experience this difficulty are:
There are many more but these are some common ones you may have experienced this issue with.
As for bombers:
Bombers in props I feel like are fully abandoned by gaijin. It seems like they decided many years ago that X bomber should be Y BR, base bombing mechanics have been changed throughout the years, metas have shifted, and ultimately a lot of these have became borderline unusable so long as any enemy tries to contest you and gaijin doesn’t change their BR because nobody plays them to provide data to show they are horrendous experiences.
Some examples shown below are bombers I feel like that fall under this category:
Again, there are many more of these but I have listed the ones I think suffer the most. The common aspect all of these share is that they have extremely poor defensive armament, basically being unable to actually defend themselves in any meaningful way from any real threat while presumably being balanced on the fact they have “decent to good” bomb loads which as of 2026 is not a real benefit in the current game since you are usually competing with other bombers to take bases and you are not really going to find many opportunities where you are able to take multiple bases without at least screwing over a teammate or 2 by taking bases they could have bombed for their own benefit. On top of that as I said earlier the bases themselves do not impact the game at all and don’t lead to winning games. You physically cannot impact matches as a bomber by bombing bases. The ticket count just doesn’t budge.
To give a specific example, here is the DB-3B, I spaded it yesterday:
It has THREE entire 7.62 machine guns to defend yourself at 2.7 battle rating, and it is quite slow and large, making it fragile. The only real upside it has is that it can bomb 2.5 or so bases without rearming. However it sits at 2.7 BR where there are extremely deadly interceptors/fighters that have no trouble climbing directly to your altitude and intercepting you before you are anywhere near a base. Even if you go all the way around the map and play passive to avoid enemies, you still do not impact the match’s tickets as I said earlier.
I would like a discussion below on this issue if possible.
