Why is the ADATS 11.7? If its purpose is Air defense, then why is it the same BR as a Pantsir where it has better Missiles, better guns, better radar where it can see everything and by the way, will highlight everything that is flying in your screen including missiles and bombs and can’t be detected by RWR when firing, Pantsir’s missiles will lead while the American ADATS only has a single gun that belongs in 8.3 while the Canadian one doesn’t even have one, won’t radar lock so you need to manually look for the target for optical lock where planes can snipe you from 10km away making the planes almost impossible to spot while only having 8 missiles? The ADATS has the ability to lock like an IFV from 10.0, No stabilization, and the ability to destroy tanks like a LOSAT which is sitting in 10.3. These doesn’t justify its the position it has in 11.7. I really think Gaijin just put ADATS at 11.7 because they don’t want players to see that the US tree is missing top Tier SPAA while they just keep adding more SPAA like the upcoming Osa.
Agree on this one. Honestly I’m fine with it having worse guns and missiles than the Pantsir. The biggest issue is the absolutely dogwater radar system, literally like every other top-tier AA has a tracking radar but ADATS doesn’t. So when you get it out the game becomes a horror one, you know there’s something coming at you, and you better pray that this “something” is not a missile, because if it is you’re pretty much cooked, and if it isn’t then good luck playing the role of the missing tracking radar, trying to find where the enemy aircraft is, and to make matters worse even if you do find the aircraft, the IRST tracker is so bad, you’re most likely going to lose lock, honestly you’re better off not even using the lock on
At least we can be thankful that after so many years Gaijin finally understood that this thing being in the class of TDs is an absolute joke and finally made it an SPAA.
You can use the air alert message to gauge the altitude for the aircraft spotted by your search radar and then do a more accurate and faster manual search. It’s not ideal still, so I think too that the IRST should automatically perform the search for you, same as a tracking radar and as how it worked in real life I believe. I think it’s a leftover from the past where IRST was unique to it still and otherwise too powerful if it had the same autoscan ability as tracking radars.
I don’t really mind it being 11.7 though. It’s still a decent SPAA, fast missiles and no warning on launch either. I would suggest playing it with the radar OFF and only occasionally turning it on to find targets, this way you allow enemy planes to get closer without them thinking they are in danger and strike them in silence. If you keep your RWR on, you run the risk of a lot of CAS planes to stay 10km away (which is not hard to do and you will still be in range of their weapons often), rendering you completely useless. Of course then there are people who always keep their distance, those are hard to deal with in any SPAA, though the Pantsir is the only one that can at least spook them by sneaking a missile close occasionally (though not ideally effective either, but it can do it at least). Probably the Pantsir could go to 12.0 with some decompression in toptier in general.
Your tactic of turning off the radar doesn’t really work that well in the modern day top-tier environment, the optics planes get access to just make it impossible to hide from them, unless you hide among a bunch of big trees, but in that case your view would also get blocked.