It and the F-104J at 10.3 both feel long in the tooth. Starting out with the ineffective slugs that are 9Bs, crawling up to the 9Es through endless waves of A-10s, F-5s, and F-4s, then finally grinding out 9Ps and…
Practically everyone in every (95% uptier) match you get can just flare them, with near-impunity, and a gun duel or ambush on unsuspecting players (good luck finding those, it seems everyone looks behind them all the time now) are your only hope.
It’s a level of play a lot of the other aircraft you see don’t have to suffer through to achieve the same goals, such as the aforementioned aircraft with access to countermeasures (and sometimes 9Ls) at the same or lower BR.
Now, I don’t know if I’m exactly an authority on balance or authenticity here. But it seems shoddy that given its lack of flares, the F-1 only gets 9Ps when it could carry 9Ls (and 9Ms, but I feel that’d be a bit ridiculous) in reality… The T-2 has the exact same missile grind minus two missiles at 9.7, where matchmaking is far more favorable, and it can see things like Sabres and earlier MiGs.
Giving the F-1 9Ls certainly wouldn’t hurt, even if it resulted in a move up to 10.7, given it doesn’t even have the AN/ALE-42K ECM pods it was capable of carrying.
