Battle Pass Vehicles: PBM-5A Mariner

And hopefully you knew I wasn’t being serious…

was hoping this was gonna be a tech tree aircraft being its the most modern variant of it

BP rewards are never tech tree are they??

no was hoping this aircraft would be tech tree one day instead of being a battlepass item, just seems strange they put the most powerful version of a aircraft as a vehicle not everyone can get

Make the next vehicle the B-36 peacemaker. At this point i don’t care if it will be a tech tree, prem, event or bp. Just add new higher tier prop,prop/jet or jet bombers!

And if you have spare time, a working cockpit for my beloved B-29 would be awesome <3

2 Likes

No offense, but this plane in the current state of prop Air RB is imho borderline useless.

Why?

  1. The current meta in wt prevents you in almost all of the cases to get near to a base, it its simply too slow and can’t climb. You face stuff like B7A2s or T-18Bs which kill you in a single pass as you are totally outclimbed long before you can drop.

    Even Fireflies can do this - and every single engine fighter (except maybe Avia S-199) is able to intercept you before dropping outside the 5 Frontline maps.

  2. So you are forced to fly large detours in order to get to 4-5 km altitude and to stay out of spotting ranges and you have to avoid contrails at any cost.

    This leads to the fact that either your team is complete dead or the game is over before you can drop.

  3. So when i use all my experience of >2.000 hours as bomber pilot to get in my 4th match in a position to kill 3 enemy bases (on a 3 bases map) and bomb an afk guy sitting on his runway (see replay) is more than disappointing that the seamines i dropped failed to explode.

    I mean there is zero point in flying out this plane if your tech staff is unable to fix a rather easy bug (see bug report) if your armament refuses to do its job.

  4. I flew this plane 4 times; the first 2 times my complete team was dead before i was at 4.500 meters, so i was forced to rtb, land and j out (which worked thanks to landing gear). In my 3rd match all enemies were dead before i was even close to a base.

    And if i flew sneaky, avoided detection and managed to drop after 14 minutes (due to necessary detour) and i don’t get any score thanks to bugged mines, i see no use for this aircraft in its current state.

  5. I will never use this plane again - and i can’t recommend it to others. You might consider lowering the BR to 3.3 and give it a strategic bomber spawn like the Sunderland, but even then it takes way too much effort trying to make it work.

Have a good one!

13 Likes

It wouldnt take anything on the exterior pylons when armament larger than the 1000lb bombs were carried internally. Is this intended, or would it be beneficial to bug report it?

1 Like

What “bigger” bombs do you have in mind? I found only 1600 lb bombs (as not implemented payload) whilst doing a quick search…

If you have valid information a proper bug report is always a good idea - maybe this plane can be useful in Ground RB or Naval AB/RB…

1 Like

The bigger payloads in question were the ones in game, that is the 1600lb AP-bombs and the magnetic mines. As far as i can understand there is no problem with the weight, combining, for example, 8x 1000lbs bombs and two torpedoes.

1 Like

It’s a good bomber but 3.7 is too high, at least a solid 3.3

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Do you know anything regarding this @Smin1080p_WT ?

i am a bit late to the party as it seams, but tbh i find this plane rather useless; like above posts mentioned i tried playing this plane for 9 games or so; in just 1 game i managed to get to the enemy base and bomb it; in all other games it got killed way before reaching 1/2 the distance to enemy bases; didnt care to sideclimb, cos it is so damn slow, whole game is over until i reach ~5000m; so yeah, this is an usless plane and it looks like the vehicles from this bp are kinda odd, to say at least.

5 Likes

@Stona_WT @Smin1080p_WT

Its a boat that flies so… its only real utility is in naval where it gives you the option to attack or try to cap/decap an unguarded point.

There used to be a large Air map that had stationary ships in it where various torpedo carriers could be used to effect - sadly disappeared quite a while ago along with a few other very large maps.

4 Likes

You might not be aware of that the mine bug is not fixed.
Despite gaijin’s claim they would have fixed it (like the bug report quoted by me above), it is still bugged…

Just take a look at this report:

Community Bug Reporting System

1 Like

Gotta love Mariner players tagging bases to bomb, when literally everything will get there faster.
…and then they are cursing other players for bombing their base while they are still half way to the target and enemy fighters start swarming them.

This plane was not dead on arrival, it was dead on dev blog.
Creating BP task around it was sadistic.

4 Likes

Looking forward to the BR going down.

is it better in AB I wonder??

It’s a pretty aircraft tho :)

1 Like

Norway? It had ships that moved around but could still be targeted fine. I loved that map.

I did add it to rhe BR change feedback in an attempt a move to it 3.3, unsurprisingly it did not happen.

I found it utterly useless in its natural naval habitat where 3.7 is full of 37/40mm that can hit such big, slow targets with ease. And if HE-VT is available they are minced. I will admit to being killed twice, although both were kamikaze attacks where i was fully engaged with surface targets, and my AI gunner still shot them down.

My coupon remains unclaimed in the chest of shame. Flying the freebie missions were enough to tell me 3.7 was too high.