ALL F-104G: 11.0 - 10.3 F-104S TAF and F-104S: 11.3 - 10.7 or 11.0 F-104S.ASA: 12.0 - 11.3 F-104J: 10.3 - 10.0
After flying for a long time on Italian premium F-104S TAF i want to suggest a br change for this aircraft. Right now Starfighter have 11.3 br and i cant understand “Why?”, you don have manuverability at all, you dont have good missiles and the most offensive thing is that at 12.3 (where you end up very often) you can no longer compete with anyone in terms of speed for which the F-104 was created.
Compare F-104S TAF with Mig-21bis (11.0) for example, both planes have 6 missiles but Mig have all-aspect and Starfighter isn’t. You think what F-104 have Fox-1? Wrong. You can take 2 Fox-1 missiles only INSTEAD of your MAIN GUN, trust me, no one will do it, I’ve tryed it and its really bad. You dont have good enough radar and bvr is only 4km so your missile can’t even track. Back to comparison, Mig-21bis is flying almost as fast as F-104 (maybe even faster tbh), have much better manuverability (sure, anything is better), the same amount of missiles and flares, a bit worse cannon (It doesn’t matter) and bis can bomb bases with napalm too. The point of this comparison is what in terms of Air RB Mig is better in any way and sitting on lower BR so whats the reason, why is all F-104’s (not only S TAF) have such high BR? Why Vietnam-age aircraft needs to deal with 4th gen fighters on 12.3? what in the world F-104 pilot supposed to do to a 12.0 Mirage F1C-200 or 11.7 Mig-23ML (btw this guys is faster than Starfighter and always take all bases with napalm).
In the end i want to notice what i’m a experienced pilot in WT, i have around 3000 hours and i have fully resarched air trees of USA, USSR, France, Italy, Sweden and Israel, all of this is not “skill issue” or just a try of getting better conditions for my grind, i’m already get my F-2000A and AV-8B+ in Italian tech tree, i’m just really curious why players on F-104’s must suffer?
10.3 might be a bit low for the F-104Gs with 4 9Js and flares in my opinion.
I’d put them at:
ITA F-104G: 10.3-Worse F-104G
GER F-104G: 10.7-Any lower would make it too opressive.
F-104S: 11.0-Correctly balanced relative to the 104G, 21bis, and other aircraft
F-104S ASA: 11.3-Held back by it’s bad RWR and lack of cannon when using SARHs
The F-104S is faster than it, and the Mig-21bis is also undertiered and should be 11.3.
I’ll agree with you. In fact, the F-104S belongs on 11.0 and not 10.7, I thought about it and realized that in fact the only reason why I wanted to see it on 10.7 was the lack of Mirage F1C-200 in the selection, again, this plane is faster than you on F-104, more maneuverable, has Matra Magic 2 which guarantees you 2 permanent kills, can bomb bases aswell and has SARH missiles which is not the best cause of bad radar but you can get a kill with it anyway. I have this plane, as I already wrote, I researched the whole of France on it and it seems to me that it should be 12.3.
UPD: My bad, i forgot what German F-104G is not this bad as Italian one.
I just played the F-104S TAF recently and it did well.
The only advice I can think of is don’t try to do with it what it can’t do. Other words, don’t dogfight in it. What you do with it is you wait for the teams to get into dog fights and then you fly through the center of them at top speed and unload your missiles at any enemies that leave an opening. I got several multi kill games doing that.
Dont get me wrong, i’m not trying to show-off or something, the only thing i want to say is from my perspective, from my experince in other nations and aircrafts F-104S is on very high BR. Yes, it can’t dogfight and you wrote the right tactic for this plane, i know it, but the point is that now, on this BR, you are losing all the advantages of this aircraft. Can the F-104 bomb bases well using napalm? The Mig-23ML will do better because it is faster and can get 2 kills on the fly with the R-24R. Do you have good dynamics and maximum speed? There are a LOT of planes here that are faster than you because you are only fast at high altitudes but you can’t fly there because of the radar-guided missiles and at low altitudes you lose all your speed from a single gentle turn. Ok, to not waste our time, what can F-104 do to a F-20A, F-16A, Mirage F1C-200? You are flying metal pipe with rear-aspect missiles, the only thing you can do is fly straight and fast, to be honest, you can’t even fly this fast as you want to get even a small advantage on BR’s like 11.7 or higher.
11.0
sub sonic
flarephilic AIM9L missile
Missing a whole 2 G nearly of STR and ITR
Only 60cm in a BR filled with SARH All-A IR
It’s IR sig is probably the hottest in game
30mm grenade launcher gun
Mostly agree though some disagreement-
F-104G China- 10.3 (no countermeasures! Though it maybe should have them?)
F-104G Germany/Belgium- 10.7, 10.3 is too far
F-104G Italy- 10.7 and add 2x 9J
F-104J- stay 10.3, it’s got 6x 9P
F-104S/TAF- 11.0
F-104ASA- 11.3 is fair, 11.7 also could work though
We also need to get early Gs for Germany and Italy with 9Bs for 9.3, and the ASA.M with 9L(I) for 12.0.
I know I’m late to the party here but, I agree that late model F-104s need to be lowered but there’s a couple things to add. For one, we just need a bit more decompression up top to start and that may well solve the issues as the F-104S and G are solid in down tiers but they rarely face down tiers thanks to compression. Secondly, if that doesn’t fix the problem then the F-104G needs to be 10.7, (10.3 for the flare-less ones only) and the F-104S needs to be 11.0 instead. The ASA has no business being at 12.0 and needs to be 11.3 considering that at 11.0 there’s the Mig-23M which has all-aspect missiles, MTI radar, and generally a better flight performance than the F-104S save for maybe a little speed. It’s pretty obvious when you look at Mig-23s, Mirages, Kfirs, and even some F-5 variants which all have similar or better flight performance, similar or better radars, and better missiles at the same or lower BRs than the F-104S and ASA. There’s literally no reason the Starfighters are so high in BR. People will say “but it’s a high speed interceptor not a dog fighter so why do you care if it can’t turn” well that’s because its speed is nullified at 11.3+ since everything can keep up enough to cancel you for an entire game, if not outright catch you if you have any sort of ordinance on your pylons. I love the F-104, but I’m not asking for the F-104 to become godly, just put in a BR bracket where it can be competitive. Yes I’ve had some great games with my F-104S and G but if you have to rely on dumb opponents, downtiers, and you have to work 10x harder for a kill than most (admittedly not all) people on the battlefield, it’s not exactly balanced and it just makes it uninviting to play them. Even a hardcore starfighter fan such as myself begins to grow tired of being destroyed for 9 games straight just to get a solid 2-3 kill game on the 10th try with a down tier on my side. Unfortunately I guess it’s not profitable for gaijin to fix so they simply won’t. We need a new copy-paste F-5 instead
Gaijin balances by SL earning, and people keep bombing with the F-104 series because it’s very good at the job, so you end up with something overtiered.
What’s sad is I’m pretty sure the 9.3-11.0 f104s all have the same engine. And the Italian ones at 11.3 and 12.0 only have like 20% more thrust. All the way at that rating you are not even outrunning something like a mig 21 bis by much and in return turn like a whale.
I’ve tried to get the mods for f104j and it feels impossible but I don’t think it should go to 10.0. It seems like the ultimate slaughter in downtier and useless in uptier plane. It’s insane they moved 10.7s like mig 21smt/mf and j35xs down. In most cases planes that gain flares and some sort of other upgrade should be 2 battle rating steps higher like the mirage 3c vs 3e.
Perhaps they could solve planes having unfair ratings just cause they’re good at base bombing by having a special rp from bases bombed multiplier for really fast planes like f104.
The ideal would be to reverse the nerfs he took…
simply the biggest nerf I’ve ever seen in FM.
f104 f was a very fun plane, the f104A and C were problematic in their br, but the F104s was a lot of fun, post nerf it is by far one of the worst experiences you can have in game.
