I’m interested in hearing the details.
I’m eager to hear your exeperiences with them.
Sorry, I thought that was something else. Give me a minute.
J1N is quite evil right now being 2.0 and seeing reserve planes, but 2.7 is a little much. It’s not THAT good, would be fine at 2.3 right where Yak-2 KABB is - and that one has much better guns.
I would rate these two the same at 4.0. The Model 32 rolls better but loses more speed in turns. They are good counterparts.
A6M3 22 Ko is not that much worse than A6M5s, it loses less speed in turns which matters a lot while A6M5 is faster.
A6M5 Otsu should also be 5.0, the 13.2mm Type 3 is nowhere as good as it once was.
By far the worst of the late Zeros and should be no higher than 4.7
All would be fine at 5.3. N1K1-J has significantly better climb rate and handling, as it is lighter. N1K2-Js are also just not what they used to be.
I don’t see any of these as 5.7 worthy. I don’t like J2M2 at 5.0 as well.
This one is missing a pair of 20mm cannons.
Not as bad as it was like 2 years ago (got a huge weight decrease, like -800kg) but it’s still really bad. I don’t think it would be out of place as low as 5.0.
In pure air to air capability, 3.0/2.7. Two 7.7s with not that much ammo is quite poor. The engine is great but it overheats a lot.
I have a personal beef with this plane and they should both get attacker airspawns instead to stop useless spaceclimber larpers from going to 9km and staying there all match while watching you die
Has no real advantages over Ki-43-II in-game and overheats a lot more. Water injection is limited, don’t remember if it blocks WEP or just overheats even more.
The firepower and nose authority are unironically too bad to be higher, even though it is VERY evil in the right hands. You’ll see the aiming reticle just flop around while trying to follow someone.
4.0 at most, it’s bad at altitude like a Yak but has much worse energy retention. You still get the japan effect of everyone running from you but without the amazing turn.
It’s fine at 3.3. Good, not exceptional.
Just get rid of the airspawn and have it be a cannon bus for good.
Both are fine at 4.0. Also good but not good enough to be higher.
Fair on the Ko. Hei could also be 5.7, the 30mm is not much of an advantage with how rare bombers are, and how lackluster the Ho-155 is.
All too high. The J1N flies better than the Ki-45s and none of these have particularly good armaments. 2.3.
Both of these are overweight and suck.
It’s kinda good, but 4.3? The nose authority and rudder are terrible.
I don’t like it. That aside it’s probably fair, being a Hornet sidegrade.
1 Like
What I dont understand is why the Yak-3s arent also moving. They can maybe argue that the strongest aircraft of 5.7 needed to move up and that maybe the zeros were part of that. But to totally ignore the strongest aircraft at 5.7 and leave it at 5.7, whilst moving everyone else up to 6.0…
Gotta love being false flagged for suggesting soviet aircraft get held to the same standard as everyone else
1 Like
Yak-3s are in a major nation, have massive playerbases, and are routinely praised as some of the best fighters at their BRs. You will see HORDES of 3Us at 5.7 and very very few of them actually know what they’re doing.
It is worth asking you for detailed explanations.
I agree on A6M3 mod22 being comparable to A6M3. It is just my personal preference that favors roll rate.
A6M5 is just much easier to control than A6M3 mod 22, it’s more on ergnomics rather than pure performance comparison.
Both A6M5 hei and A6M6 are 4.3 performance-wise. I set it at 5.0 because “I can do alright with it” which is not a good indiciation of how balanced it is.
Ko and Otsu have higher VNE, Ko/otsu is lighter than og A6M5 slightly. I thought a straight upgrade that is A6M5 otsu sitting at the same br feels weird. I see it is not worth 0.3 br.
In-game N1K1-Ja is significantly lighter than N1K2, the fm is a copy-paste so the historical “better ergnomics” is nowhere to be seen. Other than the 800 rounds of 20mm rounds, I see how on-par they are.
I think J2M2 is worth 5.3 for its performance. Though 5.0 works. J2M5 on the other hands, it has a top speed of 640km/h. It is pretty good at higher altitude. so at least J2M5 is 5.7. Though if N1K2 is at 5.3, it’d be weird for a comparable J2M5 to be at a higher br.
D4Y3 is a bomber, it is absolutely fine at 3.3 even for a pure dogfight. The turret is just that good when manually operated mid-fight.
Ki-43-iii is significantly better than ki-43-ii in top speed, the high alt performance is not even comparable. Ki-43-iii ko and otsu share the same top speed even though ki-43-otsu should be worse in flight performance. Even the weight increase is not there. Both ki-43-iii variants reach 578km/h at 6000~7000m.
At ground level, Ki-43-iii climbs at a staggering 24m/s.
Ki-61-i ko is 150kg lighter than otsu, though the slightly increased minimal fuel weight. The retractable tail wheel gives it a slight edge in aerodynamics.
Ki-61-ii has better cooling, it has an unique pitch setting where you can extract the same thrust from 80~85% at low to medium altitude. It is probably the only and last upgrade from Ki-61-i
Both ki-102 and ki-108 can operate at very high aoa around 17~18, they have really good turn performance so long as you bind a key.
Though the Ki-102’s turret coverage sucks absolute ass.
J1N1 is extremely slow though, it was intended to be a turn fighter. At 2.7 it would face more monoplanes than biplanes.
Ki-45 has insane speed for its br, and the 19m/s climb rate is nice. I think it is heavily underrated. Maybe 0.3 less for all variants from what I set initially.
Ki-96 is practically a slow ki-84 with slightly more sluggish control.
1 Like
I think that’s directionally correct, if perhaps a little too far. The main issue is the 13G nonsense you can do to perform reversals in a dive.
1 Like
I haven’t used the J2M5 much, but in my experience it has always just been worse handling than N1K1-J.
I don’t like turret dogfighting. I’d rather just have to aim better for engines/pilot.
Really? Is the propeller much better or something?
If its just an increase of 20kph or so, I’d rather have a colder engine that can stay in WEP the entire time and keep the cowl flaps closed more, for more consistent performance.
The downside is having only two Ho-103s. Otherwise I think they’re close enough in performance.
How? I haven’t gotten them past 14deg AoA with the instructor on. Ki-108 is also REALLY slow.
I have also not experienced this. J1N feels about as fast, climbs about as well, but turns a lot better and the flaps are more usable. Nose authority is also better.
I cannot agree.
I think it suits the Zero’s character perfectly. Its performance is outright unmatched below 280mph (I added about +1G making it turn similarly hard to Ki-43-II here), while the steep dropoff in available load factor (G) prevents it from doing 13G at 700kph. Which is extremely funny, but very wrong. My proposal would make that entirely impossible, however if they’re below that speed they’ll be even harder to hit.
Right now the Zero feels a bit odd, since this slow plane is most maneuverable when going way too fast, and when slow it is about even in turning with Spitfires while in testing reports it could quickly go from a lead to chasing position in like 2 full turns.
Ki-43-ii is 536km/h with thruster type single stack exhaust pipes historically (3d model for US premium.) The Japanese tree Ki-43-ii is supposed to be about 517km/h but the fm is shared between them. Last time I checked, both of them had 532km/ih top speed. So ki-43-iii would be 45km/h faster at altitude. The climb rate is higher about 3 meters per second on deck. The real Ki-43-iii is about 555km/h but a Taic report says no to Gaijin devs.
J1N1 is 510km/h at beat, Ki-45 achieves 580km/h last time I checked, or was it 570 like the catalog suggests. Only tei model is equipped with thruster pipes but the speed is exceedingly high for previous models too.
You can pull Ki-102 and Ki-108 by manually binding a pitch key with 0.75 ~ 0.85 sensitivity with no relative control. You usually get about 15~20% tighter turn with most aircraft. Ki-45’s AoA won’t reach higher than 13 even if you do this. Ki-44 reaches 18AoA with just regular mouse aim, that’s why they tend to almost snap-roll even without going full real control.
Ki-108 in particular has a high synergy with the manual elevator pitch adjustment.
About ki-61-i, they already turn well enough. But even then, Ko vatiant has a marginally better performance. It’s alright for it to be 3.3 though. For me, Otsu is not much of an upgrade considring the reduced climb rate.
1 Like
I found some more information on this when digging around.
The A6M3 32 could actually roll with a Hellcat at pretty much any speed… it just needed +40% force. It’s obvious how that would be an issue for the japanese pilots.
1 Like
There is nothing insane or unbelievable about those BR changes - it just points at two topics:
- Flying a turn fighter requires way less skill and effort than an BnZ or even an energy fighter if these bloody turn fighters refuse to stall out.
- Some aircraft benefits from adjustments of the instructor - others not. Some planes got open or hidden nerfs - others not.
-
This works in an isolated 1 vs 1 - but wt Air RB is no “duel-simulator” and depending on the enemy you are facing it can takes ages to push them to the deck, denying them to pick up speed. That’s why isolated Zeros and Spits get swarmed - the “time to kill” duration is usually way to long and makes you highly vulnerable for 3rd party attacks.
-
As mentioned in the thread it is also quite obvious that gaijin has optimized the game to meet the expectations of their main income source: People looking for a casual shooter - unwilling to spend time to learn basics, but willing to spend money.
-
If you look closely at the Air RB BR changes at ww2 BRs (up to ~6.3- 7.0) you see basically that all aircraft which are easy to play or produce way better results than gaijin wants them to have saw a BR increase.
-
BR increases are basically gaijin’s polite way to address an income nerf for all players - that’s the whole point of BR increases. The only noteworthy exception is that “allrounders” like USSR prop fighters are excluded from this process. That means either that Russian bias exists - or that their pilots perform so poorly that they don’t trigger a BR increase.
-
I would even bet that the BR increases for turnfighters like the A6M won’t stop there - everybody who has flown (6 or 7 years ago) the “un-nerfed” Re 2005 at 6.0 in constant full uptier loops to 7.0 against Meteors and F-80s might remember that you still could get a rather easy a 3-5:1 KD ratio even if your enemies were 300 kmph faster on the deck…
Edit:
In oder to put evidence to my claims:
If you watch this replay (replay link) you see why the standard A6M5 at 5.0 will get caught in the next round. A decently experience player (Porsche Turbo) scored rather casually 6 Kills (last was a written off P-38 - black horizontal stabilizer- after we lost by tickets) playing for several minutes 1 vs 4-5 even without getting a scratch. Almost nobody climbed and the game was more a less just a low alt furball.
His last 2 kills were even scored with 7,7mms as my team did the best they could to stay in gun range as long as possible - either by turning horizontally or going vertical in front of him with no air speed. The P-38 shot finally a wingtip away and i got a chance for a good burst. It took way too long to take him out - we even got strafed by a reamed Do 217 bomber 😂
1 Like
Do you mean the rip speed?
I guess what we have in game is speed of already thicker A6M2.
Funny fact but diving speed of Zero at some time was limited to 520km/h. It was after Shimokawa accident. Of course it wasn’t speed of wing destruction but the limit to save pilots until engineers and commission were analyzing that accident. Later after some changes (including thicker wing cover) they returned speed limit to the 660km/h
But what is interesting, as some people states, that speed limit of 520km/h was one of the reason why Japanese pilot had to focus more on dogfights than developing boom-n-zoom tactics. And it was at the time when 12th squadron served as combat school for all graduated fighter pilots
1 Like
Would you rather be in a N1K1/2 (btw why is N1K1 better on paper…) Ki84 (ko \ otsu) or in a A6M…
Also why can’t Kikka go 6.7?
I agree with op but maybe the devs should not have buffed them years ago. Like a self fulfilling prophecy kinda thing.
Funny thing is that late Zeros are still not fully buffed as could be according to some historic stuff
N1K2-J is supposed to be lighter than N1K1-J, but in game it’s much heavier. With the same engine the N1K1-J is a much better plane. It is obviously better than a Zero. I’m not a fan of how Ki-84s handle.
It wouldn’t be very fair to face props as low as 5.7 in one. Also not even Me 262 A1a gets to be 6.7.
Figures… isnt that plane like 10+ years in the game at this point…
A2 does, but yeah i miss rembered its stats
A2a is an old event vehicle and was released at 6.7. With so few players it may never get changed.
Its crazy how the A6M5 was 4.7 back when you could still buy the campaign packs and now look what happened to it, Now its going to have to deal with the Su-9, F-80, F-84 and the Me-262 A-1’s in uptiers that it has no hope of catching, At that point you might as well just J-out on the runway and re-queue.
Balancing off of player statistics has proven time and time again to be a terrible way to balance things, As eventually you just reach a point where its just an endless feedback loop of only demigod skill players playing something causing the stats to look great when in reality its because no one who values their sanity wants to play it anymore.
1 Like
It doesn’t really matter for this discussion whether the Zeros are correctly modelled or not, for how they are modelled at the moment they are already way overtiered. Never has the flaw of Gaijins ‘balance on player performance, not aircraft performance’ design methodology been as acutely exposed, but they are absolutely wedded to it and will not change no matter how absurd the results of it end up.
Except depending on the plane you are on & version of spitfire. You cannot just fly away, some of those things are FAST ASF.
The zero on the other hand is just garbage.