Brit Phantoms are no longer usable unless you spaded them years ago. Back when they were top-end at 10.7BR it was a different story. Now equivalent-BR Phantoms have superior IR, Superior SARH, better stock grind options, and yet Gaijin says they’re all the same. The upgraded engines do not give these an advantage at 12.0, not even close.
12.0 and their only option to start grinding with is…AIM-9D? Wtf? Even if you slog away and upgrade them, your IR option is capped at AIM-9G. What other Phantom around this BR is getting shafted so hard?
If you think you’ll be saved by skyflash later, you won’t, since in-game they are much much worse than AIM-7 and the Phantoms have near-useless radar capabilities.
Maybe you want to do bombing to grind. Nope, the BR is too high, if you see a Mig-23ML or Mirage F1C you literally should just J out because they beat you to every single base even if you just take enough 540lb bombs to bomb one base and nothing more.
If these aren’t getting buffed, they should have their BRs lowered again to more aptly reflect their unusable position. They are victims of Gaijin apathy and extreme power creep and need revised / adjusted.
The Phantom FGR.2 should get the Aim-9Ls they historically had so it can stay at 12.0.
The FG.1 should go back to 11.7, hell even 11.3 with those shitty Aim-9Gs.
However, regardless of what they do, in my honest opinion, the FGR.2 will always be a worse option than the Tornado F.3. They don’t have BOL Pods so they have less CMs, are slower than the F.3 (can dogfight better but only for a single turn) and have worse missiles because they have the Skyflash (DF) instead of the Skyflash SuperTEMP (made for the Tornados specifically) and don’t have Aim-7Fs or Aim-7Ms.
As a result, out of all the 12.0 Phantoms, the British ones (Including the F4Junk Premium) are the worst of the lot. F4Junk is even worse because it doesn’t get the upgraded engines lmao
Gaijin are known to bite the bullet and give things ahistorical content when they feel like it (cough cough japanese tanks), they could just continue unifying the equipment loadouts of the British phantoms with AIM-9Ls and honestly get rid of the AIM-9D as the stock option, it is far too unusable for 12.0 and only made sense back when 10.7 was the limit.
They literally lowered the real-life autoloader times on their top-tier tanks when they were underperforming from 5s to 4s making their stats officially fictional for the sake of the game.
I afraid they won’t since F-4EJ Kai isn’t as slow as Harrier GR.7 (that in same BR allowed to have AIM-9M) and will use the 13.0 as minimum BR for major fighters to have IRCCM. Yes the Bison has R-73 but only limited to just 2. I also wonder what’s the line for snail devs to consider what should or shouldn’t get IRCCM below 13.0 Air
Also yes I do think UK Phantoms are over BR’d, should be 11.3/.7 if they won’t give AIM-9L
well yes but they had to decide either 2 IRCCM + 2 SARH or 2 IRCCM + 2 LRIRCCM (27T1) and always end up with only 4 missiles. Phantoms meanwhile has up to 8 with 4 IR + 4 SARH
The Phantom could have 30 IR if they’re AIM9D and AIM9G they still shouldn’t be anywhere near 12.0, and if you give them 30 skyflash it still won’t make up for their radar or BR since it’s a terrible skyflash.
The plane with the lowest IRCCM Missiles right now IIRC is the JH-7A at 11.3 with PL-5EII. (Which is the result of a Magic 2 and R-73 having an unholy baby culminating in one of the hardest IR missiles in the game to defeat which means you literally get two free kills at 11.3.)
problem that their 4 missile 90% (wouldn’t say 99%) of time are 4 kills, in same AIM-9L most of time can’t hit a target so it only leave 4 Sparrow (with broken by Gaijin radar)
Funny you mention that, the R27R1 isn’t actually hard to defeat, its not that fast and the Mig-21 Bison’s radar doesn’t have very wide gimbal limits. The actual scary ones are the R-27ERs which go Mach 5.8 and are practically impossible to dodge as a result. The real danger from the Mig-21 Bison realistically is from the R-73s.
plus R-27R ideal shooting range at best is as similar as AIM-7F anyways, like around 7-10km. More than that it’ll just fall off and lost their energy to catch up