Su-25 is already compressing the heck out of the 9.0/9.3 BR, making jets like the Hunter intolerable to play given the number of up-tiers. And bumping planes like the Bucc up to 10.7 makes that plane face compression too.
They SHOULD decompress the whole tree, rather than just moving planes around a little bit and have a hard block on subsonic planes without countermeasures flying against all-aspect heat seekers. But apparently, they think it’s okay if the Russian teams can have that, so why is it only a problem with other nations having it? While the AIM-9L is slightly better than the R-60M (at least, over 2.5-3km), the Su-25 makes up for it by being significantly more tanky, more agile and having a gun.
The problem at 10.7 is the Bucc is beaten to just about every objective by any other plane (other than A-10 and Su-25, which it is SLIGHTLY faster than the latter) so you have to hang around until the bases respawn and hope you aren’t shot down.
80% of my matches I get 0 RP as I can’t reach the target fast enough. How is that balanced?
Yes, but trying to get the mechanics changed to better support a realistic cross-section of combat tasks (ie ground attack as well as fighters) provokes the fighter elitists to kick up a fuss because they cannot tolerate people enjoying things they don’t.
Thus they have to resort to balancing them AS fighters, hence why they get all-aspect missiles much earlier than they otherwise should.
We could, for instance, get rid of enemy markers as in ground RB, and spread the targets out across the whole map space, then raise the BR of attackers to be more historical (as well as stopping people flying A-10s and Su-25s out as fighters and clubbing subsonic flareless fighters)… But that kicks up a fuss from the fighter pilots who enjoy the brawling meta. I play fighters 90% of the time and don’t particularly enjoy the brawling meta as I rarely get a good 1-on-1 (or 2-on-2) dogfight.
I prefer dogfights in ground RB, and deliberately play CAP planes without bombs for that reason, but then you have to deal with waiting around for ages for another plane then 1980s SPAA sniping your 1950s plane from miles away mid-dog-fight.
I think the general hope is for an RB EC gamemode. Air Sim but third person with RB controls that allows for both PvPvE gameplay but also much larger and slower paced matches for fighters. That would naturally also have no markers for enemies as well.
In the meantime, give Air Sim a go. Its cockpit only and full real controls, so it has some learning curve, but uptiers are mitigated due to the MM system and the gameplay is exceptionally good for CAS in comparison. Also carriers for take-offs and landing which is fun