For anyone who doesnt feel like reading through the wall of text below, the sparks notes are:
Don’t bother playing this event in its current state, it is a total waste of your time.
This event is quite literally the single worst event in all 13 years of WT history, and its not even close.
First problem:
The actual strike target makes literally no sense. You would never have to knock out EVERY SINGLE STRUCTURE in a power plant or oil refinery to render the target inoperable for extended periods of time. The idea of larger ground targets with multiple points needing to be destroyed is good, but requiring 50+ individual structures to be destroyed is utter insanity. Drop the number to something in the ballpark of 20 structures instead, if that. In exchange, make the structures harder to destroy. It should not be possible to easily destroy entire buildings with mighty mouse rockets or zunis with only 1 or 2 hits.
Second problem:
The helicopters are quite literally completely and utterly worthless in this event.
- They have no anti air missiles, and aren’t capable of locking targets, so its almost impossible to defend against jets. If a mig spots you, you’re dead, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
- The TOW missiles are outranged by even the gun based SPAA, and are incredibly slow, so they are pointless
- Mighty mouse rocket slinging at AA is the only way i’ve managed to net an SPAA kill with a heli, its only happened once in 20+ matches, and I still died doing it, because the only way to get enough range to accurately hit a target is to fly up to rapier altitude and die to them while you try MAYBE killing 1 SPAA in return.
- ANY damage the helicopter receives will make the weapons completely inoperable, which means that functionally, if you encounter a stiff breeze at any point, you might as well J out and try again.
Either add helicopters that can ACTUALLY deal with AA and not be free RP for jet players (thermals AND ATGM’s that can outrange atleast the gun based systems), or just remove them entirely, because as they stand, they might as well be unarmed civilian helicopters in a warzone.
Third problem:
The attacking team has functionally no way to deal with the GBAD. There is an immense amount of Rapiers and ZSU’s around the target, and jets have no TGP to look for them, nor any ordinance to reliably destroy them. It takes most of the ordinance from a single phantom to have a half decent chance to actually kill an AA system, and even if you manage to do it, the targets are so small and hard to see that you will be well within range of multiple gun and missile AA systems when you finally manage to pull out of your attack run, likely resulting in either a death, or damage that will make you functionally combat ineffective. You will also have used most/all of your ordinance, so you wont be able to strike the target anyways, so objective-wise it will amount to a death anyways.
A 1:1 or even 1:2 trade ratio of F-4’s to AA systems is untenable, ands thats being EXTREMELY generous, since in all the matches ive played, I can count on 1 hand the AA systems that were actually knocked out, and it was always done by me or my squadmate who were actually trying to do SEAD to give our team a chance at actually finishing the target. Seeing as there are still 0.75 enemy player MiG’s to every F-4E as well the defending team is functionally playing with what feels like 32+ “players”, instead of the 12 they actually have, if the attacking team is trying to actually complete the objective.
Fourth problem:
If the match is played during a dawn/dusk setting, ground objectives become functional impossible to differentiate between destroyed buildings and live ones, and AA systems become nearly impossible to see, making the match a literal auto-loss for the attacking team.
Final thoughts:
Despite being a very good step in the right direction regarding ground objectives for aircrafts, whoever designed this game-mode has somehow managed to do such an utterly terrible job at designing what should be a slam dunk of an event that the ONLY way an attacking team has an actual chance at winning the match is to completely ignore the objective and focus on just killing all the MiG’s, making this functionally no different to a normal air RB game, except one team has GBAD, and there is no spotting.
There is no point to bring ground ordinance because the attacking team has no real way to actually complete the objective. Everyone just fires zunis at standoff ranges where their accuracy is low, and their ability to ID remaining targets from already destroyed ones is non-existent, and then they go and try to do air to air combat instead.
There is effectively no reason for anyone to play this game-mode in its current implementation. The SEAD event was VASTLY superior to this one in every single way. The SEAD event had an actual learning curve to it, and the objectives felt rewarding to actually complete, and more notably, had a tangible impact on the tactical situation on the map. Destruction of GBAD assets in the SEAD event meant the attacking team were tangibly rewarded with advancing the game state, and though the GBAD sites were more powerful in the SEAD event, they also felt actually possible to find and strike, since you were trying to find a target the size of a bush, in a forest, with 12 other AA systems firing at you simultaneously, while being limited to only using your eyes and unguided low splash ordinance.
The idea is good, the execution needs a LOT of work. As it currently stands, I would recommend just closing the event early, and trying it again next weekend after fixing the problems.
Suggestion:
A much better way to implement this “Deep Strike” event would actually be to combine it with the prior SEAD event. Give the defending team a picket line of long range GBAD batteries and gun based systems like in the SEAD event, and put the refinery/power station behind said line of GBAD batteries, and provide it with a lot less GBAD systems (maybe 1/4 the number seen in the current Deep Strike event).
This way, the defending team would have a potent GBAD threat making it difficult for attackers to get through to the target early in the match, but the attacking team could actually degrade the defenders GBAD to create vulnerabilities from which they could begin attacking the actual target, without the target feeling impossible to actually fully destroy like it currently feels.
