In Air RB, 12.7 and 13.0 (especially with SARH only) are already really rough BRs. Buffs to almost every ARH missile will make it even worse.
I personally think the maximum BR should be raised to 15.0, and all aircraft with ARH missiles should be moved up one step. With the exception of all F-14s, and maybe with the exceptions of the Tornado F.3 Late, The F-5TH TCU, M-346FA, F16D Barack II (Derbys are unchanged and the Tornado flight model is horrible)
With the buffs to the R-77 base version and PL-12 which got arguably the biggest improvement, I think bumping the Su-30 premiums up two brackets instead of one is finally justified (although likely wouldn’t happen)
As someone who is currently grinding this br and only has fox ones and twos, I’m very often uptiered to fox three territory, i absolutely agree as the fox three planes are usually the prem su30s
We needed decompression way before that point. War Thunder has almost always had powercreep problems, but the average player doesn’t care about that, they just play the vehicles that aren’t victims of powercreep.
Introduction of new mechanics or weapons has a tendency to come with a massive BR compression/powercreep spike.
All-aspect IR missiles, PD radars, all-aspect PD radars, ARH missiles, IRCCM missiles, etc all were added without a meaningful raise of the top BRs at the time of their introduction.
The people that are hyped about those new things don’t care about the vehicles that have to suffer due to being confronted with said things and Gaijin doesn’t want queue times to be negatively affected by proper BR separation.
You’ll always hear excuses when you bring this up. “Just notch”, “just multipath”, “just cut throttle to zero”, “just pre-flare”, etc, as if all combat just happens in a 1v1 vacuum and all vehicles are equal.
Worst of all, Gaijin just can’t stop themselves from lowering the BRs of vehicles that are negatively affected of BR compression and people don’t really seem to care about that. When they tried to reduce the BRs of the Leo 1s recently, people were defending that and asking for even more tanks to go down in BR.
They’ve basically “fixed” this by nerfing ARH’s (and radars in general) but making their notch gates far larger than they should be, making notching and chaffing easier than it would otherwise be. The speed gate for example is roughly 60-100kts, where it should be 15-30kt, and AESA’s are practically immune to notching, not to mention no chaff resistance modeled in radars currently. They also (probably not intentionally unlike the former) don’t model radar return increase in missiles. When a missile is 3 miles out, the return on its target is so strong that almost not amount of notching or chaffing will spoof it, not to mention that any chaff deployed is usually way outside its radars FOV (which right now they’ll go for chaff 30 degrees off bore, which isn’t even physically possible). Overall, this makes current ARH meta not about range, but about who can go slow, fire a missile, turn, and pop chaff to spoof a missile. It’s not remotely how air combat works, but they can’t make it right otherwise the maps would be too small and 32 players would be unbearable (compared to nearly intolerable today).
BRs could be decompressed all the way to 20.0, but then there would be no frustration and less motivation to ge your vehicles that struggle. They wouldnt even need to do anything, just give that task to playerbase who has skills and understanding of game to do it for them, Anyway just nerf adats and add new pantsir!
Yeah, this br need decompression asap, rn its already not very fun to fight fox3 slingers with sparrows, i was hoping the buff on the fox1’s could bring them into a more competitive state however they are also giving buffs for fox3’s so yeah im expecting to have an even harder time playing planes such as the f18c
the Harrier FA.2 will still be completely useless, the AV-8B+ doesnt fare much better, Rafale will still dominate despite what certain francophiles on this forum claim.
if 13.0 is staying as the lowest BR that amraam can appear at (lower BRs should be deompressed to push current 13.0 to 16.0 at minimum) then top tier should become 17.7