I used the F-4S to grind up the american tree all up until the F-5E, F-4E and F-4J currently so I used it quite intensly and got used to most of its quirks like the extremly tumbling roll, the rudder lock up in certain conditions in mouse control especially when performing a spiral, the pretty good nose authority for an F-4 and so on. But after the last major patch I noticed that the behavior of the AIM-7F changed rather drastically for the worse. Two things I noticed:
First, the AIM-7F always had the tendency to go on an adventure somewhere far away from the battlefield but currently it’s even more “adventurous” especially against targets moving a few hundred meters above ground while you’re slightly above them and they’re moving straight at you. This was less of a problem in ACM PD mode before but currently it’s nearly impossible to land a hit as the AIM-7F either pulls sideways or into the ground. Most of the times sideways as if an already notching target behind the currently locked target, which comes with 600 m/s straight at you, is much more interesting. This change reduced the already low usefulness of the AIM-7F at lower altitudes quite a another bit and it’s even more severe in cluttered environment like valleys which should be less to no problem in Pulse Doppler mode like it was before.
Second, until the last major update it was possible to lock on different targets moving towards you with ACM PD and launch all your AIM-7F in a few seconds and switch back to SRC PDV HDN to not trip off the targets RWR and still guide your missiles all the time. The radar of the F-4S acted as if it illuminates all targets in it’s 120° azimut and 120° elevation angle which could lead to quite a few silent multikills in the beginning of the match while both teams were all heading towards each other mostly perfectly straight. This behavior seemed like the radar had extremly intense sidelobes over its complete elevation and azimuth in all modes which had the advantage of illuminating all targets in scan range but also the disadvantage that the AIM-7F would choose a target to their liking somewhere in the direction you were looking and launching them (sometimes even up to 45° off boresight).
After the last update the missiles loose their lock on their target as soon as you switch from ACM PD to SRC PDV HDN. If you switch to ACM PD again at another target the AIM-7F will sometimes correct it’s course rather drastically towards that one as if it would have a data link which it has not (at that point two or more missiles track the same target) but most of the times the missile will just wander off into Nirvana.
These two observed changes took quite the bite from the F-4S SARH ability and I couldn’t find anything about these changes in the changelogs. So the question is: Was this behavior changed for all SARH missiles and planes or just the F-4S specifically? Was this a long standing bug which got fixed without further notice? Is this a so called “shadow nerf”? Anyone else noticed this change in behavior or is it just my imagination?