I’ve had a lot of trouble getting into Air RB. I’ve been playing it recently mainly because of the ongoing f-16 Persian Tomcat event, but also so I can research and know how to intercept CAS in ground RB. I am currently at 5.0, but I feel as though I can’t win any engagements I get into other than the rare instances where I BnZ someone successfully or win a head on. I mostly struggle with aim and air evasion, those two things often get me killed more than anything else. I really enjoy good engagements when I get into them and I really want to learn how to properly dogfight, but I feel a distinct lack of resources for helping players get better at air rb. I understand the principle of ‘practice, practice, practice,’ however I don’t really think I have direction on what to look for in my failures. What can I do to improve?
What plane are you flying at 5.0? Things like the P-51 have better climb rates and are great for BnZ, but things like spitfires are only bested by zeros in turn fights.
Also don’t take headons, they may be efficient but they are a great way to get you killed and have nothing to show for it
Planes unlike Tanks have different characteristics. Some pilots, and players in the game always state if you cannot read your aircraft, then you’re going to force it into something it cannot do.
Start playing different Bi-planes and other lower-tier crafts as well, you will take notice of how they perform differently/Feel different to fly. This is something you need to learn before doing propeller/mono crafts. However, what you learn in WW2 planes cannot work in Top Tier jets. You need to treat Tier Jets similar to Bi-planes->Not by turning but by speed.
Too fast makes it ineffective but too slow makes you easy prey.
This is going to be a pretty basic question:
Are you only flying with mouse aim, or do you combine WASD/QE into your flying?
I’ve found it significantly easier to pull off harder maneuvers and perform evasive/defensive flying in general by using WASD/QE as my primary tools of maneuver, and only use the mouse aim for fine control of the plane’s nose (aiming or complementing some maneuvers).
It may seem like a rather weird thing to ask, but I’ve learned a lot of people fly with just mouse aim only.
Beyond this,
Patience. A quite difficult ask given half your team is LARPing as lawmowers and die 3 minutes into the match, but patience can net you kills. Don’t dive the first plane you see, pull out if your target attempts to evade you rather than chase and so forth. Unfortunately, current air RB means that patient flying earns you the glory of being the last 3 planes on your team alive versus 9 on the enemy team as a BnZ-oriented team.
Still, you’re more likely to net at least 1-2 kills like this compared to diving in too early.
Doesn’t really help if you’re the only one who climbed tho.
Mhm - playing a 5.0 P-51 D-30 with less that 150 Air RB matches in total is a recipe for disaster. Some years ago the BR range 5.0 - 6.0 was the ultimate contest for actual pilot skill, now Air RB is reduced to a grinding tool dominated by “pew pew” players / tankers without any clue what their planes can (and can’t) do.
So technically seen it is currently way easier to get familiar with the mode as there are just a few good pilots left - so every rookie can score kills, all he has to do to find a lesser experienced player. That’s the reason you see rather often rookies with 4-5 kills as they found those guys.
Imho the answer depends basically on your goals whilst playing Air RB and the time and effort you are willing to invest into getting better - prop Air RB is no rocket science, imho rather easy to learn and guys like DEFYN (see his yt channel) have quite nice tutorials.
I strongly recommend to use the replay function - just to see why there was an enemy coming out of nowhere - most guys get killed because the made mistakes minutes before…
Air RB boils downs to:
- A contest of potential vs kinetic energy as the plane with the higher energy level can dictate the fight.
- A contest of situational awareness - so your relative and absolute positioning vs all enemies.
- A contest of decision making - by assessing the enemy team and the threat they produce to you or your team.
- A contest of knowledge about strengths and weakness of your plane and all potential adversaries.
As you play mainly US planes you have the advantage of having a lot of severely undertiered fighters (most prominent P-39N, P-51C, F4U-4b, P-51H-5…) but also the disadvantage of a highly popular Air TT - a much higher ratio of highly motivated, but also highly inexperienced team mates (compared to minor nations).
On top of that the wt meta favors planes with good climb & good turn and most of the fights are way below altitudes at which US planes have severe performance advantages.
So imho you might decide which playstyle fits best to you - and select your aircraft with the goal to play them to their strengths whilst playing around your (personal or aircraft) weaknesses.
Thanks for the feedback! I have watched some DEFYN videos. They’re great, but I might be a little slow and have some trouble absorbing the information. I’ll definitely try and keep a high altitude. I didn’t really know there was a difference in performance at different heights.
Yeah, I fly mostly with mouse aim and use WASD/QE on harder turns. I have noticed that, unlike ground RB, my team folds much quicker, especially when I have the Brits on my team with their Wyvern spam.
I’ve been flying the P-51D-30. Whenever I try to avoid headons by using wep and pitching up and to the side, I end up getting pilot sniped. That might be a skill issue, but regardless I’ve mostly resigned myself to taking headons when I have a slight-to-moderate energy advantage.
So the P-51 has a really strong climbing advantage over most other planes, try to get high and dive on attackers/ slow planes. Here’s the wiki for more tips too: https://wiki.warthunder.com/P-51D-30
For headons I recommend rolling and turning left/down or right/down because they have to pull negative Gs to fire at you
See it positive: You are smarter than 95% of wt players, just because you asked for help; asking for help is an actually a personal strength.
A few words to your other comments and received feedback.
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A good pilot uses headons just in 2 scenarios:
A) He is way faster than his opponent and sure that he is able to dodge incoming fire
or
B) He has no other options as he got caught low and slow and gets overwhelmed by way more than 1 enemy. -
So as long as you need headons to get kills in the first place: You are too high in your BR. Play the US P-51 C-10 (after watching DEFYNs vid about it), imho easier to use and better positioned than the “never saw combat” D-30…
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Diving on attackers is actually the worst advice - you might get a rather easy kill, but with your current lack of experience you are just target practice for the enemy team.
Now you know it :-)
Climbing and keeping alt is always a good advice. Yes, u run into the risk of being the last of your team, but you can always use airfield aaa cover to land and jump out in order to leave the game; there are no repair cost if you j out after the repair.
After i have played almost 18.000 matches exclusively in prop Air RB (just for fun) i learned that match results are more or less just a random event and determined mostly by the MM. There is no need to put energy in or waste time with already lost matches or to fight alone vs multiple enemies with superior performance and/or in a disadvantageous position - extend, land and j out, next match.
To show you a positive example of what can happen if you are patient enough, grab a coffee and watch the replay of this match (Switch to my plane and use option 2 player view):
Gaijin Entertainment - Single Sign On
- The match happened with a dusk/dawn weather condition - this reduces the range of markers significantly and kills subsequently your situational awareness. Without knowing who is where you will usually end up killed by a guy coming out of nowhere.
- Your only defense: Climb to high alt as incoming enemies will produce contrails above 5.400 meters, so you have a surrogate for non-working markers.
- Another effect of this weather is that the worst thing you can do is to get spotted - usually you get swarmed as the enemy team is happy to see a marker in the first place. So both teams end up really quick extremely low.
- My rookie team went in low and dragged the enemy team low. As a result of the furball i played 2 vs 7 after ~ 8 minutes. So time to fly to my main af, land and j out as it makes no sense to play in this weather 2 vs 7.
- But - 3 of the enemy team managed to die whilst attacking ground units or ai planes, 3 others tried to kill the poor soul in a Bf 110 landing and repairing and got killed by airfield aaa.
- My 110 left the game after repairing, whilst the last enemy alive tried to spot him. As i have tracked the location of the enemies it was clear that a P-63 was left ~ 9 km below me, the heavy aaa gave an additional indicator all i had to do was to clean him up - he never saw me coming.
- Result: Totally undeserved win after ~ 11 minutes based solely on basic mistakes of the enemy team.