It’s extremely predatory, when you consider many helicopters you have to rocket rush in grb just to unlock ATGMs. GJN are basically trying to force you to pay for modules. Freemium gaming.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to do it unless you spend money on a premium account and a talisman. Even then, it still takes forever. I don’t think people would mind the grind as much if the gameplay was actually fun. As of now it only consists of getting shot down by 2S38s, getting shot down by jets, getting shot down by SPAA, camping and shooting ATGMs, tickling tanks with rockets before immediately getting evaporated, and racing other players to targets in PvE. I think more objectives in PvE would fix most of that.
Yeah it’s super annoying to grind. In GRB, the rewards are somewhat very low even if you get a kill or two (At least I am currently grinding the Swedish, so I have ATGM right from the start) and the PVE takes so long for very boring targets/objectives…
I am sad because as usual Gaijin nailed the controls, making helis very usable but they are just so bad to grind.
The rewards you get for helis are terrible. I mean sure if you get 10 kills per game with a heli your rewards would be decent but it’s nearly impossible to get that many kills per match. Only way you’re doing that is by sitting above your helipad launching ATGMs IF a plane doesn’t shoot you down.
If I consistently got 3 kills per game in a heli, it would take me 188 games to unlock the next one in the tech tree. And yeah, you can use tanks to research them, but 4 kills WITH premium AND talismans only got me
4,840/300,000rp. Thats 61 games of consistently getting 4+ kills. The grind really doesn’t suck too bad it’s just the methods and game mechanics that make it unbearable. The rewards you get (especially for helis) really don’t scale to the amount of effort you have to go through to get them. It’s like trying to build a sandcastle with one grain of sand at a time or trying to make a liter of lemonade with one dehydrated lemon and no arms.
Add these, and make it PvP, as well as Simulator mode as well. Oh, also, make the heli RP either more grindable, or cheaper.
Even the steam page for the new heli mentioned more roles for helicopters. They already have the answers to this problem.
Spoiler
ASW, S&R, and Troop Transport would go hard as secondary objectives for utility helis
They could introduce exclusively ASW helis/weapons for existing helis as well…
They actually already have a few ASW airframes in the game.
Ka-29
UH-60 (MH-60)
Z-9 (Z-9C/EH)
UH-60(SH-60)
LYNX (Super Lynx)
Pretty much every nation has at least one. Could be a whole new lineup like naval helicopters.
Yeah. Map is overly hard, and AI is too simple.
That and the fact that every vehicle in the convoy is just as effective as SPAA. The APCs and MBTs can shred you just as good from 3-4km away. The map is also terrible for helis because you have to spend 5 minutes climbing to get to the top of the canyons. The A.I is broken too. Just a few games ago I had one of the SPAA phase through a ridge and end up driving down the side of it. Completely left the convoy to phase through the only cover I had then cooked the whole team.
Grinding through US helis with PVE and it’s clear that the RP gains (before bonuses) are capped at approximately 1200 RP/10minutes or 7200/hour.
That means that without a premium heli, talisman, boosters or premium account, you’re looking at a minimum of 430 hours of heli pve to grind the US tree alone (~3.1 million RP).
That’s IF you always have enough “useful actions”, which is a big if considering that there are often gaps where nothing spawns or where there is only one or zero objective available.
Insanity
Yeah, I’ve gotten to the point where I kind of wanna give up on helicopters all together. There just isn’t much for helicopters to do in the game. I just unlocked the UH-60 today then realized the only things I can do with it are:
- Get shot down by SPAA and Aircraft
- Lob unguided rockets and maybe damage an enemy
- Sit off in the distance and use ATGMs
- Waste hours racing other players for points in heli PvE
Heli PvE hasn’t really been touched in years and I haven’t seen anything in the dev blogs that say otherwise. For, 2 years, there have been tons of players suggesting ways to improve it but the devs just completely ignore them for some reason.
I do some Heli PVE when I don’t want to get into a match… And it’s just so bad.
The game mode feels like it was made 20 years ago.
Objective spawning under you… It’s not unusual that a bunch of gepard suddenly appears within a km of me.
The objectives feels kinda weak, nothing is very “interesting” to do, it feels bland.
Also the fact that when I take my Tigre HAP there (grinding the French helis atm), I only get matched with Heli that have far superior capabilities (Apaches and Hokum)…
And yep, even with 200% boosters I managed at best 20K RP for a FULL GAME where I scored about 3500 points iirc.
To be perfectly honest, the only way to grind the helis is to grind them with tanks by checking the option on the tech tree.
The main thing is grinding the modules, and honestly on some helicopter I am that close of GE some modules…
Yeah…Heli PvE needs a MAJOR works on it. I would love to play helicopters and gridn them, but i will not spend almost 2hr in a game mode for at best 12k RP. Im sorry but that is just not only weist of time but also SL. Still remember when i tried to grind Japan helis. The starting one, every time i died to SPAA snipe at 3km, i lost 20k SL …for a stock helicopter that only has rockets…yeah, no thanks
yeah the grind is abysmally slow even with a heli that gets rocket pods like the mi24A so you can kill the ground targets before anyone else, id imagine with my KA-50 itd only be an extra 20k rp so it would still take at best 6hrs of grinding to get a heli that is unusable stock becuase rocket rushing at the start of a GRB game is borderline worthless you might kill a light tank but thats only 800 rp or so, pretty sure the easiest way to grind out helis mods would be to rush to the enemies helipad and camp there the whole game killing anyone that spawns instantly
Played a few matches yesterday and they looked like this for most of the match…
Nothing to do for 90% of the game. It got so bad that everyone just left the match.
Big maps without a lot of objectives is very lame. Sometimes tank spawns get bugged and stop spawning until like 10-25 minutes has passed, leaving only the bases if there’s even any left to begin with, or planes, which might not be ideal if you don’t have AAMs/hard hitting guns or want to maximize your RP earnings (killing planes in PvE bleeds a lot of tickets and thus ends the game sooner)
The biggest problem with Heli PVE is that info about its mechanics is fragmentary and scattered all over the internet, and very few people care enough to learn.
For example greed ruins nearly every single heli PVE match. Rewards don’t work like in other modes, 250 score every 10 minutes of being alive gives you most of the rewards (like 90%) that you can possibly earn, and 300 score gets you deep into diminishing return territory (something like 96% of max). Going above that is nearly always just taking potential score, and thus rewards, away from others.
So often some stupid Ka-50 (or Hind A/D in lower bracket) or other premium heli just doesn’t care about anything, doesn’t read chat, just clears every objective on his own racking up 1k score every 10 minutes, bugs out the base objective by killing them too fast, drains most of the tickets, and then just leaves when his booster expires. Very common occurence, and screws everyone over for almost no gain for himself.
The sweatier players J out whenever a new convoy/frontline spawns, respawns on the helipad closest to said objectives, and hoard all the kills before others could even manage to turn their choppers around.
Grinding the Hueys and BO-105s I was forced to adapt the same strategy, as otherwise I won’t be able to get any kills before they’re erased off the map. Especially on the BO105s since they’re slow and gets matched with top tier helicopters for some reason. I have to admit I’m also guilty of it myself while grinding the USSR helicopters with the Ka-50. (I hated the 4AV)
Thing is that’s just stupid, screwing over both others and also yourself (even if you don’t care about bleeding SL by doing this). Your rewards are tied to time alive as well as score gained, so by just J’ing out like this you throw most of what you’ve already earned but haven’t been paid yet into the aether. If only Gaijin gave even the slightest shit and explained stuff like this to people before they’re allowed to join the queue, or at least while you are sitting in the queue - after all you can’t do anything else, might as well have a screen explaining gamemode-specific tips and mechanics explained?
It really isn’t that hard if Gaijin gave even the slightest shit about QoL, instead of the endless flood of (mostly useless) new vehicles.