On the development server, I’ve been testing the man-in-the-loop helicopter weapon, which will be added in the next major. As shown in the image, this system allows helicopters to safely hover outside the SPAA radar’s detection range while launching attacks. I simply aim at a distant target and use the seeker head to lock onto enemies, securing kills. Although only one missile can be guided at a time, once it locks on, I can immediately fire another. I’m concerned—could this be a OP?
I don’t believe that this will cause all too many issues in GRB.
From my experience the main strength from helicopters comes in the form of spam attacks. You see an enemy SAM and fire 5 missiles at it in quick succession. This is not possible with MITL outside of you yourself peaking a ridge and subsequently exposing yourself. With DIRCM finally receiving a substantial nerf, facing IR SAMs has pretty much become a death sentence, if they stray too far from cover to perform said spam attacks. With the relatively large downtime in-between missiles, SAMs should have very little issues intercepting them.
What could have been done before re-adding the MITL mechanic to top tier helis:
APS main battle tanks for every nation possible
Spawnable CIWS for all top tier SAM systems (especially those that have a very large dead-zone and/or no gun)
Radio call-out to alert teammates of incoming missiles, allowing people to hide / use smoke without having to waste time typing in a language they may not even understand
They could have waited a little while longer, before adding MITL to helis but I don’t think that this will be as potent as many people portray it in their video examples, which have no enemy SPAA and aware ground players. It is easy to say sth is overpowered when fired against static tanks.
This depends on the teammates. Whether they are willing to intercept the missiles for the tank, and it would be more difficult to intercept the missiles that are flying towards other locations. Moreover, In Dev server ,DIRCM can still interfere with many missiles.
And consequently it will be difficult for the heli to defeat the SAM if every single on of his missiles gets intercepted. It will easily take 2-3 seconds between a heli firing it’s missile, entering MITL, searching for and locking the target, leaving MITL before it is able to fire the next one. Way more than enough downtime for any SAM
One thing that needs to be addressed is that the rearm points are well within range of the MITL weapons.
This means you can fire and then instantly rearm. So you could spam 16x Missiles to overwhelm any SPAA, and then guide the last one onto an actual target, and all you have to is instantly land and do it again.
Adding a notable amount of travel time for helis before they can rearm and do it again, would heavily mitigate this issue and offset a lot of problems.
Also makes helis more vulnerable because they are invisible to jets when hovering, but vulnerable when actually moving, of course that is a load of total nonsense and they should be visible all the time, but small victories I guess
