The first is that the balance is so binary it feeds into the conformation bias. Bad helis are so bad noone plays them unless they’re going for a challenge, and with RP from tanks you don’t even have people suffering through them to get the next one. This means that people pretty much only play good helis so people only die to them.
The second is that it just takes so long to get the mods while helis are practical useless in their stock state. By the time you actually face an AH-1W player with the mods to make it viable they’ve likely already put several hours of practice in in EC (or they’ve GEed it)
There’s also a 3rd lesser problem where ground players don’t see when a heli missies only when they hit; An AH-64 7.99km away may seem really powerful but they didn’t see the last 5 missiles that missed due to blocked LOS on the target or having to disengage due to AA.
Ground only players love to believe that all CAS is point and click and all the players are dumber than them, but any non FnF or under BRed heli is really some of the hardest gameplay the game has to offer imo.
There are very few free kills you can get unlike most other vehicles where you can eventually get lucky and have people end up Infront of you.
Honestly my least favourite thing about warthunders online community is that seemingly noone wants a better game for everyone, they just want a worse game for their enemies.
The only one you ‘perform well’ with it, it’s the Mi28 ( not a surprise ). You can have some ‘fun’, they’re less useful than planes and with the spawn of SPAA.
The most telling stat in my view is kills / death… That stat seems to be correlated directly to the type of munition used.
In short, the usefulness of the helicopter is totally dependent on whether or not the munition is self-guided or not.
Any radar assisted SPAA has a huge advantage over units without that type of munition in several ways, the biggest in my view being the target acquisition. You simply stare into the sky, and the game paints a big green bullseye on your target.
I think the helicopter is sitting astride both ends of the spectrum when it comes to usefulness…Self-guided munition and the things are simply too good, manual guidance and they really kind of suck and could use some help.
Updates to the game to make the maps randomized to include more terrain features might be helpful for the manual guidance group as well as adjustments to the big green X radar assisted SPAA’s.
Some top-tier helicopters like the UHT, Tiger HAD, UH-60 and the AH-129 are quite literally useless at top tier. IR SAMs were a mistake; the “universal bump to 13.0 regardless of capabilities” all because they had access to FnF was a mistake. The German and French UHT can go as low as 12.0 and the rest can happily sit at 12.3. There is no reason for them to 13.0.
The blackhawk has always been a punching bag, the Israeli one is ok because of spikes but the US one should not be the BR it is.
The thing is, people who don’t play helis don’t seem to understand it. I had someone fully seriously telling me it would take over a a dozen 23mm to take one down.
It’s so easy to play these helis that I actually believe they should remove the fnf missiles or make top tier sams actually able to hit them. I can literally notch any missile in the ah64e which makes no sense. Anti air radar missiles are easy to dodge (which shouldn’t be possible) but air to air launched radar missiles hit (which makes sense)
@GeNeXsis-psn Please stop spamming your own video over and over again, especially as it doesn’t even prove much. That would have to go to the communities fan zone area, not here
Yeah, feels like 10-11.0 BR helis are borderline useless now. FInally got here and feels sad when game is full of no flyzone for jets and helis on this BR when no FnF missiles… For planes dont have them on any up to 12. either. Specially most modern AA does that. There is just no way to fight back.
Ground RB just isn’t the place for helicopters. Helicopters werent designed to fly into areas filled with SPAA and enemy planes. Got a whole list of helis that are pretty much useless in ground RB. Hell, most of these are useless even in Heli PvE battles. The criteria for “useless” includes one of the following:
No Rocket CCIP
No IRST Auto-tracker
No Fnf Missiles
ATGMs with a range of 4km or below
No reliable AA missiles
Spoiler
US:
AH-1G
UH-1B
UH-1C
H-34
Germany:
UH-1D
Mi-8TB
BO1 05 PAH-1
BO 105 PAH-1A1
USSR:
Mi-4AV
Mi-8TV
Mi-24A
Great Britain:
Scout AH.Mk.1
Wasp HAS.Mk.1
Wessex Mk.5
Lynx AH.Mk.1
Japan:
UH-1B
China:
Z-11WA
SA.342L Gazelle
Italy:
AB 205 A-1
A 109EOA-2
Mi-24D
France:
H-34
SA 313B Alouette II
SA 316B Alouette III
SA.341F Gazelle
SA.341M Gazelle
Sweden:
HKP3C
HKP2
HKP9A
HKP9A(FC)
Israel:
Lahatut
Tzefa A
Tzefa B
That’s like half the tech tree helis in the game. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to get kills in any of these but it’s just not worth the time and effort. You’ll take the time finding routes and flying behind cover just to get shot down as soon as you’re able to engage anything. You’re better off not using them at all. The same applies for anyone who doesn’t wanna just sit above their helipad and shoot ATGMs. People get upset when helicopters do that, but it’s the only thing that works reliably.
