The Hunter FGA.9 and F.6 are some of my favourite planes in the British tree, but they’re extremely painful to play. I got the FGA.9 back in 2020 when it was borderline OP and I have like 1500 or so games in it. I’ve played a couple of matches in the F.6 as well but I gave up on it quickly after realising how unusable it is.
The FGA.9 has 2 AIM-9Es (just glorified Bs) whereas the F.6 has 4 SRAAMs (too short range and prone to flares to actually be useful). They both have the same airframe and speed wise they’re both very mediocre. They get sucked into 10.3 matches 90% of the time so you face jets like the F-8U and A5C which you quite literally can’t touch.
Here’s my problem, at THE SAME BR as the F.6 lies the Hunter F.58 in the german tree which has AIM-9Ps and Counternreasures. It’s literally better than the F.6 in every aspect possible yet it shares the same BR, how is that possible? The fact that the F.58 is only one BR step above the FGA.9 also doesn’t sit right with me.
Imo, The FGA.9 and F.6 should both go down one BR step respectively.
Sadly all the Hunters and the whole BR bracket from 7.0/8.0 up to 10.0 are still compressed as hell.
Gaijin did some decompressing with the latest BR changes, but that was still not enough.
The most problematic planes are those flareless supersonic planes, that just dominate all the other planes in these BR ranges. F-104, Lightning, ect.
Then there are the All-Aspect slingers (mainly A-10 and Su-25). As long as they are not raised in BR further, the flareless supersonics will neither and the subsonics have to suffer.
(Because you know, an A-10 has to be effective as an Air 2 Air platform, because that is what it was built for; dogfighting in contested airspace /s)
Lowering the BR of a jet in mid to toptier is not the solution. Decompression is.
Hunter F6 is tricky. SRAAMs have potential to be too good at a too low of a BR and I think it would be better to buff the SRAAM (which there are several bug reports for) than to decrease the BR of the RAF hunter F6. But it may yet need it afterwards.
The French Hunter F6 being the same BR of the RAF Hunter F1 is stupid and clearly shows just how much they hate Britain.
Hunter F1 should be 8.7, should have moved down when the F-86 and Mig did. Hunter FGA9 is slightly better than the French F6 but not enough to be an issue and is very rare these days. So yeah, I’d move it to 9.0 in RB (also needs to move down In SB, 9.7 is way too high)
I wish i could say i played the hunters in their prime but i didn’t. I bought the FGA.9 not for grinding or for any real purpose outside wanting it (i know crazy) still like to fly it in custom SIM battles which in my free time im normally flying around in private sim battles.
Same, I got to that tier just afterwards, they were better than they are now, but loosing their strength (I briefly remember the pain though of Hunter F6 at 10.3)
Man, the FGA.9 back in 2020-2022 was a blast, I managed to grind the entire british tech tree with it in maybe 2-3 months. Imo it was borderline OP as it was faster than 90% of things so you could use it as a boom and zoom fighter. I had a 2.0 K/D back then and now it has fallen to 1.0 because it really suffers right now.
The best part about playing the hunter F6 is never being able to catch anyone, let alone get in an aspect / distance where you could use the SRAAMs.
Usually end up just flying between enemies and watching them die to someone much faster than me or watching them simply ignore my existence and fly away.
Yeah… I’ve been playing it a bit in SIm recently and had a T-2 survive 3x SRAAMs because he just lit the coals and ran away everytime I got a firing solution with my SRAAM and they exploded just behind his aircraft. If they actaully fixed SRAAMs, all 3 would have been kills.
It wouldn’t be nearly as bad if they just gave it the All aspect capability it should have at least then you could force headdons and be about as effective as an Su-25 with 1/4th the missile range
Yeah I agree. But apart from fixing the damn missiles, we need serious decompression at 8.7-9.7, imo it’s the most unbalanced BR bracket in the entire game. Just a bit of decompression would make the Hunters so much better to fly