I have few premium fighter jets… after 220+ battles on turkish F-104S i can say it is worst of all planes(at least on current BR)
Lets compare advantages to swedish J35xs which got BR reduced from 11 to 10.3.
Radar: same (pretty useless anyway short with one mode)
IR missiles: same 4-6 rear-lock missiles (they lock on every flare and sun)
Radar missiles: pretty useless because of radar. You can lock MIG25 when they fly 10km above ground but one chaff is enough to break the lock. You cannot lock anything 1-2km above the ground unless they fly above you. Early radar missiles are pretty weak anyway even with good radar. you cannot fit radar missiles together with cannon (choose one of them… and somehow i ended up with canon instead of useless radar missiles)
Speed: they both are pretty fast at max speed F104 accelerates and gains altitude faster
Maneuverability: J35 one of the best turning jets while F104 like elephant(even bombers turn faster)
Bomb Load: F104 can carry 2-3 heavy bombs/napalm tanks(which makes them even harder to turn)
So… 10.3 plane is better fighter while F104 worse and gets 1BR above??? WTF ?? All you can do is fly in straight line and bomb enemy base , rarely hitting somebody with cannon and sometimes sleeping players with aim-9J. While frequently your enemy’s will be F4S, mig29 (which can find/lock you 100km away with proper radar/heat missiles) Dogfights are impossible as ANY aircraft in this game get better turning radius and dont loose speed as much as this cow…
How many years it will take for gaijin to notice this crap?
Its Gaijin being Gaijin.
A combo of legacy BR, Compression and gaijin’s “effeciency” metrics
Legacy BR
F-104S got massively powercrept iirc and is now outclassed. I think it was semi okay when it was first added, but now is just outclassed by anything and everything at the same BR
Compression
It can be tricky to adjust some aircraft appropriately because there are weaker stuff below, and you cant just move them all down. The F-104s definetly seem a victim of that compression.
“Effeciency”
This is the big one, and the main one. F-104s are potent base bombers with Napalm. They can make it to a base fairly reliably and get a base kill. That is OP in gaijins book, and a LOT of aircraft suffer from that mindset that anything that can “do well” by dropping bombs must defacto be nerfed.
So, decompress the game is step one. Totally rebalance and overhaul all aspects of PvE in war thunder and then actually balance aircraft properly in that regard and then they need to judge the aircrafts performance in that new environment and not what it was like 3 years ago
+1. Most of the F-104s in the game, apart from the 9.3 ones, are completely overtiered, and they’re incredibly annoying to play because of that. I talk about all of the aircraft’s problems in this discussion.
Technically the Saab J35X was originally 10.3, then it was moved up to 11.7 when the rocket nerfs happened because, “it made too much RP”, and then it was finally moved back down to the 10.3-7 area because, as it turns out, glorified AIM 9Js are not super duper OP and capable at fighting 12.7s
Yes. All F-104s except A and C should go one BR step below.
The F104S sits only at this high BR, because due to its ability to carry napalm.