I haven’t played at a BR below 7.7 for a long long time only to return to my 5.0 Japan ground lineup and see the peak of enjoyment that is Yak-9K spam every game
I remember seeing youtube videos about the 9K months ago and I thought, surely it cannot still be that rampant? Turns out I was wrong. I truly have no idea how anyone is still playing at this BR with that UFO flying around in droves. I heard it was given APHE now instead of HVAP - why? This was clearly a very poor decision. Planes with high caliber cannons suffer with flight performance to help balance them out - the duck, Me262, P108, etc. Yak9K is a UFO with a BT7 cannon.
I’m playing solely for fun and I’m finding that to be very hard to achieve in this BR bracket.
Because Gaijin felt like it, and (possibly) because it’s a vehicle in the russian tech tree so it doesn’t need any historical documentation to prove its useage, or even existance, cough cough KH-38MT…
before I shout russian bias I have to be fair in that they have done this with other nations too, e.g Maus APDS shell. But this was very clearly a terrible balance change
They could probably still move it up some more, but in 5.x you got similar machines like the premium do335 that are probably better, just the fm isnt as good and players tend to bleed energy in those making them easier targets.
Problem below 7.7 is every game is an airshow because spaa is just not cutting it in the hands of the majority of players without lead indicators etc.
From 1.0-8.0 CAS spam is basically 3x worse than above it.
Falling it a “UFO” is truly the name, surprisingly the plane, Yak-9K can survive some shots or even fly without one of the wings. It’s true because I was unfortunate to not adjust my angle of attack.
Because of that I’m actually going to use the Yak-9K how it was intended to be used: against other planes, which deals incredible damage with a single round.
To be honest I’m kinda surprised that people didn’t discovered the Yak-9UT which is far better platform but it has the same weapons at battle rating 6.0.
Tu2 at 5.7 sort of overshadows it for a lot of people, 3 1000kg bombs and a great fm with 20mm rear gunner probably ends up with more kills than the yak on average for most people.
No, nothing is being done because it’s a vehicle from Gaijin’s chosen nation. Yak FMs are still incorrect and give the plane more agility than it should actually have, after all.
The full - yet dubious in IRL application - APHE belts for Ivan aircraft really is just another tally on the board of Russian Bias. Gaijin truly just cannot get out of their own way when it comes to giving more ammo to the argument.