Planes like the Yak-3, Yak-3U and La-7 were and somehow still are at laughable low BRs since they used to deal so little damage.
At the same time some planes had higher BRs simply because of their strong armament, like the Yak-3P.
Now every caliber hits like above their weight class, making heavier guns quite useles.
Two ShVAKs is all you need to destroy both fighter and bombers alike with ease.
It’s one thing that incendiary shells are generally useless but even AP rounds are simply useless in comparison to HE rounds.
If all you need to destroy a fighter is one or two 20mm explosive rounds to the wing, no one would have even bothered with AP or Incendiary shells.
20mm API and SAPI are made redundant and Gaijin can’t even model Hispano SAPI or Japanese APHE right to even make any sense. Namely to penetrate armor and not explode the instant it touches and airframe.
We have shell animations showing that HEF is supposed to damage components with fragments while HEI is supposed to cause fuel fires but the reality is you hit a wing with any type of explosives shell and it’s gone.
That’s why we have BR’s on paper but that’s not really how Gaijin balances aircraft in the game.
They pretty much use the win rates, and the aircraft that tend to have the highest win rates are the ones that have great headon potential + turn rate.
Yak3p has a legacy BR, the other Yak’s and La-7 are good indeed but not on the hands of your average player that will turn fight a zero or a spitfire plus USSR is a major nation so more bad players and mid stats overall. This is why they will likely stay where they are regardless of the current state of guns. Also why the F8F is at 4.7 while being an insanely good superprop.
Nowadays ppl barely climb and the match becomes a furball within 2-3 minutes once teams encounter eachother with one team being wiped 1-2 mins later. So good guns + turn rate is more meta than ever.
F8F-1 sits at 4.7 has 49.9% win rate while A6m6c sits at 5.0 has 58.4%. But their performance isn’t even comparable at all. Also why I-225 went from 6.0 to 5.0 while having insane performance even in a period that it’s guns were incredibly strong & why we see atrocities like Spit Mk24 going to 7.0 or J6K1/Spit Mk22 being sent to 6.7 while not even being the best 5.7’s.
Also when it comes to gameplay, I will always prefer strong guns over weak ones for everyone. It’s just much more rewarding and fun than hit, hit, hit, hit + 50 lions. As if 151’s weren’t mediocre enough, making other guns perform just as bad or weaker is far from a good solution to me.
I wish however that Incendiary/SAPI/API made sense / were modeled at all.
Particularly large guns are made completely obsolete by smaller guns making up for damage in RoF.
Like you can shred a bombers wing or tail with 3-4 20mm hits, whats the point is bringing a 37mm cannon, which mind you, shouldn’t even be doing that as well.
4-5 30mm Mineshells to bring down a B-17, which inflict massive structural damage in real life.
In WT a single 23mm will kill it with a hit to wing or tail, not even a 37mm required.
But at the same time you can still hit a plane with either gun and dealing no critical damage, because the way realShatter works.
Probably 90% of the killing power comes from dealing critical structural damage, 10% is may maybe the result of hitting pilot, engine or fuel.
While it should be around 25:75, unless you are using Mineshells.
Sorry man, but i share the opinion of @KillaKiwi regarding the BRs of ShVak armed USSR fighters - and your opinion about the behaviour of average pilots is imho not accurate - at least not if average pilots meet average opponents - which is the majority of players and has usually a severe impact on the numbers game aka TDM.
Why?
The current game play of average pilots in Air RB is centered around point and click head-ons - in infinite loops. The flight performance (climb & speed) of almost all USSR props makes them together with the massive buff of center mounted ShVaks the ideal weapon of choice for rookie players.
Planes can be assessed as op as soon as their performance and weapons allows even just mediocre players to rack up 3-5 kills with one ammo load without using any kind of tactics or strategy - and USSR aircraft with ShVaks excel in this as their opponents happily accept head-ons vs easy to use and hard hitting cannons.
Whilst experienced players are able to find workarounds against them - the average pilot has usually neither the experience nor the plane performance to exploit their weaknesses.
And even as experienced pilot you have to prioritize them (like Ki-44 IIs or Pyoerremskis or rat planes like A6Ms or early Merlin Spits) if you have to fight multiple opponents or playing outnumbered.
From my pov this whole thread deals with the disadvantage of MG 151s with mine shells. Your argumentation as a whole (as quoted above) is totally disregarding the described disadvantages - whilst the mine shells should have a severe advantage regarding damage output.
Whilst i do agree that the sole purpose of cannons is to get maximum damage output in the shortest time frame possible (“one pass: kill”) and nobody wants to play like during RS 1.0 (little to zero damage of HE shells) i miss completely the immersion factor of your pov.
So yes, it is a video game and i do agree that it is extremely satisfying to blow up enemies with a short cannon burst, but if you have witnessed BIs scoring 5 kills with 2 x 45 mm rounds (link) you can’t deny requests to equal the playing field - this does not necessarily mean you have to lower the damage output of all “non-mine shell cannons”.
What exactly is my intention then? All I’ve done is shown gameplay footage against bombers and fighters to see if they need buffing or not. When I get time I’ll do the same with Air Target belts as I mentioned earlier. I don’t see how I have an angle here when if anything I’m trying to help. If they’re weak we’ll see they’re weak.
Also playing in SB compared to RB as mentioned already makes zero difference. The damage and flight models are the same as has been said already. The only difference is that I don’t have the ease of mouse-aim and I don’t have an instructor. That being said considering I’ll happily admit I’m not the best shot I still didn’t have issues shooting aircraft down.
This was when MG-151’s were hilariously overpowered when you could find videos of bombers having their tails shot off with literally 1 round and people still complained that MG-151’s were underpowered.
I’m very cautious over buffing the Mine rounds because going back to that would be a catastrophic mistake. Mine shells were powerful… they weren’t that powerful. Many sources online state they do similar damage (some say slightly less) than the Hispano. From what I’ve seen from stealth belts I’d say that was the case in game.
That being said the main problem is the Shvak cannon which absolutely is overpowered unless something changed since I last flew for Russia. It never ceases to amaze me that such a historically weak cannon that many Russian aces openly complained about can saw wings off and dissect bombers like they do in War Thunder.
I’ll see if I can make a comparison video between the two. If it doesn’t help to buff the Mine shell it might at least help to realistically nerf the Shvak.
There are no tests necessary to prove or disprove the issues with mine shells - every player using MG 151s/ShVaks/Hispanos frequently if fully away of that the mine shells are the worst of them. So trying “to see if they need buffing or not” is useless by definition.
There are a hell of threads dealing with the low and often inconsistent damage output of mine shells - a post from earlier this year:
Whilst i agree that RB and SB flight models are identical - you can’t transfer your experiences out of an absolute niche mode into the most popular air mode Air RB.
It is not only the much higher skill level regarding necessary pilot skill controlling the aircraft - the Air RB game play with markers is denying any kind of surprise effects which allows you to place langer and accurate bursts like in SB.
I use exclusively a Hotas and SFC without instructor (i keep auto trimm) in Air RB - and played IL-2 in FR with an X-52 decades ago - Air RB and Air SB are different games.
Hilariously overpowered by stating an issue which still exists today. As a long-term player you are fully aware of why gaijin introduced the shift from delayed kills to instant kills - and why they introduced these Michael Bay effects.
Trying to downplay the devastating mine shell effects whilst trying to change the historic wt narrative regarding Hispanos (they had their in-game nickname"Hitspanos" for a reason) in the same paragraph looks a little bit too much for me.
Yes but here is the problem. I’m not at any point saying that Mine shells shouldn’t get any sort of historical buff if they need it and I’ve also quite clearly pointed out that if anything other rounds are overperforming. Literally read my posts back.
The problem I’ve repeatedly tried to highlight which apparently keeps getting lost in translation is that instead of buffing Mine shells you need to concentrate more on rounds that are overperforming because otherwise you get what we had before where German fighters one-tapped everything. 30mm rounds were completely redundant and you know they were.
Here’s where consistency rears its ugly head.
As it stands unfortunately RB and SB share the same flight and damage models as you’ve said. When implementing changes to aircraft or even adding new weaponry etc Gaijin wants/needs historical documentation to support such a change. In Gaijin’s defence when it comes to weaponry and flight models they’ve tried to keep the game realistic. The problem is in my opinion that they need to stop listening to the whingeing players.
For instance do you know why Shvak’s were/are overpowered? Because a thread a while back complained that they felt weak compared to other cannons (as they should) and all the Russian pilots instead of rightfully saying “yes but they were weak in reality” instead voted for them to have a buff. It was the same for .50cals a while back if you remember when they were flamethrowing laserbeams.
Flight models are just as bad, the 109 has a magical elevator that allows it to do pull outs at 650kph like a Mustang because RB players whined that they couldn’t boom and zoom because the elevator got heavy. Then you have the 190 flight model nerf because people couldn’t handle its more agile FM because if you were ham fisted it would snap…as it should. So now you have this mess that we have today.
The point I’m making is that you’re essentially saying “I want my cannons as broken as theirs are!” Instead of “I want their cannons to function more historically like mine do”. Or maybe they don’t, despite how you’re clearly labelling me I want to try them with Air Target belts like I said earlier. If there’s an issue we can use the video to help show it.
Yeah because people screamed about kill stealing. That’s the literal reason why your tail plops off when a cannon round grazes it. Instead of reworking the kill system they caved in once again and now we have this utter mess where a Breda .50 can chop wings and tails off in short bursts. Awful change.
I thought they were “Hitsparkos” a while back. I haven’t flown for Britain in a while so I can’t comment on how they are now but if they’re 1-shotting aircraft they shouldn’t be doing it neither.
I’m not downplaying anything, the 20mm Mine shell was a powerful shell. But it’s still a 20mm and it clearly wasn’t powerful enough for some applications as otherwise why on earth did Germany invest so much time into the 30mm?
If you watch any gun cam footage on YouTube I can bet that it looks a lot closer to what we have in game right now compared to potentially what you’re advocating for/what we had before.
You also need to play a seriously careful game if you start begging for changes for “balance” purposes over accuracy…
Imho this ship is long sailed - it is obvious that gaijin tries their best to nerf everything which does not come from the USSR. And you might agree that the majority of players has zero interest of historical performance - they want to point and click and want to see a “boom”.
It doesn’t matter if you try to buff mine shells or nerf every other cannon - from my pov the tenor of this thread is the disadvantage in damage output and ballistics needs to be fixed. You might agree that asking for buff seems way easier than to nerf all other cannons.
Imho this has stopped years ago. I mean this whole thread proves that they just implement what suits their overall goals. One one hand they nerfed ballistics, the SD fuse and the damage output of mine shells - and on the other hand we have to talk about unrealistic damage output of ShVaks.
They still perform very well - my long term observation (~1.000 matches in P-47s and Hellcats) is than on average 2 hits kill a fighter (P-47 late war belt, usually pilot snipe or fire) and up to 6 for early war belts (Hellcat).
This whole forum deals (outside SB) more or less with 2 topics:
The demise of popular modes regarding game play as the game gets “dumber” in order to support the gazillions of rookie players and/or sales of premium products
The BR setting policy in conjunction with the MM and open or hidden vehicle nerfs regarding accuracy in order to achieve / support gaijin’s goals
So both topics are “balancing” over accuracy - and i repeat as earlier written: I am not “begging” for balancing over accuracy - the game is (as far as i am concerned) far away from being even near accuracy.
It’s ok to disagree and am not exactly disagreeing with him either on this, I just mentioned how for Gaijin, win rates are above everything else for some reason when it comes to using BR’s to balance aircraft.
And about the average pilots I still have the same view and I think that it’s accurate but it’s not the only reason or rule to it, I did not mention every single thing that I believe that resumes it you know, just one of the main ones.
They are also headon masters as you mentioned, but remember that Yaks and Las also face Spitfires, Corsairs and J21’s that tend to kill them faster in a headon due to better ballistics / more cannons. To this day we still see so many J21/A21s rack up 4-5 kills by just full committing to headons - it’s hilarious.
But hey, when you check the win rates of some Yaks and La’s it’s truly something else, they are too low, so that indicates that somehow average players are dying a lot on these still.
That’s alright, I don’t really lean towards the immersion / very realistic factor that hard when it comes to guns honestly.
But I still believe that Mineshells should be on top in terms of damage, don’t get me wrong.
They were perfect at 750 RoF and I genuinely hated that they added these drag changes to guns, nerfed Mineshells even harder on top of the previous nerfs.
My ideal damage for all guns is more or less what we had in 2022 before realshatter with the exception of Mg151 that could have it’s 2019-2020 damage / ballistics.
About the BI’s, I simply believe that this thing is a monstrosity and if anything that should be just a collector item or whatever. I don’t even bother trying to play in matches against this thing cuz there’s genuinely nothing you can do.
I don’t expect ppl to agree with everything I say here. We can agree on some aspects n disagree on others, I see where you are coming from and I hope that it goes both ways. Cheers.
→ Fragmentation damage to fuel tanks, radiators and pilot
It also wouldn’t hurt if pilots would fall uncouncious from DoT once their health falls below 50%.
If an engine can run out of coolant, then pilots also shouldn’t be able to tank damage without consiquence.
Well im fine WITH either buffing MG151 cause everyone else gets it or NERFING everyone else IT SHOULD NOT BE PICK AND CHOOSE thats just playing favorites
as this isnt just a german problem this affects italy and france too as they both use it mind you the ONE RUSSIAN MG151 vehicle that has them in RUSSIA HAS REAL SHATTER ON THEM