I’ve never tanked more than 2 spikes. I either die to the first spike, or the 2nd spike, because they sure love to hit areas that don’t have ERA.
To me, they seem utterly broken.
So why are people still complaining about spikes?
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to some extent negativity bias
but also they kinda do suck and we have no control over their suckiness
but also also
most vehicles that have spikes only get 4 spikes and then after they only have a bushmaster so being able to kill two tanks and then having your 10.7-11.3 vehicle turned into a 9.0-9.7 vehicle is very sad
especially considering under fire demonstrations (which are under basically optimal conditions sure) they make tank go big explosion
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Because they are heavy RNG weapons, meaning that when you need them you have no guarantee that they’ll actually kill someone you need to kill. In fact they are best used against squishy targets that you’d be better off treating with your canon.
This is compounding with the frustration that they are most often paired with a Bushmaster 30 that while a decent autocanon, is really limited at the BR carrying F&F ATGMs propels you.
Also since you get a very limited number aside from the Freccia, you really notice whenever they do nothing.
There’s also a population of player that willingly refuse to understand why a weapon that has no feedback, virtually no range limit, and that can be used from behind cover shouldn’t be a guaranteed OHK.
Also you won’t really notice the F&F that outright miss you, or just clip your commander optics…
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Because most of the tines they do not work on medium/heavy armored vehicles, either miss or do almost nothing. If I want to kill lights I have a 30mm bushmaster for that.
Spoiler
[quote=“gfdsa_killer, post:2470, topic:314801”]
First match: 3 spikes launched at players; 2 non lethal, 1 kill
Second match: 8 spikes launched at players; 1 non lethal, 1 crit (engine), 1 crit (commander and breech), 1 crit (breech only), 4 kills (2 light armored vehicles)
Third match: 5 spikes launched at players; 4 non lethal shots (one of them hit the cannon without doing any dmg), 1 kill (2s38)
Observations: Spikes do work well against light armored vehicles (such as the 2s38, 2s6 and btr82at), but not perfect because one of the spikes just hit the SPIKE launcher of an enemy PUMA without doing any significant damage. In case of MBTs its just a gambling, spikes sometimes goes to the UFP where the stronger armor and ERA is, and other times hits the turret. Also spikes launched at BMPTs are wasted shots, but what can you do when you spike carrier its at the same br?
Conclusions: Spikes do work well against light armored, but also does the 30mm bushmaster, the whole point of having an ATGM in an IFV its to defeat more armored targets that your autocannon can not pennetrate frontally, which the 11 total spikes launched at MBTs/BMPT, just 3 made kills, and 4 crit damage, the rest non lethal hits. So considering the BR the Namer and other spike slingers are, they do lack power at dealing with armored targets, which an mbt would take 2 spikes average to kill it, not ideal when you only have 4 spikes available.
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People complain about the system because of the HEAT performance. Even though Spike-LR, Spike-ER and PARS 3 LR do have Tandem charge this doesn’t indicate good post-pen damage. These missiles will behave like any other HEAT-shaped round: equivalent of the warhead explosive in TNT, conic damage and inability to cause overpressure most of the time—this is where the problems lives on: in-game the copper jet doesn’t behave like it should, it only goes forward, it doesn’t cause local damage where the liquid hit, and given that in chemical-warhead ammunition (HE, SAPHE and HEAT) the caliber dictate how good is, is no surprise that AGM-179 JAGM-MR and Izdeliye 305 will perform better (respectively HEAT warhead at 178 mm-caliber platform and HE warhead at 200 mm-caliber platform, if I’m not wrong).
Sure, you get killed by 1 or 2.
But what about the 4 that missed because the missile clearly does not know where it is?
Me watching all 4 of my spikes aim for commander’s optic, tracks, or roof machine gun.
Spikes and Akeron MP missiles are barely a threat to the majority of vehicles in the game with enough armor to stop an overpressure kill though. Even light armor can just randomly manage to survive a hit from them. MBTs are a total gamble, with more losses than wins.
I often have my spike hit commander periscopes, tracks or…the fav rooftop machine gun. They do nothing in this case. Manually guided TOW2A are much better. With Wiesel you aim by youself and kill most tanks with one missile Spikes usually fail to kill tanks. They might kill light vehicles…but so does the 30mm… this defeats the purpose entirely.
PARS3 from Tiger heli has a similar behavior. Its like all western weapons are bs.
I tried telling someone this a few months ago on the forums and for whatever reason, it won’t click.
Spikes are terrible, but I’d prefer them being terrible to be how they are IRL. No warning when they are fired and can be fired from cover. If they were consistently good, they would be outright overpowered. The only buff I would say for Spikes would be to add ammo boxes to each Spike vehicle, since they are so weak. It also will help with vehicles like the PUMA who get their auto cannon ammo destroyed every time they are shot.
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Helicopter missiles and aircraft missiles do basically the exact same thing with even less time to react or counterfire, and they usually have significantly more consistent damage profiles. It doesn’t really make sense to let CAS be the only broken one while ground is “balanced” by being gimped.
Something like Pereh (if implemented fully with NLOS and MITL+LOAL) would be broken, but 95% of the spike carriers in the game would not really even change the match flow if their missiles could kill MBTs more often than not. Only the Freccias with their huge magazines would be made very strong if their ATGMs were improved.
They are also incredibly annoying to try to get a lock with them, one match you can lock half a T-80s turret peeking over a hill, the next you cant lock him because 1% of his tank is still behind a rock.
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