I strongly believe the Mirage F1 should be lowered in BR (air RB), here are my reasons :
The Mirage F1’s best weapon is the Magic 2 missile.
This all-aspect infrared missile has a great probability of kill but suffers from two major limitations; it has short range and Mirage F1 can only carry two of them.
It is generally not considered overpowered as a proper use of flares reliably defeats it.
The Mirage F1’s second best weapon is the Super 530F.
This radar missile is extremely ineffective as it is extremely easy to chaff and therefore to defeat.
It has been worked on a lot but it is clear it cannot be improved further for the foreseeable future.
Many players consider this missile to be “dead weight” and prefer to just not take them into battle in order to avoid the additional weight.
The Mirage F1 is also able to equip the much older R530E.
This rear aspect infrared missile is sometimes prefered over the Super 530F due to the fact that it doesn’t appear on the target’s RWR and therefore doesn’t alert it.
However, this missile is also very ineffective as it is extremely slow and very weak against flares.
As a result, it very rarely hits its target either because it cannot catch up to it or because the target dropped flares (which very often happens even if the target is not aware of your presence).
In the end the only effective weapon on the Mirage F1 is the pair of Magic 2 it can carry.
The flight performance of the Mirage F1 is not helping its case either.
It is decently agile at medium and high speeds, but cannot sustain such speeds in a dogfight at all.
It can hold its own against the heavy weights at 11.3 such as the F-4J, but anything more manoeuverable can easily defeat the Mirage F1, meaning pretty much every fighter at that BR is more agile than the Mirage F1.
The poor energy retention and average acceleration also mean the Mirage F1 cannot escape a dogfight.
Trying to dogfight almost any opponent is a death sentence in the Mirage F1.
This is why the ineffective missiles on the Mirage F1 are such a big problem.
Once the two Magic 2 have been fired, the only weapon the Mirage F1 has is its guns, but trying to use them almost always leads to your death.
Going back to the airfield to rearm is also not a viable option, as by the time you get back to the action zone the battle has already been decided.
Conclusion :
Due to all those reasons, I believe the Mirage F1 needs to go down in BR.
I have been told before that this would be problematic due to the high efficiency of the Magic 2.
My opinion on this is as follows :
I would much rather have the Mirage F1 at a comfortable BR without the Magic 2, than the Mirage F1 at a miserable BR with the Magic 2.
As there are two Mirage F1s in the tech tree, it may also be possible to remove the Magic 2 and lower the BR of only one of them.
This way the players have the most options and this could make the F1C and F1CT less similar, giving more reasons for players to get both.
Thank you for reading so far and I hope this will help you better understand the problem with the Mirage F1 and find a good place for it in the game.
.png.6aca7d804761e3cf34a85a64b712a158.png){kind=link}