Show me the patch notes that said they buffed AA. They never did. It was overperforming from the start, and all they did was nerf it.
This is not something I witnessed while I ground out both event planes. Each SAM is only capable of guiding in one missile at a time. They will instantly fire a followup if their missile is destroyed or their target is lost, but they cannot guide more than one missile at once.
Multiple patch notes said they did, though testing seems to suggest it was the limited reloading they added originally that actually made it in, rather than anything realistic (IE each same gets IIRC 20 missiles to fire before they’re on a multi-minute cooldown.
The Roland being invisible was a bug. If a SAM missile hit a tree in game, the model would disappear while the missile itself still existed as far as the server was concerned. Due to the Rolands not having the vertical launch angle that the OSAs had, they were more prone to this issue than others.
Still, it wasn’t remotely difficult to tell when you were being fired on. If you were within their firing range, and doubly so if they had their RADARs on, it’s safe to assume you were being fired on.
I’m actually glad they were unavoidable unless you broke LoS or outranged them, because that made them an actual threat, as opposed to how they are in ground RB where they’re more of an inconvenience. It made SEAD important. There were still tweaks needed, as I posted above, but making them less capable resolves one issue by creating a bigger one.
Because they’re substantially faster and far easier to lock on with? Plus, TV guided ordinance wouldn’t actually be able to lock a moving unit at the firing range of an OSA, meaning it’d only be useful against stationary targets, and even then, they’re far too slow to reach the OSA before the first OSA missile timed out, meaning it’s free to just fire a second and take out the Maverick.
While they’re fairly limited in how you can use them, it’s far preferable to the alternative, where all you’d have to do is take off, ripple fire off your HARMs, and land while you net 4 free kills. Wild Weasel work should involve some level of skill and risk, and this implementation provided that. It just needed there to be less SAM coverage, and for there to be more capable SEAD platforms.
The air to air nerf needed to happen, and I’ll happily die on this hill. The entire gamemode was nothing more than an even more braindead version of Air RB, where all anyone did was respawn at the central air base, fly in a perfectly straight line at the enemy’s central airbase, get as many headon kills as possible, and die shortly after, before repeating.
This was by far the best way to get points, to grind, and to win, as it was far from uncommon for multiple aces to have the nuke plane ready to go by the time the third escalation was reached. Thus nessesitating multiple people having to camp low earth orbit, earning nothing, in order to not just instantly lose.
SEAD and CAS became a completely irrelevant sideshow. You know, the stuff they were actually trying to test? There was no point to perform SEAD since doing it in the middle of the map, inside the giant furball, was impossible, doing it outside that area was pointless, and you got pretty pathetic rewards from doing it. And you were literally just greifing your own ability to win the game by spawning a tactical nuke, since almost ever game ended by a large nuke.
A lot of other changes had to happen alongside (And never did), but the rebalance of rewards to make air to air less enticing and air to ground more rewarding needed to happen, and I’m glad it did. Otherwise, the mode would have been nothing more than an even more braindead version of Air RB, rather than the tactical and strategic gamemode we were promised.