I typically fire within the LSZ (when it can be trusted) more often than not that is around the 20km mark. Its pretty rare for me to fire further and usually when I do, its because the person is either really high and probably not paying attention, or has just cranked hard and bled a lot of speed.
But I would argue that is people being dumb when it comes to defending and not that the missiles are good.
My typical strategy is to side climb and play defensive, rather than zerg ruhsing down the middle of the map spamming missiles.
Im surprised you have such a « small » LSZ. Its pretty common for me to fire 1, 2 MICA at 25km or even more just to make a SU30 turn around, and I’m usually well within the MICA « LSZ » (which is abominably inacurate and overestimated to be fair)
As of that BVR discussion, I wanna reiterate that it’s not necessarily the missiles being « good » (aside from having a long range that is) that make them good. After all above 15km every missiles (and even the MOCA) gets notched just as easily. Rather that shooting 6, 7 or even more of your 12+ missiles at 30-40km allows you to pressure planes that can’t compete in the range department, forcing them to play passively or take risk to bring you in their own missiles’s NEZ. This « META » is just a free « get into and advantageous position card », the same way a rafale within 10km of you and somewhat going your direction instantly get the advantage (especially when all you have are AIM120s or similarly bad HOBS missiles). The enemy just can’t get a clean shot on you witho it getting in bad position.
In general, I find that there’s a decent portion of the early deaths being less skilled players, maybe that just got to top tier. Then there’s average - above average players like me, that when they play the rafale for example can evade confidently 2, 4, even more missiles but make a mistake every few games or so when trying to counter a SM2 and gets returned to the hangard pretty soon, with the other games being me bullying players with MICA or not doing anything because by the time I finish evading 5 R-77-1 the enemy team got destroyed.
Then there are excellent players like MBDA_MICA which can get extremely high KD because they have a better sense of gameplay and are more competent when evading swarms of missiles and can almost always bring their rafale in their best positions.
Overall, my point is that planes which rely on medium-short range HOBS missiles (and especially the rafale), are not the only META anymore, and there’s finally somewhat of a skill ceiling to bring them to their true capability. The. You have the regular try BVR planes line the EFT, F15… which are a bit more luck dependent but I would say also more straightforward to play. And then you have the SM2 that does most things either good or great, and is a bit on an easy mode even for lower skill players
Well… half the issue here is Community Bug Reporting System it can be impossible to know whether the LSZ is true or just bugging out, so I tend to be a bit conservative.
But 20-25km is probably about right half the time.
and I usually just notch them all then destroy them at closer ranges. had an Su-30Sm2 literally spam all missiles at me, defaeted them all and then proceeded to take him out with 1 missile because he had expected at least one of his spam to actually hit
The latest stuff certainly closed the gap on the Rafale, but I still think the Rafale is highly relevant and if/when I get them on NCTR (not common being in the FGR4) i treat them as a high threat target
A lot more people are climbing to around 10km in jets that cant defend well at the height- aim for the f15s and flankers from 40-60km with 120Cs and is usually profit. Rare I hit rafs and EFs though.
Oh that’s a cool trick, thank you
Though it would be nice to have a small message like 45 messages were deleted to indicate that it happened
In a similar style to the thread lock message
thank you so much for shutting him up, lol. matrix has started stuff like this in several threads i have been on and i am sure more that i have not seen.
If anything, Rafale is massively overperforming in supersonic performance, and I mean MASSIVE and MICA issue has been beaten to death, already. It’s funny how it was allowed to choke the game for over a year now.
