Devs, I implore you, please consider the usefulness of the Me 163 and all of it’s variants, and review it’s battle rating.
The komet. Almost no one plays it. I believe it is reasonable to lower it’s battle rating down to 7.7 for air realistic and ground realistic battles.
The previous fuel load it could take allowed it to to quite competative in it’s hayday, but with the addition of a lot of new vehicles since then, and a fuel nerf that slashed it nearly in half (which is debated on it’s realism) the plane is just sort of useless, and not the fun kind.
Jets not even a full battle rating above it are faster, can fly for the whole battle, and carry much more ammunition to the fight as well as more guns. The komet has poor ammo, poor flight time, and low velocity guns that are nearly impossible to aim at a distance, which means chasing any target faster than you.
It is also worth noting that German air at 7.7 is almost nonexistant and 6.7 jets are near constantly pulled up to this battle rating, resulting in pilots in Me 262s, many of whom aren’t experienced in jets yet, get absolutely dogged on – so badly that they usually drop the BR and go back to props until they unlock better jets, skipping the rank entirely because of how challenging it is.
With only a 3-minute fuel load it should in fact be at minimum a whole BR lower, same with the B-0. I don’t see it being a problem given it takes a third of its fuel to just take off. The guns are horrible velocity, the plane is made of glass, the rudder bricks at 750kph so even though in theory its fast it can’t effectively use that speed because it can’t effectively aim at that speed. To kill people requires those people be dumb enough to try vertical fighting you or turnfighting you. The moment they aren’t dumb enough to do either, you cannot do jack shit.
Nope.
It’s hard to play, but it can be very good in the right hands. 3 minutes of fuel is enough since you can sit on 25% for most of the battle and then use your insane acceleration to catch someone when they are in a bad position. The BI is undertiered at 7.0 so you can’t make a comparison
bi=/=me163 it’s drastically better, there’s literally zero reasons the me163b0 couldn’t be 7.7 the fuel isn’t nearly as effective as the bi for some reason so it’s much worse at that
If I remember right bi also requires much less throttle to get near its max speed. Me163 should be tested at 7.7 and ki200 at 8.0. People say “they can make it back to base on 1 minute of gas” do people not realize how extremely vulnerable they are doing this? That’s like going 500kph or less, basically a death sentence. If someone comes out of nowhere you have to reactively accelerate in time to be able to avoid them.
Rocket planes need accurate thottle controls, accurate fuel consuption (Lookin at you BI-1)
And an airspawn, maybe the same as floatplanes, because it’s the takeoff that takes away all your fuel.
Imo most rocket planes could be lower, they could be balanced around this super early impact focused class, where in less than 2 minutes you need to clip parts of the enemy team so that your team is more likely to win the battle.
If Bi-1 actually had 2 minutes of fuel I wouldn’t really be so annoyed by it, maybe I would even say it to be lower if the airspawn never came, since it is just “survive 30 seconds vs a plane with only 90 rounds”, just 1 or 2 turns and the rocket needs to head back, and it’s team will be left without a teamate.
A rocket plane needs to kill 1-2 important people and then needs to trust on it’s team so it can refuel without being strafed in the runway.
Yeah it’s super stupid at least it was recently raised in rating. The 3 other rocket vehicles aren’t nearly as good and must be tested at lower rating. Like why can ki200 fight f100 even considering max uptier. Isn’t fast enough even if it turns well to avoid a missile if someone launches on at you.
Counterpoint: Also, we do not need Me 163 fighting CL-13s and F3H.
BR compression problem as usual
We cannot send Me 163 down and create another BI case if we think about the downtier.
However, we cannot keep them there or send them up if we consider an uptier.
Personally, i’d love to see its fuel consumption rebalanced and its BR moved down. But that fuel consumption rebalance is important.
Right now, the engine becomes exponentially more efficient at lower throttle, making the limited fuel duration not really that big of an issue. (IE, rn, at 50% throttle, you only have 25% fuel consumption). Meaning that a decent player can more or less ignore the downsides of the plane. While skill ignoring downsides is a good thing, when the plane is so stellar outside of said downsides, it very easily leads to the plane being broken at what should be more appropriate BRs.
If they only had say, 37.5% fuel consumption at 50% throttle, then I feel like that would do a lot to balance the flight performance.
Me 163 is somewhat kinda stuck at reverse-sweetspot
not too bad enough to get buff, or not good enough to remain still or get further nerf.
send em down can cause a [Another-BI-built-from-Germany-not-from-soviet] case, but keeping 8.0 and letting em being same BR as F-86A-5 to letting them see F3H is delusional.
We might need to rebalance it, but not by BR adjusting.
