The tracer fire from the helipad removes the possibility of positioning in a 360 around the map.
The first helipad also increases lethality of first spawn rocket rushing as helicopters are able to enter the engagement much faster than normal.
This will also remove any justification for helipad SPAA being disabled and thus will help to prevent spawn camping the enemy helipad as one does now.
There are no benefits to having the first helipad.
For this alone, it would be a good idea.
Though a possible refinement of this idea, could be to have no seperate helipads but instead combine the heli pad with the AF, but add a second AF (same distance as the first) . This would still give you a choice for which direction you want to attack from, but could also give you a choice for where to spawn with planes and more importantly nukes as well. Combine with CAS spawning on the AF and AF SPAA restored to full strength, it could go a long way to balancing things out a bit.
But yeah, just removing or better yet, moving the first heli pad to be roughly the same distance as the first would be great (I think 2 spawns are needed, but neither need to be that close) , but perhaps you could have 1 at the AF and 1 helipad in a different location (about the same distance away)
Helipad “AA” need to do damage in the first place.
Getting rid of that was a bad idea.
I’ve got no problem with the AA being able to be destroyed… Additionally it should be incapable to respawn right after 15 seconds.
The first helipad is too close to the battlefield for it to be enabled without tweaking its range to only be effective within ~100 meters
I still think it would be better to remove the first helipad entirely to both prevent heli rushing / make ATGM helis less immediately effective thus reducing spam / letting you enable helipad protection fully since the second pad is far enough back it wouldn’t restrict air space
The first helipad already being where it is makes tracer fire alerting the enemy to your position. Removing the first pad from both teams allows 360 movement around the battlefield giving players the ability to position more effectively.
Effective only within 100m is a tad bit to short imo, but spacing out the Airfield and Heli-Spawns should’ve be done at the latest as by the introduction date of AA’s like the Pantsir or Thor.