This change is one of the worst changes we have seen in years and show a clear lack of understanding as to the issues currently affecting all ground attackers in War Thunder at the moment.
This change removes airfields as targets entirely from ARB at all BRs. This was a mistake. Not only was this a core part of the heavy bombers role, it was pretty much all it could do to actually influence the outcome of the match… Now it cant do anything. This change is basically the final nail in the coffin for heavy bombers.
Additionally. This change needs to be reverted for ALL BRs. Not just lower BRs. The ability to attack an Airfield if all bases have been destroyed would be an incredible buff for ALL ground attack aircraft, peticularly those that are way too slow to beat the fighters running napalm. The impact on the match outcome can be heavily mitigated if you want, but a permament heavy target, that takes a LOT of bombs to destroy… Now that would be an excellent addition to ARB (Modular airfields like this already fully exist in ASB and is an excellent addition bar the Zombers exploiting them during events)
Alternatively. Add the targets currently found in the deep strike mission to ARB/ASB to give additional targets to attack, the current options of 4x bases that slowly respawn is insuffecient.
Do you want to see this change reverted?
Yes
No
0voters
Do you want to see attackable airfields at higher BRs?
We will never see Tu 95 or the Victor (The best V Bomber) with their loathing of bombers.
Who knows, maybe we’d even see enough bombers set up to target it that the terrible performance of bomber survivability will be addressed purely through overlapping fields of fire (Ignore that the best you can get is them opening up at 1km).
They took an interesting feature and decided among the worst possible outcomes.
I’d even advocate for them to revert it and allow the attack of airfields at higher BRs, progressively increasing their HP by determined brackets, so instead of becoming a site to camp refueling people, it becomes an objective to play for depending on the plane role or loadout.
They’re even working on strategic bombing with the last deep strike event. Making airfields a permanent objective sounds even interesting for eccentric planes, but anyway.
And if someone wonders about GBUs balancing… easy. Give dumb rockets an artificial damage multiplier, so it becomes a far more worthy ordnance to use instead for people to actually get close.
No, on the contrary it is quite a good one, and is long overdue.
As it should be. Air RB is fundamentally designed as a PvP mode, and as such, there should be no incentives to play the game in a way that requires zero skill and only prolongs the match for those who choose to play the game how it is meant to be played.
If anything, four bases and the amount of other AI units/PvE elements in ARB are too numerous as is. Again, ARB is a PvP mode; Sim EC and the ground/air arcade assault modes exist if you want to brainlessly click on AI targets.
ARB always had a PvE component, it was designed to be a mission based PvP mode.
The destruction of bases and the airfield is one of multiple possible mission objectives. Other mission objectives include protecting/destroying AI targets (landing boats, ships, carriers, convoys, city defenses) and capturing areas (usually done by the ground AI).
ARB never was a pure PvP mode, the PvE aspects just eroded over time due to matchmaking and gameplay changes.
The less restrictive matchmaking made specific maps appear less and less, ticket drain changes made bombing and ground pounding less impactful and the shorter match timer made certain objectives impossible to complete.
The removal of the airfield destruction is another step towards making ARB as monotonous as possible and turning most bombers and the majority of strike planes into useless vehicles in their main gamemode.
The EC maps exist and the EC logic works when those maps come up in regular ARB matches, but without a longer mission timer and respawns those maps just don’t work like they are supposed to
If we can’t have airfield destruction to contribute to victory.
There is no way to keep bombers in [Fighter-Heaven-Realistic-Battle], because they are worthless
Fighter players complain even more about dead-weights.
Then Gaijin will have the right to ban every bomber/strike jet from ARB, just as Helicopters work.
Because bombers are useless dead weight.
And we all will go to grind to unlock the modification of Lancaster to use Blockbuster by playing CAS with 250lb bombs, or grind to unlock the Modification of Tornado GR.4 by playing CAS with 1000lb dumb bombs while fighting against Buk and some other fancy top rank SPAA.
I’d be happy to have airbases as bombable targets at top tier but I dont think it should be an instant win (at any tier that has them really) maybe like instant 30% ticket drain or something instead
maybe the repair stuff, but i disagree with the spaa stuff, maybe spaa should be disabled if one team only has one guy left and the other team has like 5 people or more but even then. SPAA at the base should always exist just it should be disabled for X minutes if you stay within 10km for X minutes (at least 3)