With the recent changes to scout drones they need some fixing. Having the ability to spot targets for your team is very powerful, particularly against immobile SPAA.
Currently drones can head directly into spawn and are very hard to target and kill with MG fire or ARH SPAA. They can they just sit over spawn and scout your entire team.
Russian teams seem to spam the drones because their lineups have so many light vics in them. The very popular 2S38 also 1 shots all drones, but not all nations have proxy autocannon shells.
Why is this an issue? Well paired with the ability to mark the map and indirect fire from both ground units and CAS it makes playing SPAA very frustrating. The maps don’t allow very much room to hide or even leave spawn with the giant multi system vehicles.
Additionally the scout drone damage model seems to need some fixing. Often hits with SPAA missiles will trigger their proxy fuse but end up doing no damage.
I play 12.0+ GRB and I have a full lineup including Heli/CAS for perspective.
well only thing what should be done is damage model.
I play lot of top tier and usually dont even bother on drone spawning.
But on topic, damage model on those are completely busted, the scout drone is modeled on Zala 421-08, so it’s wingspan is 0.8m and it weights 1.7Kg, now this thing can some miraculous way survive 4+ abrams multipurpose heats, 2-3 autocannon proxyfuses, pzhp2000 proxy HE, igla, stinger, pantsir heck i got even crit on BUK once in it.
For all fairness, any of those “big cannons” or missiles shot would be enough to decimate it from the sky even with blastwave , but gaijin has decided that it is made from adamantium and vibraniums combination and had stalinium 2k ceramic coating on top of it
They were technically nerfed after the update since the cooldown is much longer. Before, player can just scout the entire team with ease and barely any cooldown by just marking the target with the drone and scout right on that mark (u can still do this btw).
The fundamental issue is that there is no terrain detection for scouting, and adding such a system is pretty complicated, so Gaijin just chose an inbetween of letting the drone scout by itself, and we just have to deal with it.
Idk why u gotta bring Russian bias talk into this when every other nation got just as many light tank to spam drone themselves. Even JP got like 7 light at rank 6-7. But it is true that drone should be nerfed and should be able to be one shotted by even stuff like AHEAD rounds.
The UAV is fine but scouting needs to be completely removed from the game. It’s to broken and causes way to many issues. I’m fine with the UAV being used as part of your squad to convey information in a VC but scouting people through walls and at the beginning of a match is just ridiculous. Only option is to remove it scouting mechanic that is I don’t necessarily have a problem with the drone itself.
they kinda nerf them after adding this, before you could spot them though the map with the drone, with much lower cool down, the damage model does need to be fixed they resist way too much manpads often just “hit” them.
Nah sounds like you want to sit in spawn with your spaa and be safe while you use absolutely no skill attacking aircraft with FnF weapons.Scouting is fine as is
It doesn’t take a lot of skill to first spawn a heli with rockets and use CCIP to spam rockets from 5m above heli pad and then immediately land and rearm to do it again in 30 seconds.
I also play CAS and think it’s pretty easy to kill SPAA and it doesn’t need to be easier for CAS in GRB.
Also any game design that has effectively no counter isn’t healthy for the game
after the change to the recon drone scout CD, theres so little recon drones around that honestly, who cares at this point.
There were matches with 6+ recon drones prior to the change, now youll see like 1-2, lucky if 3.
Recon drones are a powerful tool, but like, every nation has a way of killing them one way or another.
The multipathing is rather annoying ill give you that, maybe for sake of fairness it wouldnt be a bad choice to just make it so they cant multipath but honestly i can already see the spaghetti code thats holding this game together just disabling MP altogether and gaijin would take 7 years to fix it.
On small maps, your SPAA will be found out one way or another, youre the size of a house, dont exactly need a recon drone to find you.
On larger maps, it depends. On one hand its a valuable intel to have since now you have more of a wiggle room to hide and run to. On the other hand being scouted and then rushed by a fast light tank that managed to go through an opening in your frontline to kill you is annoying, be it a completely fine and intended gameplay.
Honestly in my opinion, the drone right now, unless youre in a squad and can quickly give updates is pretty ass. You get 3 scouts per minute, in or out of drone and most average players dont pay any attention to your map pings. On top of that with the SP reduction its now more used for what it was meant to be used for rather than to abuse to get into planes/helicopters faster.
And in my opinion, it would genuinely be better if gaijin just got rid of the SP reduction all together, kept the SP gain from scouts and reduced the CD from 18 seconds to 10. That way planes and helis will cost the exact same amount, no matter what while giving you some reward for being the eyes in the sky, the CD wont be so annoyingly long both in and out of drone, and will be still a strong tool to use in right hands.
Alternative, get rid of UCAVs and make the button summon in an MQ1 without weapons and with the ability to scout. Spawned much higher ARH missiles wont have issues hitting it. It cant defend itself same as ucav and is much larger, letting it be intercepted by planes and SPAA alike.
I see some every game, particularly when playing against RU. I also notice whenever I hop in a drone I immediately die to a 2S38 in 1 shot every time.
Its not the multipathing that is an issue. Many missiles don’t do any damage, even when exploding directly on top of a drone.
There is a YouTuber who showed how to use a scout drone and light vehicles to mark the map and then indirect fire. Spawn to spawn which provides exactly 0 counterplay.
Its difficult to move in general and with 3 vehicle systems it takes time/there often is no room to move to. Map marking also makes it very easy for CAS/Heli to pre lock your location
I was spading the Rapier and Stormer AD recently and I had multiple back to back matches where there was none and some where I might see 2-3 over the course of the entire game.
Though this I agree with. My record was a drone tanking 4x Raper missiles.
At least from 2 updates ago they became not lockable by Spikes, it was an effective way to deal with them. But I generally agree that drones need a bigger hitbox and less HP. Their damage model is all over the place.
People were exploiting a bug back then, nowadays Gaijin gave us this slop because they couldn’t figure out how to fix that scouting through solid objects issue.
Yes, i think youre talking about Loner (?) but thats so rare that taking that as a general rule is just dumb. Most people dont even know how to aim via direct fire, let alone do indirect fire across the map into spawns. So its generally rare, youre more likely to just get rushed and killed by light tanks or one MBT that slipped through.
That is fair.
I mean, i see them too but its genuinely numbers wise low. Ive been playing RU recently a lot and be it on my team or coming from enemy team, the amount of drones i see is pretty low. Way less than before the CD and SP reduction nerf was introduced.
Ive played A LOT of SLM when that came out (hell ive even got a nuke with just it) and with those vehicles (multi-vehicle SPAAs) you gotta first spawn them. Its just how things are. Late spawning them will result in you not being able to spread out your TELs away from your TADS, so its first spawn or bust. With BUK its bit different since TELARs can function on their own but thats kinda besides the point and also not applicable to sky sabre/SAMPT
If you late spawn, depending on current game situation youll have an easy or very hard time trying to set up.
The CAS or Helis are going to find you one way or another 9/10 times very easily, drone or not, since youre the size of a barn