yeah pars were my favorite too. Bullying ka50/52s that were targetting each and every low lvl heli that werent even a threat to them or influential to the match outcome was my full time job. and it was more or less balanced between the top tier helis. especially now after the beamriding missiles nerf where u cant just spam all of them and guide them like 8 beads on a string but need to rely on 2 (or maybe 3?, didnt play the vikhr slingers in some time) each would have their advantages. Targetting multiple enemies at once and hide with the pars and spikes (which can be easily dodged if you know theyre coming for you especially when shot from more than 4 km out which is (or was their approx booster distance) shooting the vikhrs with proxy fuze and good speed over long distance (or dodge these close to the ground to disable the proxy fuze) or one of the best back then, the ah mk1 with the star streaks as the fastest a-a missile.
Just the us apaches were seriously suffering in the air to air department, to which i seriously hope gaijoobles finds a solution better now than later (yes yes the oh so op agm114l’s with the longbow radar would be oh so op but its no problemo amigo if theres numerous planes in game now that can do exactly that but they can shoot their whole ordinance top down right after spawning 20 km out conveniently at 2 km altitude in ground rb, like just popping in with full view of the whole battlefield, out of range for most ground based aa, with ordinance that is fire and forget, has ios and enough range to spam from spawn. or they can easily go around the battlefield in 30 seconds and shoot from a completely different angle)
“Too profitable” Haha yeah if thats not a good reason to turn a already boring and pointless gamemode to shit. also 300-500k sl and 50-80k rp in three hours is yeah…not that good anymore compared to how many matches you can play in that time in ground rb and get way bigger rewards. But whatever theres absolutely no reason to play heli pve if you dont have to spade a heli, and if you are in that unfortunate position it really makes you question your life’s choices.
Saying the UHT was a match for the Ka-52 in PvP is copium, Vikhrs outranged PARS (and ATASK) by 3,000m, the Ka-52s radar gave you Arcade markers and there was something like 6-8 months between the Ka-50 being introduced and PARS being made IR F+F (they were SAL before).
Vikhrs were outrageously broken and destroyed 3 gamemodes at the same time (ATGMs could be 1st spawned in GRB and had to be patched out because of them, Heli PvP was now a lost cause and USSR had a 100% W/R in Ground Sim for years because there was nothing comparable)
I played Heli PVP religously and can assure you the PARS were absolutely comparable to the vikhrs in strenght. Just a very different playstyle where you needed to be much more stealthy, skim the ground and find routes to strong positions where from you could attack but hide behind terrain to dodge the return fire. If you could lure them to get closer than 4 km they were dead no matter if they climbed to shoot over your cover or not. at least back then pars were close to undodgeable when their booster was still on. while even then (Before the missile changes) it was not impossible to dodge vikhrs as long as you stayed close to the ground so they had to score direct hits.
But yeah as you said the arcade spotting definitely made it much trickier and on desert maps with very flat terrain and no other cover close to impossible. On vietnam, gl to the kamovs, especially the ka50s without aa radar or thermals.
EDIT: Partly, obviously thes required at least some ka50/52s in your team that knew what they’re doingto keep enemy kamovs with their ufo climbrates from just top down shooting the whole map. On the other hand climbing up to 5 km alt and just deleting ka50s from orbit without them ever knowing what hit them was fun af. Unfortunatley took way too long to get up there ;-)
You never encountered a decent Ka-52, granted most Kamov pilots were absolutely braindead. You could in theory do something on City using the skyscrapers and buildings to get close but you could just abuse standoff range with Vikhrs as the map was so small. Vietnam/Zhengzhou/Tunisia/Afghanistan = gl lol.
The 52 didn’t have to be stealthy, there was no punishment for just space climbing and raining down Vikhr missiles and with no missile physics it wasn’t hard to land direct hits at ppl flying low trying to avoid/disable the proxy through the 25m limit.
The Vikhr was the reason this mode devolved into hover parties and boosting.
Well your missing the fact, if you fly low enough the Vikhirs switched to direct hit mode, and then you of course required a direct hit to kill the enemy.
well it wasnt too hard but you still needed to put work in. and i wouldnt be just sitting below 25 m hovering waiting for you to hit. and with the new missile models it would be even harder to hit those.
Also a ka50 in space is a dead ka 50 in space to other vikhr slingers cause they were always in both teams. Nowhere to run and hide behind, no way to get below proxy fuze alt. If your goal is to go 1-1 then yeah go ahead and hover at 1 km, but thats a shit result for a ka52. Also gl hitting a apache with star streaks before he hits you. Most people just played this gamemode with brain turned off flying into the most stupid positions were they would inevitably die. Conveniently the ka50 is still stupid strong even if you fly it without a brain ;-)
Also
Feel free to look for my arcade heli stats. I think I’m not lying when i say i played it religously (and i think i was in the first 30 ppl leaderboard for number of matches played or whatever the leaderboard showerd in pvp)
nah 25 to 30. Hard to do when theres trees around which is where you want to positon, but being between trees below 25 hm strafing left to right even back then made it quite hard to hit vikhrs with your lock constantly turning off and the missile waving around. and before you know it you’re too close. and dead
I’m pretty sure it was 15m and was upped to 25m with a SAM rebalance
And really wasn’t hard at all even at max range and having to fly so low you weren’t doing drastic maneuvers.
The idea was you’d be so high the opponent would have to hold his nose up at absurd angles for a long time and if it came to equal alt you’d launch more Vikhrs/S-13s as they’d fuse on each other.
Well yeah i liked to call that the vikhr vs vikhr minigame :-D kinda stupid but yea, plan was to get your vikhr off first, dodge all his vikhrs with it and explode it above his heli.
But getting up there is risky even for the ka50 and shooting at max range means the enemy can always just fly away making you waste your ordinance, which is not what you want to do when it took you 5 min to get up there. Main problem imo concerning the space kamovs was when the teams were just blatantly unbalanced so one team had much more or just way better ka50s so they could always just hover up there uncontested.
When theres topography involved id just sit positioned so i have a hill in front below me now i can either dodge all missiles coming for me or: what barely anyone ever did. get behind, below the hill. shoot one of my vikhrs up over the hill. climb, lock the target and guide the vikhr into him, dodging all of his and because i shot first, kill him before he can hit me which makes all his missiles miss. He can have all 8 in the air, doesnt matter while i still have 7 left. And theres nothing he can do, because he’s got no terrain, he didnt shoot first, hes been hovering at 1 km like a bot for the whole world to see unable to do anything. And thus he dies. to one single missile.
yeah city was probably the most balanced map. especially because of that bullshit mm where 8.0 helis had to face ka52s. But on city you at least had a chance to sneak up on them
10.3 and then the top tiers. make it 4 brackets. Mi 28n and stuff even while able to lock targets is still just way outclassed to stuff with thermals, radar and much better ordinance.
Starter helis with just guns and dumb rockets,
Helis with ir missiles as best aa loadout (r60s, stingers and mistrals)
Helis with lock on turrets and missiles
Top tier (with a buff the the apaches that are just way outclassed but used by 4-5 nations).
GL to the BO105, they r just pointless in that mode.
I mean the snail couldve also just improved the maps and just fill it with objectives and missions and introduce those 4 brackets.
but as we all know it was just too tempting to introduce a completely new, boring and broken pve mode that gives 0 rewards (3 full matches for 1/3 rd of one modification…wtf) and lets you finish a map with a net negative of sl after dodging laser accurate radar aa in helis with dumb rockets only for 2 hours unable to finish the match when half your team left after their boosters ran out (after which it is basically pointless to continue).
Yeah it wasn’t hard under the right circumstances. Back then before the SAM or missile changes. Today it would be a pain in the ass with how much even the vikhrs are wobbling after their booster turned off. But i also get a laser warning i check thruogh my gunner sight i see who shot at me, i see 8 or 9 km distance, i just fly away you will never hit me. if you keep doing that you are dead to my allies with 0 chance of hitting me because i am always out of range
I challenge you to hit me and push me agressively in one of my tiger helis from 7 km out on a relatively flat trajectory while im in or better behind a treeline weaving left to right. You cant lock on to me cause constant trees break your lock. so you have to eyeball it. also you cant see me all the time. and consider during that whole engagement, the higher you climb to increase the threat to me to look over my cover you are exposing yourself more and more to the vikhr slingers in my team.
You will not have a lot of shots you can miss even if you do the smart thing and fire one (or two max) guide it till hit or miss and then the next (not like all those bozos that ripple fired for a potential one kill of one alouette and be completely useless and defenseless afterwards). consider in all that time you are completely exposed and any laser warning probably means someone else is in vikhr range to you and fired on you before you fired at him, which means you are probably dead unless you find him fast and proxy fuze his vikhr with yours.
as soon as you are at 5 km i will fire back. at that point you will have a very hard time to keep manually guiding to hit me below proxy fuze alt while dodging pars or spikes. when you are at 4 km you are basically dead because thats the range until which the pars (and maybe spikes) booster is burning and it turns quite well and isn’t only gliding. unless you perform an absolutely crazy dive to the ground to gain speed, perpendicular to me to outpull my missile when it gets close. You better judge that point correctly ;-) If you dive too fast you cant pull enough or u might not recover due to overspeed. if you do recover or try to reengage i will shoot the one that does you in.
You won’t believe the amount of times some completely overconfident ka52 or mi28nm player got angy and pushed me believing he got the upper hand. i hide behind trees, weave, dodge 4 or 5 vikhrs because hes not got enough alt and autokill him when hes 4,5 km out still closing in like a lunatic.
Also consider as soon as there is any AHMk1 in game you’re in a world of pain. he sees you high up then you are most likely dead since the starstreaks have 2 times the speed of yours. And you cant proxy fuze those.
Going high alt was high risk, high reward. And only works well if your team either has twice the amount or much better ka50 players. If it hadnt been for the stupid af spotting system (yeah why not get autospotted across the whole map for anyone you killed while being able to spot everyone around you for you and your team through gunner sight in a ~10 km radius and with keen vision playing a big role to at what point enemies “pop up”) going high alt would have been even riskier. Would have been so much better without it.
Probably my proudest achievement was killing a guy in a ka50 with the alouette back when it had snebs. Twice. In one flyout. and yes the second time he did go for me because he wasnt happy. and i was spotted for him and he did ripple fire all his vikhrs at me. which wasnt smart. cuz snebs got them all ;-) I almost cracked.
Big problem was the the ka50 was available to so many people and half the lobbies were ka50s. Facing starter helis. And the ka50s that shot each and everything even the low br helis without exception and that the ka50 is so dangerous even if you have barely any idea what you were doing or how heli pvp worked.
I even forgot one thing which i believe is (or was) somewhat of a hidden secret in heli pvp. Something that I barely saw anyone ever doing. One of the most powerful tools I am almost a bit scared of revealing in case (which i hope) heli pvp does come back (only with rework considering br brackets and spotting system pls):
J out!
And not only j out but land and j out. i never saw anyone doing that. everyone j’d out mid air. As long as you have flat ground you can safely land on close by quickly and you are attacked by something you got no chance against: As long as you are undamaged: Land and j before he hits you. It doesnt count as a kill. It doesnt count as you dying. not in the killfeed and not in the match stats or anywhere. You dont have to pay the repair costs. you can respawn for something like 600 sl even in a top tier heli. with full loadout again. No ammo? Land and j. being pushed by a ka-suckling while flying a starter heli from 10 km out? land and j, make him waste all his vikhrs. Feeling like you cant win being engaged in a apache by a ka50 from 8 km out? either just fly away or, you guessed it. land and j. theres a cap quadrant or ground units spawning close to one of your spawnpoints and you’re low on ammo anyhow? Correctamundo: Land and j! (just make sure you dont do it close to one of your spawnpoints)
They play dirty, play them dirty. they were literally asking for it sometimes.
funniest was running behind hills or mountains chased by bloodhungry ka50s go behind the hill they lose vision, you land and j and they search for all eternity. It didnt even appear in the killfeed which was the best thing about it. Not as kill and not as you dying. because you didnt die ;-) you just reset the engagement and now have a free chance to sneak up on the dude without thermals again
For them you just disappeared and they never grasped what happened. Like a dog that cant find a ball you pretended to throw.
while youre already half way sneaking up on them from a different angle and a different spawn point. being unscouted :-D (actually unsure whether it reset the revengekill scout but at least the team scout one it did)
You just admit the Vikhrs zone you out completely but you still “win” by being chased blindly into your team assuming a Kamov doesn’t just engage something else or leave.