Dude honestly. in ground RB, there’s almost nothing you can do to counter SPAA. Don’t even get me started on the 2S38. Flares don’t work because most of the SPAA is Radar based, they can track you THROUGH TREES AND HOUSES, and SPAA is pretty much watching you the second you take off and you can’t even see them because they’re sitting in the back of their spawn like a rat. I’ve had Spike missiles kill my AFTER I’ve already landed on the helipad. SPAA was bad enough for helis already. Now we can’t even get close enough to do anything. The only helicopters that needed a nerf was the KA-50 and KA-52 but now every helicopter suffers. Even if you manage to grind and finally get the best helicopters in the game all you can do is:
Sit above your helipad and shoot ATGMs before getting absolutely obliterated
Sit above your helipad and shoot AA missiles before getting absolutely obliterated
Sit above the enemy helipad and spawn kill getting absolutely obliterated
Damage an enemy with rockets before getting absolutely obliterated
Tickle the enemy with guns before getting absolutely obliterated
Trust me I’ve tried every tactic in the book, and they all have the same end result.
I just played a game where I took off and a 2S38 immediately shot me down like 100m away from the helipad. Like you can’t make this stuff up.
On this part, I don’t really mind if SPAA swats us helicopters like flies, that’s the nature of helicopter CAS since day 1 (except for the 7.7-8.7 ATGM carriers)
Thats a big part of what makes the grind suck so bad though. We can barely get kills and when we manage to finally get one, the rewards are little to nothing. Getting swatted out of the sky almost instantly makes it 100x worse.
I thought you were referring to the ground RB situation, but alas I was wrong.
Yes, I do agree that in a lot of situation, AI SPAA are too strong. One example is in the map “Rocky Canyons” where M42 dusters and M60A1/M113’s commander .50 would snipe you out of the air in 1 milisecond the moment you reach their 2km death zone. Add to the fact that ground units are always glitched (due to map desync/server desync), early helicopters wouldn’t be able to hit SPAA properly and with pinpoint accuracy.
The only thing that could fight these SPAAs effectively, are helicopters with autotracker, which can’t be found under 10.3 BR
They really need to just buff the amount of targets / payout for targets / a match.
Thus for individual, and overall rewards they’re at least 30% higher.
The problem isn’t / wasn’t solely on the KA-50, people need to stop blaming it as the scape goat. The Tiger UHT in heli PVP was also heavily spammed.
Nor should the KA-50 go up in br, lacking any thermals, (it should have gen 1 since it has the night vision upgrade package irl and in game) and being 11.3 for 12 good ATGMs is a bit silly. 11.0 would’ve been fine, 11.3 is tough but do-able.
Nor do Heli Pve brs apply the same way. It goes 7.7-8.7, 8.7-10.0 10.0–12.0 last I checked.
Heli pve sucks, as you have to fight tooth and nail against other players for good rewards. It should be team spirit.
Generally helicopters are a mess in game. They’re played less than planes, and are the minority.
The way PvE BR bracketing works, as far as I remember, is this
7.7-9.0
9.3+
Yes, I’ve seen non-squad Mi-24Ps in my Ka-52s.
I actually believe that the way Heli PvE bracketing works is by rank instead of BR
On the UHT/HAD/HAP case, yes, I do agree that they were a problem and they were spammed to the brink of death when PARS and Mistrals were actually useful (with their pre-nerf 20G+ maneuver). That, until Ka-50 is on sale.
I do agree with the individual and overall rewards, amount of targets and rewards per targets, and the fact that PvE sucks because of the competition.
While I do agree that helicopters are the minority, I would like to argue that helicopters are a major incentive booster for Gaijin’s economy if they reworked the supporting game mode.
They’re needs to be more heli pve brackets. 9.3s should never mix with 10.7s or higher. You may be right with the br placement, it’s been awhile since I’ve played it.
Also I brought up a similar topic, but I mentioned modifications cost etc.
If I might make an suggestion, we should try to combine posts.
The only time heli PvP was good was before EC was implemented, because the game was balanced. Sure, Mi-4AV wasn’t able to go toe-to-toe against a Viper, but they didn’t have to. The complexity of maps like Rice Terraces made sure helis could sneak around and win by objectives. At the end of the day the Hound has 96 rockets and 4 Falangas, it could cause its fair share of damage to AI. And the Huey vs. Hind dogfights with cannon pods were surprisingly fun. There weren’t air-to-air missiles, fire-and-forget or proxy-fuzed ATGMs. Even the first AAMs were almost balanced by IRCM, flares and HIRSS. It sucked to be on a heli without flares, but as long as you had them an R-60 or AIM-9L could be flared off if you paid attention.
But now? After Gaijin powercreeped everything to hell and back and raced to the bottom to find the worst starter heli for each subsequent nation? No. Playing a PvP mode with that Swedish Huey is a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. And high tiers, where helis have AAMs with IRCCM? Hard pass for me.
It would be the simplest, most straightforward improvement. Rewards are already soft capped by the useful actions system, so it’s not like people hogging kills would get to grind faster, it would instead mean more targets for everyone else.
well, there’s a certain demographic from a certain part of the world, (that also happens to cheat a lot), that buys the KA-50 as it’s truly the best helicopter to spam for rewards, and they fly it in, and wipe everything, thus nobody gets rewards.
The useful actions should be a bonus for teamwork or “useful actions” I’m sick of playing for a long time constantly to get shafted by gaijin.
Like I can spend 3 hrs in a sim match, with premium time, and barely get 1.25 modifications for a vehicle if I’m lucky and am at the top of the team. Meanwhile, it should be 2 modifications at the least and somewhere between 400-600k silver for being 1st on the team with a win (if in a premium heli / premium time) and trickle down from there. Which is what it first was, gaijin saw a surge in the mode being played and blamed it on the rewards, then they tanked. I think now you’ll get about 325k at max, which makes it worthless.
I could play ground and average between 86-136k silver a match or naval being 100-168k a match.
also after not playing heli pve for so long, i feel like the mode became even worse, before i atleast could queue up and see a match where there was like 4 peeeps max in a lobby, today i queued into two different matches and saw like 10 people in 1 match twice
i decided to stay in the second one, and here came the second issue, every heli which is in the 7.7-9.3 bracket, doesnt have irst autotracking, which makes it borderline impossible to hit the moving sniper convoy gepards because they are desynced from the client-server side, and either the hitbox is ahead or the model is ahead, which makes it a guessing game, with IRST autotracking you atleast force the server and the client to resync again, but without that, good luck attacking convoys on stuff like afghan.
I honestly think because heli pve is arcade gamemode, every heli should get irst autotracking, or atleast the ones in the gamemode should
It was the best gamemode back then IMO. Massive maps (and smaller ones suitable for low tier gunshipping: City) Competitive gameplay, long matches, decent rewards.
No balance between top tier and lower tiers though and ka50s especially 52s just the strongest and easiest to learn and do well in. Would or could have been amazing with more brackets to have slow low tier helis with guns and dumb rockets bracket, ir missile heli bracket with more objectives and missions for helis with not so good loadouts, helis that have gunner lock and true top tier. Maybe even with maps that scale with higher brs. 4 Brackets. Thats all it wouldve taken. Apparently impossible to implement. Or test. Snail sez: No players. No Shit? Hordes of ka50s can just maul on starter helis match after match and people getting frustrated with it. Which was completely understandable. → No one plays it
Now it’s gone. For whatever the pve mode is supposed to be: Boring af, everyone leaves 30 min in, capped rewards that make it pointless to do more than average, fighting ai that just spawns right underneath you with no warning or oneshots you in dusters from 5 km out if you don’t pay attention. Insane spawncosts for some helis that sometimes make you question if you will make it out with a net positive in sl or if you should just leave before the server decides to spawn some more ai right underneath you. Premium helis with good loadouts and high top speed (aka russian helis) that dont play to spade like the ka50s still killing all the ai making it hard for others to do well.
From my most liked to i thank god for every second i dont have to play that boring crap to spade half a module in 1,5 hours playtime.
And yes, i spaded the mi4av free to play and researched two whole heli trees f2p back in the old pvp. Better experience than this. by far.
Good post, but to say all the problems came from the KA-50 is just not true, sure it was slightly more seen than the Tiger UHD (or whatever the German top tier is) as it has spammable IR seeking warheads that landed with deadily effect.
I do remember that Eurocopter Tigers were hunting everyone down with their Mistral/PARS, but they weren’t as frequent as Ka-50s, nor as frustratingly annoying as Ka-50s
I spaded my Mi-4AV, Mi-24A and Mi-24V in that game mode. I don’t care how many times do I get slapped by the Ka-50 but damn does it feel better to obtain 30k RP from just dying 30 times (/s)
Not sure i understand you right, which do you prefer?
Anyhow im quite sure back then you still got way more xp because it wasnt capped over time intervalls. Sucked ofc if you were hunted constantly in helis that cant do anything to a ka52 and through the stupid spotting system back then you were autospotted across the whole 50 km map if you finally managed to kill one of them making revengekills easy af and hiding impossible but still. I felt it was way more engaging actually fighting real players than just random ai thats either just sitting waiting to get shot or oneshotting you from 5 km out in a duster without rwr warning obviously because it has no radar still shoots with laser precision from 1 km further than any radar aa.
PVE sim was good like that at first, but it was “too profitable” so gaijin nuked it, since if you spent 3 hrs in a single game, you’d make between 300,000-500,000 k silver, and 50-80k rp, if you were actively killing things, the way it should go back to, since there is so few targets!
