The F-15’s Current Performance in War Thunder Feels Incorrect and Unfair

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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Not in the universe where the spectrum of 11.7 to 13.7 is a compressed mess.

Listen, I’m not even in the mood to debate this for much longer lol, You’re right to some good extent, but we’re not changing the world here, the fact they’re not considering 15.0 for this update says everything you need to know. You can either seethe at what I’m telling you (which is what Gaijin is already doing by keeping everything stupidly compressed from 11.7 up to 13.7, which is totally nonsensical and wrong, to the point they knew this wave of premiums within 12.7 to 13.3 are goldmines), or you can spend your energy somewhere else on something useful, like grinding a tree or watching memes.

They will simply not move the F-15A/J/Baz at 13.0 until top tier is shifted at the very least (and I bet my dime it won’t be immediately) to 15.0. My bet is that they’ll decompress both Su-30s with 15.3 once both get their respective sales.

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Yes… still makes sense for the reasons I said above.

None of what you’re saying in this specific paragraph has to do with our current conversation, which is you promoting recompression as a possible solution.

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Recompression is the answer for vehicles that were already compressed before the premium spam, to which is currently unsolvable without 15.0 (or even 15.3) as their stupid rule of their premium vehicles being unable to face top tier vehicles exist, simple as.

While that idiotic rule exists, move the damn Mirage 4000 down to 12.7 and make Gaijin accountable for their disastrous BR balancing that currently favors brainrot premiums.

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Which does what exactly to lower BR vehicles? Do you think they actually will cope with being mega compressed more than THEY already are? It’s a trickle down effect all the way to 1.0. It is never a solution.

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its literally a night mare right now gaijin is forcing it hard

compression sells

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The thing is, Air RB is not a series of 1v1s. It’s one disorganized horde of planes crashing into another. This is doubly true starting around this tier, where BVR goes from a credible threat to all but certain.

The outcome of the game is often largely decided in this initial missile jousting. It’s not as certain in a downtier as it is in an uptier, but and initial losses immediately snowball into a series of lopsided fights, where the outnumbered team gets swarmed and stomped over and over again.

The F-15 may easily win that 1v1 against an F-4S, but what happens when there are two, coming in from different angles? By the time you’ve closed to IR missile range of the enemy, the game has often already been decided.

The problem doesn’t lie with the F-15s, at least not directly. The main problem is a gamemode where winning games comes down almost entirely to “Who can kill more of the enemy in the first few minutes”, and a meta where getting early kills starts to become very easy on certain planes, and almost impossible on others.

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The F-15 also curb stomps every 11.7-12.0 when it comes to managing multiple targets and engaging multiple targets.

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I mean I would expect it to do that, being 0.7-1.0 above them. But it still doesn’t hold up against anything with AESA, HMD, or both.

I do agree though, I didn’t like the F-15A a ton but it’s miles better at dealing with multiple targets than many other 12.0-12.7 planes

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Not really?

You get a good RWR, I guess. No TWS though, which some planes at that tier do (Just took the Viggen D out to check your point). It’s not as agile as something like an F-16, nor does it have the instantaneous turn to snap into and out of notches like a delta. You’re too big, and roll too slowly, to consistently multipath. The missiles aren’t particularly effective in headons (AIM-9M/AAM-3s remain a pretty consistent one flare in a headon, AIM-7s can be pretty trivially outrolled).

Ultimately, you get to be quick, and you get to spam countermeasures. That’s kinda it.

If you can survive the merge without a couple people just deciding to hard commit to you (And without your team swooping in to third party), then yes, it is very effective at salvoing off IR missiles and knocking out 3-4 people at once. But that requires near perfect positioning and a hell of a lot of luck.

And even in this very limited niche, it is definitively worse than other 13.0s like the Gripen (Which is more agile, bleeds less speed, is much more easily able to multipath, has a TWS and a HMD, more countermeasures, and 2 more IRCCM missiles). And the Gripen is still not particularly good at 13.0.

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ok, and all the 13.7s curb stomp it in this even harder

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Shouldn’t the APG-63 PSP have something kind of like TWS?

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Ok? Not justification for a 12.7 F-15.

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big feetpics, what he said about the eurocanards?

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Yea, and neither was F-15A but solution simply isnt recompression ffs.

I ultimately do not care, I expanded my inventory of aircrafts and once dust settles i will move to next thing that is playable. In the meantime I will continue spamming MKK.

But now the cat is out of the bag, community stance has not only fractured, it shattered, everyone is using F-15A as justification to move their aircraft down in BR and I do hope that all of you advocating for whats basically “F-15A is fine at 12.7” will calmly accept in similiar way next stupid BR change once it comes around.

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Nope. All you get is PD, PD HDN, and PD velocity search. The later is kinda useful, as it broadly allows you to track the bearings of the enemy from the start of the game, but it doesn’t give you any useful distance information.

Compression isn’t even really the issue this time, it’s deeper than that.

It’s the meta that results from a gamemode where early game impact is the only thing that matters, and a tier where some planes start to get really good at killing planes early, while others do not.

This produces games that can be decided in just a handful of minutes after the first merge, if not before then.

This in turn makes it so that aircraft that cannot participate in this initial engagement become almost irrelevant. Which in turn means that Gaijin feels a need to push them down.

As a reminder, Air RB was original designed around prop planes. No jets that can third party someone on the other side of the map in 2 minutes. No missiles that can beam someone from across the map. Fighting for altitude or energy don’t matter. Fighting for position barely matters. The only thing that does matter is knocking out your opponents numbers as quickly as possible before they do it to you, and the team who does that better, wins.

Good luck trying to carry the game in an F-15 when the enemy is up 6 kills and you’re lit up on everyone’s RADARs. You may have advantages in top speed, energy generation, IR missiles and countermeasures, but none of that matters when you can only effectively engage one enemy at a time in a headon, and you’ve got 3-4 planes looking at you.

What we need to actually solve this problem is Air RB EC. Large maps and spread out objectives dilute numbers down, so snowballs are less likely. Respawns mean the initial engagement is not the only thing that matters in terms of who wins the game. More objectives on the ground mean giving an actual role to attackers and multiroles, rather than forcing them to be balanced by fighter capability alone.

BVR capability will still matter, but smaller fights mean it’s entirely possible to outplay an opponent that has adavantages in BVR and close in. It’s what’s needed to balance the game around things other than “How quickly and effectively can you engage the enemy?”.

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Sure, I agree.

But in the meantime, the band aid solution simply cant be recompression.

Even if you think F-15A at 12.7 is fine, you surely see the issue with people using F-15A at 12.7 as justification to move their plane down in BR and what consequences it will eventually have on all BRs.

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I’d be far more worried if Gaijin has ever shown an interest in listening to player feedback.

Also, having now played a decent number of games in the 12.0 Viggen D, I have to say F-15s are far lower on my list of concerns than, say, the ARHs I meet in uptiers, the F-16s that club me in a dogfight if they survive the merge, the ERs which swat me every time I deign to go above multipath height, and the hordes of brainless F-4S and MiG 23 ML players who are like a lead weight on the team balancing.

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Now imagine just slightly decompressed BR range where Su-27/Su-33 wouldnsit at 13.3, F-15A at 13.0, legacy ARH slingers similiarly at 13.3 etc.

No more ARHs, 27ERs limited to two on MiG-29s etc.

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We’ll say, for the sake of argument, that 12.0 is now safe. It’s not, there’s still F-16 and F-18s running around, clubbing all these unmanuverable 3rd gens to death, especially now that a lot of the things they had to worry about got moved up, but we’ll ignore that for now.

In this new MM, the F-15 will still be terrible. As will the Mirage 4000, the Gripen, and other ARHless 13.0s. The Su-27 will be on suicide watch, ERs are potent missiles but combined with the base Su-27’s mid RADAR and questionable RWR, it’s just going to be food, especially if it’s only slightly below competant ARH slingers.

There’s always going to be a final BR where the last of the SARH slingers sits, and as long as that’s within 1.0 BR of the competant ARH slingers, they’re always going to suffer from it. And since Gaijin is never going to add a gap like that to the game, the only fix is to change the gamemode so that getting an early BVR kill isn’t the sole thing that matters.

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With the exception of IRCCM ones, the F-16A has distinct disdvantages - no presence in opener, low presence in furball, no radar missiles etc. It isnt such one sided matchup.

So move them up as well, we now have space to do so.

So move those up as well.

Su-27/33 is much better platform than legacy ARH slingers. That matchup is fine.

As for much better ARH slingers, these can and should be moved up as well.

The decompression im talking about needs to be widespread and large scal, not just limited to few aircraft.

But RB EC does not automatically exclude decompression. You can want both.