Bruh what.
All the F-104A/F-104C needs to do is keep up speed and proper positioning to prevent aircraft with more advanced missiles from coming up behind them. In your case, I can’t blame you for feeling the pain of flying F-104A/F-104C since you are not ARB main to begin with, but even me, who is not that good a player in Jet RB, can get 2 KPF without farming the AI as long as I can do what I need to do when I fly 104s.
And in 9.3BR, the only counterpart to the current F-104A/F-104C is literally the F-104A (ROCAF).
I can myself confirm, as I did play them with both combined adding up to 130 matches, that the F-104A and F-104C is absolutely disgusting at 9.3 and here is my rather long reasoning/personal experience with it.
General flight characteristics:
It has very good acceleration/climb rate, very good top speed, very decent roll rate, a very decent gun if you know how to aim it; along some basic missiles which are also decent as you get a high launch speed with them when flying fast.
Sure it has miserable lower speed maneuverability, hence if you try to turnfight enemies at a lower speed with a F-104 you are as good as dead. Hence you actually never try to get into such situations in first case, play in a strict Boom and Zoom style and fairly enough if you just keep your speed high (1100kph at least) you are pretty much untouchable from lower BR enemy planes. Even if they have basic missiles you can outrun them easily when roughly 2km away from them at point of launch when flying supersonic !
BR bracket problem:
As mentioned just now, lower BR planes will struggle massively trying to kill a F-104A and C. Take the Mig-15Bis for example when it gets uptiered. A smart F-104A/C player will turn literal circles around the Mig-15 and keep diving on it; the Mig-15 barely has any chances to retailate and it ends up being a fish in the barrel situation as the Mig-15 cannot engage or disengage from the F-104 as it is too slow and has generally speaking insufficient armaments to deal with it effectively.
On the flip side getting uptiered in the F-104A/C is also a massive struggle for it now as missiles like the Aim-9Gs,Magics and R-60(M) make very quick work of the Starfighter as they are fast enough to deal with it even when supersonic. A smart player will try to position themselves to either avoid such planes or attack them from such angles when they cannot make use of their missiles and destroy them (like do not head-on a Su-25 without any flares please, except you really know what are you doing).
Point is though:
In a Uptier: F-104A/C still can make a decent contribution to the team, but has to be extremely mindful of missiles.
In a Downtier: Utterly wrecks the entire match if well played and becomes in simple terms “unfun” to fight.
Suggestion:
F-104A/C should go back to 9.7 or even 10.0 but as mentioned, its BR bracket is a very messed up one.
It’s disgusting at 9.3, 10.0 would be the right BR for it. It should never be facing the 8.3/8.7s. Just because it is less favorable in uptier isn’t enough reason to just let is go ham in downtiers with no equal. It’s exactly this train of thought that gets us the BR compression where there are too powerful planes sitting at too low a BR across about the entire BR range, but it is especially prevalent in jets due to the advancement of missiles. F104 isn’t the only guilty thing here, but it is one of the top offenders at 9.3.
Because yes, F100A/D with 9Es at 9.3 is dumb, Mig19S/PT is too, A4N Ayit is completely stupid, FGA9 should also really not be seeing the 8.3s, Yak38 with 4 R60s, there’s a whole bunch of jets at 9.3 that shouldn’t be 9.3 and they only sit there because people can’t make them work at 9.7. And while for some it may be a struggle to work at 9.7, the F104 holds up fairly well even without CMs due to its sheer speed and acceleration
Yes.
F-104A/F-104C, EEL, MiG-21F-13/J-7II, MiG-19PT/MiG-19S/J-6A should move up to higher BR.
Nobody wanted these aircraft to be changed from 9.7BR to 9.3BR.
BTW, American F-104A and ROCAF F-104A historically could carry better missiles so, it is possible to move up to 10.0BR or 10.3BR.
Those ROCAF F-104A’s are the ones equipped with J79-GE-19 engines (same as F-104S). Given to them after their original F-104A’s were given to Jordan in the mid 1960’s.
The missile in the picture is probably an AIM-9P4 based on the seeker head color and year the picture was taken in 1998.
And you obviously don’t know how flying straight is too easy in ARB.
It is literally something a player with no playing Jet RB experience can do with actual brain cells, and while it is less toxic than the BR9.7 F-104A when we had BR hard caps, it is close enough to it that the current F-104A/F-104C is easy to fly.
I spaded my F-104A(ROCAF) in few days ago but, I don’t want to play this thing in ARB anymore because it takes no skill for killing enemy aircrafts and it is just unfair for facing against 9.3-8.3BR subsonic jets. In fact, I am not good at flying supersonic jets in ARB, but I still get 2KPF and 6KD in my stats for the F-104A (ROCAF) that is really decent at any BR.
The only problem with flying the F-104A/F-104C is the awful teammates who skipped the grind and chose the road to the F-14B or MiG-29 instead of learning to play Jet RB.
then don’t play it? you are literally whining about a single jet, when there are 9.3 jets with R60s, hell the fact you actually made a post complaining about 1 plane is comical and not the true problem. You also aren’t talking about how useless the f104 is when it gets uptiered to fight mig-21s
What you should be complaining about his why gaijin increased the BRs on many of those 8.3 planes, because thats what they did. Every sabre sub sonic mig / yak could sit at 8.0 and they would be fine, instead gaijin has them at 8.3 and 8.7, because its clear that gaijin does not want people only flying sub sonics anymore, for whatever reason they don’t want people to have fun.
