The Iron dome meta

[Marauder316]

The current Iron Dome (Missile vs Missile) meta at top tier is seriously damaging gameplay, and it’s starting to trickle down into lower brackets as well, exactly as Mustang said:

“We can ignore it and just continue to play sub top tier brackets.”

Unfortunately that’s not a viable solution anymore when the mechanic is spreading and affecting the overall experience in higher-tier air battles overall.

Using IR missiles to shoot down other missiles is annoying, but at least somewhat understandable since these missiles produce trackable heat signatures. But for radars and ARH missiles to be locking these things as easily as they currently do is both unrealistic and extremely unhealthy for the game. I’m glad Gaijin is giving us new radar filtering modes to experiment with on the dev server, but the current situation undermines a lot of the skills players spend time learning while climbing through the tiers.

Right now the meta encourages a very simple mindset (that unfortunately works):

“Why spend time learning how to notch properly, defend intelligently, and develop fair counterplay against good players when I can just fly straight at them and spam spacebar to delete their missiles? I have more anyway.”

The player attempting to defend properly by means of notching, positioning, and managing radar awareness and weapon count, can actually end up in a worse position than the player simply flying straight at them and intercepting everything they launch. Instead of rewarding tactical positioning and knowledge, the game rewards missile inventory and brute-force spam.

This is especially frustrating in ASB, where engagements are supposed to reward situational awareness, radar discipline, defensive flying, and map control. When missiles can simply be erased mid-flight by radar-guided counter-missiles, a lot of that depth disappears and makes the mode stale, unfun, and uncompetitive.

Preventing radars from detecting missiles outright (or heavily filtering them by means of some form of calculated RCS) would go a long way toward restoring top tier to a playable state. Various aircraft can get back to doing what they do well, and players could actually demonstrate the skills they developed while progressing through the tiers.

Right now, engagements too often devolve into missile-vs-missile spam instead of actual air combat .

This was a mouthful, sure, but this encompasses what a lot of us that actually primarily play ASB think and how we feel. I do hope the devs and playerbase can hear us out cos this is a biiig issue. 👍🏾

[skilz2kil]

oh yeah ik, the rcs is entirely too detectable - but that point has already been made so i wasnt talking on it

[Marauder316]

These people will only J out once they either get a feeling that they’ve lost the advantage and will soon die, or outright know they’ve been outplayed and just J out.

Look at this clip lol, two equal planes. This guy J’s out the second the missile hits. If I knew he was gonna do it I would’ve just not launched the missile, but he only did it because I launched the missile and he didn’t get to first. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[ZarathustraE]

Aside from the fact that shooting missiles is a no skill play style, this bring an immense unfair advantage to the planes with more missiles. Su30s with 12 arguably the best missiles in the game is already overpowered without even trying to shoot down the missiles. There are many players that is going high up, spamming missiles, shooting down whatever comes to them and going back to base. This type of play style should not be encouraged.

I have a solid 3-6 hours to the game every day and this is the reason i stopped playing anything above 14.0. Also another reason that i pulled the trigger on the f16 in dcs.

Simulator game mode has long been ignored by the devs or the decision makers. The path that it is following will simply have it vanished very soon. I hope it will be fixed but realistically, i don’t expect it.

[Great_Paywall]

Gaijin be like: ok, understood, ima about to break all radars to the level of freakin apg-73 or N001

[Marauder316]

Datamines showed some slight radar adjustments, both for helping to reduce ground clutter noise but also some type of speed gating that might be addressing this issue. We’ll have to find out either if they re-open dev server after the current one closes or they just take these changes straight to the next update

[Pipimer]

now in the game i am in this person j out multiple times doesnt he deserve a ban?? (the photo was taken 10 min ago)

[TFS_64Mustang]

if you read the replies you would see it was a misunderstanding and he already apologized. Be civil.

[Yomum123]

I did, hence I removed it.

For me, the radar filters are a step, but I think locking a missile should be impossible anyway. I use the cycle method to select my target and spam clicking to swap target to the enemy when there’s 5 missiles on my radar is very frustrating.

There needs to be two types of filters, viewable (what’s currently on the dev), and targetable, so you can choose what contacts you want to actually be able to cycle through, and which you want to ignore. When using an AESA I’d still like to see the missiles coming towards me, but I don’t want them taking up valuable time to cycle through to get to the actual important target. Though really, should just remove the ability to lock missiles anyway.

[TFS_64Mustang]

Personally I think the best fix would be a mix of suggestions, specifically nerfing the proxy chances to very very low numbers. The ability to “see” launches on radar is nice and allows you to gain alot of situational awareness on when to launch, notch, crank early etc. So keeping this function but reducing small munition proxy would be best of both worlds. Pair this with the new feature they are adding for filters I think there is a happy compromise for everyone.

Issue with this is it may have huge negative effects on ground RB. The ability to shoot down munitions in ground RB I personally think should remain, or at least be up to them to decide. So if there is a way to only effect plane launched munitions that would be honestly best case scenario.

[steyk_kus]

The grind can affect the dome meta. Only one kill is needed to get the full reward. So now we have a bunch of … players who won’t have any fun, but will still get that easy reward. No skill, no effort, smt on the second monitor.

[SlayerStyle]

This ruins the gameplay at top tier. Removes skill from a 1v1 and its just a competition of who has more missiles. So smaller planes like the new f16 just wont work.

I get that with modern systems this is technically possible to do IRL(even if it has never been tested).

But this is a game that has tweaked some things to be different from real life for the sake of gameplay. For example how easy it is to multi path and notch missiles. Or how many Gs modern fighters can pull.

This is not a good gameplay feature. It should be removed.

Maybe keeping the interception of ground ordinance like bombs or cruise missiles since this is helpful and a key feature for ground RB specially for sams and spaa.

[Razryshitel12345]

i dont know how people are able to consistently shoot down fox3s because when i do about one in four missiles would miss because it just can`t lock missile by itself thus killing me, so i suggest making this effect worse: fox3s should not be able to lock other small missiles at all and be able to lock only bigger targets like bombs, h38 and phoenixes

[Suicidal_Suhkoi]

Not a top tier sim player but this being in the game is stupid cause even tho it is feasible IRL it wouldnt be encouraged at all as well as the fact that it doesnt translate to fun or engaging gameplay for anyone involved

[autocorrect01]

It shouldn’t be too hard to set the specific RCS and IR signatures of AAMs(both of which were heavily exaggerated for all ordnance for SAM interceptions) to be smaller and harder for IR and Radar guided AAMs to pick up.
EX: Even if a Su30SM2 tried to intercept AAMs with the r-77-1, the missile simply wouldn’t lock onto the enemy missile and just be datalinked to somewhere near it and miss. Similarly, if it tried to intercept with the R-73, the IR seeker wouldn’t detect the missile even with a radar hard lock until the missile is less than a second to impact.

[Xeno_quaza]

Something this has made me try, actually. Is bringing rocket pods at top tier lol. Just firing off one every like 6-8~ish seconds while entering engagement ranges. To trick people.

Now, in theory this should work, but lowkey i’ve got no idea if it actually is or not. I feel like i’m dying less using it, but its also very evident that im just generally playing differently while trying it anyways. As im getting a lot less kills due to being overly focused on it.

I feel like it would work better if I had unguided rockets with a longer lifespan, the ones im using self detonate after like 10 seconds, limiting their ability to actually decoy.

[White_Timberwolf]

I know you can use Zunis/S-8s/S-13s/S-24s/etc to act as jank flares when they are set to impact fuse, so I can see them working the same with ARH intercepts.

[LanceLynxx]

@autocorrect01

Even if a Su30SM2 tried to intercept AAMs with the r-77-1, the missile simply wouldn’t lock onto the enemy missile and just be datalinked to somewhere near it and miss.

Why would the missile not lock a massive doppler radar return right in front of it and why wouldn’t the proximity fuze of both AAMs detonate?

[kizvy]

@Xeno_quaza

Something this has made me try, actually. Is bringing rocket pods at top tier lol. J

`that’s why i still bring a 27er, cause someitmes I’ve notcied that some f-15s bring a bunch of bombs that when dropped that my fox 3 will track, but r27er just ignores them and just goes for the plane itself

[kizvy]

yeah good idea, i think that fighter esa radars will probably always be able to detect missiles, but the arh missiles themselves should have a much harder time tracking radar missiles until lock range, around 2-4 km, at least 2km for r-77.

I don’t think they can ever fully remove the mechanic, becuase ground arh missiles use the same seekerhead as air to air missiles.

Like imagine if they nerf arh missiles a lot and then you’re in a spyder trying to intercept kh38mts with derbies, or a claws/nasams with amraams/amraam er. Would be terrible for gameplay