I was really enjoying the Sea Vixen last weekend and got awesome matches with handsome rewards. War Thunder was actually rewarding and emjoyable. Here is jus a glimpse of the Sea Vixens potential:
But suddenly, this weekend, everyone was instantly on my ass and outrunning and turning me, my slow airframe and equally slow Red Top missiles had no chance at all. I got slammed out of the sky most matches hardly accomplishing anything. What happened, my Sea Vixen was so reliable and awesome before? And then it struck me. I got lured and deceived by a weekend of downtiers and no uptiers, giving me a false experience. Now I got hit with full uptiers the usual 9/10 matches.
Why is a subsonic plane with a slow turnrate and G-tolerance and slow missiles matched with afterburning missile slingers that have much better missiles?! The Sea Vixen is fine at 8.7, but it cannot go higher! I cannot fight those way too fast enemies, I cannot turn in and even if I get on their back they mostly just outrun my missiles. When it says 8.7 on the package, it should be 8.7 only!
The Sea Vixen is just useless against AV-8 and Mig-21’s! All I am doing is losing control while trying to get my nose on target and lead the missile!
Whatever this balance is supposed to be, if a plane gets unusable because of it, something is very wrong.
Unfortunately the Sea Vixen is a sink or swim plane. It can’t feasibly go down in BR because it’ll ruin that BR range (7.3s are trembling) and it can’t reasonably go up because aforementioned… MiG-21s, F-104s, etc(I’m addressing the people who say its OP)
I have and do get good results with it. Unfortunately the pre-requisites to doing well in it are not having your team die. So there’s that. And of course, there’s aircraft above you in BR with far better performance and weaponry to which your counterplay is… well you don’t have one. You can’t even attempt a reversal because you have no guns to reverse someone with.
It’s a very good plane, with good engines and power to boot, and the post change Red Tops are a lot better than they used to be, especially at high altitude. But it’s a victim (another one) of compression.
I think the Sea-Vixen is just a victim of Compression more than anything. Things in the 9.0 range also need to be decompressed and thus it would be a lot better. You also have the fact that Red Tops should be fully all-aspect, which would help greatly in actually getting shots off, considering the lack of guns. Unlike SRAAMs (which should also be all-aspect) and other all-aspect missiles like the R-60 and 9L. I dont believe Red Tops would be all that big of a deal withwise of balance considering they can be easily defeated by simply turning slightly.
