Yeah, having you CCIP pip in the middle of your fuselage is less than ideal and the rockets are not anywhere close to the zunis as they are either HE or way smaller HEAT. It dose have a WAY better FM than the ZA/ART though, that thing drops down to ~350kph after a couple of turns.
I’m just hoping Gaijin balances it without completely killing it, it is nice to have some CAS between the B7A2 and the Alpha jet, I would rather lose the zunis and be limited to the hydras then get put up to a BR where it’s fighting MANPAD SPAAs and the HE-VT/AHEAD SPAAGs, I don’t think it’s FM could handle those.
And unfortunately even with those going up to 9.3, Japan lacks an 8.0 ground vehicle, so putting the ZA/ART to 8.0 is effectively putting it to 8.3 on top of the usual compression issues.
most the AA at those BRs are gun or SACLOS so i dont think flares are too big of a deal.
Either way the albatross should be 8.0-8.3 if we put it with similar CAS gremlins
6.7-9.7 is very badly compressed because you get really late Second World War tanks (Tiger II, many T26’s and whatnot) Vs early cold war tanks (Centurion Mk 2, T-44) which then gets uptiered to early-mid cold war vehicles (Centurion Mk 5/1, M48, T-54,) which themselves get uptiered further to modernised versions of themselves (Olifant, Sho’t, M60, M48A2, T-55A)
So we go from APHE and no stabilisers to APDS to HEAT-FS and then APFSDS with a LRF all in the same span of going from the BT-5 to T-34(1942), Pz IIIB to Pz IVH, M2A4 to M4A2, and Cruiser Mk III to Cromwell V
Yes, the regular compression is extremely bad at those BRs and the ZA/ART is one of those vehicles that is incredibly hard to balance on it’s own due to its awful FM but OP weapons, so 2 large balancing issues combined into one plane.
As with almost all balance issues decompression is the best first step, but we all know how Gaijin feels about that unfortunately.
So the ZA/ART will likely be either OP or useless, and as much as I hate to say it as a Japan player, given how many holes there are in the JP TT, it’s better to kill one plane then the whole BR bracket.
One of the lesser talked about side effects of the BR changes, 9.0 has been killed as a BR in squadron battles for ground players with the increase of the M247 and PGZ09.
The Scimitars will pretty much just murder everything and no AA will be able to do anything.
Do they? Trying to spade it was like pulling teeth so im just curious what i am doing wrong lol
If flown by an air team with even a basic common sense and coordination, they absolutely wreck squadron battles.
Even the M247 was just helpess against a full air sqb team consisting of scimis and sea vixens this season.
Hm. Squadron battles enviroment sure is different.
War Thunder with actual team coordination and matchmaking seems like an impossible concept to me after playing for multiple years
A lot of GRB relies on people who are playing with no hands installed or have poor situational awareness. Lower number of players who are experienced and coordinated = there is far less room for opportunism and therefore the meta narrows dramatically
Not to mention knowing the max br that is able to be played before entering a match.
Not need to worry about uptiers or downtiers in sqb
Squadron battles are such a miniscule part of the warthunder gameplay it would be extremely weird and/or dumb to base the balancing of GRB around it.
Theres a vast difference between how a squadron battle is played and ground RB battle is played, solely due to the fact that you have a fully communicating team of people vs fully communicating team of people. Unlike with GRB where its 1v15v16 as you often have to fight against your own teams idiocy to win and/or have some leeway to use worse but funny vehicles.
Plus the fact that you can spawn CAS as first spawn too and with the lower count of players its just not very much applicable to regular ground gamemode.
Only other way to fix this would be to decouple squadron BRs from ground BRs but that would create more issues than not and would not even guarantee that the change would be positive for squadron battles, after all were currently seeing the extent of gaijins ability to properly balance things based on vehicle capability well enough as it is.
Does anyone know when the Spitfire LF Mk IX was lifted from 5.0 to 6.3 in ground SB? That’s a huge change (1.3) and now it’s higher than the Mk 22. I checked it on wiki in internet archive and on 01.08.2026 it’s BR was the same in air and ground SB and it was 5.0. Now it’s 6.3 in ground SB, but it wasn’t mentioned in the planned BR changes. They only mentioned moving it from 6.0 to 6.3 in ground REALISTIC. Is it a mistake or did I miss something?
Mitsubishi zero treatment
They matched a lot of Ground RB and Ground SB battle ratings for aircraft, so some got a huge increase. I think one of the Zeros also had something like 4.7 → 5.7 lol
Not only it did but it nearly got to 6.0 recently
a fate it has avoided… until the next BR change update lol
Didn’t move the Premium SU-30s because you didn’t want them facing AESA? What about the F-16AM and C, what about the Gripens, what about the Sea harrier?!?
Your reasoning makes no sense
Still find it hilarious they moved the Tu-1 down instead of giving it bombsight and moving it up
I’m not too deep into the game, but the Swedish aviation tree is a bit off to me.
B-239 got moved up from 2.7 to 3.0 - fair. But at 3.0 sits the J22-A with worse armament and except top-speed worse flight stats: climb rate, turn time, take-off distance, even less max. IAS (rip-speed). Then the poor J22-B sits 0.7 above both of them - with even worse flight stats and armament to somewhat match the B-239. Either bring both down one step, bring them just one step apart instead of two, or both. Because at the same time the USSR Be-6 and it’s modernized twin, the Chinese Qing-6 are EXACTLY the same BR 5.0, whilst the Qing-6 has better flight stats across the board due to the turboprop engines and even an additional incendiary bomb option.