Whats a good joystick/hotas to get for WT?

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1

Basically looking to eventually get some form of joystick/hotas for war thunder and other games like dcs and nuclear option.

Do yall have a preference of what to get?

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depends on how much youre willing to spend, ive only had logitech 3d pro joystick and x56 hotas set (bought a used one) so far.
3d pro is good enough to try out if you like playing with joystick or not without spending alot of money, you just need to use alot of keybinds set on keyboard. x56 is better with enough buttons and mini joysticks and wheels for all your fingers to control everything you would ever need in WT. if youre going to do alot of dogfighting i would get also rudder pedals.

many people also recommend thrustmaster t16000m set which is somewhere between those two costwise.
you might want to look into some headtracking setup also, id recommend trackir5 with the pro clip from my own experience, low latency and responsive. there is lots of other options like beam,tobii and things that work through your webcam/phone camera.

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I use virpil and thrustmaster warthogs for dcs, il2 and games that are actually sims or more deserving of the term realistic and worth actually spending the money to get a good setup for.
For warthunder buy a cheap stick or a controller 🤣

I think turtle beach are doing a fairly decent entry level joystick these days but a warning regardless the control mappings for warthunder joysticks and hotas peripherals can leave a lot to be desired and feel like an after thought to be honest.

Warthunder lacks decent functionality and customisation that come as standard in other games like dcs for sensitivity, curves and dead zones as well as support for multiple devices and can generally turn into more of an exercise of frustration trying to tweak or workaround warthunders quirks when trying to add anything more than complicated than a single peripheral.

I’m not trying to put you off going down a joystick route for warthunder as ultimately if you have that interest you will still have a start for a jump over to dcs or something else but I would say hold off spending a ton of money before you’ve tried the other games but if you have a mind for sim or other sim games definitely look at head tracking you have

VR as an obvious route
track ir or track np (Chinese clone of track ir slightly cheaper but basically the same and uses the same software)

There are some open source solutions as well but I’ve never used them. They do work by all accounts but can be fiddly to set up.

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I picked Virpil because the cheapest option after them for me was still $550 for something with durability.

Going from cheap $100 stuff to high-durability stuff is the biggest change, and I was playing other flight sims at the time as well.

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Pretty much agree, I would stay away from tm hotas x’s, saitek and Logitech they are the definition of cheap plasticy 💩 they wear out incredibly quickly and are just a waste of money in terms of actual entry level if I was starting from scratch but keeping the experience I’ve gained from playing flight sims since 2001
I would be buying the VKB gladiator evo as an entry level choice

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I spent £30 on a thrust master side stick and I can confidently say it’s hot garbage.
Sticks are expensive and there’s no real cheap way into them, unfortunately.

Generally VBK stuff is what people recommend as entry.

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T flight with pedals is good unless your on console

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Thrustmaster T16000M

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I only play helicopters in flight sims like DCS and MSFS.
I use:

  • Monstertech chair
  • VKB Modern Combat Grip Pro with the 200mm curved extension
  • VPC Hawk-60 collective (if you want to train startup as well I would recommend a throttle collective but most helis have a governor for normal flight either way)
  • VKB T-Rudder Pedals MkV (these are low profile rudder pedals without toe-breaks, they dont feel super nice especially compared to real helis but they work just fine)
  • Pimax Crystal Sim VR glasses (if you have a big enough monitor eye trackers are fine, if you don’t have a 16GB VRAM GPU I would say its the far better choice compared to VR in terms of clarity and performance)
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Steer clear of T flight and the Thrustmaster cheaper options they have issues with quality…

I’ve never tried the turtle beach offerings but i’m tempted to give the velocity one set a try once i save some pennies the reviews are not terrible and i would probably go so far as to say it would make a fairly decent step up from an entry level setup if your not 100% commited to going for a vkb/virpil choice.

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