Where have the critical hits gone?

Instakills still carry the crit bonus in ground RB, as well, they just removed it from kills on air vehicles in that mode, same time as the AB modes… For now, anyway.

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Where have the critical hits gone?

Vanished into update land in a game Gaijin cant stop tinkering with.

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You know what really helps to deter killstealing, making every plane with severe damage enter a slow flatspin.

I do agree for rare exceptions like one-shot pilpt snipes - but the overwhelming majority (=99% ?) of instant kills had actually critical hit components - at least when flying props.

The exceptions i noticed were long range pilot snipes scored as gunner in my B-18B vs tailchasing SB2-Cs - thanks to their absence of bullet proof cockpit glas. Always 500 points for a pilot snipe.

This was possible until September - November 2022, then there was a stealth nerf of the 13.2 mm Akan (followed by Real Shatter), such kills (2.74 km in once case) vanished. And yes, then shells of the Akan 13.2 cannons were modeled to “stay” in the game for ~ 3.500 meters whilst most 20mm+shells “disappear” after ~ 2 km.

Edit: I scored today by spaying italian stealth 12.7mm (= AP bullet) a one-shot pilot snipe which gave me just 450 points - no additional hit/crit/whatever - so the score alone dropped to 450 points vs 500 in the old world - 10% reduction.

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  1. No, this would just lure more teammates to the easy target

  2. It is unrealistic and therefore should not happen

LOL, how did you not realize this is sarcasm and EXACTLY what’s happening since the Severe Damage update. It’s like a flat spin simulator.

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To be fair - sarcasm & irony is not easy to detect in written form.

Although i fully agree with your general view - this sudden increase of flat spins is imho not connected to the necessity to score a severe damage on them like mentioned in your previous post.

Maybe that’s the reason why the fellow player was confused.

A simple “hit” anywhere near a wingtip is often enough to create these spins - twin engine planes like Pe-2s are champions in the new “flat spin simulator” - at least based on my observations.

The sudden increase of these flat spins is for sure a result of gaijin playing with certain parameters in the background. And this constantly…

I noticed sudden increases and sudden drops of engine fires - and since a while a sharp increase in just dead engines.

Fun fact??
Critical” is worse than “severe”

I’ve always wondered why, in game, a fire is not a critical hit. I mean, excluding early cloth covered planes (where a few incendiary rounds might set things on fire perhaps?), to get a metal-skinned plane on fire would require a fuel fire or an oil fire.

I can get a critical hit on fuel tanks and make them leak fuel…without a fire.
I can get a critical hit on oil and make them leak oil…without a fire.

But somehow I can set a plane on fire without it being a critical?

What’s fueling the fire?

And further, I’ll get the ding-ding-ding of multiple heavy-damage grey text of everything burning down on the plane, but yet, still no critical?

(This was before the introduction of the severe damage mechanic)

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Same here.

I managed a few months ago to set an A6M5 3 times on fire in the same match. All 3 fires went out due to the small sizes of the burning tanks and he ofc he used the “burning wing in the air” trick and repaired 2 times…no crit - ofc.

In AirRB (and prior to severe damage) it wasn’t an automatic crit for an instakill (or non-instakill for that matter)

In my experience, sure there were times you’d get both (a crit and a kill credit) for what appeared like an instakill when you’re blasting away at someone. But I remember quite a few times taking out some plane (e.g. rank 3 prop) with just 2 mg guns and gently tap-tap-tap to try to get crits (for a task) and boom instakill… over 3 games I had 5 air kills and no criticals. Somehow I had turned in to a super-sniper… Great for score… not so good for doing the task.

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Yeah, I was simplifying. What I was describing was an “instakill crit” was the situation where the kill message came so close after the critical message (often the same second) that the crit message never shows up, because the killing damage also met the critical requirement, or the bullet just before it did, or whatever… just close enough there was no time to bring up both messages, so the kill message overrode it visually. But if you looked on your scoresheet after, you’d see you got the extra 30% score for the crit. That was the same in all modes.

Those are the crits that are missing now, affecting score and task completion. It seems impossible to get a crit anymore unless it’s a distinct time-separated event, crit and severe on top of each other no longer “stack” like crit and kill used to in that way. This possibility was deliberately removed (and they announced they would do it) prior to the severe damage mechanic being implemented.

I’d much rather the critical recognition… helps with crit tasks and assist tasks… heck, I’d be happy with no score for it… just give me the crit! :)

Overall, I like this idea of the severe damage. I’m the sort of AirRB player where if you kill their engine (and a far away, or low, from their base), or badly damaged airframe, in a flaming flat spin, etc, I leave them as they’re basically out of the game… I especially don’t want to chase them down if I’m high.

So now I get the credit for them being killed, rather than just an assist, or worse, nothing extra, for others going after them and doing basically less effort/damage, and getting the kill for it.

But, the reduction in criticals without changing tasks for crits or assists… crazy…

Also, “severe” damage is somehow worse than a “critical” … they need to swap those terms around.

Also also, a lot of critical damage wasn’t critical in the first place… central gear leg… left flap… not really criticals…

Phew… ok… somehow gotten a bit focused on the criticals… time to get off my soap box …

TMI…

I think the real issue is they said the severe damage change would not change “rewards.” But the trouble is, if you start handing out extra rewards for other things, you need to reduce them elsewhere so the rewards stay neutral. In this case it’s led to a reduction in score from crits to balance things and also impacted task completion: score isn’t technically a “reward,” it’s a component in the “real reward” SL/RP calculation. Only really impacts you if you care about score (as many did in the Jaguar event just passed) or need that crit task.

Critical hits have gone went . . . .

But, here’s some good news, they have cut the requirements in half for the Special task, from 100 down to 50 . . should be more like 30 as crits showing up have easily been cut by 70% - 80% as far as I can tell.
I have not seen if or how much the Easy & Medium tasks for crits were cut, but hopefully a good deal as well. I was thinking it might be easier to add Severe Damage in there with the crits and we could still basically play for those tasks the same as before the “change” . . but this kinda makes it clear, doesn’t appear there will be any “going back” to how things were before . . . C’est la Vie I guess . . .


I didn’t read anything about this, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t put out either . . . lol

I mean “Critical Hit” & “Severe Damage” are practically the same thing, to me anyway, as far as my bad English goes . . .lol. And it is very possible it’s a translation thing, that these two terms are quite different in the Russian language they were originally written in compared to the English version we got . . . I mean it does happen on occasion.

Oh and sorry, this is for AB tasks. . . sorry, got a little off topic, even tho it is occurring in both modes

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They should really make severe damage also counted as a critical hits to make mission like this easier, as of now i usually just take any plane with .50 cal and purposely aim for the fuselage.

I have no idea when they did this, unless it was the past 24h or so. I still have 100 crits and not gonna re-roll it after I busted my ass to get to 85/100. And I usually carry the fights, as I end up 1st or 2nd most of the times, with most kills, or in the first 3. I don’t want to know how this feels for someone who can only manage a few kills in a fight, AND lose all of their planes. Even so, I probably still need about 20 matches to finish this special task, I guess :)))

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There used to be absolutely useless crits, but red engine seems like a damn good reason for a crit. Here we have almost dead engine, 2 fires, oil reservoir busted, black nose, black section of a wing, several red or orange, damaged rudder.
And it’s still not enough. The plane burned to severe damage (it lost 1 wing, then another) no crit during the fire.

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I’m trying to make a suggestion but so far one suggestion was canceled. Waiting with the second suggestion to be accepted by moderation.
In short someone mixed the definition of critical and severe damage.

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Someone should’ve posted up the John Travolta meme in this…

pulp-fiction-john-travolta