The idea is thus to bump its BR up so that it’s equivalent to the duck (pure A2G) rather than multirole.
Did you not understand that I too am arguing to raise the BR?
The point that I was trying to make was that the capability as a ground attacker is the only element that needs to be balanced, and that while it can readily dispatch other fighters in Air to Air, it is not in my opinion over performing as a fighter. I wholly agree that yes, the flight characteristics are a major part of it’s overperformance, however seeing as its battle rating can be adjusted separately in ground RB, there’s no reason why we can’t uptier it until it has to contend with Radar SPAA. My opinion is that you can freely adjust the battle rating of the Yak 9K with no consideration for its ability to dogfight as a limiting factor.
Can you give me an example, bear in mind I’m approaching this from a ground perspective only so I haven’t consideres planes or game modes other than ground RB. Additionally, your comment as far as I can tell is simply describing a skilled player achieving better results as result of practise and experience. I can scarcely imagine any ground vehicles that have such a unique and obscure playstyle as not to have mostly transferable skills, as if to say that any player thay can unlock major hidden potential in slme vehicles isn’t already overperforming in every vehicle they use and no amount of BR manipulation is going to change that.
leading to those who are capable of hitting the skillfloor bullying players with that vehicle.
I think it’s worse to have multiple other players made victims than to ‘gatekeep’ a vehicle to some active hours’ worth of mindful practice.
The text reads like you making a counter argument but I can’t help but wonder if you’re actually disagreeing with me or not.
Air RB - Classic example is U.S fighters getting downtiered because people flat-turn everything in them (F8F). Just because U.S planes don’t do well in the intuitive response (ring round the rosey), they aren’t bad planes.
Air SB - Spitfires is what comes to mind. At my skill level, unless I do intentional practice beforehand to ease into them, I spend more time trying to control my plane than doing things to win. As such, I grossly underperform compared to the potential of spitfires. If you took someone like me and considered my performance for balancin, you might consider downtiering the plane because compared to other vehicles I use (e.g a6m3, bf109g14, mustang mk ia), it’s seriously underperforming. However, give spitfire to someone who made controlling it second nature and the mk 9 becomes a very dominant player.
In case of the Yak-9k, the difference between has the skill floor met/learning isn’t that big, but with given differences in observed results, footage posted and counter-claims, I do feel there’s at least a significant enough skill floor that might make it seem to underperform. From Percussion’s reports (or was it someone else?) for instance, it seems people tend to be very tunnel visioned while flying it making it easy to catch them out, which judging from my own experience flying it around for dogfighting comes from low ammo count and fire rate making you hyperfocus on setting up that perfect shot, so the skill floor is learning to “use the force” and developing a muscle memory for when to shoot.
However
I concede I reacted assuming you were defending the yak-9k due to the mention of balancing around skilled/average/learning players, since earlier in the thread we’ve had people claim they don’t get the amazing results others claim.
This I definitely appreciate, I am mediocre pilot and have recently discovered that the F8F-1 is a remarkable plane to fly and it’s performance is very forgiving when I make mistakes (which is often). I don’t have a great vocabulary for discussing the strengths/weaknesses of planes and how they perform however, planes like the F8F-1 (BR4.7), The Yaks and Japanese planes give me the distinct impression while flying that ‘the plane’ is doing all the work, I’m just pointing the nose at the enemy.
I just want to make sure I understand what you mean by skill floor. From what I understand you’re suggesting that vehicles should be balanced around players results once they’ve achieved a minimum level of competency in a vehicle. This reminds of the quote about Judging a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree. I would wholeheartedly agree with you if war thunder as a game made even the minimum effort to instruct its players on how to use the vehicles but it doesn’t.
You mention US planes being under tiered because the average player insists on trying to use them as turn fighters, resulting in more nuanced players being able to dominate owing to the fact that the true strength of the vehicle has not been accounted for in its Battle Rating.
I stand by my original comment about balancing around the ‘average player’, what you describe as the misuse of specific vehicles, I describe as the misuse of all vehicles. To me, the players who are turn fighting in US planes are turn fighting in everything some planes work other planes don’t and BR rises and falls based on the ignorance of the playerbase.
I don’t like it anymore than you do but consider how we would implement the skill floor. Assume that there is a cut-off for player stats when considering battle rating. I.e. player stats don’t start being considered until the plane is fully spaded, the player stats don’t start being considered until the player has achieved a minimum number of kills etc. We would limely end up in a situation where large portions of the aircraft become unplayable for most people. War Thunder is not a very accessible game, so I feel like balancing around the average skill of players is a necessary concession for the game.
I do this but the vast majority of players won’t. 4.7 is still very early game, most players interested in tanks won’t have any competitive planes or be any good at flying them.
Visibility (rotating periscopes), crew survivability (hatch design, ammo on the floor with wet stowage which helped vs shrapnel) mobility, gun handling, ergonomics. M4 was a complete package. Of course certain aspects are basically overblown, but it was a mass produced tank that did not cut costs. The ability to easily replace transmission was also a nice feature.
Stabiliser was not used by some crews, but we’re not discussing low IQ people in the army. It allowed for faster aiming. Anyway, with very tough turret it was generally well protected. So IMO it’s not as good as peoole think, but when your competition is Panther and T-34-85, it’s not that hard to win.
Anyway, Yak-9K is a menace. But F6F with 3 big bomb drops are not easy to deal with too. I mean, 2000lbs + 2x500lbs (or 3x1000lbs, if somebody thinks 500lbs is too hard to aim, lol) can easily take out 3-4 tanks and then you have 31 pen MGs and all that at 3.3 BR and you need 1 ground kill to spawn it. Even stupid SB2C is super deadly (500lbs bombs do the job just fine and it has 4 drops, or 509kg magnetic mine with a force of 1000kg bomb and 2 500lbs bombs, also works) and has bombsight as a bonus. So CAS is busted overal. 1 kill and if you know the basics of bombing, you score 3 kills easily and then can stragfe SPAAs and German tanks around 3.0-4.0 BR to your heart’s content.
Sherman when introduced was superior to other medium tanks, but crew survivability outside of armor was meh.
But as war progressed it received better armor, especially on the turret, better hatches, ammo was moved and put in wet stowage. So while hull was no longer well armored by 1944 standards vs tanks, thanks to good number of Panthers on the frontline (however it was now decently armored vs Pak 40, which is a big thing) the tank overal improved enough to still be considered survivable. Supension also got improved.
But it’s hardlys surprising considering American industrial superiority. It’s rather interesting that US went with extremely basic designs in the near future, while British, French and even Soviets started exoerimenting with feature-packed vehicles. Oh how the tables have turned.
Loofah out, cause I’m going super off topic.
Back on topic - Yak-9K is also greatly enhancing the effects of lack of any good WW2 SPAA after Wirbel, Ostwin II is kinda OK, but in reality, it is a shorter-ranged a bit faster firing cousin of M42, so nothing special, actually as an SPAA it’s less effective than double 25mm milk truck, because 25mm HE absolutely wrecks the plane in 1 hit anyway, and 37mm M-geschoss scores “hits” just as often as 25mm, except it has worse ballistics, but hopefully not by much.
If Germany got some decent SPAA in-between Wirbel and Ostwind II, or if Ostwind II went down in BR, it would also help. Wirbel is decent but it really lacks range and stopping power.
But lets be honest… if u play a 4 man squad with any good CAS… its not just the Yak9K that is utterly broken. The only difference here is mostly that the Yak9K is on such a low br… its the first really powerfull CAS people encounter, so it can really shred these low exp teams apart.