Unlike a lot of people, I don’t consider an SPAAG killing tanks to be “broken” in any way, shape, or form. An SPAAG shredding a tank’s sides or rear in seconds is a good thing. The user of the SPAAG actually moves out of their own damn spawn and is now in position to help swat down CAS.
IMHO, the sole times an SPAAG (or any rapid-fire vehicle) qualifies as “broken” is when it’s clearly taking advantage of an obvious bug (like the rolling armor glitch, the shell teleportation glitch, etc.) or bullshitty aspects of game mechanics that are awful but technically “legal” (cupola shots).
The Coelian proves that when we got a spaa, which has too powerful guns cause a disaster, of course players won’t complain CAS anymore, due do it is almost using a gepard without radar at 6.3(now is 7.0) we do have see what happened for those 35mm guns spaa did at their BR.
remove their AP shell or limiting it as CAS cannon ammunition could make them focus on the air, and still, never make SPAA as the main force to against CAS, that’s why I said there are too many players focus on SPAA only will also make another balance as well.
Same for SPAA users, there are also over 90% players won’t able to play CAS as well( like the guy above you, most of his CAS plane K/D is around 1-2 LMAO), but that doesn’t mean they need more assistance, the only thing they need is skill, or also provide simple CCIP for all of the CAS(clost ot AB)
The complaints on the forum are actually from a minority. Most people don’t say anything here. Compared to the silence of the majority, I trust the data more (even though Gaijin sometimes does a terrible job).
Speaking of records, while checking yours I came upon some, how shall I put it, rather unusual Naval RB stats of yours that caused me to have a look at your available NRB server replays.
Let’s just say that Gaijin’s anti-cheat measures could do with some refinements.
The 262 its not that much capable to one tap with 100% efficiency every heavy tank like the Yak does
stop trying to say its balanced,it was been proven by other people with screenshots that its broken
Why?Cause i got a bad rating on AirRB?I played only bombers but trust me,i am more than capable of obliterating you from the match
If you want to look at stats so bad,at least do it properly
Thing is, I don’t even consider it “too powerful,” really. In some respects, the Coelian is more effective at 7.0 now that it can routinely matchmake with all the 8.0 glass cannon early MBTs.
I remember when it was still 6.3, and I saw the “uptier insurance” potential of the thing, and chose to run it in my 7.7 Maus deck. I got an 8.7 game on Alaska, dark and raining. So I spawned the Coelian. Someone on my team said in chat “what the fuck is a Flakpanzer 341 doing here?” I parked myself around a corner I knew lots of people would push by, and then proceeded to kill an M103 and Bradley which drove by me totally oblivious to my existence in less than 5 seconds, leading the same guy to just say “holy shit” in chat. I did not bother moving from that spot, and proceeded to dunk on another M103, a Conqueror, and some other light vehicle. My team was losing so eventually the Conqueror driver respawned a Centurion and killed me later, but I was laughing so hard I did not care.
Absolute fuck no. We tried this - it didn’t work! What did result was the following:
SPAAGs with limited or no anti-tank ability sit uselessly in their own spawns, and are too far from the frontline where the CAS is striking to intercept.
SPAAGs which retained good antitank ability continued to be used as Ersatz TDs.
CAS generally continued owning the place unless one of the Ersatz TD users happened to look up.
We have tried nerfing SPAAG for years to “make them behave,” and much like all the boneheaded nerfs to CAS, they accomplished essentially nothing.
Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result?
Hence, I say instead of nerfing SPAAG - rebuff it instead, let it go nuts killing tanks through their sides. There is really no damn difference between any normal tank shell obliterating your tank in one flank shot and an SPAAG buzzsawing your tank in 10-30 - you’re dead either way, are you not?
I would rather see SPAAG be used as Ersatz TDs, because then at least people will move them out of their own spawns and be in positions useful to swat down CAS near the front lines. Not all of the SPAAG drivers will actually bother swatting CAS, but enough of them will do so to make the desired difference.
And to drive the point home, I would then also give all SPAAGs that have either no radar or have their radars destroyed/deactivated a short-range lead indicator. This “further arcadization of RB” seems controversial, until you stop to notice that planes in RB unequally benefit from RB control characteristics.
Planes gain far more from having 3rd person camera due to not dealing with the cluttered mess of tank maps. They can spot all kinds of tanks, including SPAAGs, from much further out than they would if they were restricted to cockpit view, rendering SPAAG easier to notice and much easier to evade.
Planes also gain far more from mouse aim controls than SPAAGs do, enabling them to pull maneuvers which would be suicidal in reality, further limiting options for SPAAGs to engage them at all, let alone actually score kills on the planes.
SPAAG meanwhile lack their real world numbers advantage they often had against attacking aircraft (in many WT matches it’s frequently CAS outnumbering SPAAGs), where whole batteries of SPAAGs communicating on radio would coordinate their fire vs single planes. It’s a similar situation to lone bombers being fighter food in Air RB. Trying to add in AI clones of your SPAAG that follow you will lead to all kinds of buggy messes from AI pathfinding being not the brightest. And if they also aim where the player aims, they could furthermore set up interesting ambushes on tanks from multiple simultaneous directions and get screeched about even more.
Thus, if removing the features from planes that make them so potent is a non-starter, and giving SPAAGs their numbers advantage is too messy to set up, what other option is there but to give SPAAGs an aiming assist to help them hit planes? Dumb average players go from being nigh-worthless in SPAAG to being decently effective as soon as radars are unlocked, so we KNOW it will massively help.
How the short range lead indicator would work:
No red marker around the plane saying what the plane is, just the line of dots and aiming point saying where to shoot.
Range of this lead marker is limited to 1.0km with a bone-stock crew. Rangefinding skill being maxed out would increase it to 1.2km. Leadership skill being maxed out would bump it to 1.3km. Expert crew would bump it to 1.4km. Aced crew would cap it out at 1.5km.
This marker would be available on all SPAAGs and SAMs which have guns, if they either have no radar at all or have their radars turned off/disabled.
I would not be opposed to this marker also existing when manually controlling any tank’s commander MG.
Likewise, I also think that all SPHs which possess HE-VT shells would get the same lead marker.
All “Heavy SPAAG” currently labeled as TDs (88mm Flak37 Truck, 76mm 29-K YaG-10 truck, 88mm VFW, and QF 3.7" Ram II, among others) would also get these lead markers. I would furthermore not be opposed to artificially giving all of them HE-VT shells for gameplay reasons to ensure they would be effective at hunting planes.
One of the old nerfs to CAS I would see undone is the removal of 3rd person bomb sights from all bombsight-equipped bombers back in 1.59. It was quietly done without any justification, then later repackaged as something “new” when jets with CCIP became a thing.
Furthermore, to give dedicated Attackers and Tactical Bombers a reason for being used instead of usual fighter-bombers, I would not be opposed to giving both of those classes the AB dive-bombing 3rd person bomb cross (the one that only appears when you are in a sufficiently steep dive toward something).
I’m aware, but I want to see all talk of “tank-only mode” shut the fuck down once and for all. The best way to do that is intentionally empowering the counters so that random people not invested in either camp would say to people spouting off about it “dude, you have easy as fuck means to swat the CAS, why the hell are you still complaining?” It starves their “movement” of support and eventually will kill it completely, just like giving Bluewater ships effective AAA protection killed “naval-only mode” arguments in the cradle.
Another feature I would want to see added, which could be sold in the name of helping further address ODL, but would have the ulterior motive of fully shutting down TO talks, would be to use that incoming “random BR-appropriate tank” feature, itself inspired from the “random BR-appropriate plane” feature of Naval. I would first copy over Naval’s “random BR-appropriate fighter” and “random BR-appropriate CAS” for all BRs. Second, I would add a “random BR-appropriate SPAAG/SAM” to the mix. Can’t have any meaningful discussion of “tank-only mode” if there no longer are any tank-only players.
And the best part of all the above changes to SPAAGs and aircraft availability - stomping out the stubborn embers of the TO debate need not even be mentioned officially. It would be intentionally rendered irrelevant, forevermore.
Same as planes, without high pen ammunition, the only thing they can do is camp or fouse on some non-armored target(SPAAs and some TDs), but compared to SPAA, the cost of SP is unacceptable.
On the contrary, if the SPAA does not fire prematurely, Planes is pretty hard to identify the target, all ground vehicles can use ULQ and Air alert to easily find any planes (even behind the mountains or clouds), but unfortunately, some of players even feel it is annoying
What does “chocolate pasta” taste like? I thinks it’s sweet and slightly bitter. Honestly Yak-9K isn’t all that broken, but it does not need moving down. It seems fine at 4.7-5.0
I love how some folks pretend the Yak-9k is bad against other planes. It literally outturns FW190s and BF109s as well as some other dedicated fighter planes. And it annihilates bombers.
The thing is good against air, and busted against ground. Which is what makes it so strong.
And that is why, at least where it makes a lick of sense, I have long thought SPAAG should be primarily balanced by their ability to pen tank sides, and accept that as perfectly normal, not an outlier to screech about like the average player seems to do.
Idk about you man, but I can see rough silhouettes of what tanks are from far enough away in my planes that I can dodge SPAAGs’ ability to do much of anything with ease. Perhaps it’s also because those SPAAG currently just sit in their own spawns in an open area with their thumbs up their asses most of the time.
Overall though, restoratively buffing SPAAG in multiple aspects is only a portion of my proposed CAS overhaul. It’s rather just the start of it to preemptively stifle non-constructive complaining about CAS by making the counters highly effective with about as much effort as it takes to use unguided bombs with planes.
Once that is done, and all players also have default SPAAG, default fighters, and default CAS force-fed into their decks like Naval does (I’m aware that default SPAAG will soon be a thing, albeit only for 9.3+ games unfortunately, but hopefully that feature is extended to lower ranks as well), then the real overhauls can begin.
Firstly, axing the game mechanics that make CAS so needlessly annoying without nerfing the CAS functionality itself. Force all planes to runway spawn, no questions asked. Remove separated helicopter pads, force helicopters to spawn on a pad built into the plane runway - this prevents up-down pad camping w/ long-range weapons and also gives helicopters a working AAA screen again. Neuter the kill camera to where it only shows the final few seconds of the current one - the shell entering your vehicle and hitting whatever caused your demise, but not even so much as a brief snapshot of the killer’s position. Then, also remove the giant text notification of cap zones changing hands, which for all intents and purposes is just a “hi im here please bomb me” to the enemy team.
Regarding what you said about Spawn Point costs, I firmly believe that CAS in general is fundamentally unbalanceable so long as it continues being treated as a powerup. Therefore, I would propose instead a modified version of Simulator’s SP system instead. Each user gets 1000SP at game start, they can take whatever they want, as many times as they want, until they run dry. There is no ability to earn more SP through any means (nukes could be awarded by getting a certain number of kills instead like AB). SP costs would be itemized by amount of ordinance and of course also its size. Ground units would intentionally cost considerably cheaper than currently, to make it highly impractical for CAS to knock players fully out of a round unless they wasted their SP on a CAS plane and did little. SP doubling would be removed entirely.
Light tank & medium tank: 40 SP
Heavy tank & SPAAG/SAM: 50 SP
Tank Destroyer: 30 SP
Attacker, including Helicopters (base): 300 SP
Bomber (base): 250 SP
Fighter (base) 200 SP (itemized ordinance costs would be more punishing on fighters than nonfighters intentionally, given the ability to drop bombs on some things and then kill all other CAS at your leisure - for top tier CAS as much as 800-900 SP would be quite possible).
Light tank discounts on planes would be removed, though I’m not sure what else the Airstrike module would instead do - ideas?
This SP system would allow technically any unit type as a first spawn. This does mean people could first-spawn CAS, but also fighters to swat down that CAS. Thus it is up to the players to do something about their CAS problem themselves, now that the ground-to-air tools are empowered.
The final main arc of the CAS overhaul is adding in all the missing objectives for both CAS and Tanks to perform - the mode sometimes feels like a pressure cooker when the two are always at each other’s throats, but most people getting angry rarely stop to think “wait, he has literally nothing else productive he can even do but rain lead on my team’s tanks.” Thus we’d need a bunch of AI objectives for both to perform which would intentionally be quite relevant to match outcome to draw away CAS weaponry at least somewhat - every piece of ordinance killing a bot is one less screamer on the forums.
