I would also like to comment a bit more on the part of the patch notes about the attack jets.
The patch notes say:
Explosive Cannon ◾️ Blast Damage lowered from 8 to 6.5 ◾️ Blast Radius reduced from 5.5 to 3
Regular Cannon ◾️ Maximum damage lowered from 16 to 12.5 ◾️ Minimum damage lowered from 12 to 8 ◾️ Damage fall off starts from 350m instead of 450m ◾️ Damage fall off ends at 600m instead of 800m
These changes are being made to the Attack Jets to ensure that things remain a fair and fun experience when a player is on the giving but also receiving end of the encounter. Our goal with jets is to have longer engagements with their targets and require the pilot to take more of an active and risky manoeuvre in order to successfully deliver a lethal blow, whilst also providing the target opportunity to react and counter within an acceptable timeframe.
The very point of the engagement of airplanes with ground forces is for it to be brief and not long. Airplanes are not built like armored tanks, they are supposed to be glass cannons that can swiftly do damage and then go away because they are fragile. The Thunderfoot is so fragile that I seem to have been oneshoted by an A.I. who used the AP rounds from a Brawler gunner seat of all things
Almost every ground vehicle that is mid sized or larger has APS countermeasures as an option now, this means that they can completely negate a single strafe of the attack jet since the APS stops the GAU-8 bullets too. So there was never an issue of capable vehicle uses getting one-strafed. The MAV is so armored that one straffing it seems very unlikely and the smaller vehicles are already small and harder to even see and hit.
The only nerf in here that is reasonable is the one about the effective range. If the Jet has to come closer in a strafe to be effective, there is more chance to counter it with ground assets. That is a fair nerf.
However the maximum damage should have been left the same in order to reward those who do take the risk to get in those 350m from the target. The jet is still very fast and at this distance there is little time to do much.
The Explosive cannon damage needs to be higher than it is right now. You have to still try hard to kill a single soldier, considering they are tiny like ants in the ground and the impact effect creates a smokescreen around the target which obscures them unless they have been spotted beforehand.
You cannot possibly be talking about a fair and fun experience when a player is on the giving but also receiving end of the encounter when you make something as limited as a jet something that has a harder time killing anything than a solider on the ground does. This defeats the purpose of using it or any other vehicle.
I hope that your baseline for balancing is not the what if scenario of if two pilots of the same caliber as Silk are on the same team working together. This is not a good baseline to have.
PS: Alternatively, if you want to have the damage stay low like that and have "longer engagements" you got to also significantly increase the armor of the attack jet so the ground force cannot also destroy the attack jet with a finger flick
