Here's the thing: if you want AT weapons to do realistic damage to a tank by taking them out with one shot then you have to go the other way with the realism as well and tune it so that 1 bullet from the .50 cal machine gun rips the player in half. And tank shells would have to have the splash damage increased to be at least 10X bigger than current so that anyone within 25 feet of the point of impact is killed by the pressure wave of the explosion.
Same with the Bolte and Hokum, sure in real life a single rocket could take them out but if you want the game to reflect that infantry getting shot by a 30MM cannon should be obliterated in one hit, not take 5+ rounds and keep running. Plus anti-infantry rocket salvo's should fragment and shred everyone in the area on a pass instead of requiring direct hits.
Clearly some of the air vehicles are too resilient, so question is now if the player community can agree on e.g. how many stingers in a row should be required to take out the various aircrafts?
These are definitely needing a nerf in their health parameters versus some of the AA weapons we have:
MI-240 Super Hind
KA-520 Super Hokum
MV-38 Condor
You can literally keep sending stingers into them one after the next and they still just heal up as fast and keep flying around. So currently 4-5 stingers in a row are not enough to take them out of the sky. Another parameter that may also need a change is the time it takes to lock-on to an air vehicle and the extreme over-sensitivity the lockon has to even just the smallest tree branch in the scope to acquire lock-on.
The lock-on mechanism also appear broken very often. Especially with the Condor its very obvious, as you often never get any lock-on at all, despite you have it in target all the time and it slowly but surely just keeps coming closer and closer. But still no final lock-on that enables you to launch the weapon. Sometimes the condor is soo close that it is even bigger than your entire onscreen lock-on reticle. So yes, its very very close. ;o)
Same problem so to speak with the little birds, as despite e.g. all open field around, the lock-on is so poor and slow that you never can get even a single lock-on before they either have hammered you to oblivion or just flew out of range again despite they came right overhead 30 meters away when closest on you.
All in all the onboard repair should be removed. Having vehicle magically getting health back just by pressing X (especially air vehicle), is beyond ridiculous. I'm hating deep down this s*** since it very first appearance in BF franchise.
What's the point of having an (ex, RIP) engineer, or at least a repair tool gadget if the vehicles have it incorporated in them.
The choppers are the real problem because the aa missiles are absolutely garbage.
The lock on range is pitiful and when you do manage to get a lock and the pilot has used flares half the time your rocket goes awol and randomly goes anywhere!
I had a game yesterday and the havoc was literally 20 foot above me and the aa refused to even lock after I hacked it.
Whilst realism should be applied where practicable, balance should always trump realism as is the case here.
The problem with AA at the moment is that locking is very inconsistent and missiles often fail to track without the apparent use of flares.
No buffs or nerfs should be applied in this area until the above is fixed then see how things go.
That said, range may need to be adjust, Nightbird can fly towards you and fire its rockets long before (a good) lock is achieved nevermind fire, and you're dead before anything can be done.
@CyberDymeStingers could probably use a +5 damage increase to air vehicles. What would really help is stingers actually functioning properly. I've had so many stingers lately just fly straight up into the sky and do nothing (and no, the pilot didn't flare or leave range of the missile).
A small damage increase on the stingers and them working properly would be enough IMO.
For the M5, they probably need to adjust damage values to require 1 less rocket per vehicle at the moment outside of jeep/hovercraft which are already very weak.
Change bolte from 3 rockets to 2 rockets, change tanks from 4 rockets to 3 rockets.
Something that isn't discussed much is the repair function on vehicles. The repair function was originally broken and not working properly when the game released. Now, the repair function is working properly and gives +health each time used. So a smart tank player can use repair between rockets which increases his required rockets to die from 4 to 5. That's just too much IMO.
Damage needs to go up on M5 and Stingers now that repair function works accordingly, and Stingers have to be fixed so that they work properly and don't shoot up in sky at absolutely nothing.
With these changes, C5 drones should be removed as well since vehicles will be much more vulnerable to the increased damaged values.
These issues ~should~ (key word SHOULD) be the simplest of simple fixes but we all know nothing is simple with these developers, unfortunately.
