BF6 Helicopter Feedback from a Veteran Pilot – Sluggish, No Practice Range, AA

Agree. I do however feel like they are also very easy to control sometimes, like...overly easy, until you start feeling the "front-heavy" thing you mention....where pitching up doesn't exist anymore. Been enough times where I try to evade stingers and heatseekers, I dip down and I have no way of regaining altitude and slam into the ground as the pitch isnt responding at all.

Yes! Sometimes, I'll tilt down and start getting some speed, and I'm like woah this is nice, and then I try to turn or do something, and I can't, and it ends in a similar way.

They simply don't generate enough lift as they should. Too much downward momentum when you struggle to recover from a dive. 

bf4 heli pilot here, here are my thoughts: 

1. - The flares should last at least 50% longer (even if ecm is available in upgrade tree) 2042 flares are a good example, maybe a bit shorter if ecm is available (like in bf4)
2. - Engineers shouldn't be able to pick AA and an rpg in the same kit (maybe an option to have anti-air mines like in bf4 that are shorter range but less time to react for flares) 
3.  - the landing system should be reworked it feels worse to land for a repair than bf3 and 4, idk how to explain it just go land a helicopter anywhere and you'll see exactly what i mean, feels cheap/sluggish, like landing an empty  coke can not a heavy aircfaft. 
4.  the gunner's burst should have at least a few extra bullets imo, without damage reduction
5. I don't know if it's just me but i've died from 90 hp in the heli to instantly dead in 1 manpad "stinger" shot, it could've been a bug. 
6. Maybe take a look at slowing down tank's main gun's shot velocity, I've died to a lot of tank cannons while flying from across the map, it feels a bit too easy to snipe helis out of the sky for people who want to fly low if there is no jet superiority on your team.
7. If you want a more grounded and realistic physics system, while also maintaining a controllable feel for less experienced players, you can't do both at the same time, which is what they tried to do. It should have a high skill gap and be unforgiving in mistakes, carry more momentum, but at the same time be extremely fast and agile in experienced hands (it took you at least a full week of trying to fly a heli to get a hang of things in bf3 and 4). If you want just add an "autopilot" or "auto level" button for people who need help, maybe a system where if they crash in a heli a message is shown to them "CLICK X TO AUTO LEVEL HELICOPTER" or if they pitch the heli too far down an autopilot kicks in automatically (toggled).  If you don't want bf4 heli physics but want something more realistic, a great example is VTOLVR's choppers, that game has a very very satisfying flight model and the devs put a lot of love and care into making it feel realistic and satisfying at the same time. You have a lot of examples to look at just don't base your testing off of someone who hasn't enjoyed the piloting side of battlefield as their main choice of gameplay, when you do that, the result will be what we have now. I thought this is what battlefield LABS is supposed to take care of? I understand that you  might ask an average bf player "does the heli seem alright" and they might go like "Yeah it looks good", but you should dig a little deeper than that and make a separate chat or channel of info from PILOTS, people who know what satisfying piloting looks and feels like, what hooked them to spend countless hours in your game to begin with, aside the boots on the ground part of the game. Dice please listen to your pilots, I want to be playing bf6 5 years down the line..

yup

Oh and yea, player launched, shoulder fired anti-air should never deal more than 50% damage. I'm all for slowing you down for 4-5 seconds but if they can reload it, I should be able to take a hit and try to recover the helicopter without crashing, especially now that you can damage helis with small arms fire. 1 tap anti air is just brutal. Also I don't know if it's just me but the range on the vehicle anti air seems insane, I'm getting locked on from 4 flags away. If that stays the same I should at least have some cover to duck behind the enemy lines and pop out on an anti air and try to take it out in 1 strafe. I like what they did with that ravine on one side of the map where you can duck down and pop back up but i was thinking something further away as well, out of bounds for the rest of ground vehicles and troops. 

Also, it seems that if a Stinger hits you in the tail rotor, it can one-shot you from full health. I’ve been instantly killed this way once and have seen other players experience it in videos a couple of times.

Yeah Right on!

1. I definitely miss the ECM from BF4... maybe I'm just forgetting, but I don't think it's in 2042 and I want it back! Gives great chopper cover and would do great on a map like Liberation Peak. 
2. As for engineer loadouts, I haven't used the engineer class much besides for repairs, but yeah, that is insanely broken. I'm sure it will be changed.
3. For landing the choppers, it's definitely a crapshoot experience. It's so unstable, and while landing, I blew up because I tried to land and reset myself, and then I bounced and hit something else. A bit hard to explain, but yeah it needs some reworking fs, since that was not the case in past games...
4. I personally haven't gunned for a chopper yet, so I can't comment here. 
5. When it comes to taking hits from RPGs, I seem to be around 1 hit, so I don't think that's a bug. It should definitely be 2 hits though, so you have a chance to repair and reset. I believe in Bf4, a good RPG shot brought you to like 50 or so hp, and a tank shell got you to like 10-ish hp, so you had to land fast, but it was recoverable and felt fairly balanced for both sides of that fight. The way Liberation Peak is designed kinda brings you right into range of the tanks, unfortunately, and I'm not sure how that gets fixed without map updates tbh. Even if you slowed the tank shells down you would probably be able to hit those heli shots easily so im not sure what to do here.
6. I do love the CLICK X TO AUTO LEVEL HELICOPTER idea that is smart for new players. I really do hope they take some of this advice to perfect the choppers since right now they are so unfun to use. It definitely seems to be an afterthought in the grand scheme of things right now, which is probably smart for game success, but is unfortunate for us pilots!:(

didnt see this comment before I commented but yup my thoughts exactly. After some more thought I think Liberation Peak needs a light re-work to figure everything out and balance it for the ground vehicles a bit. Not sure how they would do this, maybe just adding an extra point higher up somewhere or you could remove some of the ground vehicles. Having an Abrams and the other tank does seem overkill tbh for how small the town is.

Great reply, we're pretty much on the same page. 

Ecm's were not in 2042 but the flares lasted about 4-5 times longer than what they last in the current bf6 beta so it kind of made up for it in a way. The shoulder fired thing, I was mainly talking about the stinger type anti air that's currently available alongside the rpg. If you can rpg a helicopter in any scenario I agree that it should be a 1 hit to instant death for the heli. However for the stinger anti air (the lock  on) it currently deals 90 damage apparently, in a game where small arms damages the heli and there is no auto-repair that's tough..  For the tank shells It just feels like a point and shoot and not a calculating lead type of thing like in older battlefields that's why I mentioned it. I think if i recall correctly in the previous games it would fly fast first 100 meters or so and than start falling off dramatically so you really had to lead those tank shells (which of-course should be a 1 hit to death for any helicopter). In bf3 and bf4 tanks 1 shot even transport helicopters, definitely the attack ones and the little birds, I think that's how it should be IF it takes a lot of skill to hit those (which it should), that's why those clips were impressive, if you make things like that easy to do, those "battlefield moments" will lose their charm. That's why you haven't seen a lot of those types of clips from bf2042, because they made the tank shells deal around 60% damage to the helicopters requiring 2 hits for a takedown, and the shell velocity was very fast as well so it wasnt impressive but also happened way rarer because you could just fly away after getting hit, and same with rpgs and smaws btw (in 2042).  As a heli pilot one of the best feelings when playing boots on the ground is having to make that hard choice to go for the RPG instead of the anti air stinger and then seeing a chopper and sniping it out of the air in 1 shot, knowing **bleep** well that pilot is going to wait another 60 seconds in the loading screen spamming that chopper, hahaha, and I'd miss 20-50 of those rockets because of how hard it was to hit but the one that hits is the impressive one that people relate to so much and want to experience when they see it. Making the rockets fly faster but do less damage kind of kills it for me as a pilot even.. Oh and the 2042 IRIS launcher that you could controll like a TV rocket from the ground was absolutely the most broken thing ever added to any battlefield imo hahaha, I hope there is nothing like that in bf6 ever.