Why is CAS getting nerfed?

[DogACTUAL]

I wrote it off as just a coincidence in the beginning but over the years a clear pattern emerged:

-Introduction of unrealisticly low speeds for helicopters.

-Introduction of significantly reduced manouverability, removal of proper dive capability for many helicopters.

-Removal of ability to quickly release multiple missiles or bombs targeting different spots at once (to be fair, this could have been considered an exploit, but afaik aircraft IRL have similar abilities).

-Reduction of missile turn rate and agility.

-Reducing the number of CAS assets on different maps and increasing their spawn time.

-Tampering with gunship cannons in different ways (increasing overheat, decreasing damage, increasing deviation).

-Making flares way less effective and making ground AA systems more effective. Preflaring used to work mostly and rewarded smart players while at the same time it limited the time they could loiter and engage targets significantly and forced them to RTB often.
Now it is very random and you might aswell just wait for a lock and then pop flares.

-Making flares burn out and disappear way too fast.

-Introduction of extremely unrealistic high jet cannon drop.

-Serious consideration of DEV team to remove almost all splash damage from jet cannons.

-Serious reduction of jet cannon damage to armour.

-Removal of splash damage from helicopter miniguns and 50. cal.
Like viirus already lined out, with a game engine like this, that actually leads to unrealistic ineffectiveness of those weapons. Very obvious when using the littlebird on the newest map now. I dare say IRL it would be way easier to incapacitate soldiers with that helicopter than ingame.

-Removal of many potent assets from maps, like gunships, jets and ground attack jets and their replacement with less potent variants of assets like light attack helicopters (OH-58, Z-9). Some powerful variants not featured in any map now: US AH-64, Z-10, Hind-F.

- Removing the capability of firing more than one AA missile per second. Don't know if this is even realistic, but it robs the player of gameplay choices. Before you could spam missiles but risk that none of them hit anything because of bad conditions or you could decide to conserve them to be able to engage more times. Now the game forces you to only play one way.

-Introduction of sneaky, small changes that are not mentioned in the changelogs and over time add up and alter the gameplay meta. Which implies clear intent imo. Latest example is changing physics on some helicopters making flying them and aiming as pilot harder.

-Sometimes the DEV team throws CAS a small but insignificant bone, like giving jet anti tank missiles slightly better splash against armour, but overall the pattern is clear.


To some extent armour also got nerfed, see the latest change to coax machine gun overheat.
But certainly by far not to the same extent than CAS. Armour actually got a huge buff with the armour update.

Overall to me it seems that PR got turned from a game that was equal parts about infantry and asset experience to one where infantry comes first and assets, especially CAS, are just the sideshow now.

Your thoughts?

[Rabbit]

Til that changing cas on 1 layer on kashan by changing it to light cas is an attack on cas.

[Raidonrai]

Vehicle gameplay priority = Balance

Infantry gameplay priority = "Realism"

[DogACTUAL]

Originally Posted by Rabbit

Til that changing cas on 1 layer on kashan by changing it to light cas is an attack on cas.

That's not the reason, i actually like the new layer very much, although imo both sides could use an additional proper gunship considering the amount of armour they are up against (maybe plus an AAV to balance it out).

This thing has just been going on so long and i am not the only one who noticed. So please instad try to refute the points i made in my OP if you want to argue my position.

[viirusiiseli]

Originally Posted by DogACTUAL

-Sometimes the DEV team throws CAS a small but insignificant bone, like giving jet anti tank missiles slightly better splash against armour, but overall the pattern is clear.

Funny you mention that, 0.98 and before the SU-30 (only 2seat aircraft along with tornado at the time) had a massive killradius for the kedge missiles, like 30 meters. Tornado was shit but oh well. They only removed it in I think 1.0 and then made the new change that added killradius. I haven't even been able to test it because maps that have 2seaters are very few and never played xD


About the bigger scope of things, yes, there are one or two DEVs on the team who absolutely despise CAS and armor. These people have a clear intent of reducing the effectiveness or even playability of CAS and armor.

The "realism" part that is often paraded as the reason for these changes targets only specific properties of CAS and armor, the ones that make them less effective. Things that would make CAS or armor much more powerful and realistic, are ignored largely and left unchanged.

My addition to the OP:

-armor turrets still broken from inertia change

-jet gunrun near impossible to do accurately due to drag

-jet manual bomb near impossible due to drag

-coax on armor overheat too fast, irl able to fire extremely long bursts

-apc autocannon overheat too fast, irl able to fire extremely long bursts if badly needed

-apc combat broken, requires too many rounds to kill apc, usually around 50, which is half of an APCs AP load

-cas helis take the same time to rtb on a 4km map and get back out as an IFV for example (min. 5min to rtb and get back on 4km)

-cas helis bleed too easily, forcing rtb even from small arms

-there are too many jets in all jet maps, forcing only aa combat, no cas (e.g. the joke that is hades peak)

I could go on forever but unfortunately, I think even with a larger part of the CAS players giving this type of feedback, it will get labeled as asset whore whinging. And it ultimately wont change those DEV's opinions who are responsible for these changes.

Only thing that will change this course is if we get a DEV who starts really playing CAS and notices how completely useless and unusable it is now.

I hope the DEVs reading this actually go play CAS seriously a few times and try to get something done with it, other than only going for 2 lasers in a round and hiding for the rest of the time and call it a successful game.

[DogACTUAL]

Yeah, people just laugh and won't take you seriously or get all butthurt and defensive when you call out their bias. I wish people could just look at the overwhelming evidence of CAS getting nerfed to shit and maybe start seeing things from the perspective of people who like to use CAS (I also play infantry a lot).

[DogACTUAL]

Could you at least bring back proper splash damage for miniguns and 50.cal on aircraft? Right now the only thing they are good at is suppressing the infantry. Getting kills even in an open field is way too hard, if you used the miniguns on the new map you know what i am talking about.

[viirusiiseli]

Originally Posted by DogACTUAL

Could you at least bring back proper splash damage for miniguns and 50.cal on aircraft? Right now the only thing they are good at is suppressing the infantry. Getting kills even in an open field is way too hard, if you used the miniguns on the new map you know what i am talking about.

Previous values were good, but since people who knew how to use them ended up succeeding, they were nerfed.

Helis are still ridiculously easy to take down with infantry weapons so I don't get why it was considered a problem too big.

Also, crickets

[solidfire93]

Originally Posted by viirusiiseli

-jet gunrun near impossible to do accurately due to drag

-jet manual bomb near impossible due to drag

[fecht_niko]

You are right about the splash of bombs and the retarded gunrun.
But I think that the biggest problem is that no one is lazing.

On the other hand the AA system is still broken with the most random logs I've ever seen.
Sometimes you get a kill with each rocket sometimes the whole team is using all AA possibilities and doesn't hit shit.

If devs fix the AA finally they can make CAS op again

PS: stop whining asset whore virus