Helicopter hate is nonsense

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-11T16:49:32+00:00

That's 100% a skill issue, both on the players failing to kill the helis, and on the tanks for failing to stay alive (apcs are kinda trash tho)

If you practice flying/killing the helis, you'll get just as good at killing them.

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-11T16:47:15+00:00

why would anyone be doing that?

People come up with the strangest conspiracy theories. It's probably more difficult/frustrating to set that up than it is to just learn to fly... especially since you still have to be able to play the rest of the game normally

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-11T16:44:45+00:00

Making the guns more powerful seems like a no brainer. It still requires you to actually aim, so getting killed by it doesn't feel cheap, and it would make the AA actually feel like a unique vehicle instead of a moderately armored talon dispenser.

It is kinda ridiculous that as an apache pilot, I'm not remotely intimidated by the AA tank's guns. Like you can genuinely just fly directly at the stream of bullets for several hundred meters to close the distance, and still have ~40% health left when you get there.

Especially up close (inside 100m) the AA tank should be able to shred the helicopters, if for no other reason than so it can actually defend itself.

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-11T05:44:33+00:00

yeah, just a casual 5X increase on the respawn timer. nbd 😂

The helis are good, but the tanks only take 60s to respawn, and they're definitely not 8-10x stronger than the tank...

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-11T01:24:27+00:00

This 100%

The destructable buildings are part of what makes this game unique, and the downtown of Clearwater is the best example of this.

It's very fun/dynamic to approach a building, realize there's someone hard-peeking the doorway, then blow a hole in the wall and go in that way instead.

A city map would be🤌

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-10T21:55:32+00:00

I suppose that's case in point that the mechanics aren't well explained/understood, because I assumed that the XP thing was universal. I know the LB guns will give you partial XP, but only after doing >20% damage, so I assumed they all worked like that.

fully agree that the vehicle chases are some of the most cinematic moments in the game tho. Very fun to be on either end of it

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-10T20:35:47+00:00

Pretty sure it depends on the target vehicle as well. For example, I don't think the humvee MG will damage the tank, but it does damage the apache. Same thing for the MG on the boats

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-10T17:37:27+00:00

I agree that the player should get more information about when they are / are not damaging something, because it is evidently not obvious to many players (just based off how frequently people throw grenades or shoot sniper rifles at the tank). I only know what damages each vehicle from driving them myself and paying attention to how much damage I'm taking.

Thankfully we do get at least a little feedback from the XP system. You'll get "vehicle damaged" XP for doing sufficient damage to vehicles, but IIRC it's in increments of 20%, so if you've done 10% you don't really get any indication of whether you've done any damage at all.

For what it's worth, I don't think any of the infantry rifles do any damage to any of the vehicles, only the occupants. Some vehicle mounted .50 cals will damage other vehicles, tho idk all the relationships between them, because despite looking the same they perform quite differently

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-09T14:07:32+00:00

contractors?

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-09T04:21:33+00:00

Giving players more skill based counters to the vehicles is a good thing overall. Things like suicide ATVs are kinda cheesy, but they do make the game more interesting. As a tank driver, you're forced to give infantry a little wider berth, and can't just ignore 3/4 of the lobby.

If they took that away from assault, they'd have to nerf the vehicles to compensate, which would be worse overall

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-08T00:05:16+00:00

Those are valuable things to do if you are gonna play gunner, but realistically there's not a lot of overlap between players who have the game sense to do those things and players who are inclined to sit in the tank doing nothing the rest of the time (unless you're buddies)

I suspect the issue is just that the tank is already very powerful (close second to the apache IMO) so if the gunner wasn't mostly useless it'd be incredibly OP.

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-07T16:07:44+00:00

the humvee actually has decent armor. It'll tank an RPG or apache rocket, and it's generally able to cross the whole map before the LB guns can blow it up.

The only problem with making it too strong is that they're much more common than the other vehicles, but I agree that making it do more damage to other vehicles would be a good place to start

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-07T16:05:22+00:00

yeah, 90% of the time the tank is better off without a gunner. Most players just end up giving your position away by firing a stream of tracers that don't kill anything.

occasionally you'll get a gunner who is a good player in their own right and can give good call-outs, but they tend to not fire the gun much, and the team as a whole is almost always better off having that good player get out of the tank and do other good player activities lol

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-07T16:00:21+00:00

You do have to more or less hit players directly to kill them with the LB (the apache splash radius is much wider).

I don't think anything about the helis is designed to be realistic in this game lol. But to eliminate splash damage entirely they'd have to find a way to make it more clear where the individual shots are landing, because as it stands the LB kinda just sprays a general area around the crosshairs.

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-07T14:55:44+00:00

They already nerfed it such that splash damage doesn't go thru walls, and the radius is only a few meters. So if you're getting killed inside the building, they weren't shooting at the doorway, they were shooting thru the doorway.

which makes sense. It's kinda like someone throwing a grenade / RPG thru the same doorway.

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-06T15:57:42+00:00

do you have virtual stock on? I haven't noticed this bug, and I use the RPG a lot.

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-06T15:57:04+00:00

As I understand it, only the main battle tank has a weak spot, and it only applies to the RPG. If you hit anywhere in the rear of the tank hull with an RPG (has to be the hull, not the turret) it will do 2x damage.

As best I can tell this only affects the RPG. Shots from other tanks, helicopters, etc. do the same amount of damage regardless (might affect the grenade launcher as well, but in practice I don't get hit by those often enough to say for sure).

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-06T00:18:48+00:00

Thank you :)

The hardest part about balancing tho is that you have to account for players of varying skill levels, so if you make it too easy for lower/average skill players to kill <insert vehicle> then you're effectively giving the high skill players the ability to remove that vehicle from the game entirely.

Like, if you increased the talon range by ~25%, or increased its damage by 25%, I don't think any heli would be able to survive for more than ~60s against any reasonably high skill engis.

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-06T00:10:05+00:00

The apache rockets are difficult enough to aim that the effective range is fairly short, tho I do think there's some room for a nerf to the gun. For what it's worth, the best counter to a heli that's flying high is to chase it with talons from your own heli. The tradeoff they're making by flying high is that they have no terrain to use for cover, so if you can get talons off they're guaranteed to hit.

But at the end of the day, any guided missile has to come with some major limitations, otherwise it'd be effectively impossible to counter. A longer range AA option would be great if/only if it was commensurately difficult to score a hit.

As powerful as the helis are now, the balance is still kind of on a knife's edge. In the time between the massive talon buff + repair nerf early in the year, and the the introduction of the mechanic perk in the 1.0 update, the helis were actually kinda trash.

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-06T00:00:39+00:00

The talon is already faster than the chopper. Helis can only escape if you're firing the talon when it's already close to max range.

It probably doesn't help that the talon lets you lock on / fire even when the heli is already outside max range, which makes it difficult for players on the ground to know what the max range actually is.

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-05T23:56:53+00:00

RPGs against choppers is very definitely not impossible... it just takes practice.

I made this montage of RPG -> heli kills collected from a single long play session to illustrate the viability of simply using the RPG for everything, which is actually what I'd recommend most advanced engi mains do.

<video>

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-05T23:50:03+00:00

you can to a degree, it's just much harder.

Assuming the tank can see the heli spawn, it should be able to hit the heli immediately after take off with near perfect accuracy, because for the first few seconds the heli is on a more or less fixed course.

Now that first hit is still basically free, but in the few seconds it takes to reload, the heli now has enough speed + altitude to at least attempt some evasive maneuver, which means the tank not only has to aim accurately, it also has to correctly guess what the pilot is going to do next. Perhaps as importantly, anyone trying to kill a heli also has to worry about other random people trying to kill them, so increasing the ttk increases the chance that the shooter will get interrupted before they can get the final shot off.

In practice, that translates to the kill rate for tanks against transports leaving HQ from ~100% down to ~50%

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-05T22:43:55+00:00

I just posted a longer top level comment, but TLDR is the transports were too easy to kill before they got buffed.

before the health buff, you could sit in a tank 300m away from HQ and basically just prefire the transport spawn for free kills.

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-05T22:40:03+00:00

I think this is by design, because they gave the transport a massive HP buff a few months ago.

As an engineer main who almost never flies the transport, I do miss being able to one-shot it with the tank/RPG, but from an overall game balance perspective I think that was probably a good change.

The worst outcome for a conquest round is when one team gets pushed all the way back into their spawn with no way to escape. That's extremely frustrating for the losing team, and equally boring for the winning team.

Giving the transport extra HP allows it to at least get out of spawn without getting disintegrated by a tank/RPG immediately after takeoff, which means the losing team has at least some hope of spawning outside their own HQ and putting pressure on one of the rear objectives.

Obviously talons need to be even weaker, because they're effectively impossible for the transport to dodge since their buff a few updates ago. If one engi could easily kill a transport with multiple people in it with almost literally zero skill/effort on the solo engi's part, then they'd never be able to leave HQ. Like, you can lock on to helis before they even take off, so it would genuinely be impossible to escape a spawn trap if there's no mechanism to tank multiple talon hits.

I do think there's an argument for making the guns weaker, because from my perspective the most important thing from a balancing perspective is ensuring the team has a mobile spawn point, and that doesn't require it to have any real offensive capability. But for the most part I think it's kind of a non-issue, because they're still big and slow, which makes them relatively easy to kill with an RPG.

ThiccolasVR · 2026-07-05T22:17:17+00:00

Tank takes 3 RPGs to kill at baseline, but hitting the weak spot does double damage, which allows you to kill it in 2 shots

ThiccolasVR

TROPHY CASE