Attack Helicopters with Laser Guided Missiles

[Spook]

Check this video.
At mark 10:45 you can see the gunner spamming missiles vs a BTR. The reduced splash means the BTR survives for some time, but still it's a ridiculous amount of firepower raining down over the course of a few seconds. The entire video is worth a watch, a couple of awesome scenes in there, but also several scenes that show how carelessly CAS can be used currently.

It really depends on the enemy team. If there is not much effort in AA protection you start to care less and do more risky things. There are rounds where you get locked and shot at as soon as you get close to any enemy, and you will have to rely on very good intel, lazes and only do careful dives. Then there are rounds where you realize in the first 10mins that the enemy does not care about you and you can start chilling and fly around and search for targets on your own and be seemingly untouchable.

[fecht_niko]

It really depends on the enemy team. If there is not much effort in AA protection you start to care less and do more risky things. There are rounds where you get locked and shot at as soon as you get close to any enemy, and you will have to rely on very good intel, lazes and only do careful dives. Then there are rounds where you realize in the first 10mins that the enemy does not care about you and you can start chilling and fly around and search for targets on your own and be seemingly untouchable.

You are right that it can depend on the enemy team. But I've seen much more organised rounds where CAS raped everything (most recent: PAC vs VK on Beirut, VK vs EE on Beirut/Archer...) than CAS being scared.
After squadleading CAS a lot from the ground it is most of the time enough to give the pilots a marker (no laze) on AA positions and they will kill them even before getting locked.

I think virus & Senshi made some very good point about the current situation + how to fix it!

[Frontliner]

We are kind of stuck with a system that either means helicopters do good vs everything, or they get raped by any and every kind of AA there is.

The purpose of AA to be good against anything flying, so to expect anything less from is a bit weird imo. While admittedly APCs, Tanks and certain other vehicles have Smoke Dispensers to passively counteract getting targeted by handheld AT, being surrounded smoke itself doesn't make you invulnerable, which makes it different in effectiveness from flare(you also only get up to 4 of those).

Choppers can be effective against everything, as they should be, it's just their counters need to be working to equalize the playing field. Virus' idea of faster dropping flares seems like a good starting point.

[Frontliner]

It really depends on the enemy team. If there is not much effort in AA protection you start to care less and do more risky things. There are rounds where you get locked and shot at as soon as you get close to any enemy, and you will have to rely on very good intel, lazes and only do careful dives. Then there are rounds where you realize in the first 10mins that the enemy does not care about you and you can start chilling and fly around and search for targets on your own and be seemingly untouchable.

Didn't seem like much of a careful approach a few weeks back on Vadso when you and Don raped my FOB with AA that was undetected Should I have called 2 MTLB Strela's just to provide an adequate counter when you were just hovering there not giving a shit?

[Mongolian_dude]

More suggestions to make CAS more of the surgical tool it should be (especially Hellfires):
- Delay between firing individual rockets. Currently you can fire Hellfires faster than you can empty a G3 magazine. Only necessary for LG mode really. Having a lazed target always should be beneficial over manual guidance

The problem with this is that PR Hellfires are already massively less efficient than their irl counterparts, perhaps unrealistically so. For example, it is by no means uncommon for LT missiles to strike a LZR attached to a vehicle and fail to significantly damage it. The current in-game balance rests on the fact that you spam an unrealistic amount of hellfires at a single target to simulate a modern attack helicopter's lethality.

I think the compromise would be to increase their Area of Effect lethality against vehicles by a small margin and implement a 1.5 - 2 second delay between LG missile launch.

LT should receive the same boost to AoE vs Vehicles, but not receive the firing delay.

Would neither be opposed to the idea of having hellfires reload longer on the pad, as a disincentive to the current spam.

[Mongolian_dude]

mr mongolian how can you say this ?

Can you clarify even just a little bit please?