Mectus i am very frustrated with your reply as you obviously went into this argument thinking i am a retard and wrong and i do not know what i am talking about. This is very apparent from the tone of your reply and the fact that you totally misunderstood most of my points, probably because you didn't even bother reading carefully since you already had a preformed bad opinion about me.
I don't blame you though, because as usual there is a big circlejerk going on in this community and i am sure my name was slandered so many times in your presence that you just believed everything, that i am bad at CAS and a retard yadda yadda.
I know this reply might seem cringy but frankly i am very tired of this whole circlejerk, which is also why i mostly stopped replying to threads highlighting the broken state of CAS/AA balance.
The sad truth is that if you routinely speak out against something on this forums, no matter how much you appreciate the work and dedication of the DEV team in general, eventually you'll find yourself on the sidelines getting ridiculed. I wish i was the only one but that is not the case, altough i might arguably be the most prominent example of this dynamic.
What especially bugs me about that is that quite a lot of people claiming i am ignorant have time and time again shown themselves to actually be the ignorant ones regarding certain objective facts about the current AA/CAS balance and related bugs/issues. So i find it very hypocritical of them to paint me as the ignorant one.
Hey but that's the power of the herd mentality for you, you don't see the real person, you just create a crude mockery of me that you can attack.
Yes i do not really understand how this engine works exactly and yes i don't understand much about the development process of this game, but despite that i am in fact qualified to talk about certain broken mechanics in this game, since i discovered and singled them out through lots and lots of testing, in some instances before the 'experts' even knew of them.
Now to adress your points:
I can't tell if you're just contradicting yourself there or what? I don't know how you've been using AA but I've AA'd jets that flew towards me and didn't flare up.
Since the latest patches AA missiles heading directly or at a shallow angle towards the nose of the aircraft will in fact explode behind the jet and deal no damage to it, unless the missile hits the jet directly. So all you need to do is fly towards the missile and then push away slightly/dodge it at the last second to be fine (without flaring!), this works best if the missile flies past the top of the jet instead of the belly. With this technique you will be able to dodge most of the incoming missiles from the front.
Maybe what you experienced was in fact a direct hit. Or maybe the jet flared in the moment before the missile hit and it exploded on the flare next to it and destroyed it.
I rarely hit a jet with AA when he flares up.
Maybe you are reluctant to lock the flares and shoot? While preflaring still offers some protection me and others discovered in tests (that were also documented in videos, check previous pages for more) that locking flares somewhere in the general direction of the jet and shooting has a high probability of the missile just ignoring all flares and going straight for the jet and destroying it. Usually firing two missiles at flares is enough for one of the missiles to do the deed.
Then there is also the issue with the 'invisibile missile' bug CASual discovered where a missile will explode on a flare and then will just continue on to the jet, this bug might have already been fixed though.
Why would a jet pilot willingly go towards AA that could potentially kill him, that's just stupid, either avoid the AA or laze bomb it.
Yes, indeed, the game mechanics should encourage to fly away from AA, not towards it, yet as of right now when a missile is headed your way the best course of action is to turn towards it and dodge it without flares. Exactly what i was trying to highlight.
I hope a jet flares when they're getting locked by AA because that's the point of flares to make AA inaccurate and to give you a chance of getting away
I hope so too, yet as of now flares do not fullfill this purpose in any satisfying manner. Only preflaring offers any form of protection, flaring after missile launch rarely helps anymore and at worst will only make the missile explode next to you when flying towards it. When flying away from it flares will in many cases just be ignored by AA missiles.
So you see my problem with the current system? Instead of encouraging to fly away from the missile threat when locked and flaring it encourages the opposite, turn around and fly towards the missile and dodge without flaring. How is this in any shape or form a good system? Yet this is the best course of action as of now when caught with your pants down by AA, since flaring after the fact will not help you anymore. Even preflaring can be circumvented by shooting missiles at flares and seeing the missile go after the jet instead.
I've seen good CAS pilots that actually know how to properly fly a jet with a good squad of people that know how to laze do that successfully and were able to get the bomb inside the control room in the second floor.
Don't forget that bombs have a big splash radius.
Believe it or not, i am actually a modest person and don't like to boast, but i can say with confidence that i am in fact a good CAS pilot in this game, maybe even better than the people claiming otherwise. About getting a bomb inside the bunker, i've done it too a few times, but the cicumstances to do that rarely arise, so i think it is a non issue and distraction from the real topic at hand. About the splash radius, one wall is enough to stop the splash from hurting infantry (unless the wall is hit directly by the bomb), so splash radius doesn't matter much in that case.
You are spot on about the 'good squad of people that know how to laze', because nowadays they are essential in having a successful round of CAS, jets are totally reliant on them now. It used to be that spotters were an excellent addition that made CAS more effective, safer and easier. But you could still do decently without them if you played carefully.
Now they are a necessity you can't do without. The broken AA system punishes any kind of action involving going below 'cloud cover' other than for a few seconds to hit a lase, even if you preflare you will not be safe. Even gun runs on lases are too risky to do nowadays, since if there is even a manpad present somwhere it can potentially shoot you down through your flares.
Going below 500m altitude with a jet, even for a short moment while spamming flares is a big risk now, so most good pilots will just opt for high altitude bomb drop on lases now. That's about the only thing that is still more or less safe to do if there is AA around (and there always is).
I still have good rounds in CAS if i have 1+ good spotters in the squad, but without them all you can do if you don't wanna waste your jet within 5 minutes is fly at high altitude and hope for a random lase or intel. It feels more like the spotters are the ones doing CAS and the pilot is just reduced to a drone flying in circles at high altitude that occasionaly is allowed to go below cloud cover and drop hot loads on lases.
Some say that's exactly how jet CAS should be, but most of them have one thing in common: They don't even fly jet CAS. I am sure if they did regulary, most of them would quickly change their opinion.
