Flying a helicopter got ridiculous. Potential fix.

Battlefield 4 PC
1

Hello my fellow battlefielders!

Being a decent attack chopper pilot/gunner in BF 3 (20000+ kills) I of course decided to hop in the attack choppers in BF4, and I gotta say: I’m totaly pissed at what the chopper turned into.
All of the points I’ll list will be things that changed in comparision to BF3 (to the worse obviously). I won’t mention the points which also sucked in BF3 like the ridiculous hitboxes of the TV or all the objecthitboxes that cause you to die or your own TV causing your helicopter to flip over and crash. So here we go:

  1. You cannot exit a flying heli at anytime, you always get run over, no matter what.

  2. The amount of stuff that can bring you down (Mobile AA, AA in the spawn, multiple rocket launchers, more tows, tanks, jets etc.) has grown significantly in comparision to BF3 and still the time flares/ECM need to reload has increased ridiculously, It’s like you’re waiting the entire round for the flares to reload. Why the fu*k?

  3. Stingers, Heatseekers, or anything that hits you, no matter what instantly flips your helicopter and you cannot avoid dying by any chance. I mean where is the point of the stinger dealing 45 damage, if you just flip and die anyways because you cant exit without getting run over?

  4. The damage the pilot can deal to tanks is way too high. Gunner damage against tanks is Ok.

  5. You have virtually no chance against antiairs as they can control the whole map with active radar (makes you flip very often). You cannot even sneak up from behind (as it often camps near the spawn) cause the automatic antiair in the spawn will drop you instantly. Only thing you can do to them is the TV missle which still didn’t get fixed.

  6. Dogfights with other helis are ridiculous, the gunner and the pilots rockets just don’t deal enough damage with normal hits. The reload time on the heatseekers is a joke. TV’s are the only fast way to destroy another heli. (Will only deal 80 damage and cause the opposing heli to flip, sorry no kill for you there)

  7. On some maps the map ends for you where it ends for ground units, thats stupid, you cant sneak up from anywhere or hide from lock-on stuff. In BF3 you could quickly fly over a mountain e.g. which is outside the map (Kharg Island)

  8. The 25mm of the havoc is much stronger than the 25mm of the other helis as it has a higher rpm and no recoil, thats ridiculous.

Last but not least: 9. The flares and the ECM got a delay when you hit X!!! WHY!!!??? LIke this you don’t have any chance against incoming stingers, active radar, etc. (combine that with the current netcode!! It’s a nightmare avoiding rockets!! Thats the most annoying thing to me as it triggers many of the things above!

EDIT1: An educated player called “HwanZike” picked up 2 other imporant points which I’d like to post here now:

  1. Lower flight ceiling for choppers, so that jets have a natural upper hand now.

  2. The agility of the attack choppers is too low. They’re not agile enough to effectively dodge stingers etc without using flares, let alone escaping from anything. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
    Conclusion: The heli got bumped down to a tool for beginners, as they just hop in the heli to get 1 or 2 tanks and maybe a few infantry kills (Most of the time you even die before being able to do that.. The average time you’re in the air with the heli got reduced significantly in BF4, most of the time you’re done in less then 1 minute, because of one of the things I listed above. Good piloting skills don’t help you in BF4. Every beginner can do as well as you do. Skill should be something that is rewarded with a higher K/D, more points, and especially more survivability. In the chopper, most of the time, this isn’t the case anymore.

Most people won’t even read up till here and just say I’m a noob. But with all my expierience from BF3 and so far from BF4 here’s something I’d suggest to balance the heli out:

  1. Increase the agility and the speed of the attack chopper.
  2. Reduce the damage the pilot does against enemy tanks, increase the damage against other aerial vehicles.
  3. Get rid of that ridiculous Flare/ECM delay and give us flares at least 5 seconds faster or just give the gunner the same flares (maybe with a longer reload time).
  4. Stingers shouldn’t flip you, dealing 45 damage is enough for a dull weapon like that.
  5. Reduce the heatseeker timer and maybe even upp the damage to at least 30.
  6. Decrease the range of the automatic AA in the spawn
  7. Tankshells should be a 1hit kill against helis, no matter what. Making them flip doesn’t help anybody.
  8. Decrease the effective range of the active radar and the main gun of the mobile AA.

The rest like, fighting infantry, stinger range, heatseeker range, TV’s is fine to me and is a welcome change to BF3.

If there is anything you’d like to add, let me know, please stay polite.

Another player named Sarg_Scorpio made an excellent thread about this topic, too. Look at it for further information! → Attack Heli Change Thread. (keep alive for Devs)

Greetings,
An angry Helipilot

2

finally… thanks for writing down whats on my mind for weeks… i loved the attack choppers in bf3 but for bf4 it is really frustrating for most of the time…
they arent fun any more :frowning: hope dice reads this

3

I AGREE

4

+10000 @ OP! Hope Dice will take action and fix this ridiculous attack Heli in BF4.. even a Littlebird can take you down if it has 2 engineers inside fixing it..

5

Yes.

6

I dont disagree on your other points, but Havoc needed something because its a flying bus, the 3d model and hitbox are WAY bigger than the other attack heli’s. Remember in BF2 they gave the Havoc gunner cannon more damage than the other Heli’s to compensate, here its just fire rate and recoil.

In any case once they give Attack Heli’s SOMETHING in the way of actual defensive capabilities and survivability then we can talk about tweaks to its weapons. As it stands right now you’re basically getting hit by 2 + 2 Attack Radar Missiles the moment you’re taking off. Shit is just broken all around.

7

i loved it aswell in bf3 but damn , in bf4 it feels like a 1000 ton flying POS

8

Lol, so you’re not going 100-0 anymore, so for you it’s not fun anymore. How sad. I mean, something can actually kill you in a chopper now! The nerve!

9

Attack heli is useless as it is the rockets seem to fire too far from the side and the spread is awfull and the guided missile is ok but if the scout heli got a repair guy your attack heli is a sitting duck.

need a way to buff the repair on the attack heli to counter the scout with repair guy if the scout has no repair guy leave as is but i doubt they could code that.

10

Childish comment. There’s a middle ground. Some lucky round from BF3 posted to youtube =/= what’s typical when you join a server in BF4 – 99 times out of 100 you’re dead within seconds in an AH on any map not named Shanghai.

11

^^^This

12

cod game with vehicles, and your all crying how

13

nope its fine, no more fucking chopperrape.

dont fix anything, thanks!

14

Agreed on most points except: gunner cannon damage, I think 1 round does 1 damage to vehicles and we have 90 rounds. How can you be ok with that?

The flipping needs to go, mobility hit is enough, why missiles impact any momentum on your chopper?
Also, when you disable a vehicle and it crashes, you should get the kill!
Stealth perk is useless with current countermeasure reload times. It only gives like 1 sec increased lock-on time vs 25 sec countermeasure reload it’s not much.

15

I’d like to echo many of the OP’s points.

The chopper needs re-working and the jets are a fucking JOKE.

A list like this could be made for all the vehicles but I appreciate someone taking the time to elucidate some of the choppers big blunders.

It’s really too bad the game is so dreadfully borked right now because it means a lot of these weapons and vehicle tweaks that are badly needed are just going to be that much more delayed.

16

I think DICE is trying to remove anything “skill based” from the game.

Sniper rifles are one example, heli are another. They simply try to dumb it down as much as possible, nerf anything that ppl whine about. Btw. its just me or attack choppers are way slower now?

Btw. in case you fly heli, you wont notice that much, but in jets that limited flyzone is really an issue. Worst is Dawnbreaker map.. thats like if you try to park jet into garage for Mini. Also not fan of that bullsh*t of “jet starts in mid-air” (nowhere to land usually).

But as I said, they try to make from it “game for kids”. It went long way from BF2, with each version to the worse. Except netcode, thats almost as bad as in BF2.

Just in case someone wonders, if you remove chance to show “skill” in the game, you will also remove will of good players to play and/or reason for others to try to match those which are better than them. Eg. leaving you with game that pretty much no one wants to play.

DICE right now look like they dont know what they are doing. Or what they want to do. One thing that they really shouldnt do is listening to the whiners or “community” as they say. It really didnt improve game (yes in small bits, but hurt in most).

If you want to create a great game, you must think on your own, you must be sure this is what you want to do and you want it certain way. Moment you let “community” speak into it, is moment you start to fail. In case you want some confirmation, you can look where WoW ended compared to “vanilla”. If you try to please “everyone” you end with game, that pleases almost no one. I guess they dont get that. They will, as soon as sales will start to drop. Maybe BF5 or BF6, it will happen. Its bound to happen, unless they change.

Yea I went bit “off-topic”, but its as usually everything tied together. If you dont have firm idea “what you want to do” you end with this. With “this” being BF4.

17

You try jumping out of a descending helicopter.

18

Ignorant post. I saw that coming. It’s not about me not getting kills with it anymore. I’m just saying that there isn’t a point in having an attack chopper in the game if its as unbalanced as this one.

19

The attack heli is basically an automatic death in this game. It will definitely get a buff at some point. There is no way they intended on it being this useless.

20

The reason why jets start in mid air is to avoid teams stealing jets from eachother :wink:

I like the way air vehicles are now. There are still skilled pilots out there in BF4 who get a high KD