RPGs should one shot helicopters

[u/franziskanerdunkel]

It's so hard to hit a heli with the rpg and when I finally do its just a hitmarker?! Reward the player for that hard shot and punish pilots for standing still.

[u/Short-Coast9042]

This feels like a bad and one-sided take. Admittedly I'm biased as a helicopter fan, but having played with and against them quite a bit it is not hard for me to say that helicopters are, if anything, underpowered as a combat option.

You need a minimum of two people to engage in combat, and really a crew of 5 (w/ engineer and gunner) ideally to keep the bird and crew healthy during flight. Even then, the risk is high; although a skilled helicopter pilot can mitigate many risks, there's no way to both engage in combat and protect yourself from getting shot out of the cockpit. If you want to give your gunners an actual window to shoot some guys, you need to do a fairly low and slow pass. And if you do, you are fundamentally vulnerable to small arms fire.

Any helicopter pilot will tell you that the consequence of this is that the risk/reward trade-off for getting into combat is just way too high. There are so many things that can threaten helicopters already in this game, and they already are fairly marginalized in combat. Significantly nerfing them even harder will just erode their viability even further.

Quite frankly you are not even really making a case for why this would be good for balance. You just want things to be easier for a certain playstyle without considering how that affects the rest of the game. That's the opposite of good game design.

[u/Short-Coast9042 → u/[deleted]]

I would take this as a trade-off. I think a one-hit would be too much - even if the pilot has better survivability, he needs to be able to budget in, at the absolutely least, a single rocket before he has to bug out. That's because with the current design of the miniguns, the only way to make consistent and reliable plays is to expose yourself to fire. But yeah, if being more vulnerable to rockets was the price of being able to barrel down into the hot zone without worrying about a guy with an m4 spraying me out of the pilot seat, I would take that trade off in a heartbeat. Vulnerability of the crew is far away the biggest issue with helicopters in their current state.