For those of you who think Buffs are Deathstars...(stats)

[Innominate]

It's worth pointing out that bombers are bugged, so that the whole formation tends to take some of the damage inflicted on a single plane.

[Hortlund]

40 kills of various buffs vs 6 losses to various buffs.

Beefcace we should have a date, Ill bring my 190a8, and you can bring whatever buff you want

[Hooligan]

The B-17G has 2291 kills and has been killed 6405 times.

The B-26B has 1050 kills and has been killed 3021 times.

Divide those buff kills by 3:  2 out of 3 buffs are drones.

B17 stats are 2291 vs 2135
B26 stats are 1050 vs 1007

In these 2 planes a buff PLAYER apparantly kills about 1 fighter for each time he is killed.  This doesn't seem so horrible to me.

Kills probably should not be awarded for killing drones.  Maybe 1/3 of a kill should be awarded for each buff shot down?

Hooligan

[Wotan]

the objects of buffs are not to get kills.

They way most buffs are flown in ah there k/d are about what I would expect.

kinda of a dumb topic given all the early bugs with buff and kill scoring. Also the runways where you take into into a hill have probrably half those buff kills

[Hortlund]

Originally posted by Hooligan


Divide those buff kills by 3:  2 out of 3 buffs are drones.

B17 stats are 2291 vs 2135
B26 stats are 1050 vs 1007

In these 2 planes a buff PLAYER apparantly kills about 1 fighter for each time he is killed.  This doesn't seem so horrible to me.

Kills probably should not be awarded for killing drones.  Maybe 1/3 of a kill should be awarded for each buff shot down?
.
Hooligan

Not everyone take drones on every mission. You cant just divide by 3 and get an accurate result

[Beefcake]

OK guys, maybe it was wrong to post stats of buffs this tour given the bugs they had and still have. So here are Tour 29 stats, and remember Tour 29 ended before 1.10.

Buff Stats for Tour 29:

The B-17G has 7049 kills and has been killed 9743 times.
The B-26B has 6657 kills and has been killed 9178 times.
The Ju 88 has 883 kills and has been killed 2980 times.
The Lancaster III has 3757 kills and has been killed 9108 times.
The TBM-3 has 1277 kills and has been killed 5817 times.
The Ar 234 has 114 kills and has been killed 386 times.
The Ki-67 has 684 kills and has been killed 1621 times.

And here is Tour 28:

The B-17G has 8685 kills and has been killed 12797 times.
The B-26B has 7928 kills and has been killed 11047 times.
The Ju 88 has 765 kills and has been killed 3268 times.
The Lancaster III has 4638 kills and has been killed 11589 times.
The TBM-3 has 1498 kills and has been killed 7682 times.
The Ar 234 has 117 kills and has been killed 344 times.
The Ki-67 has 755 kills and has been killed 1828 times.



I guess what I'm trying to get at here is alot of folks keep saying that buffs are "deathstars" and that they need to be nerfed, and blah blah blah. When in reailty they're dropping like flys all over the MA. And with this new "Mirrior Damage", buffs are now even easier to kill for all you must do is badly damage 1 buff out of the formation and the rest get that same damage. I belive the age of fluffing and buffing in AH are at an end, and the age of JABOing has started.

[ET]

Beefcake,

The buff kill stats have been like those you posted for at least
24 tours.

I would usually have 100 or so buff runs by now but because of the bombsite problems which are supposed to be fixed in the next patch, I haven't been on one medium or large buff run this tour.

I've been jaboing and GVing although I enjoy buffing more.

The new limits set on buffs are tough. If you maneuver too much you lose your drones and may have two kills chalked up against you. You have to stay in bombsite too long while the the 3 crews are blind to the outside world. The nme fighters can still fly through their own ack. I expect the kill stats against buffs to at  least double and don't think many buffers will go up against those odds for long and most will revert to Jabo.

[Wotan]

beefcake buffs arent supposed to kill fighters

Theres no way to get a true idea of how a buff is modelled based on k/d. I dont think buffs are "deathstars" but they certainly are "more deadly" then they were in rl. By that I maen they hit pretty regularly at longer ranges.  This has to do with the stability of the gun platform in ah. Add some shake to the buff guns and you will see the kill numbers drop even more.

Buffs in ah arent operated in such away as to avoid fighters. I have vulched numerous buff this tour and in previous tours who up at capped fields. I have killed buffs at 4k tooling around lo.

Looking at kill to death proves nothing about buff gun lethality.

Ht has said and others have shown that the 50 cals on the buffs are correct. What I doudt is the ability of rl gunners to track a 400+ mile per hour plane and get consistant hits at long ranges like we have in ah. Buffs are not any harder to kill then anything else in the game. In most instances they are easier to kill because of how they are operated.

I understand what your are saying but k/d is hardly evidence of it

[Innominate]

Real buff gunners didnt get nearly as much practice as we do.  They also didnt get to have 4 to 10 .50 mg's slaved to thier turret.  I believe that is what makes the difference, the solution I think would be to allow multiple gunners in a buff(as in one per gun) instead of just one, and remove the slaved guns.

Barring that, buffs are patheticly easy to kill right now anyways, so it's not a big deal.

[Shiva]

the solution I think would be to allow multiple gunners in a buff(as in one per gun) instead of just one, and remove the slaved guns.

Thereby making it safe for fighters to attack bombers again for the vast majority of buff drivers who get no gunners at all, or only get a single gunner. The guns in a bomber group already only fire in one direction at a time, or two if the pilot manages to get a gunner; is it so hard to get three people to attack a bomber formation to be able to kill it pretty much with impunity?

Something that should be doable fairly simply with the existing code is to allow up to five gunners in a full bomber formation. If the pilot and a gunner can both gun in a bomber, then it should be possible to put either a separate gunner in each plane of a formation, or a gunner in the lead plane and two gunners in each drone (you could add a second gunner to the lead plane at the expense of the pilot not being able to gun themself). If the lead plane of  a formation is the only manned plane, it still controls the whole formation's guns; if a drone is manned, its guns are controlled by the gunner(s) in that plane. This has the immediate effect of breaking up the fire from the formation into smaller pieces as the group gets more gunners, which helps the fighters some, and allows buff formations to defend themselves against more simultaneous attackers, which helps the buff drivers some.

Another thing that could be done is a .slave command for use by bomber pilots, which requires you to specify a handle. When you slave your bomber to another bomber, whenever your aircraft is on autopilot, it follows the slaved plane exactly the way drones follow the lead bomber now, letting the pilots of the slaved planes jump to gun positions without worrying about falling out of formation. This would have the same effect as allowing the drones to be gunned manually while allowing the crew of the slaved planes to continue a mission if the lead plane is killed.

[Wotan]

go fire the guns on the ju88 no shake or vibration

go fire the side guns on any buff no shake or vibration

none of the guns vibrate or shake. Real guns do. The theres no way a buff gunner could hit 20 pixels @ 1.5k if there was vibration.

Slaved guns arent the problem my squaddie urchin test them they dont converge the spray out  parallel  to each other. you can test it your self.

Everyone agrees 20 50 cals would shred a fighter. hell 1 more destroy an eng.

The only "problem" with buff guns is their stability. No human gunner could track a 350 - 450 mpg across the sky and score enough hits to rip a wing.

But even then buffs are ez kills.