Why are shoulder anti-aircraft guns so useless?

[smokingSnakeRIT]

Helicopters and jets have infinite flares, they barely use them and can now use them again HAHAHA while they destroy your team using a helicopter or jet you can't do anything except take a vehicle with anti-aircraft to take it down. What's the point in having guided missiles in the game if they're useless?

[Walrus-Sama]

The shoulder fired AA launcher is actually rather strong, it has no Y axis upper limit and ignores the below radar state. Since it carried by infantry it's also difficult for enemy aircraft to know where they are being targeted from and respond.

Even if you don't destroy the aircraft, the mere presence of infantry with AA launchers can deter enemy aircraft from entering into that air space. Forcing enemy aircraft to disengage and wait for their flares to regenerate can keep them out of the fight for a while, which helps your team.

[Alfen]

Lock-ons against aircraft in general is pretty bad but it's not because they don't do enough damage or are unreliable it mostly comes down to map design, most maps basically have a free out of bounds cover built into them for aircrafts (buildings, cliffs, mountains), you cannot follow them here and you wouldn't have the range to target them anyways.

Doesn't help that engineer have very limited rockets and the cooldown of flares is very short.
Even if you do land it the chopper will survive it (don't get me wrong infantry shouldn't one shot choppers) and the lack of reason to use anything but repairs on aircrafts means the downtime of a damaged aircrafts is extremely low.

If you have a team of 10+ anti air yeah sure air vehicles are going to be non existent so why do teams never gravitate towards that? It really does not feel gratifying that you deter an aircraft from approaching and force him to retreat every now and then without ever really taking him down. The attack helicopter having unlimited range on its thermal vision often leads to hunting the engineer down and instantly killing him, completely demotivating him to continue.
Don't get me started on how unsatisfying (down right frustrating sometimes) it is to use the soflam to help that endeavour.

If you want ways to have more chances of succeeding note where a chopper tends to retreat and ambushing him there is a good strategy, you'll often shoot your rockets at damaged helicopters who most likely will have recently used their flares but that most likely means you're going to have to get behind enemy lines and near their base.

Aircrafts are too powerful and the game heavily favors them, this is a reality we can't do much about.

I've trained myself to become quite good at hitting long distance helicopters with the .50cal sniper, taking about 5 hits to take down a helicopter.
Which is just sad that it's more reliable than the AA-missile.

[Ace The Kangaroo]

Alfen sums it up pretty perfect for me even if you get a lock which will be difficult to begin with because of the massive amounts of buildings or ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ trees blocking your vision helicopters can usually just ground themselves out of bound and avoid the shot if they don't have flares or duck behind a building. Failing all that you will probably only do 50 damage the only way to counter aircraft as infantry is to hope the pilot is bad and isn't aware of this strategy which is not good balance in my opinion. As such skilled pilots are easily able to rack up over 70 kills as engineers try in vain to take them down you could try to use Lis's controlled rocket launcher but this is incredibly difficult to land hits with.

If I do try to take down aircraft as an engineer it feels pointless as I would rather just kill the infantry at the point rather than try and fail to take down the helicopter attacking the point.
Don't even get me started with the jets especially the ones equipped with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thermite.

[smokingSnakeRIT]

Originally posted by Alfen:

Lock-ons against aircraft in general is pretty bad but it's not because they don't do enough damage or are unreliable it mostly comes down to map design, most maps basically have a free out of bounds cover built into them for aircrafts (buildings, cliffs, mountains), you cannot follow them here and you wouldn't have the range to target them anyways.

Doesn't help that engineer have very limited rockets and the cooldown of flares is very short.
Even if you do land it the chopper will survive it (don't get me wrong infantry shouldn't one shot choppers) and the lack of reason to use anything but repairs on aircrafts means the downtime of a damaged aircrafts is extremely low.

If you have a team of 10+ anti air yeah sure air vehicles are going to be non existent so why do teams never gravitate towards that? It really does not feel gratifying that you deter an aircraft from approaching and force him to retreat every now and then without ever really taking him down. The attack helicopter having unlimited range on its thermal vision often leads to hunting the engineer down and instantly killing him, completely demotivating him to continue.
Don't get me started on how unsatisfying (down right frustrating sometimes) it is to use the soflam to help that endeavour.

If you want ways to have more chances of succeeding note where a chopper tends to retreat and ambushing him there is a good strategy, you'll often shoot your rockets at damaged helicopters who most likely will have recently used their flares but that most likely means you're going to have to get behind enemy lines and near their base.

Aircrafts are too powerful and the game heavily favors them, this is a reality we can't do much about.

I've trained myself to become quite good at hitting long distance helicopters with the .50cal sniper, taking about 5 hits to take down a helicopter.
Which is just sad that it's more reliable than the AA-missile.

You have a point. I really like BF4 and BF1 because the AA weapons and aircraft are well balanced. In BF2042, after that I stopped trying to shoot down aircraft and preferred to exchange fire with the enemy team to try to capture an objective.

[Mayate]

4 rockets max, use Anti aircraft button be immune to rockets for 5 mins repeat. No counter play against aircraft unless your in a wildcat. Been this way since the game released and the devs are too cowardly to change it

[smokingSnakeRIT]

Originally posted by Mayate:

4 rockets max, use Anti aircraft button be immune to rockets for 5 mins repeat. No counter play against aircraft unless your in a wildcat. Been this way since the game released and the devs are too cowardly to change it

It's explained