Is anyone else finding the helicopters a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pain to actually aim with?

[Blunder Bro]

Test driving these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ things has not been fun. Hover mode takes forever to stop moving. unless i am strafing i can't get the stupid cannons to point where i want. Actually hitting things is not easy or fun.

[kamikazi21358]

Helicopters are like what I predicted they would be: way more frigile to everything except small arms from coax MGs and stuff if in the MI-24 or whatever; but has the firepower to literally kill half of the entire enemy team.

[Firedune]

copypasting from my reply to someone else having trouble setting up their flight stick for helos

Anyway, Basically, you'll want/need to be rebinding everything.

Step 1 is making sure that your main flight axis (axsisi?) are set up properly. Be sure to give yourself some generous deadzone space, any movement will reset your gunnery camera to zero. Make sure that you've got at least one throttle equivalent; you'll want to bind that to the collective min/max (your primary thrust-y thing). The last movement-related thing you'll want to set is the Hover Mode button (hover mode on/off) and Hovering Height buttons (set 1 button each to min/max). This'll get you flying but the flight dynamics are differet for each helo, so heads up on that.

Step 2 is setting up camera controls, and this one can be a PITA, it took me a while to figure out what does what. So, oddly enough, flying can be significantly easier whie in cockpit mode as you'll have less of a tendency to over-correct and it gives you a better feel of which direction your helo is actually going. Anyway, the first one to set up is the Toggle View button, you'll be pressing that one a bit. Next is the real PITA, setting up your actual camera. I'm forced to use a hat switch, which is... not ideal so if you've got head tracking, use that. Otherwise, it you want to bind head movement to a hat switch start binding the "View in battle" axis and set it to "Relative Control". This moves the camera smoothly instead of 100% in an instant.

Step 3 is setting up gunnery/weapons. Set "fire machine guns/cannons" to your favorite trigger. This will fire every machine gun while in cockpit mode but the main turret will also be locked forward (everything should more or less line up nicely with your sights). Next up is binding your rockets to your second favorite trigger. (i like binding the key to "fire salvo" because aiming is a bit inaccurate and most helos carry a lot of rockets). Next thing you should bind is your "Missile Control" X & Y axis, preferrably to a hat switch (NOTE this isn't SUPER important as when you are in the gunnery camera, your mouse will still work, making aiming MUCH easer, and it will also control the main turret). Finally, bind the "Fire Missile" button to your third favorite trigger.

Step 4 is mostly binding Misc items. A handful of handy things to have bound to some auxillary buttons are "Sight Stabilization" (only works in gunner mode) , Open Map, and Landing gear. This is all for Simplified control, but it'll get you flying. Enjoy!

[kamikazi21358]

Originally posted by kamikazi21358:

They must have nerfed stuff again, on the dev server you could hit tanks with like 80% accuracy from 4.9km using ATGMs.

Quick update:
So apparently, the range of these helicopters are rather ridiculous.

Just killed an M113 20mm from ~6.9km.

[Obamenau]

Originally posted by MeanSwing:

cmon man, plus who needs a chopper when you got a jet that can carry 114 hydras and goes at 800km/h with them

Those things actually work against eachother. Hydras are much better on a heli

[Hydra]

my guess is that you are probably not used to flying helicopters yet. all you gotta do is practice to become familiar with how they work

[kamikazi21358]

Does it matter how fast I go if you can literally just hover over the tree line over 7km away and accurately snipe tanks from complete immunity from ground forces like the little (censored) I am?