The radio squad was OP, prior to the latest two nerfs, yes, but it is really not all that useful anymore. Not unless you have several other such squads in play, so that they can chain their barrages.
What we see currently in the game is probably the brigade level support (75mm - 10.5cm), but we are missing the heavy artillery batteries and rocket batteries that would have been at the division or corps level.
I’d like to see the radio squad get the unlocks for heavy artillery, same duration but would be very damaging to tanks (~155mm+)
Another unlockable should be for the rocket batteries, at least with the Eastern Front radio squads. Between the Nebelwerfer and Katyusha, they were in widespread use and were extremely terrifying for the infantry on the receiving end. These barrages should be shorter, but more lethal to infantry in a wider area and have the suppression (camera-shake and blurred vision) effects.
Radio operator is perfectly fine. 1min arty strikes. Good options for soldiers in the squad. You can get 2 radio dudes 1 engineer 1 gunner 1 assaulter. Nice and all round and on top of that you get a arty strike every minute.
Its not op anymore, take a deep breath and ajust your playstyle. It is now just another squad in your arsenal, it is not a no brainer to bring but you can bring it if you feel your team needs it.
I still use it on cap zones sometimes, as it moves the bots on the periphery of the red circle, thus making them stand in weird and often unsafe locations. The shell rain itself is not dangerous anymore thanks to the overly long delay, but it also means the circle stays longer in play and keeps bots out longer. I use it at my advantage.
Piat can kill a tank from range, and a good tank with a somewhat competent team will not generally be moving close to detpack range. Particularly against the German tanks, the piat is amazing. If you’re german he can have an fg42 which is better than any assaulter weapon, and the sturmpistole is still very usable against anything except a sherman, even fairly frontally. Plus, who knows what they’ll release next, why not want to have ranged AT in a squad for future?
In my opinion, I think two possible ways to buff radio operators should be considered, either reverting the startup delay neft it received, or making it so the red circle of death doesn’t appear on the enemy team’s screen until after the ranging shots start to fire. This would mean artillery actually gets a killcount and poses a real danger.
I also would suggest changing it from the present circle of doom style, and change it to a grid-based call-in. I’d then block off capture points from being able to call down artillery on, after all, you’re going in to capture the points, not to level them to the ground. (basically just meaning prebuilt destructible defenses at caps last at least until a vehicle reaches the point to wipe it, instead of immediately getting wiped by attacker artillery on invasions. It also means you wouldn’t get to use artillery to push bots off defending points) This would both be more realistic, and easier to balance around, and would reduce the cheekyness of some artillery drops. The tradeoff being perhaps artillery hits / pushes bots away from a slightly larger area, perhaps?
But utility barrages like a secondary smoke barrage for radio operator squads would be nice too.