I came to Enlisted from War Thunder and while I very much enjoy the infantry and tank combat plane combat appears very lackluster.
A major part of the problem in my eyes is the ability of planes to soak up damage. Not only does this feel very unrealistic, it also has some negative effects on the gameplay:
First is that aerial fights can take a very long time due to this huge amount of damage being taken. Once your target tries to actually evade his fate and get you into a turning battle you might as well just bail out and suicide to respawn as getting shots into the target will be only possible in such short windows that its wasted time as during all that time you’re missed on having any influence on the ground battle. Which is a general problem of enlisted as experienced players will feel an enormeous amount of pressure on their shoulders to carry their team due to what seems to be an ELO ranking. So from a team perspective any dogfighting good player is a burden to the team.
Second is that it makes AA equally time consuming and unrewarding. Its one player missing while he checks the skies for the next devastating enemy bomber attack runs and the damage dealt by AA is usually too few to take down an enemy plane reliably in one pass. Which means absolutely nothing to most enemy bombers anyways since they just make a suicide run. So if AA should be worth the time and resources they would need to be able to take down an enemy plane before he reaches his target.
Third is that this whole mechanic makes fighter planes obsolete and actually gold fighter plane squads a waste of money. Theres no sense in using them at all if the enemy doesnt really have to care if you shoot them down or not and when youre just wasting time waiting for another enemy plane to appear if you cant have any noteworthy influence on the ground meanwhile.
Now of course could people in planes who suicide get a much longer waiting time to be able to spawn anew but thats stuff for another topic. What I would like to see though is that planes become much more fragile. Ironically if you look at War Thunder Realistic Battles you’d find a system that would work quite proper. Which would mean that even strafing runs with only a short firing solution would be enough to effectively down planes.