As the title already says, I have trouble flying the Do-335. I tried boom 'n' zooming with it, but somehow the elevator is extremely weak, which makes pulling out of a dive, a rather tricky thing. It also doesn't get up to speed in a straight line, which is historically questionable.
Anyhow, before my frustration takes completely over and I give up on it, I want to ask some of you here: "How does one Do-335 properly?"
Posted Aug 5, 2017, 6:50 PM UTC
Fly high shoot bombers avoid fighters
Or lure fighters with wing mounted guns into headons and laugh as you murder them long before their convergence.
I loved my Do 335, got through tier 4 and got all german jets but the narwhal, 162, and MiG-15 with the Do. 335 B-2 in one week. Unfortunately, it is not in a good place right now. I would primarily ground pound, killing medium tanks on Sicily and landing craft on Norway, in addition to the occasional F8F or Wyvern that thought it was a good idea to head-on three Mk 103s and two Mg 151s. But since those days the health of AI ground targets has been buffed and the effectiveness of the guns have been reduced. Your best bet is to climb hard right when you spawn and try to intercept B-29s head-on. You really only get one pass, because by the time you complete a turn they are long gone. I can't really recommend flying it right now unfortunately. These are my stats for anyone interested.
That's about what I expected...
I can fly pretty much every plane in the German tech tree to an effective degree, the Do-335 is somewhat of a final frontier for me.
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The higher you go the faster you get, and most opponents you face go slower at those altitudes. Sometimes more sluggish... nothing is more sweeter then out turning a Spitfire 22 at 9000 meters altitude in a turn fight. Though a problem is you can't dictate how high the combat will go, if your team is full of fw 190's diving on the first AD-2 they see then your best hope is just go for bombers and try solo'ing out enemies low on energy and escape.
It also doesn't get up to speed in a straight line, which is historically questionable.
It's pretty zippy at altitude. I don't know why everyone expects it to be fast down low. It's got fat wings and a lot of wetted area, that's not a combination that leads to speed down low.
If you're basing your expectations off a few encounter reports, please remember that encounter reports can be very subjective, and rarely paint a complete picture of events.
I knew that saying that would get me Flak, should have left it out. :/
If you're catching flak flying a German plane, you need to buy the AA gunners more beers (Or maybe less. Point is, the gunners have the wrong amount of beer.) :P
The Do-335B-2 is my secret lover, and my most flown plane in the game, so here's my advice:
go to bad-dragon.com (nsfw), and search for the largest, thickest dildo they have (told you it's nsfw).
Don't even think about buying lube.
Once it arrives, the second you've taken it out of the box, shove it up your arse as violent and forceful as you possibly can. Don't practice this beforehand, you want to learn the Do-335 after all.
You should bleed from your arse and be crying now, I expect. Congratulations, you've mastered the Do-335.
I feel like I should also give you some actual advice (though the above is pretty useful, tbh).
climb right from the beginning, your airspawn is really helpful for that. Sideclimb a lot, like 60° away to the side from the enemy airfield at a minimum. I usually go closer to perpendicular, i.e. parallel to the "frontline". Climb to 6k at least, or as a variant at 4-5k start climbing in an intercept vector to the enemy bombers.
take out the bomber(s). if you've taken damage, rtb (chances are good you've got your front engine damaged in your first pass, and contrary to documented real-life behavior, you can't fly on one engine.... and your engines don't last long with damage).
Now, observe the battle, but do so from a save distance. You want to be way above the highest enemy. if you're still high from the bomber intercept, good. Otherwise, climb to at least 5k or 2k above the highest enemy. preferably go to 6k. hopefully you will still have some of your team left, and hopefully the battle is rather low by now. Stay very high, and dive rather steep (you need to get a good feel for the
elevatorstaircase to not lawn-dart). Cut your engine when you're about 1.5k distance away from the enemy you've targeted. Hopefully he'll remain unaware and preoccupied, so you can get a shot on him. Fire all you've got, you've got to make it count, and you can't adjust to his maneuvers anyawy, so more rounds = more chance to kill. Fire up your engines, and extend or climb again.This is the most consistent way to get kills with this plane, and you I guess you can imagine how consistent that is. The only other thing you can hope for/bait out is stalls, you've got great energy retention when not maneuvering, and for some reason allies like stall climbing when you're approaching.
Apart from that, never get in a situation where you have to move your mouse while the enemy is nearby. You can't get guns on target if he's maneuvering, and on the defensive it will only cost you energy you gain back slower than the enemy, while not even moving the plane out of the spread of the enemies guns. Not to mention a TU-2 and even B-17 outmaneuvers you easily.
for grinding... just groundpound, which doesn't work well either since the 103s suck against ground targets now (air-target can't kill ai mediums anymore, and HVAP does little damage, takes about 7 rounds per tank and; let's not even talk about player-tanks...).
^(I'm posting this as a response, since it's not advice anymore, and the comment is long enough as-is.)
The Do-335 has a really shitty FM, and is massively overtiered. It's fairly comparable to the F-82, personally I'd say a little worse in every metric (even firepower thanks to retarded DMs and sparks, as well as crazy MG damage). Yet the F-82 sits at 5.0, almost a full down-tier below the Do-335. As does the Wyvern. These three planes are roughly equivalent, I'd say the Do is the worst, but close enough to make them equal. Yet the Do is at the same BR as the highest german props. It can't compete even against equally tiered allies, (LF Mk. 9 vs 335 = lol gg).
As for FM, there's a report from '45, of a british CAP consisting of tempest mk.V, being outrun by a 335 at sea-level, after they ran into each other by chance. We don't know more about it, but even if it was a 335 without ammo and low on fuel, it shows the plane was massively better than it is in-game. mass that doesn't increase your drag doesn't meaningfully impact your speed or acceleration, and it'd have to be an entirely different type of aircraft to behave so much better than the Do-335 if the ingame performance was correct. You can't outrun 3.7 planes at ground level, and even at your """"optimal""" altitude of 7k, plenty other planes outrun you. for example P-38k (rare premium sitting at whooping 5.0), while you're barely faster than griffon spits.
Its placement and FM, and that nothing has been done about it, is to me at this point further circumstancial evidence (together with the other nerfs to germany over the last year or so, be it 109s furnace, 190s elevator and unique "realistic" compression, or the recently-removed exclusively german tank chance to catch fire from any hit, even non-penetrating mg fire) that gaijin is intentionally making sure germany performance poorly in the game. Right now, germany is the worst nation to play at Tier 4, where "coincidentally" the majority of the playerbase plays and the grind picks up. german GF Tier 4 is pure masochism, and you can see it on the queue numbers (regularly less people than japan, even though it was always the (2nd) most played nation). Air is not too much better. With skill you can still get decent W/R and K/D, but it's an uphill struggle since german props stop at 5.7 while allies have great and very popular props just above, meaning often the teams are unequally tiered, i.e. you face better planes without equivalent among your team.
I see what you mean, the thing with the Do-335 is that it would be actually well placed at its BR, if it would actually perform more or less historically accurate. I mean the Pfeil was mainly known for its high speed and surprisingly good handling for a heavy fighter, which in game, it does neither. It is by far the most underwhelming plane in the German tech tree, and that has to say something.
And if someone doesn't believe me, here's how the first encounter with the Do-335 went:
"French ace Pierre Clostermann claimed the first Allied combat encounter with a Pfeil in April 1945. In his book The Big Show (pp. 273–274) he describes leading a flight of four Hawker Tempests from No. 3 Squadron RAF over northern Germany, when he intercepted a lone Do 335 flying at maximum speed at treetop level. Detecting the British aircraft, the German pilot reversed course to evade. Despite the Tempests' considerable low altitude speed, the Royal Air Force fighters were not able to catch up or even get into firing position."
yup, exactly.
And thanks, that was the encounter I ment. It's been posted here before, and I remember it was brushed aside because we know nothing more about the flight. Which would be a decent argument, if the discrepancy between the report and the in-game FM wasn't so stark that nothing short of the plane closterman was talking about being a completely different design would explain it.
It think it's kinda odd that it gets Brushed aside like that, I mean, it's in a book written by an allied fighter ace, most people arguing about allied aircraft use such accounts as proven fact. So why doesn't it count in that case then, what more do they want?
There's also this
I'm not sure where this perception of a consistent hate for german vehicles- especially planes- comes from, makes no more sense than the "prussian bias" thing a while back. Gaijin is very slow to make any balancing changes, and overall mechanics changes (radiator behavior on wep, ludicrously insane rocket inaccuracy fix, fuel type changes, interceptor spawns, the long-dormant cap rush CAS abuse) have happened to favor non-German vehicles the last couple of patches. New planes, which are also given rather generous BRs a lot of the time has left the late P-47 models rather clubby. And it is rather ridiculous to thing something as poorly implemented as the non-pen fire chance as an intentional nerf to German vehicles, rather than a mistake copy-pasted onto everything new for the faction.
The 335, though, isn't as badly modeled as is being implied. The roll is fine, and the pitch/rudder honestly seem accurate. The plane turns rather well for its size, but has an abysmally bad pitch response. This isn't compression, it's just the effect of having the ridiculous amount of weight each engine represents so far from the center of gravity. That much pitch inertia will lead to an elevator response that is very slow to kick in, regardless of any bad or good wing loading. I haven't done enough flying of the plane to evaluate lacking speed or acceleration behavior, but that should be relatively easily corrected in bug posts: you have speed at alt and horsepower, use that to find wetted area to derive speed at low altitude and use weight/prop efficiency to determine proper acceleration.
The only reason 109s have thermal problems is the change a bit back for wep to close radiators. This does largely make sense in combat, but hurts wep-climbing, particularly in planes with rather all-or-nothing radiators like the 109: they cool quickly, but heat quickly with rads closed. You can argue whether the mechanic makes sense or not, personally I'd prefer a system that without MEC opens them at slower speeds for climb, say fully open at 150ish KIAS down to full closed at 300, but this wasn't a directed nerf to German planes.
The 190s, similarly, aren't nerfed much if at all. They got a flight model update, but still don't compress if you take 45 minutes fuel. I've repeated this ad nauseam, but the low fuel loads would move their center of gravity to inhibit positive G load (without excessive trim adjustment). They don't really compress at all. Taking a minimal fuel load in a 190 and trying to boom and zoom is like trying to work with default ammo on the 151s, you are making a decision to cripple an essential aspect of your performance. This does need to be better illustrated, by preferably gaijin or even just the community, but isn't a problem with the flight model.
They do face almost insane competition in the bearcats, griffons, and LF 9, but the late spitfires tend to club all of air RB, and the bearcats and 22/24 spits are an uptier from any german props. They just fall into the problem of the allies having few equivalents at the tier, but very popular groups just higher and lower. In 4.3-5.3 games, the only real (non-premium) threats to the D-9 or late 109s are the P-51D-30 and the P-47N/F-82, which should be 5.3 and 5.7 (without airspawn), respectively. On the other hand, on an uptier, they find little they can compete with at all, as they only allied planes present in a 5.3-6.3 or 5.7-6.7 match will be superprops.
I'd kill for something as simple as seeing a CG fore-aft percentage that dynamically changes as you alter loadouts.
I think the p38k is 5.3. But yeah, I agree that the 335 sucks.
Ok, so I bought a long one and a girthy one... maybe both at the same time will do the trick. (those things kinda look like modern art statues)
On a more serious note: So basically play as careful as possible and don't loose speed, kinda like a jet then. And I guess a big part of it is also hoping that the enemy team is made out of utter idiots. But thanks for the advice, I'll definately give it a try! :)
💯💯 I see a bright future ahead of you.
thankfully a lot of allied pilots at this tier get lazy/complacent. I'm the same when I play my Lf Mk. 9. The planes are so good that you can play extremely careless, and for the Do that's what you can try to capitalize on. But if the enemy is on top of his game or even half awake, you'll have a very hard time.
You keep saying this every time the 335 comes up. And it's still not true. The Do 335 can fly on one engine just fine. Hell, you can fly the Do 335B-2 with a full fuel load and full bomb load on just the rear engine.
Don't believe me? Try it in test flight. Get airborne, shut down your forward engine. You'll maintain level flight around 320km/h IAS.