If you stick with the attack chopper for a while, you start to realise the rocket pods carry most of your fights, especially once you get a feel for how they behave around mid?range fights on a big map in something like Battlefield 6 Bot Lobby. From roughly 400 to 800 meters the bulk of your rockets land close to the center of the crosshair, so your bursts actually matter instead of just throwing smoke in the air. Push in too close and the spread opens up, you are basically painting the sky rather than a target. The weird part is how much your own movement throws shots off: dip the nose and the rockets tend to ride high, pull the nose up and they sag low, so either keep the bird roughly level when you fire or start building that muscle memory to offset it without even thinking about it.
Reading Movement And Leading Shots
Once you are comfortable with the feel of the pods, the next thing that separates decent pilots from the ones farming the server is how they lead targets. You are never shooting where someone is, you are betting on where they are about to be. See a heli start to climb and you shift your aim slightly above its current path, see infantry sprinting across open ground and you drag your reticle ahead of them and a touch higher because they will usually try to jump or strafe at the last second. A lot of newer players just hold the trigger down and pray, but if you fire in short, controlled bursts, watch where the rockets land, then correct, you squeeze far more value out of a single mag. On moving targets out past 500 meters, aiming one or two chopper?widths ahead feels about right, but you tweak it by feel over time.
Using The TOW Like An Airborne Sniper
The TOW missile changes the tempo completely, it is basically your precision tool for deleting armor or other helicopters that think they are safe at long range. The trick is to stop staring at the main crosshair and lock your attention on the glow of the missile itself the moment it leaves the rail. It always dips right after launch, so starting just a bit low and then guiding it up with small, smooth inputs keeps it on line, while frantic, sharp movements almost always send it wide. When you keep the chopper relatively steady and ride that glow all the way in, hits on AA vehicles a kilometre out start to feel normal instead of lucky. Because the reload is long, something like seven seconds, swapping back to pods to throw in a quick strafe run while the TOW is cycling keeps your pressure up without sitting useless in the air.
Gunner Seat, Zoom Control And Target Priority
Sitting in the gunner seat turns the whole thing into a two?person grinder, especially now that zoom?lock lets the gunner ignore every tiny wobble from the pilot. You flick onto a target, hit zoom, and suddenly the sight just sits there, which makes it way easier to lead with the autocannon. The rounds still need travel time, so you drag your aim ahead of anything moving, but the rate of fire means you can walk shots onto them pretty quickly. Good gunners usually burn down infantry first since the splash damage punishes anyone clumped behind cover, then shift to light vehicles or open?top transports that cannot soak as many hits. If you are soloing, climbing to a safer altitude and briefly swapping to the gunner seat to dump a couple of tight bursts can flip a fight, as long as you are disciplined about swapping back before someone lines up a free missile.
Positioning, Flares And Staying Alive
All of this does not matter if you keep feeding the enemy lock?ons, so the last big piece is treating positioning like another weapon and not just an afterthought while you chase kills in a public lobby or a stacked squad grinding a buy Battlefield 6 Bot Lobby session. Think of your throttle as your main altitude control and your nose angle as your speed, then use both to break line of sight fast whenever you hear a lock tone. Diving behind hills, buildings, or canyon walls beats burning flares early, because you only want to pop them once the missile is definitely on the way and you have no cover left. The worst habit people get into is hovering over enemy spawns or hanging around after a pass, because every engineer and AA driver on the map gets a free shot at you. Hit from an angle they are not watching, drop your rockets or TOW, then peel out hard and come back from somewhere else once they have turned their attention away.
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