3241

I think there should be a forced maximum firing range by type of tanks. A heavy tank should simply not be able to snipe as a tank destroyer, regardless of tier.

3242

Yeah, but you still always get fifteen tanks per match, unless something really odd happens. What I’m talking about is adjusting the number of tanks too–so if you use all your points on six IS-4s, that’s all you take into the match. How this could work in public matchmaking I have no idea, of course.

I have all the upgrades except for the 105. Yes, it gets faster, but never fast, and the turret traverse isn’t too speedy either, but then again, that turret is as big as Texas. It’s not a slow tank once upgraded, but it’s fairly cumbersome.

Yep. The weird bit is that the stock 152 will sometimes make amazingly accurate shots, and other times miss targets right in front of the tank. The erratic aiming is more frustrating than the inaccuracy I think. But it’s also so damn slow I figured I had to get an engine upgrade, even if that delays the long 122. The stock gun still kills things pretty well.

Tell me about it. Arty unlocks are vicious. But I do like playing arty (except on city maps, ugh, and Mountain Pass sucks too), and it can really be helpful when you’re facing a lot of heavies. Here’s one way they got it right, in that lower tier (comparatively) arty can indeed have a real role to play in a high tier match. But lights are screwed, blued, and tattooed.

3243

Rejiggering the matchmaking - especially in terms of level range for non-Russian servers, but potentially also for the heavies/medium mix - strikes me as a better compromise than reducing view ranges on heavies.

I hate to pull out “realism,” but many heavies were and should be “sniping,” and some of them are (and should be) less suitable for close range encounters. And something about artificial view distance caps like that just rubs me the wrong way, it’s too much of a quixotic balance preference > pseudorealism tradeoff.

I’ve more or less quit WoT over the matching issue. I understand what people say about making a bit of an impact with an undergunned tank, but the up-gunned PZIV isn’t all that well-suited for that sort of quasi-scouting, damage-avoiding role. It’s more like wait for the best opportunity to trade your life for a few shots that do damage. After X amount of games of that it doesn’t matter if XP is accumulating because you haven’t had fun for 90% of your games for a few weeks.

3244

In game terms, that might make sense, though historically some of these heavy tanks were little more than tank destroyers themselves (cf. Maus). Then again, one of the draws of higher-tier guns is range, and penetration-at-range.

You have a good point in that the same gun on a TD chassis could often have a greater effective range than when mounted on a tank turret. A fixed mount of limited traverse and probably heavier hardware (as it didn’t have to rotate, etc.) could provide a more stable platform, and optics on a TD, which would also benefit from not rotating and stuff, might well be better. I don’t know for sure though.

3245

I’d tend to agree, in general, though if anything lights need longer view ranges–their guns can’t reach that far so it wouldn’t make them snipers, but they could actually scout then. Historically, light tanks did a lot of things that aren’t reflected in the game (traverse terrain heavier vehicles could not, supported infantry as mobile machine guns, etc.) including scouting, but scouting was often done while stationary and hidden, or with crew dismounting even to scout over ridgelines and stuff, things you can’t do in the game. What they did not do in light tanks in the Second World War (at least not as a matter of either doctrine or choice) was zoom around the battlefield desperately trying to expose as many enemies as possible before dying in a fiery explosion…

3246

With the SU 151, I’m not sure what gun to use while I focus on grinding away exp for the ISU. The first gun is more powerful then the other ones on the tech tree, but has a 3 shots per minute firing rate. The highest tech gun has a 9 shot per minute firing rate but does 3 times less average damage.

3247

Please don’t misunderstand me - reducing view ranges isn’t my preferred solution, it’s just the easiest one. If anything, imo, all view ranges should be increased…

Preferred solution, in my mind, would follow something like this:

  1. Remove arty
  2. Restrict ‘view’ to combination of 3 ‘views’ - driver view(30 degree cone, straight in front of tank), gunner view (60 degree cone aligned with turret), commander view (60 degree cone aligned right click). So at most, assuming perfection seperation, you could see in a 150 degree arc in front of your tank. Anything in your ‘view’ you can see. (ie a tank could be 5 feet away, behind you, but if you dont have the turret, hull or commander facing it, it’s invisible
  3. Team spotting only happens on the mini map
  4. Remove auto targeting
  5. Remove 3rd person view
  6. Remove glow from targeting reticle
  7. Remove view range limitations

I don’t really mind arty - and agree with the rationale of why it’s in the game now - but I think it’s a poor motivator. Right now, camping has more benefits than moving - which is fine, if you want a game about camping. If you want a game about moving, i think you really need to impair those things about camping that make it so effective or, otherwise, give moving those benefits it should have.

3248

If you plan on playing the tank at it’s best, focus on getting all the gun upgrades. The first upgrade is a better version of the SU-100’s top gun (higher rate of fire and good penetration). The second upgrade even better with even higher rate of fire and better accuracy. The first gun has higher rated damage but worse penetration, so as a tier 7 TD, you’ll have a hard time penetrating anything your own tier with it, making it mainly an HE tosser until you get one of those upgrades.

Both upgrades transfer to the ISU-152 and make it solid while you grind to the disgustingly powerful 152mm BL-10 gun.

3249

Hey new weird medal today:

3250

Congrats IMO that’s got to be the toughest medal to get.

I think Burda’s is also pretty difficult: “Awarded for the destruction of five or more enemy self-propelled guns.” since there aren’t that many games with five or more SPGs in the first place.

If you haven’t already seen it, there’s a full list here. Most of them do look pretty hard to get.

3251

I think without 3rd person view the game would be claustrophobic and not nearly as intuitive, but that’s only my viewpoint. Like much of the other stuff you mention, this is more sim like than FPS like, and if you did that you’d really have to change a lot about this game, because it’s still CounterStrike with tanks at its heart.

As for camping, the fundamental problem is that tanks in WWII couldn’t hit squat while moving, and on the defensive they generally did camo up and hunker down, and when they moved they moved to another nice hunkering down position. But the game mechanics echo standard FPS mechanics, where the gist of the game is about running around shooting each other. It’s simply not really applicable to WWII tank combat–it works in game terms, but because WoT is just realistic enough, the game rewards sitting tight. Hell, if you have a big slow tank with a kick-ass gun, why not wait for some fool to run in front of you?

Arty theoretically should make camping dangerous, except for two things. One, the spotting system makes spotting for arty pretty suicidal for the spotters, and two, the constricted geometry of the maps means there are far too many places in dead spots where arty can’t hit, even with high trajectory weapons. Moving is the best defense against arty, it’s true, but even in matches with no arty people still camp, because again, you can’t hit anything while moving, not reliably at least, and not when you’re spending several thousand a shot. On balance, I find matches with arty much more “tactical” than those without arty. Campers that are spotted or fire run serious risks, and have to move or die, while in non-arty matches there is less risk to staying in place it seems.

3252

Saw the new TK system in action for the first time today. Was playing my M6 and a T-28 on our team took a shot or two at a friendly at close range after they bumped a few times. He hadn’t even killed anyone, but his tag turned aqua blue.

I figured even though he hadn’t killed anyone yet, the system wouldn’t be tagging him if he didn’t have a history of shooting at friendlies, so I lit him up. I got marked -1 kills, which I guess makes sense. But presumably it didn’t mark me as a potential TKer in system.

Even though I wasn’t sure he was going to continue shooting friendlies (he had stopped firing before I took him out) I figured the more we prevent letting those type of people play the game the better. No idea how often you have to shoot friendlies to get turned aqua, but I’ve seen a number of team kills happen since the auto-TK system went live. I’m pretty sure they were all accidental, and I’ve never seen anyone turn aqua before.

3253

Seen the aqua twice. Once it was clearly an intentional TK’er and eventually after he killed three I think someone took him down. The other time it may or may not have been intentional, and he didn’t actually kill anyone; the enemy killed him however. AIUI, once he’s blue you can shoot him with impunity, but I don’t know how the system flags someone for the “Rage of Aqua.”

3254

I brought up the high-damage, low-rate-of-fire vs. low-damage, high-rate-of-fire tradeoff a while back, and their seemed to be more people voting for high-damage, low-rate-of-fire gun. Now that I’ve had a chance to play with it a bit, I have to agree that the high-damage, low rof is the way to go. Reasons include:

[ul][li]As schurem pointed out to me, you want your alpha strike to be as big as possible. Ideally you want to hit your opponent so hard that he doesn’t hit back. If you can kill him in one shot, he’s done. With the high-rof gun you have to hit him twice to do the same amount of damage, which gives him a chance to hit back.[/li][li]Sometimes you’ll see an enemy exposed who doesn’t know you’ve got a shot on him. As soon as you hit him, he’ll pull back behind cover. You’ve only got one shot at him, so you want to hit him very hard.[/li][li]With a high-damage, low-rof gun you can pull behind cover while reloading and still get your maximum DPS. With something like the M4A3E8 gun which fires every 2-seconds you have to sit out there exposed in order to maximize your DPS rate. With a quick-fire gun, there’s really no point in ducking back and if you do duck back, your rate-of-fire and thus your DPS go down. Firing, and then ducking back particularly works well in urban environments, but it can also work when you’ve got a nice slope or some friendly rocks. Just think with your 3 shots-per-minute gun you’ll get to be under cover 18 seconds for every shot you take :-) TDs do have a bit more trouble ducking behind corners in urban environment, and I often end up just firing away with my TD – but with an 18-second reload time, probably ducking is worth it even for a TD.[/li][li] Similarly you can do a lot of other stuff while you’re reloading. Fire and then displace to a new firing location. Your DPS isn’t dropping because you can’t fire yet anyway![/li][li]I think there’s a psychological benefit to hitting hard. If someone gets walloped for 2/3rds of their health, they are very reluctant to stick their tank out again. This gives your team a big potential benefit. I suppose if an enemy really know their tanks well, they might make the opposite conclusion – “hey, I’ve now got 20 seconds where I can rush that TD” – but I think the fear reaction is more common.[/li][/ul]
That said, a 20-second reload time would be rather painful. I’m not sure I could put up with that.

3255

The high damage gun he’s talking about only has 135 penetration, where his other options have 175 penetration.

In situations where there’s a choice between damage vs ROF with same or similar penetration, I’ll choose the high damage low ROF gun for the reasons above.

In his case where there’s a huge jump in simple weapon effectiveness, I feel you pretty much have to choose the gun with much better penetration. The 175mm penetration guns will be able to damage tier 8 hull armor fairly effectively while the 135 penetration gun will not even be reliable vs tier 7’s.

3256

My favourite tank this time remains the T46. Its not too slow (about same as a T34) and has two decent guns (45mm and 37mm auto)

Ram II is also good. Working my way up to M4E8 the M5/M7 line. In beta, M7/ T34 and M4E8 were my favourites. I just like medium tanks with high ROF.

M37 is just meh.

3257

I have Billotte’s Medal on my 3001H - Awarded to players who destroy at least one enemy vehicle and survive the battle to victory despite receiving at least five different critical hits and 80% or more loss of hit points.

I do really enjoy my 3601H though. If I feel like sniping, slap on the conical gun. 167/65, 17.14 ROF, .27 accuracy and 1.1 aiming time. The short aiming time leads to more criticals which appears to be key for a low damage / high penetration gun. It’s all, plink, plink, plink, dead. Lots of Confederate, Sniper, Sharpshooter & Master Gunner medals. If I feel like running around blowing crap up I’ll toss on the low accuracy & ROF 10.5cm 53/410. Side and rear shots ahoy! Big gun go boom. Reaper medals tend to appear with this one. If I can’t make up my mind I’ll use the 7.5cm with AP shells. 138/135 But where’s the fun in being able to handle any situation… oh wait.

Although it could be I like it because all my dudes are at 100% and have started their second skill.

ydejin has an excellent point about the psychological benefit to hitting hard. I know I play more defensively when I’m down to double digits of armor. Let me put in a vote for accurate rate of fire crits though. Hearing, “We’ve lost our tracks!”, “Gunner’s dead!”, “We’re on fire!” isn’t fun on the receiving end but there’s lots of fun in the giving.

While I’m ranting I’m going to say just how much I hated the M3 Lee. It’s the worst of tanks and TDs put together.

3258

I had a T-28 shoot my T29 in the back of the turret when I pulled in front of him and he turned aqua on me, which was kind of odd. I’ve seen people kill other tanks completely and not get turned. Hell I saw one dude repeatedly shooting an afk dude in the back and not get changed.

Maybe the T-28 had a habit of shooting dudes and that tipped him over the edge, but sometimes it does feel kinda random.

Hell one match our arty accidently tracked a Jagdpanther out of the gate and turned blue on us. He was a big monster arty, so that seemed even odder. Its like if you damage a dude but don’t kill em you almost have a higher chance of turning.

3259

This is all nice but in addition to penetration (as pointed out by Nathan), there is also accuracy to consider. Big alpha strike makes 0 damage when you miss. Your DPS takes a huge hit when you miss. The psychological effect of you missing is quite opposite from when you hit - the encouraged enemy will happily drive closer to kill you while you reload.

“Sometimes you’ll see an enemy exposed who doesn’t know you’ve got a shot on him. As soon as you hit him, he’ll pull back behind cover.” Remember you are not the only one shooting at enemies, that enemy also needs to shoot, so opportunities like this usually do not last longer than 10 seconds. With a low ROF gun, the chances are you will be reloading and will miss the opportunity.

Ducking for 18 seconds can also be detrimental when the enemy tanks are crossing the street you are covering to flank your team.

In addition, you are at mercy of medium and other “faster” moving tanks.

Pretty much each of your points can be re-worded in favor of faster rof guns. :) Because ROF and damage are not the only two things to consider in this game.

As usual, the choice of gun depends on your playstyle. If you prefer fighting at med to close distance and usually have a buddy or two to cover you, then by all means grab the derp gun (and make sure you have fully upgraded your tracks and engine). If you prefer to snipe from some distance, you will be better off with a more accurate, faster shooting gun.

3260

I was assuming all other things were equal, same penetration, same accuracy. Certainly better penetration is very important. I personally prize accuracy, but that’s probably playstyle dependent. Some people play in close enough that accuracy probably isn’t as important. Aim time can also make a big difference.

[reordering a few of your quotes to group them for my response]

Well, I will allow a 20 second reload gun can be a problem (I’ve never tried one). I suspect many (perhaps most) tanks don’t move fast enough that they’ll be able to cross during a typical slow ROF reload cycle. They will certainly be taking a big (potentially fatal) risk trying to move forward from cover to cover in something like Karelia. My guess is if they advance they’ll get caught in the open with their pants down on anything with a rate of fire above say 7-8 shots / minute.

This may be a play style issue, but in fact I usually am the only one shooting at them. Either because I’m one of the only tanks defending a particular front, or because they’re on the other front, and they think they are well shielded from our tanks on their front, but their ass is hanging out where I on the far side of the map can hit them.

Typically if I miss, they don’t move, because they think they aren’t exposed, so I can keep shooting until I actually hit. Then they move.

I don’t see how this is a function of ROF. It’s more a matter of turret speed and tank turning radius.

I will allow that when circling a heavy with a medium tank I prefer a high ROF, although I can’t think of any logical reason for that preference. In fact, the ideal would be to fire once per rotation, where you could thus time your hits to strike the rear of the tank.

Certainly ROF and damage are not the only consideration, but I’m pretty doubtful all my points can be reworded for high ROF guns. Barring the extreme cause of the 20 second reload, I see no advantage at all to high ROF guns in an urban environment – they really do require you to sit out there with a big fat target sign on you as you shoot. Same thing for any environment where there is cover you could duck behind to reload.

I’m sure it does come down the playstyle. Still I can’t come up with any advantage for a sniper to have a low-damage high rof gun, unless they are good at detracking.