i also don’t like the sounds. The arty changes feel much better, they’re slower and more vulnerable, but i find I’m hitting about the same with them (and maybe better). However, I’m not liking what they did with the tanks - the tanks feel faster, more maneuverable and less ‘tanky’. Armor seems practically worthless now as just about every hit penetrates for damage, and even the shots seem faster, like the hit is registering immediately when i fire.
Overall, first impressions are they broke more than they fixed (and tbh, i thought the only thing ‘wrong’ with arty before was they allowed more than 2 per side). When your ‘tweak’ list continues for pages, you’re no longer tweaking…I dunno, maybe i’m just grumpy, i’ll try it again tomorrow with a clearer head…
oh, the other thing i noticed is a much more ‘zerg-like’ game. With tanks not being as defensively capable, and arties being absent, ‘domino effect’ collapses seem more common as guns en masse have no viable counter in defense or arty.
speed kills. even with the new acuracy (which i really, REALLY like) its incredihard for most people to hit your weakspots if you are zipping about like a mad puppy on red bull. Playing a very predictable game of peek-a-boo or rock-em-sock-em tanks will get you wtfpwned so don’t. adapt or die baby!
They greatly improved the effect of Camo Net in this patch and it now affects even large tanks that previously saw no benefit from it. At the same time they decreased effect of bushes by about 20%, so now if you want to be stealthy you have to specialize for it and give up something else. IMO it’s a great change, at least on paper, we’ll see how it holds up.
Other than a few tanks getting the usual tweaks in engine power, there were no “across the board” changes in regards to tanks’ maneuverability, speed, etc. It’s all in your head. :)
As for the armor, it’s quite opposite. Most of the gold ammo received nerfs - HEAT rounds had their penetration decreased, can ricochet now and they lose penetration if they hit screens. Sabot rounds had their normalization decreased from 5% to 1-2% (edit - of course, degrees, not percents), which results in losing about 20-30 mm of penetration at high tiers. As a result, gold ammo is much less godly now and is not a pretty much guaranteed penetration as they used to be. Heavily armored tanks that used to be next to useless (E-100, Maus) have become much much more viable, also thanks to less arty and improvements to the liner module.
At lower levels, a whole class of “derp” guns (~105 mm) was nerfed - their gold rounds used to have 150 mm penetration that allowed tanks like M4, Hetzer, etc. to pretty much one-shot enemies. Now it decreased to 100 mm, which means they won’t penetrate more armored tanks’ (KV modifications, T1, M6, etc.) fronts. I don’t have any of the low level derps in my hangar anymore, so I didn’t test it but the change sounds great.
On another hand, accuracy has been improved and it means that it is much much easier to hit stationary enemies now and not just hit them but hit their vulnerable spots. For example, even before the patch, it wasn’t recommended for the T32 to stick out their turret and just stand there - yes, the turret’s armor is awesome but commander’s hatch is very vulnerable. I was hitting T32s there before the patch and after the patch it’s even more reliable. Another example is a tank just standing there in a “diamond” position - it’s much easier now to penetrate him through the front wheel. Hiding behind obstacles is also more difficult now - I killed M103 hiding behind a corpse yesterday by hitting his rear wheel (it was sticking out), tracking him and then just hitting there repeatedly until he was dead.
All in all, there is plenty of armor in the game now but you have to play smart to use it. Stationary tank is a dead tank.
Oh and I forgot one more change. If you are on the West coast, you’ve got your own server now with much less ping, which also contributes to responsiveness of tanks, accuracy, etc. I am not a fan of fracturing the player base like that (it’s not that large to begin with) but, in the end, I guess it’s a good change for the affected people. West coast server’s ping is about 100 for me, while the East coast’s is ~30 - the difference is not huge but it is there.
I also noticed the west coast server and have similar thoughts on player base, but also wondered if the reduced latency is behind part of what I’m experiencing. I think they just should have just set up a central NA server, in chicago or dallas, which would have served the NA community fine.
I log in once a day or so, maybe every other day. Don’t play much; I have been working on Warships mostly. Tanks has such a toxic player community now that it’s depressing to play. Every single match devolves into someone raging against the “shitters” and bitching about something, and the skill level of the playerbase is dismal, especially at the holidays. Lots of blowouts. That, and so many of the new tanks they’ve unleashed in the premium shop are over priced and from what I read at least under powered. Or they’re ludicrously over powered.
Then there’s the Czech line, which is interesting enough I guess but is very hard to get any sort of connection with, really. I mean, no one knows anything about these tanks but, well, Czechs. The free German T3 you get is a Czech design I think, the the Toldi, and it’s not bad, but the game as a whole is feeling stale.
Then again, it’s still more engaging than Armored Borefare, er Warfare.
Lately I only play low tier. 1 thru 3 mostly. That’s why I was looking forward to the free tank. As far as obnoxiousness, I just ignore it. I have great results with my Marder 2 and my Pz 2. Low tier FTW as far as I’m concerned. Otherwise I’m playing War Thunder and liking it a lot.
I gave up on high tiers as they cost too much to run, and yeah, too many elitist jerks there. But low tiers, which I really like in general, are also where you find whole teams full of people who can barely point their tanks in the right direction.
I tried Warthunder a while ago, but I found finding matches problematic in simulation mode.
The Toldi is actually Hungarian. I’m playing this every day but I’m not the whale I used to be. With this game there was always going to be the wall they would hit when all the famous tanks have been done. I’d look forward to them copying Armoured Warfares model and have PvE modes in it- people tend to be better when cooperating.
I come back to tanks once in a while and .eu is just as toxic as .na 😢 the game itself is one of the prettiest things on my hard drive however. So yeah.
I loved WoT, played it for years. What drove me away was the artificial way they controlled the game by taking away the RnG and creating matches where you are basically destined to fail. They were driving everyone to as close to 50% W/L.
The other thing they did was to introduce a new tank, get everyone excited, causing a lot of people to go for it, and grind hard / use gold and then after a few months nerf the living shit out of it. Rinse/Repeat.
The worst was nerfing the gold tanks. Spending $$ on gold tanks to make the grind easier is not something they should nerf.
But, pretty graphics, and maybe a refocus, I’ll have to keep an eye on it. I still have $50 in gold in my account.
Some time ago the devs vowed to not nerf the gold tanks anymore and they’ve been keeping this promise so far.
It kind of creates an opposite problem though, where they introduce new gold tanks that are significantly more powerful than any “regular” tank in the tier and it stays like that forever. Or at least until they - theoretically - update the old regular tanks. The Defender is the most recent example of that.
Due to power creep, a lot of “older” tanks desperately need a buff nowadays.
Haven’t played in ages, after years and years of intense play, but I do think one of the things they did wrong was flooding the game with too many tanks. There are too many to have any semblance of balance without homogenizing everything, or distinctiveness without making some tanks wildly more powerful than others. Add to that the inherent problem of basing the game off of real-world stuff but having to use game-world data and arcade systems to make it actually fun to play and you have in some ways the worst parts of both a simulation (need to adhere to reality) and an arcade game (need to have it be balanced and entertaining). On the one hand, they did a great job in squaring this circle, but on the other hand, they also created a lot of tensions that are still not resolved.
Haven’t played since the patch that introduced falling off of hills. Might be interesting to drop back in to see if it can hold my interest again. But… backlog…
