Are HE shells on machine guns and cannons up to 40mm even working correctly?

[[email protected] 359]

I have been using tanks and SPAA only to shoot enemy planes in various places to get “hits” when about 3 weeks before the major update they were killing planes easily. Now I can shoot planes and they will not die much at all. At the time of writing this got through a match where I shot a Do-335’s pilot directly with a 14.5mm gun(on top of the Object 268) and it did nothing. Even after multiple shots to the pilot, none killed it. The reason is because explosive rounds still don’t seem to do damage at all. Ever since the airfield AA broke, it broke HE shells for most guns from the 7.62mm to the 40mm. Russian SPAA are some of the most effected considering 23mm HE rounds which would realistically rip a plane apart take a lot of round to actually do damage unless you use AP now. Even 30mm AA guns have trouble. 37mm APHE on German SPAA like the ostwind II take up to 10 shots or more sometimes to even kill a plane when hitting them with HE when before it took much less. Is anyone else having the issue or is it just broken for me? I am just curious so I can find out what is going on with this.

[RXDimA 8]

The airfields were fixed for sure, and so did a lot of other HE shells, but I feel like some others were not. I returned to using a plane with Ho-5 cannons (20mm on Ki-43-III Otsu) and it feels like there's pretty much zero damage and only the AP rounds do anything, whereas using Ho-103s (12.7mm on Ki-43-II) I snap everything in half.

[Szatanshow 206]

Experience this myself keep getting lots of Critical Hits  messages - with no damage at all especially in spaa

[bananomet 626]

Playing the Do335 and Me-410 for the past week.

The German MG151 might as well shoot blanks now. I am spraying at a milktruck SPAA with these 20mm only for the crew to get yellow/red. I see the round go trough the crewman's face on the hitcam and he just goes yellow.

Planes won't go down at all. The 7.92mm and 13mm downs a plane way more quickly than the 20mm now lol.

 

I would not be as annoyed if the American .50cal weren't snapping wings off with 1 bullet.

[jericho793 46]

It's funny... 2-3 days before they released the Sky Guardians Update, they made a small patch that fixed HE shells for all planes.  Then the update dropped.  And now the HE shells are quite broken again.  Currently, I can do more damage with a straw and some wadded up paper than with my HE rounds.

[[email protected] 359]

They did add more shrapnel or fragments but I haven’t seen it work at all. I can direct hit pilots only for it to do nothing. I had even hit some M56s and stuff with the 14.5 and the HE and API could not kill the crew. Eveen with 49mm of pen.

[[email protected] 359]

I went on YouTube to find a video that demonstrates how little damage the guns do now since it will take me hours to even upload a video at all.

Check 11:08 to 11:11 to see how little a 30mm cannon currently does. I don’t think it is supposed to do absolutely nothing. I encourage everyone who can actually upload videos or clips of various guns being like that to do so considering people with an unreliable internet connection such as myself can not.

 

[[email protected] 359]

As of the last small update, it is still the same -_-. It is very fun when a 30mm HE shell gives me a “hit” and the enemy plane then destroys my AA or plane in one burst of AP.

[Miraz05 232]

20mm does no damage at all.Before this update 20mm cannons could easily destroy planes but now they barely do critical damage

[[email protected] 359]

4 hours ago, Miraz05 said:

20mm does no damage at all.Before this update 20mm cannons could easily destroy planes but now they barely do critical damage

All because they added some new shrapnel effect it broke it all this much. It needs to be fixed. The problem is gaijin doesn’t want to fix it unless there is mass outrage.

[Reddоt 3,441]

Last RealShatter update nerved all cannons, loads of them do pathetic damage now and just put me off playing 

[Casino_Knight 150]

No.

[[email protected] 359]

It is so broken. It seems to work whenever I get hit by HE shells yet mine do absolutely nothing.

[[email protected] 359]

Considering how a certain German 20mm air target round that was known for being devastating historically in real life and in the game now does literally no damage shows how much gaijin has messed with the the new HE damage. Historically German 20mm cannons would rip planes apart. Now they can’t even kill anything, let alone a B-17 which is what they usually destroyed. Now all HE shells are historically inaccurate as well as useless.

[[email protected] 359]

I guess nobody cares.

[HeliAreGae 91]

On 18/03/2023 at 22:37, [email protected] said:

I guess nobody cares.

I'm surprised at how quiet the community is about this issue. Can't help but think that a large part of the community just stopped caring about props. Couldn't find a response from the devs on this topic either, and I doubt it will get fixed any time soon. Quite sad tbh.

[[email protected] 359]

7 hours ago, HeliAreGae said:

I'm surprised at how quiet the community is about this issue. Can't help but think that a large part of the community just stopped caring about props. Couldn't find a response from the devs on this topic either, and I doubt it will get fixed any time soon. Quite sad tbh.

@HeliAreGae considering any gun from the French 7.5(which already did basically no damage(up to 1000 rounds to kill any plane pre he nerf) to the 40mm are completely useless against aircraft, someone should be noticing by now. Considering even 20mm, 23mm, and 30mm cannons on aircraft act as bad as French 7.5mm machine guns from before the nerf, it would be noticeable. When a burst of half an Su-25’s ammo from both gunpods and the 30mm don’t kill a plane you should know something is wrong. APHE still works. How long until it also becomes useless? Probably soon.

[[email protected] 1,771]

It would be nice to see some clear and proper testing on this, outside of the ever unreliable hangar damage preview.

 

This does seem more like a bug attached to the new system, rather than the new system itself being the issue (which I support in principle).

[Uncle J [email protected] 369]

On 17/03/2023 at 20:21, [email protected] said:

Now all HE shells are historically inaccurate as well as useless.

 

I tried just for fun the 3.3 Ki102 otsu - with a 57mm gun, HE shells only.

It took some matches to get used to the poor ballistics - due to massive bullet drop.

Finally i scored 3 hits in one pass on a Bv238:

The game rewarded me with 2 hits plus an unspecified critical hit, no fire, nothing.

The Bv238 was not even slightly impressed and continued his work...

 

[CoffeeBean100 2,893]

I'm getting more fires set with 20mm AP (Hispano mkII ground belts).

 

Current 16 v 16 plus this ammo oddities are to stress test the playerbase?

Edited March 21 by CoffeeBean100

[Stona 72,415]

On 21/03/2023 at 03:10, [email protected] said:

It would be nice to see some clear and proper testing on this, outside of the ever unreliable hangar damage preview.

 

This does seem more like a bug attached to the new system, rather than the new system itself being the issue (which I support in principle).

According to what I got from devs, HE works properly and do proper damage. There can be bugs in hangar analysis (please report if you are able to replicate it), but in game it works ok. 

[hav3nWT 2]

10 hours ago, Stona said:

According to what I got from devs, HE works properly and do proper damage. There can be bugs in hangar analysis (please report if you are able to replicate it), but in game it works ok. 

I'd imagine they'll see this play out in statistics and adjust accordingly but HE has had its effectiveness significantly reduced in a recent update(s) (antidotal- but I play a LOT of prop Air RB cannon fighters).

 

It's all HE filler for cannons in all calibers for all nations and if its intentional (rumor mill - a 'realshatter' implementation?) it is decidedly unfun to dump your entire cannon capacity into a single target given that there are now 4 more targets to deal with as well.

 

Increased time required to secure a kill = even more chance to be jumped by those other 4 enemy players as well.

 

Please take a serious look at what 'works properly' is changing in the game.

Edited March 23 by hav3nWT

[Casino_Knight 150]

HE working as intended

Edited March 23 by Casino_Knight

[Cap_L 35]

On 22/03/2023 at 07:59, Stona said:

According to what I got from devs, HE works properly and do proper damage. There can be bugs in hangar analysis (please report if you are able to replicate it), but in game it works ok. 

Yeah uhhhhh. This is not what I would call "proper damage". This is happening with most cannons, poor to no damage.

 

I have to use my entire ammo to get a single kill? Something is not working.

 

Edited March 24 by Cap_L

[MDC5000 52]

On 22/03/2023 at 15:59, Stona said:

According to what I got from devs, HE works properly and do proper damage. There can be bugs in hangar analysis (please report if you are able to replicate it), but in game it works ok. 

Concrete evidence,he shot 500 rounds of 20mm into that plane and it did 0 damage .Fix your game Gaijin. Everyone click on this link https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/qMQPXzgmyWeb and click the I have the same issue button.The bug was acknowledged 16 days ago and still 0 fix.Fix your game Gaijin !

Edited March 24 by MDC5000