A proposal to re-define the place of heavy tanks in this game

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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21

Not when you can spawn twice in a T-34 1941, 1942 or STZ for the price of 1 KV-1E. I would imagine people will prefer 2 T-34-76s over 1 KV-1, 2 T-34-85s over 1 IS-2 (1944) or 2 Panthers over 1 Tiger II. Even 2 Panzer IV Hs can be better than 1 Tiger I, if all you fight are T-34s anyway.

Especially when that choice only appears on the second spawn, because a heavy tank would be too expensive to spawn in at the start. On the second spawn bad mobility is a pretty big disadvantage, when everyone is already on their positions.

  1. It’s your job to position yourself in a way that will allow you to kill him, you are the one with mobility advantage.
  2. You don’t even need to flank him, just face him straight from the front.
  3. If the turret is angled he can’t hurt you.
  4. He can’t angle to everyone at once.

KV-1E/B is strong even from the side, but it’s not difficult to pen, you just can’t pen the side everywhere.

The side is so strong mainly because players are surprised, that they can’t pen a flat side. I got surprised too, but guess what, it only works the first time. KV-1E/B is just a rare tank to see.

Besides, tank destroyers exist. They are very cheap to spawn and are a very effective counter.

What would happen is that not many people would play heavy tanks, because tank destroyers, that are already waiting on their positions, can easily counter them. Not many people would play tank destroyers, because they know, that heavy tank players know, that they can counter them.

If heavy tank population increases, so does the tank destroyer population, like in nature.

Everyone would play mediums tanks, because they are stronger than light tanks and don’t cost much more, and they are more flexible than tank destroyers.

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22

It 's an era issue ,sorry to say it.

The game works when in the remit of WW2 ,add anything form the Cold war and it all f**ks up.Simple.

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23

I don’t think you are right. People would much rather use an OP tank that costs alot, over a normal vehicle. Just look at how common CAS is.

I would much rather take a Tiger II H at 6.0, than 2 spawns in a Panther. And I would much rather have a 3.0 KV-1 than a T-34-76, or even T-50.

  1. The mobility difference isn’t even that large. Kv-1s aren’t that slow.
  2. And any decent player can prevent that unless they get overrun.
  3. But you also can’t hurt it.
  4. Teamwork? in WT?

Low tier TDs are often just as slow as heavy tanks, and they often have much weaker armour. I would play the hell out of a 3.0 KV-1 or 6.0 Tiger II H because of how OP they would be, and how few things can easily counter them.

If this change were to happen heavies would be spammed, and it would harm gameplay. The idea is nice, but balancing by SP costs won’t prevent them from being OP.

24

With high SP costs, only good players will be able to use them, and it doesn’t change the fact that many tanks would be OP. Even if it costs 600 SP to spawn, a 3.0 KV-1 would just annihilate everything, and it wouldn’t be balanced in the slightest.

25

But it is not. The scenario you are immagining of “a medium tank vs heavy tank in a head on duel” is supposed to heavily favor the heavy tank.
A medium tank(MT) will always have weaker armour and/or gun and is supposed to use it’s strengths to defeat it, which are: a better mobility and greater numbers on the field due to lower SP cost. At least if the SP of the HTs will be increased as I suggest.

A good MT player will not push a heavy tank if it’s sitting in a good position and is aware of him. He shouod use the cover of terrain and smoke to approach into point blanc range and get a shot into HTs weak side armour.

If not possible, it should at least keep its attention until someone else from his team flanks it from a different direction. If it’s not possible due to a corridor-like design of the map, it’s a problem with map design, not balance between vehicles.

Fire your MG into the air to attract attention of friendly CAS players.

I want this game to require players to use tactics that require brain power, instead of just pressing “W” key and hoping your reflexes are better than the ones of the guy in front of you.

Yes I know. Casual players who just want to relax and have fun would definitely choose the “fun option”. While “sweaty try hards” as some call this type of people, would rathet pick the most efficient option.
Not much can be done about it. Hopefully both types of players will be able to have fun without breaking the game balance.

And knowing how popular these tanks will be, more players will keep in their lineups vehicles meant to counter them, which are: fast, hard hitting TD like M18 Hellcat or Sdkfz. 234 Puma.

I bet most veteran WT GF players, with some effort, can kill a KV-1 with an M5 Stuart or a M22 Locust just by driving around it and shooting it in the turret ring. Unless they play smart and stay close to other friendly players. But in late game, with half a team leaving after 1-rst death, such scenarios would be rare.

26

I would take a KV-1E over two T-34s any time of the day, and absolutely take a Tiger II (H) over two panthers.

The KV-1E is quite literally more mobile then a Panzer IVH. So please, try again.

No, what happens is people just play more heavy tanks and everything else suffers. A TD may be able to kill a heavy tank, but at that BR (With a few exceptions), they tend to have poor mobility and/or poor postpen damage.

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27

AHAHAHAHA

You are quite literally insane, my friend. The US 37mm is a very, very poor weapon against a KV-1, especially when it is… ynow, firing back at you with a gun that is far superior to yours.

No, what they will do is quite literally just play the heavy tanks themselves. Why force yourself to risk a side shot when you can charge the enemy with a heavy tank and be invincible, hmm? Not even with a bad gun, the KV-1 and KT-II have amazing guns for the BRs you specified.

Not quite. Most heavy tanks fall into the pseudo-medium catagory, in which they have average guns and mobility for their BR, but have very good armor, albeit with weakspots. Your proposed SP solution will literally just make them sealclubbing tanks for people that do well in the first moments of the match, no more.

If you want good heavies, you have to understand how game balance works, and the paradoxical relationship heavies have with postpen damage.

The gun/mobility heavy tanks have actually tends to be average for their BR, and so in order to increase one, you must decrease the others. The Churchill VII is an excellent example- it has bonkers armor for its BR, but in exchange has a poor gun and mobility. The jumbo is another example. Good mobility, pretty damn good armor, but a gun that is absolute shit.

Weakspots are a necessary thing for heavies to have, otherwise they simply become OP. If you want them to be better, what you want is for those weakspots to exist, and for aiming at them to be lethal- which means that the HT can be at a BR where tanks are forced to aim for those weakspots.

Against HEAT-FS/HEAT, you also want lethality. The current reason why many of the tanks with these are at low BRs is because of the low post-pen damage they have- sure, they may pen, but most of the time they wont kill. If you want them to be moved up, they must be able to kill, generally in one or two shots- and they must be able to at least disable in one.

Ex. the IKV 103. If its postpen was good, it would likely be moved up to about 5.0, if not a bit more, because what it penned, it would kill.

28

The only problem is when a heavy gets uptiered its useless

29

Neither of those are that strong against higher BR heavies on 90% of maps.

30

Very well said, this is definitely the core of the issue.

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31

Side on hit lower middle of the behind track armour. Its where ammo is, one hit every time. 1B/1E I try for mantlet/track/barrel if I have to.

32

You don’t say what BR you mean here so I presume you mean across the board.

The issue is about what the player expects from a so called heavy tank.
So what do you expect?

I can tell you what I expect.I expect the tank to take a hit from the front and the shot either bounce or the shot if good, to do damage, Probably to the gun knowing War Thunders crazy mechanics.I may expect a one shot kill from the side on occasion.
I may expect in rare circumstances a very good or lucky shot to the cupola and a one shot death as a result.I odnt expect a big boom and a one shot hit on the front plate killing me in a Panther F, Easy 8 Sherman or JS1 and 2

Overall I may have confidence in my tanks armour combined with my positioning and map experience.
So where does it all go wrong.Mostly for me it collapses due to one issue.Era.
" Oh no era !" and era enthusiast ,summon the police,cry we dont do history in WT etc etc .The fact is no matter how hard you cry “but it’s all balanced” the fact is it isn’t.

Stick a Concept 3 into the game and you have a noticeable disruption.You have in essence a 17PDR that at 4.3 or 3.3 can move at 70kph. For me as a relative newbie this was the first WTF moment I had playing WW2 BR (and they are pretty much WW2 BRs below 7).This was followed by encounters with the Ystervark another 70s trolley.

Playing against Russia at 3.3 means encountering the 50s ASU 57 another major WTF inducing vehicle.Major speed,huge fire power and almost invisible.Death if you dont see it and at 3.3 it ruins your game in any heavy especially if you have no roof mounted MG. Early on Future vehicles upset the game for a tank relying on its armour which is relative to its time in a brief time scale.Look how short the reign of terror was for the Tiger 1.
Think about it ,there is balance in a Jagdtiger or Elephant with 200 mm of frontal protection facing Russian tanks with around 200mm of pen.There is no balance in the same tanks facing a Swedish 103 with 400mm.
It makes those tanks redundant.

Move the Jagdtiger five years forward in time and its a useless relic.

To me that is your issue and no matter how much you scream balance ,there is no balance when a tank is taken out of its time and forced to face the future.

OK some may enjoy the challenge but clearly many do not.

I personally can take an uptier(just) when WW2 faces WW2 but when I am in a tiger facing an M109 ,2S1 or IKV103 I am essentially wasting my time in a slow armoured and often unmodded vehicle and ODL seems very tempting.

Again,scream balance all you want but I know many of you bow out on the up tier or give up on a ODL after trying and failing.I also know many of you have left the high tiers to play below 5BR or even lower to find a place where an Up tier does not mean an era shift.You are still in a WW2 vehicle fighting WW2.

My knowledge is based on what you guys write about on here.I am not making this up.
Most of you will take on a better opponent if you feel its fair but many of you will quit when you face something that deep down you know you would or should not face in reality.
I also accept that many of you may have played for so many years you are past caring but many of us have not. Does not make it right.

33

The red army didn’t.

Panzer IV H has a much better gun. You won’t have nearly as much trouble with a KV-1E as a Sherman.

Also, you forgot about SP cost.

Poor mobility is not a problem, if you are already spawn camping any heavy tank that might appear.

Remind me again which TDs have poor post pen damage? Since when APHE is weak? ISU-122 also has poor post-pen damage? Oh you mean the ones that have modern HEAT or APDS and shouldn’t even be here.

But it’s possible. With an average War Thunder player you could even pull it off in a real game.

Lmao. “Invincible”

You once again forgot about SP cost.

Aiming for weakspots is not some high skill tactic, it’s the bare minimum.

If you want a heavy tank to always have a weakspot from all angles, then you’re basically asking that it should be destroyed just as easily as a medium tank, if you’re not braindead and remember where the weakspots are.

If a heavy tank always has weakspots from all angles, then it can only mitigate them by keeping distance from the enemy. Gaijin quite literally actively fights with long range sniping. The maps design and the game mode with capture points in the middle of the maps in cqc locations are all made for fast-paced, brainless cqc chaos.

This is exactly how HEAT works right now. APHE is just broken in comparison.

So you want an IKV 103 that still lolpens WW2 heavy tanks, but one shots like a solid shot too…

I thought that if you want post-pen damage to be buffed, you also want to fight at least remotely historically accurate opponents, like T-54s instead of T-34s.

You just want a straight up buff, without any real changes to compensate for it. Going from 4.0 to 5.0 changes absolutely nothing for this TD.

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34

Archer, Achillies, Sav M/43 1946, and IKV 72 come to mind.

But it is quite difficult, and you need to rely on the Kv-1 being in a bad position/making mistakes.

A 3.0 KV-1 or a 6.0 tiger II H would be pretty invincible.

The issue is, without weakspots, it becomes unbelievably good and very hard to kill.

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35

4.7 tog or 5.0 tiger 1 and i am getting 10 kill games easy.

36

Of these two I feel like Tiger II is least problematic vehicle in this regard. Yes, technically if you find a spot on the map where your sides and rear are protected by buildings/obstacles and sit there all game, you are pretty much unkillable by 95% of the tanks you face. (except other 6.7 heavy tanks than now are in 6.0 game with you)

But you don’t win games by camping in one spot, you win games by capturing and defending cap points. And as you drive around the map in a Tiger II, enemy players in more mobile tanks will not a engage you in a fair fight but run away when you approach and then watch you from behind the corners of buildings and rocks using 3rd person camera and as soon as you turn your turret to a respond to a different threat, will peek and kill you through it’s weak side armour.

But, yes, after reading the comments everyone left here, I see a big problem with this idea. The scenario I described will only work if there are much fewer players in the heavy tanks driving around the map, than there are medium/lights on the other. And giving heavy tanks bigger SP cost will only limit their numbers, not that of their teammates who will screen their flanks by their sheer presence on the map.

This is a more difficult problem than I thought.

The issue is that most heavy tanks were not designed as a solution to fighting enemy tanks, but anti-tank guns. The fundamental difference beign: AT guns nullufy all other layers of a tank’s defensive onion but their armour. A tank is unlikely to spot a well camouflaged ATG before it fires, so it can’t destroy it before it fires, nor can it hide from something it can’t see. It’s only hope is to drive quickly and erratically to prevent the ATG crews from targeting vulnerable areas of their armour and get close enough to spot them as they fire at them.

37

We arent the red army, thank fuck.

It also has significantly less armor and can still be easily penned by a KV-1, and a KV-1 is nearly as mobile as a sherman. In a Panzer IVH I will definitely have more trouble with a KV-1E then a sherman.

Poor mobility for stuff like the Stuer Emil or Dicker Max is absolutely a problem, since they are much slower then many of the heavies they are supposed to kill.

You mean the ones that are absolutely paper easy to kill and can be 7.7d from the front, hmm? Or the Archer/Achilles, which also have glacial turret traverse to boot?

A heavy tank is still significantly more heavily armored then a medium, but when penetrated it tends to have roughly the same survivability. They also tend to have mobility that is comparable to medium tanks, which you seem to ignore.

There is a significant difference between the two, which you conveniently forget here. HEAT can generally punch through wherever it has aimed, which means that you can aim for where to disable, and where to kill.

APHE cannot, and against heavies it relies on weakspots- weakspots that, like the cupola, would not work for HEAT.

The IKV 103 would still be utterly paper, would still die to any sort of MG fire or artillery, and would still have its piss-poor velocity. Depending on how it performs there, it could go up, but personally I doubt so.

38

*Ikv 103. The Ikv 72 is the one with the short 75mm gun, which most certainly doesnt have low postpen lmfao. 260g of filler go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

39

IKV 72 is the solid shot TD at 1.7?

The 260g filler is the strv 42 eh

IKV 73 is the prem event version of the EH

40

The Ikv has the same gun as the EH, and gets the same APHE round.