You don’t get it.
Community as a whole (Alvis included) still hasn’t evolved enough to truly appreciate ZSU’s AA abilities at 7.0, thus it’s our own fault and ZSU can’t be blamed for our shortcomings.
It’s my bad for replying to such a ridiculous take.
You don’t fix that by artificially smacking SPAAG - you fix that stuff by historically nerfing APHE, which the same people cheering the Falcon’s wing-clipping voted AGAINST even TESTING!
When I go play the Gepard or its equivalents in other nations, I do at least use them as AA when opportunities arise. But @TheDudesRug puts it perfectly:
I leave the radar down until I hear or see a plane visually, because I know my guns won’t reach a plane only showing as a blip on radar anyway, and that human vision is based on movement Jurassic Park style.
In my own case its not purely the ZSU-57/2, but rather that every single ammunition type it has was neutered in the past (largely due to the constant crying of Korean War Russian Tank mains). APDS is about the most useful ammo type but that can be quite inconsistent. HEATFS is a total gamble. HESH is so bad I no longer use it most of the time unless I need to lob one over a hill on some open top.
Profile is probably the sole thing the Falcon has as an advantage over all its similar AA compatriots. It’s tiny. Not Wiesel tiny, but still quite tiny.
I also got like a couple lucky air kills in my Russian one when I was spading it. Funny enough it was some poor G.56…
The real question is why does adding HE-VT call for it going up by an entire BR? The gun handling and RoF and reload are still the same on the Chinese one, right?
Probably to not have people scream senselessly about it (even though its not all that strong). I’d be down to put it at say 6.0 with HE-VT and let it have a field day against all the swarms of prop CAS. Also Hellcats.
But the thing that most people forget is that nerfing SPAAGs’ anti-tank ability actually makes them WORSE at anti-air ability. This is because when the average player thinks their SPAAG is incapable of defending itself against plentiful enemy tanks, they do not move outside their own spawn under any circumstances. Then planes swarm them in spawn from multiple directions while the frontline tanks scream about having no AA support, even though those same tankers’ whining about AA being able to kill tanks caused much of that lack of AA support…
Gun AA have pretty short effective ranges of around 1km at most prior to radar tiers, with exceptionally high velocity cases like the Falcon and Coelian being slightly higher than that. Generally you want to open fire at more like 500-800m away if at all possible. An SPAAG sitting in their own spawn will usually not be in that ideal distance range unless it is being swarmed by multiple planes, at which point the match is already lost.
This is why I say that trying to prevent SPAAGs from killing tanks only backfires on the people complaining about them killing tanks. And since snail has tried this for more than a decade now, isn’t it about time to do something radically different because the current method isn’t working? It IS in fact possible to both embrace SPAAG-TD functionality AND also address the bugs/buggy features which enable SPAAG to get truly bullshit kills (like M48/M60 cupola shots being due to APHE overperformance). It will be anything but easy to fix those things due to longstanding neglect, but it IS possible.
Not only is SPAAG harder to learn in its intended role, but prior to radar tier aiming at planes is total guesswork. If the pilot isn’t lobotomized enough to fly right at your AA, you likely are not going to hit them in the slower-firing AAs like Bofors or ZSU-57.
The average players are not given proper tools to be able to learn effectively, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that most people eventually get fed up and stop trying to learn.
And this lies at the feet of the “whur muh tenk-0nli mod3?” crowd crying about planes.
This gap in kill numbers will not hope to change as long as CAS is treated as a killstreak powerup.
HE-VT is great for dealing with aircraft, especially those pesky helicopters.
It’s surely worth a couple of BR steps.
Buffing SPAAs’ AT ability will naturally make them perform better in general which will lead to increased efficiency, thus higher BR in the end. At that higher BR they’ll start seeing more potent aircraft (and ground vehicles as well), so you’re back at square one.
ZSU-57-2 is a living example of this.
If it’s AP rounds had like, I don’t know, 50mm of pen it would never come even close to 7.0 and, for example, 3.0 would be a much more appropriate placing.
Well proxy on the Wz305 puts it only 1 BR step above the ZSU 57 no? so HE-VT also warrants some increase
7.0 vs 8.0.
The idea is to nerf it against tanks, but i would argue that the APHE is and always has been the thing that makes it broken, much like the XM246 / 247. One APHE round penning a cupola or the driver’s hatch and a nuke detonates inside the tank, wiping it completely.
Hence why I said previously that snail’s definition of efficiency for SPAAG is long overdue for a change.
Current gameplay encourages, if not outright demands, SPAAG hunt tanks before the advent of missile systems to greatly increase engagement ranges. SPAAG happening to be good at exploiting buggy features of the game (like armor holes/gaps/seams of the old armor system) adds to this.
Now as I don’t know what their actual efficiency metric looks like, nor what the cutoffs are, I’m not able to propose what standards to use for SPAAG. But whatever the exact numbers are, I’d greatly raise the cutoff thresholds for saying “this warrants a BR increase” and intentionally rebuff them in every relevant aspect of their AT ability, in addition to giving them new-ish features to encourage use in AA duty. I would intentionally put them at BRs where slaughtering unaware tanks is normal for them, because that is how WT gameplay demands they be used, and has since tanks debuted.
The ZSU-57/2 shows that the efficiency metrics need serious reworking.
Out of sheer curiosity, where would you put the ZSU-57/2 if it had all of the following:
In my own opinion, I’d leave it at 7.0 with all of those characteristics, intentionally. If someone screams “OP” I’d tell them to just shoot it and deal with it, because if you look at it funny its ammo detonates. I’d use it as a blueprint for overhauling SPAAG as “TD with a side of AA duty, just like the IFVs we have in large masses.”
That thing with full HE-VT belt and a lead indicator would be damn strong at 7.0.
With buffed AT performance it’d be just extremely busted overall.
It’s also very easy to say “just leave them where they are even if it busts complete tiers” as you aren’t the one in charge of the game you use to make money.
And why does giving an SPAAG good AT performance make it automatically “busted”? Especially since the ZSU-57/2 isn’t exactly small and its armor is so thin that .50cals can oftentimes melt your gunner from considerable distances. Any artillery strike landing nearby can cripple you. Any bomb in the same postal code overpressures you. Any tank shell (including from other AA) with more than about 40mm pen will ammo-rack you instantly (even the poor Skink could do that).
If such performance overhauls are given fairly to all nations’ SPAAG all at the same time, then why would it “bust entire tiers”? For example, German 37mm Flak43/44 are missing APCR with 140mm pen (and the corresponding aircraft BK 3,7 cannon is missing the APHE the flak currently has), 40mm Bofors cannons are missing APDS with 120-130mm pen depending on barrel length, the Kugelblitz is still unfairly shafted years after being made irrelevant, and many other guns are totally missing their best rounds.
To my observation, SPAAG only “break” things due to being good at exploiting buggy features that have needed multiple swift kicks in the ass to actually fix.
There are probably others I can’t immediately think of off the top of my head - but why can’t we address all of those and then make AA killing tanks a normal thing instead of something to scream about?
Big Mistake.
They usually make mistakes to make the vehicle rot, by completely missing the golden time.
Removing APDS will geld the effectiveness of Falcon for AT role (Which made her BR ‘that HIGH’)
Then maybe in future, it might go down to a lower BR.
or not (some ‘forgotten vehicles due to low statistics count prove this’)
Removing APDS of Falcon itself is debatable.
Someone thinks it is better. To get SPAA to fill the air-gap between Skink and Chieftain Marksman. (In case of Falcon gets BR buff in future)
Someone else thinks it is worse. because they love Light-Tank Falcon, which flanks and kills.
But also, one thing is straightforwardly clear.
It is ridiculous to keep Falcon in the same 8.3BR even after removing APDS
-When Chieftain Marksman and Gephad with APDS still remains same 8.3BR.
-While Falcon lost its APDS.
No APDS? Then lower the BR.
‘No statistics yet’?
They should’ve tried ‘slightly lower BR’ first.
8.0BR might be good to try.
Gaijin does a lame blunder as always, and you came up to defend them.
again.
Really? it’s that big a step? I gotta stop upteiring my stuff xD
It’s the combination of significantly buffing it’s anti-air performance while buffing it’s AT performance at the same time and keeping it at it’s old BR. Busted ? Yeah.
Because you need to take care of other vehicles, not just AAs.
You just proposed half a dozen things that would demand months of work to implement and properly balance (without taking into account other problems that might arise while fixing these ones), while offering zero monetary incentive for Gaijin to actually do it.
Looks like utopia to me.
Yes, why can’t Gaijin change like half of the game on a whim ?
And how exactly do other vehicles “suffer” against AAs which are actually threatening? All I see are either 1) buggy features needing to be fixed years ago like making all tank models full volumetric armor or 2) things like barrel damage or overabundance of city maps that enable SPAAG to punch far above their weight.
Is that stuff easy to fix? Mostly no, but it IS possible and even practical to fix, if the desire to do so actually materializes.
Outright removing the ability to damage gun barrels would be the easiest one to perform, and that would help so many tanks beyond just making SPAAG less nutty where they can’t spam at barrels to prevent otherwise guaranteed death. Suddenly the “sitting there repairing awaiting inevitable death while being track-n-barrel-tortured” no longer exists.
I am aware that volumetric armor takes time to implement, but wouldn’t the PR gains be something to consider here, along the lines of “hey snail is actually fixing one of the game’s most obnoxious longstanding problems.” I mean for fuck’s sake you could start with tank hulls and turrets that occur over and over and over in many different trees - Shermans, T-34s, Panzer IIIs/IVs, and Cromwells. Elimination of all the buggy overlapping plates where thicknesses get added together would be a hugely positive change for everybody, AND help make SPAAG less capable of BS kills they shouldn’t be able to do.
And that can be a goal to strive for, but that also demands a consistent vision with enough spine and balls to stop trying to play halfsies with every mutually opposed sub-faction in the playerbase, and just pick one vision to stick with. In my observation over the years, much of the damage inflicted on the game is a result of harebrained responses to community infighting blowing up. You can’t please everybody. For example - diehard fighter mains who look at anything not a fighter as “scum infesting the Air PvP mode.” Or all the fans of the half-baked idea of tank-only mode who refuse to accept any degree of CAS involvement. Trying to compromise with extreme groups like these has only hurt the whole damn game. And I lump folk who hate on SPAAG going Rambo TD mode in with such groups.
Giving AAs better/more AT munitions will make some other vehicles suffer. You can’t escape that, especially without BR changes.
Gaijin is shrinking our maps for a reason, they want them to be like that.
Outright removing the ability to damage gun barrels shouldn’t happen.
You’re only looking at positive and best case scenario outcomes.
What if something doesn’t go as planned and now suddenly you have negative PR coming your way.
Snail has cracked the code, they’re spamming out 70€ premiums that sell like hot cakes and they’re perfectly content with that.
Take a moment and observe, you may be that extremist that’s demanding wild changes that are potentially game breaking, and all of that just out of spite.
Suffer in what way? Light tanks are a plague needing culling, and SPAAG can answer that call in the BR ranges before IFVs become commonplace.
If you’re referring to track-&-barrel torture, barrel damage is a problem in its own right and has been for years. If your vehicle cannot frontally pen something, you shouldn’t get a “get outta jail free card” to prevent them from killing you if they aim well. SPAAG abuse this feature - why not remove barrel damage entirely as a way to rein in SPAAG without harming their ability to kill things from the sides/rear like ammo belt neutering does?
Because there’s a bunch of CoD kids who have the attention spans of goldfish, I’m well aware. At least we’re in agreement here on our mutual dislike of this.
The irony here is that many maps are quite massive and are able to be expanded. For example, the city clusterfuck map American Desert - we only play on the city bit, but the actual high-res tank map is 4x4km, all the way out to just beyond the rock plateaus in the distance. Alaska is another case. Berlin is another. Mozdok, Ardennes, White Rock Fortress (before it vanished from the MM), I could go on and on. They have the assets already but are choosing not to use them despite us having the weapons to engage at such larger distances.
Yes it should.
SPAAG become much less annoying when they can’t prevent you from firing. Tanks with weak guns no longer are able to punch above their weight and actually get destroyed more often, leading to their BRs dropping (like the Jumbos which are buoyed entirely by barrel damage and cupola shots). Rolling pillbox-style heavy tanks finally catch a damn break because suddenly if an opponent has no rounds able to frontally pen and they have no means to escape, they die because they messed up.
Those all sure look like benefits to me, even if certain ones at precarious BRs will be painful for a while until BRs adjust like the Jumbos.
I am somewhat optimistic about this game, because all the necessary pieces to truly build it into a masterpiece and not a mountain of garbage waiting for an avalanche to occur are all still there despite the mismanagement.
And that requires careful communication of planned changes in advance saying “we are doing this, in order to address many problems that you all have repeatedly talked about for years…” and then specify those problems. And you don’t leave such an important change up for “community vote” to be gamed by CCs and their fanbases.
They made the game ultra-grindy and frustrated souls buy their way around thinking it magically makes things better. Only later do they realize it doesn’t due to not having sufficient practical experience of where to shoot things or where to go on maps. Plus I’d wager a significant portion of the premium sales are botting accounts using the premiums to grind up for later 3rd-party resale. It’s what ruined Sim EC after all, and is currently an issue in Naval RB and occasionally even Air RB (like the random gibberish named accounts flying Potez 633s).
How is overhauling Air RB so all plane classes actually belong there in a way where no single plane class doing its job automatically renders the other two irrelevant “extreme”?
How is ending the CAS debate and choosing to embrace it once and for all instead of trying to play halfsies with tank-only folk “extreme”?
How is getting a spine towards people who get all foaming at the mouth over SPAAG yet give IFVs with sometimes the same damn guns and ammo a free pass “extreme”?
I see obvious problems which are partially the fault of dev mismanagement and partly the fault of allowing extreme community groups to run amok, then caving to them when they whine loud enough. I simply don’t want to be pessimistic about the game, because I genuinely care about it and want it to actually succeed. But it cannot truly succeed while it keeps stabbing itself via community infighting, which means putting down the agitators and saying “No, we aren’t giving you what you want, and we never will, stop asking, it will get you nowhere” before proceeding to implement changes that prevent such camps from continuing to make nuisances of themselves to everyone else.
It’s a problem-solving attitude, the same one I’ve cultivated in my Ph.D. studies in the real world, applied to solving this game’s nonsense.
And some say AAs are a plague needing culling.
Barrels aren’t especially thick and as such should offer something to shoot at if you have no other options.
But that’s how it goes.
Gaijin suddenly getting change of hearts and starting to enlarge all of our current maps is very unlikely.
What you’re presenting here isn’t just somewhat optimistic.
They’re still making money off of copy/paste vehicles that they sell with premium status.
One of the easiest ways to get money, especially with them costing as an AAA game.
Guess you forgot what you’ve been writing a few days ago.
You yourself proposed doing changes just to spite people and that certainly isn’t healthy in any way.
Well it’s sitting at 8.3 right now with guns and no radar.
Why would anyone use it AT ALL?
And which of the two causes more problems in general? Given insane speeds (which most SPAAG below IFV tier lack), scouting, scouting cost deductions to CAS, ability to carelessly LOLpen the thickest armor they could possibly encounter, and “no armor best armor,” I’d wager that light tanks are way more of a problem than SPAAG.
35mm Oerlikon & 30mm HSS831 are really just the global APHE postpen problem. Most of the bullshit kills platforms with both of these guns get is due to this larger issue.
I get that it’s a well-intentioned feature, but in the game’s present environment it no longer makes much sense. It made sense back when LOLpen munitions didn’t exist. It made sense when maps were not just city clusterfucks. It made sense prior to the addition of so many powerful CAS platforms and the introduction of scouting cost reductions on them.
There are now so many other ways to deal with a heavy tank you cannot pen that if you pick a vehicle with a weak gun, and encounter something you cannot pen frontally, and it kills you as a result, that should be on you and nobody else - you had a choice to build a proper lineup or to use something with a better gun and chose not to.
I am aware that all of one frontal barrel hit occurred in late WW2, where a Pershing stumbled upon a Tiger 1E and put a round down its barrel by complete accident. But in a game where people can pinpoint-aim without parallax errors, this creates a weakspot that no armor can defend, thereby punishing anything that doesn’t have lots of mobility to fall back on. In a sense, barrel damage is one piece of why light tanks became the meta.
There are quite a few features in this game that I look at and think “Yep, this will only see its full potential when the official servers close and the game gets rebooted on private servers not trapped by the realities of the Freemium Economic System.” Maps are just one thing that fits there.
The messes are fixable, but it is a necessary step to realize that Snail is not the only cause of the problems. The community’s more extreme elements also provoke the Snail to do harebrained things, and I blame the community more than the Snail for those kind of changes.
I’m optimistic about them because by just deciding to ignore them, and/or implement changes that effectively trap the agitators, such community-related problems are in fact solvable.
A good example is CAS. No amount of compromise will ever satisfy the tank-only guys, yet Snail actually tested their pet mode and found it was indeed as unpopular as Snail thought it was. Yet the tank-only guys still make a nuisance of themselves. Features like force-feeding all people Default SPAAG (and expanding that to Default Fighters and Default CAS like Naval does) paired with major buffs to SPAAG functionality will serve to corner these fuckers like should have been done years ago. Now even they have all the counters they could ever want to use by default. It then is their choice to either 1) shut up and use them 2) refuse to use them out of vain preference and make fools of themselves so nobody listens to them anymore or 3) leave WT entirely. Either way, they never get their stupid nirvana mode, and cease to be an issue for entire game forevermore.
Solving the diehard fighter mains (or “toxic fighter mains” as I have also called them) is a fairly similar story in a sense. You upend Air RB’s objective structure so that Air-to-Air PvP literally CAN’T auto-end matches anymore, instead requiring bomber and attacker objective involvement to win every. single. match. Then the diehard fighter mains who look down on grass-cutting and bombing face a choice - either 1) get their stuck-up hands dirty 2) be rendered irrelevant or 3) leave WT entirely for games built solely to be TDMs. I care not which.
Are some elements of what I propose unusual? Of course, because that’s intentional. I don’t give a fuck who I offend with my ideas. Especially not the folk who I think are helping cause major problems (even if sometimes its unintentional on their part).
No I did not forget. It’s a matter of priorities - the folk who cry about AA shredding their tanks are frankly in the way of solving the wider CAS debate, which many of those same AA-criers also complain about, funny enough.
Embracing SPAAGs’ TD ability, alongside buffing their AA ability will help to solve the wider CAS debate. People need functional counters to not feel powerless, and gun AA need to be real close to planes to accurately hit them, even with radars.
Empower the counters. Make their inclusion in everyones’ decks non-negotiable like high tier is experimenting with Default AA and Naval has had Default Fighters/CAS for years, make sure the counters actually work well against the CAS they fight, and leave it up to the players to use them.
If they choose not to use them or even learn to use them, its no longer a game problem anymore, but an individual player one that cannot be used to justify more boneheaded nerfs with.
How would I know, I’m not in contact with every WT player.
The only problem in here is the scouting and at higher tiers where drones are a thing. But at that moment plenty of light tanks start to lose their mobility advantage when compared to MBTs.
So if you have lolpen munitions available to you, then shooting at the barrel is probably the worst thing you can do. You’re wasting your time and shots, just kill it outright and be done with it.
You seriously need to specify tiers you’re talking about.
Lights tanks are all but meta in higher/top tier.
Multiple years ago, with certain lineups and vehicles that possibly weren’t properly balanced to begin with. I’m sure @ULQ_LOVER can tell you more about it.
Thinking that “test” holds any value in 2026 is naive at best.
That will not solve anything.
Anything to back it up or we are just making up things again?