I don’t know for certain, they both have their unique things that can annoy players, but I would say I’m less annoyed with the fact light tanks can use scout drones at certain BRs than I’m with the fact one 35mm round can nuke the entire turret by simply grazing a cupola.
First you need to be willing to spawn in something that isn’t a tank for that to take effect.
Your armor will always matter.
They can destroy your barrel, but if they can’t penetrate your armor they’ll be forced to go around you to kill you, possibly exposing themselves in the process. You can also try to fall back while all that is happening. Doing this takes much more effort from their side than just lolpenning you, don’t you think ?
Read above.
I’d say that HEAT/HE shells are much more problematic to those than barrel torture.
Last time I checked it was an event centered around WW2 vehicles and wasn’t popular for quite a few reasons, not because you couldn’t play CAS.
Not really, even trying to draw any conclusions from that alone is more than foolish.
It happened several years ago, some people who played back then left the game and many more joined their place. Who knows how many vehicles and mechanics were added into the game and who knows how many opinions have changed from then till now.
The only true popularity check would be through an official poll made by Gaijin.
Doing this could easily backfire though and showcase that people only play WT’s combined aspect mode, which is Gaijin’s bread and butter, because they have to, as they have no other options to pick from. No wonder they aren’t content with stirring up the pot to gain little to nothing in return.
They chose to not wake up the beast (not just when it comes to TO) and just live happily while farming money from all those copy paste premiums.
Seeing the history of WT it’s clear to see it isn’t happening.
Default fighters would solve nothing as people simply aren’t interested in playing planes, which is more than fair.
Sure thing. Gaijin dont know sh… when they balance the machine. Falcon is one worst SPAA out there so it beng a decent light tank is a good thing. Especialy as its pretty slow and easy to kill. But gaijin wants it to play with APHE pressure damage, to make it more obvious that it was the worst mechanic added in game.
its fairly obvious to say that some SPAA just arent capable of fighting planes, and some are just as good with killing planes as with killing tanks. The problem starts when the autocannon becomes the ultimate weapon. Think of it as of AKM against M40. Its fair to say that M40 has better pen, better distance, more accuracy, ect. But the AKM just shreads it as soon as it comes to the safe distance.
Its fair to say that Gaijin`s balance is just broken here, and their damage model does not help. The lightweit, unarmored and mobile SPAAs with automatic weapons and good stabilization (even without STABS they have such fast aim that shooting on the move is easy enough) with current ingame reality just destroy the sh… out of cardboard boxes cold war era tanks are. Because they are hard to damage, agile and deadly. At the same time MBTs of the era are agile, but have just enough armor to make spaal fly everywhere, and thin enough to get oneshotted to cupola or roof with APHE pressure of the autocannon. And have the APDS or APFSDS that deals absolute zero damage to such lowly armored machinery. Plus the effects of explosion that make it just hard enough to shoot SPAA back that gives it time to kill you. Plus the armor model of tanks that has “holes” in it so SPAAs damage even with HEs. And so on.
And at the same time those destroyers are obviously underpowered against air. Yes, the same rank and lower rank planes are easy to kill. And then it becomes useless against GBU and AGM, and its much less effective against helicopters. So the engire game design just screams - GO DO CRIME, e.g. go shread tanks as you wont be as effectve aganits air. And thats about the cold war era SPAAs that at least have good distance. If we`re about them Wirbelwinds, Crusader SPAAs, Skinks… they are just useless utmost. They do fairly good against planes that come 500m to them and do nothing otherwise. And they arent able now to defend themselves agaist most enemies at the capture points so they lack the motivation to move further than spawn.
Well it seems your problem isn’t SPAAG at all, but rather APHE postpen in general. Yet the same people who are cheering the Falcon’s wing-clipping are also the ones who voted against nerfing APHE. I have no idea how you voted in said poll (I voted for testing the historical nerf), but when people do something and then experience the consequences of that thing they did, at that point all you can say is “you did it to yourselves, guys…”
Correct. And clearly there are lots of people willing to do so.
But as teammates are completely unreliable, you cannot shoot them back because they spammed at your barrel tip. I guess its a difference in worldview regarding the game, but if even the most heavily-armored tank can be disabled by the weakest cannon, it makes me question the value of the armor, because it only delays the inevitable. Especially since most of the rolling pillboxes cannot hope to reverse into cover faster than the guy who barreled them can run up to their side.
For armor to actually matter, it needs to provide total immunity at least frontally to the majority of its opponents, barrel included. People should have no choice but to ambush it from the side or rear to harm it.
I’m in a T95, I should be able to not just sit back and pick off unaware people through their sides like any light or medium can do, I should be able to push enemies out of their camping spots with them unable to do shit about it if they lack LOLpen rounds. That is what a “breakthrough” vehicle like that is supposed to be. But barrel damage means it can’t even think about trying.
But not every single vehicle you can possibly encounter has those, annoying as they are. Thus no matter what vehicle you run into, even in something that throws away all of its mobility for armor, it still is not immortal frontally. That is just wrong in my eyes, and always will be.
Supposedly there was an ancient WW2 event predating even my time in this game (2014 I guess, as I joined in 2015), but the one in 2019 was for the then-top-BR bracket, and it was intentionally placed in the bracket where rage against CAS was at a peak vs the Ka-50. It had a pretty good mix of open and city maps in rotation, and I observed some hype about the mode test.
Well its all we have in terms of actual experience to work with.
It could only backfire because CAS is not implemented very well, and never has been. Dumb game mechanics encourage its use as a petty revenge killstreak powerup. The counters either don’t work well without extensive practice far above what any other vehicle requires or are killstreak powerups and not available when you need them. And then the real kicker is that when you take a step back you realize CAS has literally nothing else to do but annoy player tanks, even though real CAS did many more functions the mode currently doesn’t represent (and many of those other objectives tanks could also do).
Thus we have a rage-inducing situation with questionable counters and CAS forced into doing a tiny fraction of its real job. Of course people would get frustrated at that.
I don’t consider it “a sleeping giant” of any sort, and never will. Yes, snail is just ignoring it and hoping it goes away.
The sheer irony of the entire CAS situation is that most or all of the components needed to truly fix it into a healthy, balanceable, and balanced part of the game already exist scattered in different modes.
And only by doing so would we realize just how popular TO actually is when rage and salt are not fueling it, because the vast majority of proposals for it do not think about consequences of adding such a mode, let alone try to adjust their idea to compensate.
Even in BR ranges where AA are highly effective, planes are still fairly common. If people had default ones that were actually good (not bone-stock and helpless like the current default AA are), I am pretty much certain more people will use them.
Like strike drones are frankly just bad, yet those show up on a semi-regular basis. The same people who use those because they lack other options would probably jump in Naval-esque default planes if they had the option.
Yeah, I won’t deny here that RoF > AA gun caliber. Though if people had some kind of lead indicator on all the non-radar ones out to a shorter range than most radars, I would like to think they’d make even slower-firing ones like 40mm Bofors and Co. work well enough.
Yup - the pile of old nerfs and bad design choices created this mess. And instead of actually fixing all these things, snail would rather throw a rug over it and pretend it doesn’t exist.
City maps enable the AA to suddenly zoom around corners and shred stuff before enemies can react. APHE overperforms globally on all guns. In my experience only the XM246 can be annoying to damage, all the other “problem” AAs are either made of glass or are ammo explosions waiting to happen (ex. Gepards). Old armor models not having been updated to volumetric standards are just pathetic at this point - how many years has it been since volumetric debuted?
Thing is, I don’t consider AAs shredding tanks to be “criminal” at all. If any gun can pen the sides of the majority of its opponents, then it can and should be used to hunt tanks. Currently WT has CAS as a killstreak powerup, so there are always more tanks roaming around than CAS. It’s rather rare that you see a competent helicopter user stay far enough back to avoid AA in the 8.0 range (and isn’t the Mi-4AV the only one whose missiles can outrange AA?), the rest you just have to patiently wait for them to get within gun range with the radar off so they don’t spot movement. Of course yes long range guided weapons hard-counter AAs and demand SAMs to counter instead, but that’s a whole different story.
Whirbelwinds used to be the thing that people screamed about shredding their tanks. It had a 65mm pen full APCR belt that actually had decent postpen damage and didn’t shatter upon impact with the slightest slope.
I’ve looked up the 20mm guns on the Crusader AA, AEC AA, and Skink, and have not been able to find if that gun had any better rounds developed for it. No platform with that gun and its current ammo should be above 3.7, IMHO. The Crusader Mk1 AA is a different story.
But you plainly see the player behavior issue I do with them sitting in spawn, and how it renders teams practically defenseless vs CAS if you don’t have your own Fighters up.
Yeah, it’s sad to see its wings clipped. Though I did kill a decent number of particularly gutsy jets when spading mine, so clearly its not totally unable to do AA duty.
I can only wonder though if snail would ever dare to state “we’ve seen your complaints about APHE postpen damage, but let us remind you that you as a collective community voted against even testing a historical spall pattern - you brought this on yourselves.”
Its not that it CANT shoot down planes that are gutsy enough to come 700m close to it, its that it has 8.3 battle rating without any additional measures but cannons. Like the ZSU-37-2 has a radar and close to Falcon gun characteristics. Same with Type 87, ect. They are able to easilly shoot 1.5km away. And they have better mobility. Falcon was preferably a light tank with autocannons to me.
xD well i voted against it, BEFORE they made APHE of 30mm cannons explode better than 100mm cannons. So it totally would be a gaslight
They aren’t because they were never intended to fire these shells.
It was developed to attack tanks from the air.
There was no doctrine that ever saw the need for AA guns to fire better AP than they already had.
As such there was never APCR development to be used by them.
Same with how 20mm AA were never intended to have 20mm APCR.
Unless you took an AA gun and mounted it on a vehicle intended for scouting.
Then it wouldn’t be an AA vehicle but a scout vehicle that happeneds to be equipped with an AA cannon.
Since 20mm APCR was there to boost anti-armor capabilities of vehicle that were using a 20mm „AT“ gun.
Except even in W127 the Flak 43 has it listed. And in general they wanted to give it to them wide spread use. Especially after more and more air supiority was lost and as such also their use in the Bk 3,7 and Bk 43.
Assuming this is about gepard APDS, yes, its there as a separate belt of 20 rounds per gun. Not as a built in APDS in regular belt. Bit of a difference there.
No, its about all the SPAA throughout the history. The have APCR on Flakpanzer 1, Gepard of 1938, Wirbelwind, them on 30mm Kugelblitz and Zestorer, and all that armanment on ships also.
And they have the APDS on Gepards too. And i reckon to have read about the same APCR ammunition made for 37mm that Ostwind wields. Mainly for ship use. But dont recall where i read it.
most of those are probably just gaijin deciding to add it because the ammo type existed for those weapons. there are some reasons why youd want lighter bullets to increase muzzle velocity but generally most things would just use either AP or HE.
As for gepards specifically, the APDS is stored on the side of the cannon in separate pouch. Its a form of “last defense” which is why its so limited. Technically the gepards could run a full 640 belt of APDS since the breech can load them and fire them, but it wasnt exactly done because… why would you ever do it.
And to curl this in back to the Falcon topic, honestly i dont mind it losing the APDS. Having it in the regular belt was kinda stupid. If it had a separate belt like the gepards and similar with only APDS but in limited amount id be fine with that.
Extremly unlikely, due to design, its ineffective against ships and doesnt offer any advantage over the normal Pzgr.18, quite the opposit, it can be even worse, the core braking up on impact of the hull befor reaching the Armor plate, low effect and the incenday action not even reaching the fuel tanks.
There is just 1 exception, which i really dont understand. 2 documents mention that the 15mm H-Pzgr. Was also used on ships against ships, which is rather confusing.
These are often guns which were used on all possible naval platforms as well. R-boats, S-boats, minelayers/sweepers and so on. These ofc had to use AP as well, when gunning at other boats (and surface mines). There are even old newsreels showing this. Same guns were used by SPAAs and so the ammo is aviable.
I also read accounts where Germans used AA guns for ground combat. The Sd-Kfz one definetly, as well as Wirbel and all the others. Especially vs buildings they also used AP shells. Old news reels are your friend. I also wan’t to remind you on the most well known loss of a Kugelblitz SPAA…it happened in ground combat vs. US troops. You won’t do this with HEI @ 5mm pen.
Look, ZSU-57-2 is trash for an SPAA. But the WZ305 really is god-tier and always has been. 8.0 is more than fine. I prefer it over the PGZ09, even (I think HE-VT is more reliable than the AHEAD spam).