Ive been playing this game since 2013 and really enjoyed my time with War Thunder, also my first post in this forum ever :)
The reason for this post is to make a small poll to see what the players of the War Thunder community think of barrel damage in Ground RB.
I personally feel this is a game breaking feature and should be removed or get a major rework.
There was a time when you actually had to study different weakspots for tanks in order to get a kill.
Now its enough to aim at the barrel and its almost an instant win, and honestly, all that hard work to create fancy armour stats is almost a complete waste of Gaijins time/work.
If you would like to remove or keep barrel damage as a part of the game or have suggestions how it could be changed, please do share your thoughts :)
It would be nice if they reverted it back to where you could still fire with a damaged barrel, but the shell was a lot less accurate and had more drop off.
In another post talking about barrel damage, it was proposed by another user (forget his name, sorry) to divide the barrel into segments damage-model-wise.
The tip of the barrel would be separate from the rest of it, whether your machine has a muzzle brake/fume extractor or not. Shooting the barrel tip of someone looking at you would slightly decrease your accuracy, making long-range shots impractical, but intentionally do nothing at all to prevent short-range shots from firing at full power.
Now, if you are sticking your gun out around a corner and someone shoots a round through the side of it, it would be fully disabled just like now.
Keep it as is.
Barrels are already a risky shot due to the way a lot of them are modelled and server desync.
Happens often that you will either do no damage to barrel upon hitting it or only turn it yellow, at which point you’re dead.
Removing barrel damage would also significantly buff certain nations/vehicles that already have very small or unreliable weakspots too.
Nobody enjoys having their barrel shot out but it is a necessary mechanic.
If we’re fixing barrel damage, then it MUST be paired with APHE being fixed to create a very wide cone rather than a sphere of death.
If barrel damage is gone, british tanks lose even more of their combat effectiveness as they lack the ability to one-hit-kill enemies. Barrel damage allows for outskilling the opponent and gives you precious seconds to aim for ammo rack or take out the rest of their crew.
… Seriously, APHE as it is right now can do some real bullshit kills like… you have your front wheel and transmission just about poking out from cover. Enemy shoots side towards front plate - it’d knock out the transmission, MAYBE spalling would hit the driver if you were using solid shot.
APHE somehow bounces back and kills the entire crew.
This is separate from what I was complaining about.
What I was referring to, and what most people are referring to, is when your barrel is shot out by someone you are aiming at who shoots the barrel tip. This heavily disadvantages large-caliber derp cannons, as well as heavy tanks and heavy (armored) SPGs which are already heavily disadvantaged in mobility, maneuverability, gun handling, etc.
Being shot through the side of the barrel should indeed always be possible.
But your barrel tip being shot crippling the entire thing is not a necessary mechanic. If it makes the poor Jumbo sweat a bit or even end up seeing enough of a stat decrease that it goes down in BR, isn’t that a good thing?
See above what I said about there being two types of barrel damage. If someone is sticking their barrel out around a corner and you see more than the muzzle brake, you would shoot that and it would still cripple them like usual.
However, if they are looking at you, shooting the barrel tip that is looking at you would now not prevent the guy from shooting.
I do very much support nerfing APHE to be a slightly better solid shot, in addition to continuing to rebuff HEAT, HESH, APCR, APDS, and HE.
If a barrel is sticking around a corner and gets shot through the side, yes that is totally the fault of the person being shot at.
But if they’re looking at someone and that someone shoots their barrel out, that is not okay. That is obnoxious, way too easy to pull off, and punishes already-disadvantaged machines that much further.
Also if barrels had building collision, suddenly city maps would become far more hellish than they already are.
Having it reduce accuracy, or by giving it a chance to misfire wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would make tanks with big muzzle breaks much more playable, but it would also allow you to damage or destroy barrels (if they aren’t in good condition) head on.
Personally I think removing damage from head on shots is not good, and it doesn’t make sense.
No more RNG, a slight accuracy reduction past about 500m or so is what was originally proposed.
The point is intentionally to remove damage from head on shots because their existence makes armor effectively worthless no matter what you happen to run into - literally every possible opponent, even the most garbage SPAAG, can either 1) LOLpen with time-traveling rounds you weren’t designed to fight 2) lob artillery-size HE in your face or 3) barrel-knock and then rush you.
End-on barrel shots are a mockery of balance, not a critical support of it as some try to claim. The machines which suffer the most from it already suffer from multiple other drawbacks and frankly don’t even need this.
Okay? I was talking about that. It’s a shot that can often simply do nothing due to server desync and other random nonsense which you typically employ against things that can pen you anywhere but you have very limited or no ways of dealing with it from where you are.
Barrel damage should remain as is. I know you don’t like getting your barrel shot out, neither do I. We don’t like it because we tend to die after it happens. Such is the game. It is still necessary.
And I think that is a bad idea, and wouldn’t be a good or realistic mechanic. So I proposed them to take a large accuracy hit when they are heavily damaged.
It wouldn’t be a fun mechanic if you accidentally hit a barrel head on, and suddenly you don’t do any damage. It would also make certain heavily armoured tanks very good, which means they will go up, and have the potential to face more enemies that can negate their armour. The only way to kill a Foch or T95 without APHE or a high pen round is to hit it’s barrel, track it, then flank it. Without the barrel weakspot those tanks could go up in BR.
Barrel damage isn’t an issue, other things around it are. Namely the goofy optics-in-barrel mechanic, which makes pixel-sniping drastically too easy. Remove that from the game and barrel sniping is fixed, along with a number of other (especially RB) issues.
And do either of you guys stop to think how much flexibility those machines give up for that frontal immortality? The Foch has Panther-like, paper-thin sides and modest mobility. The T28 has snail mobility and similarly paper sides. The T95 has trollier sides with the spaced tracks, but its still a snail. All three have not terribly good reverse speed.
Those machines giving up so much flexibility from not having turrets, not having great mobility, and having painfully long reloads and STILL having a frontal “weakspot” makes them effectively worthless outside the increasingly few maps enabling them to sit at long enough ranges where the barrel is hard to target intentionally.
And instead of raising their BRs further, I would rather see their SL multipliers be decreased, since any further BR increases would also make them worthless.
I have no sympathy for the “waaaaah but MuH jumBO!” crowd. If barrel damage is what allows it to achieve such high “efficiency” enabling it to frontally cripple things it has no business being able to cripple, then wouldn’t barrel damage being removed help the Jumbos by lowering their stats and thus their BRs?
I do agree that boresights by default are an issue. But I also think barrel damage from someone you’re aiming at is still a big problem. To my knowledge it only happened a single time by sheer accident when a Pershing stumbled upon a Tiger 1E and put a 90mm round down the Tiger’s muzzle brake.
Breaking the tip of a barrel should not stop the enemy from shooting. It should not make the thing misfire. It should make accurate long range shots not possible until its repaired. It should give enough added recoil that it throws off your aim after each shot.
It is an obnoxious gameplay mechanic that has very little real basis.
I would personally hope for both forced Real Gunner Sight positions and removing barrel damage. Just kill it in the most overkill classic Gaijin fashion.
To all of you: armor needs to matter, and having such an easy means to prevent something you can’t pen from shooting means that armor doesn’t really matter unless you miss. If people can’t easily get around camping heavies to side shoot them where they can pen, that is a map problem, and should not be solved by artificially weakening heavies.
