Ironically, nerfing APHE would benefit the Jumbo more than hurt it.
APHE postpen and the utter stupidity known as barrel damage are the only reasons the Jumbo got that high in the first place. Barrel damage enabled it to frontally take on things it damn well shouldn’t be able to, and APHE postpen being a nuke means the thing only needs to pen once and the target is usually quite dead.
Without both of those, the Jumbo would be probably dropped to 5.3 rather fast, maybe even lower.
Unless of course all APCR gets a global pen correction and postpen rebuff, in which case the Jumbo would now be in an awkward position with a gun penning 180mm flat that reloads very fast, but still terrible angled armor penetration.
I would personally want to watch the world burn by intentionally removing all barrel damage, nerfing APHE to what it should be, rebuffing APCR to what it should be, rebuffing APDS to what it should be, rebuffing HEAT(FS) to what it should be, rebuffing the f*** out of HESH to what it should be, rebuffing smaller APFSDS to what it should be, and also giving HE its missing kinetic pen component. Maybe also rebuffing overpressure intentionally to pre-Sturmtiger levels.
Then every ammo type actually works, BRs of course will be in utter flames for months, but eventually they will settle down to where they should have been all along.
Ironically that’s the case right now with the air BR changes haha. Many players are looking past the fact that the max BR has increased and just focus on the short term impact of it.
Removing barrel damage is unrealistic, and it doesn’t make sense. Instead of that, just force the camera from tank gunner sight in RB. It’ll make damaging a barrel still possible, but much harder to do, while also being more realistic.
Best compromise I could go with is separating the barrel into modules, so that shooting the tip of someone’s gun pointed at you intentionally does nothing but drop their long range shooting accuracy somewhat.
I refuse to budge further until the utter bullshittery of front-on barrel damage is more stone-cold dead than 2016 HVARs.
And do you both see how the mere existence of front-on barrel damage makes heavies basically worthless in any sort of role using their armor as more than an emergency save?
Any time a heavy gets a side shot on an unsuspecting opponent, a faster machine could have been there ages ago and probably killed more opponents.
Any time a heavy snipes someone from long range, same story.
But the moment they even so much as think about using their armor for more than just an occasional emergency save from a badly-aimed shot, they get tracked, barreled, LOLpenned, or all three. With a nice seasoning of CAS sometimes.
I don’t know about you two, but being forced to ignore the main point of a vehicle to make it effective is not exactly entertaining, nevermind good for game balance.
Hence why I would support going intentionally overkill to remove barrel damage. I would force real gunsight positions in RB, divide the barrel into sections damage-model wise so shooting the tip doesn’t stop it from firing at all, and intentionally not move a single heavy up even slightly as a result.
That’s precisely my argument though. Shooting the muzzle brake might carry some sort of penalty (I proposed reload rate as for example the recoil system in the Pz III needed some time to release pressure if too many rounds were fired too fast), but not prevent someone from shooting.
And I’m glad I’m far from the only one who sees the utter ridiculousness of barrel-tapping.
But will such a common-sense change ever see the light of day? Who knows? Do we have any clue if the idea has been even submitted and rejected as a Suggestion? No idea!
Likely has, the barrel shooting topic isn’t exactly new. They’ve already done quite a lot of change by making barrels significantly harder to shoot so people can’t just cheese heavily armored tanks.
Eh…
I have a couple thoughts on this. If the round goes straight down the barrel it should disable it as usual, but the first part of the barrel should be a segment that when hit simply has accuracy penalties. Depending on the pen of the round it has a chance to punch through that (When fired front-on), and hit the main segment and disable it. It means that merely peeking your barrel around a corner wont destroy it, but a shot straight down will if the round has enough pen.
Real gunsight pos is something I am against for reasons I have dictated before, though.
Much as people may hate it, that pixel-hunting is part of what lets tanks (Paticularly heavies) be balanced- quite a few of them have small weakspots that would force them higher if pixel-hunting wasnt possible.
I do think high-pen rounds like APDS should be able to kill the barrel, as should high-caliber HE, or really just high-caliber rounds in general, mainly because tanks with long reloads will be uber-fucked if the barrel becomes a black hole.
Balance is important, but it’s not everything.
I, for once, don’t want any tank to be able to easily disable any other tank from the front. It just makes different types of vehicles loose their uniqueness.