Most other stuff is just people cope, what ArmChair said was just straight up stupid.
Checklist for mobility actually mattering:
- Get to where you need to, which is highly situational and virtually luck-based.
- Keep your speed, which is also highly situational and dependent on having lots of area to move around (this does not exist in urban maps, and for longer-range maps your mobility will be worsened the farther away you are).
The only reason mobility matters at all is for starting ambushes, which (outside of the very beginning of the match) any tank can do. If there was a situation where a tank is legitimately so fast that a non-light tank’s turret traverse cannot keep up, then mobility would matter.
Unless the light tank you’re in is an autocannon, I doubt there are tanks at top tier that can’t turn even 180 degrees in 4-5 seconds.
And the lower in rank you get, the slower the light tanks get as well (and the worse the armament, too).
It’s not as stupid as the idea that people just just auto-win for clicking on a barrel.
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Being able to break a barrel head on makes perfect sense, though. It makes 0 sense that a barrel wouldn’t be destroyed from a shell hitting it head on.
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Having to accommodate for parallax to make such a shot also makes perfect sense. Something that doesn’t make sense is “no armor is best armor” because it’s trivial for anyone to exploit any grapefruit sized weakspot in the armor that your tank made such sacrifices to have. Even if the armor is flawless, one click on the barrel and there is nothing that an opponent can do but pray a third party saves them.
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… you were saying?
“Head on”
Plus, that could still damage it due to the force the round exerts on the barrel, and it would destroy it if it were APFSDS.
You auto-win by killing the enemy lol
A tank with perfect armor would be OP. Shooting barrels means that no one tank can be 100% useless in a match, except for .50cal only tanks.
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Even if large gun barrels are, technically, this vulnerable to damage in real life, in my opinion this is one of those cases where it would actually benefit the game to be less realistic.
There’s loads of unrealistic features in WT for the sake of gameplay, shooting barrels being one of them.
That’s PRECISELY why we need to force realistic gunner sights. Armor is one of the worst things for a tank to specialize in right now because it’s so trivial to just shove a round through their hull machinegun, detonate an APHE shell in a cupola, or hit any small weakpoint even if it is grapefruit sized. Lowering the BR of the armored tank to the point where it would be 100% reliable would be unfair.
The way to make armor matter again is to remove the point and click gameplay and force players to compensate for parallax when shooting. Then the grapefruit sized weakpoint like a hull machinegun isn’t a huge problem for the tank and it will be able to more reliably depend on its armor in combat. The skilled can still exploit those weakpoints to defeat the tanks. It just takes more skill than pointing straight at the weakpoint.
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Please let me know how many times you have been killed through a machine gun port. As an Italian player (who was stuck with HEATFS and/or only being able to aim for weakspots for a while), I don’t remember a single time where shooting the machine gun port did anything more than kill the machine gunner.
This is also not consistent.
This is a lot more difficult than it seems, especially in tanks without stabilizers.
Dude if you’re relying on armor then you’re doing something wrong. The best armor is simply don’t get shot.
Depends on the heavy. If it is a slow rolling pillbox like a Churchill, actually yes that thing damn well should be frontally immortal unless someone actually spawns a Dicker Max or Sturer Emil. Same story with other similar machines of the same design philosophy, regardless of what their guns are.
That sounds like heavies in RB are generally just tiered too high for the most part. They should not be teetering on the edge of worthlessness BR-wise where their armor only sometimes matters in a full downtier.
That is more of a spotting problem I would daresay. They see you coming miles away. Larger maps with varied terrain would help in both AB and RB to give everyone more room to maneuver.
And if your light tank rolled out in front of something you can’t frontally pen, you already made your mistake, and should not get any free pass unless the heavy whiffs his shot or magikbounces.
Not every nation’s heavies have .50cals coming out of every orifice. Fewer still have the better 14.5s. And very few have useful larger guns as coaxial options. Only M6s, SMK, and the Maus/E-100 come to mind, as the low-BR landships may as well have wet paper for armor across the board.
Depends on where you are relative to the opponent. Surprising someone from behind a building at fairly close range you actually can outrun their turret traverse, even with “traditional” lights like the M18 vs Tiger 1s/2s.
No, take your artificial frontal weakspots back to WoT where they belong. Front-on barrel-knocking is obnoxious, and AFAIK it only happened once by sheer accident (M26 running into a Tiger 1E). Due to everyone’s pinpoint-accurate aim, even if we had parallax error from real gunsight positions, obnoxious front-on barrel-knocking would still continue.
That behavior should be a non-option, intentionally.
Your options when you can see a heavy coming you can’t pen should be to let them get overconfident and overextend, then punish, or to spawn a piece of uptier insurance that has lots of tradeoffs in exchange for being able to laugh at their armor (Sturer Emil LOLNOPEing a Churchill VII into next week). Or any of the artillery pieces in higher tiers vs whatever heavy is an issue.
Barrel damage is thoughtless trash, and it should be eliminated from the game because at the ranges most maps force engagements at, it really doesn’t require anywhere near as much skill as you like to claim it does.
Note: I only have a problem with front-on barrel-knocking. If I (or anyone else) sticks their gun out around a corner and a shot punches through the side of the barrel, making two holes through both sides of it, THAT should disable it.
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I’m playing with true scope and grass on sight since years now, it will be fair to play versus other player with same handicap as me…
I mean, I’ll appreciate this.
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Exactly - why even bother researching, let alone using, some specialized SPG that makes serious tradeoffs in armor and mobility for a better gun if your standard medium can just poke the barrel once and laugh?
If it also has better mobility than average and an amazing gun, yeah sure.
But if it has the mobility of a snail, and the “immortal perfection” only applies to the front, sorry, that is not overpowered and never will be, regardless of what its gun may be.
It did happen all of a single documented time by sheer luck in real life. M26 put a round down the barrel of a Tiger 1.
Parallax error would help for sure, but it would not completely eliminate barrel bullshittery, especially regarding autocannons spewing sabot or darts.
Hence I would intentionally go a bit unrealistic and disable barrel damage either entirely or at least from the frontal arc of where your gun is pointing. If I stick my gun around a corner and someone shoots clean through it, I deserve to die there with my gun blown out. But if I’m mere seconds away from accurately aiming at someone only to be unable to fire thanks to a muzzle brake I cannot hide nor remove, even though he can’t actually pen my armor, that is utter bullshit.
Honestly yeah this should have been a thing along time ago.
For one it would actually force people to get creative with bush placement instead of driving around with a solid wall of bush in front of them.
Two it would make it incredibly hard if not impossible to pull stupid through certain pieces of cover/buildings (like some of the gaps between the shipping containers on cargoport).
Overall it would be a good change.
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On the topic of barrel shooting: one of the reasons it’s so easy to do in this game is because the game conflates the aiming speed of a power traverse with accuracy of manual aiming (at least for older tanks).
IRL you used the speedy power traverse to swing the turret approximately where the target is, and then, unless it’s at point blanc range, you would need to finish adjusting azimuth and elevation using manual handcracks, which would take prohibitively long to aim at a specific part of a target, unless they were unaware of you and you could take your time with it.
A light tank (of normal caliber) should be able to frontally pen ANY tanks’ weakspots at its BR.
I know, it still applies. Most light tanks can be killed by literally any MG in the game.
I’ve never had that happen, regardless of how close I was, unless the turret ring of the non-light tank was damaged (so artificially slowed).
The M18 shouldn’t be classified as a light tank…
It is physically possible to break a barrel frontally (and helps with game balance to be able to do so). Most tank engagements IRL don’t happen at <400m, so I don’t know why IRL engagements must be the model for the game for just barrel breaking.
Why?
Or hit a weakspot (which exist on tanks) or their barrel (which can be damaged IRL).
It’s partially skill and partially just dumb luck because of how inconsistent they are.
Denting a barrel even slightly should make it fully inoperable.