they claim its for balance, like for example chieftain with expert crew is over 8 seconds when in reality it was closer to 6 for a normal crew.
The conquoror did have issues loading but that was with shell ejection, which is irrelevant here, the Conquror should have roughly a 15 second reload overall
How would you rank the Challenger 2s from best to worst?
2E and BN E tier
All the others G tier
I’m more interested in what it looks like after the BN and E
2E if you want the better mobility
BN if you want the better optics and APS
Those 2 are the best of the 7 CR2/CR3s
2F and 3TD are next, 2F is a nice balance in extra ERA protection but not too big of a nerf on mobility. CR3TD is an okay glass canon, but overall not great.
Base CR2 next, because it has none of the advnatages of the others but also none of the disadvantags
OES and TES are by far the worse as they are extra slow and have to drag all that ERA around which doesnt work correctly. Provides around 1/4 the protection it should.
But only tank in game that is maybe worse is the Ariete, but it does have the better round, mobility and sustained fire rate
G-LYNX is 10.7
Something that just occured to me, probably obvious to everyone else, is the importance of sound.
Yes, I know the sound system in this game is… special but still.
Leopard’s are fairly quiet in game. Abrams you can hear coming from across the map, challengers are also rather loud, t-72’s are fairly quiet, diesel t-80’s are loud as hell and turbine t-80’s are fairly quiet in my experience.
it may seem like a small thing, but it’s actually pretty significant. It’s almost impossible to sneak up on someone in a abrams or a challenger and making a huge “I’M HERE!” sound when moving certainly doesn’t help with survivability.
I mentioned this a few posts ago, technically every tank commander should be sticking his head out the turret to hear anything and that he’d only be able to hear his own engine if anything at all as he’d most likely have ear defenders on. Nobody should hear much of anything really, definitely not the dumb listening for a guy around a corner because you turned enemy engine noise down in settings BS.
The real kicker, is that challenger 2 should actually be pretty quiet compared to most tanks. This is due to the chieftain SID, a demonstrator tank that had things like radar absorbent paint, massive broom bristles to keep down dust and sound dampening for the engine. The sound dampening was said to be so effective, the driver wouldn’t be able to hear the engine from his seat. the tank museum has a video on it I believe and the work done on the SID was incorporated directly into the development of challenger. I’ll see if i can find the vid.
I never thought I’d see the phrases ‘sneaking around’ and ‘Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank’ in the same sentence…
Still, in WT it is almost suicide to be close to your intended target in CR2 as they are now. Much better to whack them from afar where the aforementioned engine sound disparity is less of an issue. Also gives you time to repair your breech when it gets taken out for the 142nd time…
From afar on the tiny single point maps, only to then die to a Russian CAS jet spawned 2 minutes into the game.
I refer to top tier as breech repair simulator. It does get a bit much sometimes.
The other day I shot out the breech on a leopard 2a7 about 5 times in a row, every time he tried to peek above a ridge line. That’s what, a minute and a half of repair time, in the best case? I felt bad for the poor guy but I could do literally nothing else to him. It ended when he got hit by a missile from some plane, probably fired from 10+km away.
This wasn’t good gameplay for anyone involved, excepting the cas pilot probably.
I feel like something needs to change, not sure what though.
Also, on a tangent, cas is ridiculously easy to spawn. I can get in a g-lynx with 8 hellfires with a single kill. The sp requirements are often less than a jet with an a2a load out. It’s pretty stupid.
The problem is the 2A5 and other Leopards like T series dont lose crew when you shoot out the breach. While you feel bad for him he wont die from it. CR2 on the other hand always loses the commander or 2 crew members with 80% of breach shots
While i understand the comparison its wrong to day the T series dont lose crew, they top usually lose either the gunner.or.commander.
The issue is as you say the cr2 loses half its crew, so longer repair, slower reload usually.due to 2 crew loss.
Then if youre in the cr3 TD youll be lucky it doesn’t just ammo rack you.
Had a T90M fire 3bm60 through a rail car,.into my breach, clean through to ammo rack.
Its pathetic
Ok more so the Leopard but the T series doesnt always lose crew. Where as you are pretty much guaranteed as long as that shot isnt perfectly centred you are losing a crew member.
Which lengthens your repair time, usually it’s your commander so you lose the advantage of your excellent CITV
You have the already abysmal reload compared to what it should be (and now the same as literally everyone else), the 26 seconds first stage restock, and then add in the fact that every single engagement is someone clicking on your mantlet and killing your loader+cdr, cutting that reload and first stage restock in half…
What are you trying to say here ?
It’s not as simple as a worse reload, it’s worse than that, because once you spend those 4 first stage rounds you’re functionally never replacing them without a loader. Therefore the loss of your loader (which happens far too easily) is even worse than it would be in any other tank with a reasonably sized first stage stowage that doesn’t take a decade to replace.
No one is debating that, at all.
Im unfortunately well aware of the reload once injured, you either replace crew or have to replenish on a cap point.
If you even can get to one.
The slower reload is objectively a simplified response as @luque13 and I have been discussing this over a matter of days or weeks even.
But yeah it is horrific man