So I have been playing a lot of heavy tanks across various trees, GER and SOV in particular and I had a thought while getting bombed with CAS (unrelated). What purpose do heavy tanks actually serve in game?
You can’t really push with them because your armor, while good, makes you too slow to turn to confront flanking lights and mediums in most cases, your gun is also good in most cases but the reload time (with rare exception like the American Jumbo which is a “heavy” tank) is also too slow for brawling or CQC. You’d then think to try sitting back and sniping but because you are so big you more often then not just get hit by CAS or focused down by TD’s.
The heavy tanks flaws do get slightly better as you get further down the tree but by the time they do, around 6.7+ your armor stops mattering and you just get murdered by HEAT and APDS, or god forbid 30mm SPAA.
Now obviously historically heavy tanks were phased out in favor of MBT’s but that’s not really the point of the discussion I’d like to have here. In your opinion, whoever happens to read this, what purpose if any do heavy tanks serve in current War Thunder? Because I’m scratching my head trying to figure out where they sit in the game other then just slow moving targets for basically everything else.