For anyone feeling my suggestions are “insane” or “crazy” - please understand where they’re coming from. I’ve seen this cycle of “just nerf [insert SPAA], then they’ll finally go kill only planes, right? Right?!” for more than ten years!
I remember when it was the Whirbelwind being complained about, alongside the Flakpanzer 1, Flakpanzer 38, and Panzer IIs. Nerfing the gun put the lineups with them pretty much out of commission, but did it fix the underlying reasons people go hunt tanks with their SPAA? NO!
We basically have two main “camps” on this issue regardless of which SPAAG in question is being talked about.
People complaining about SPAAG killing their tanks, coming up with any number of reasons why they shouldn’t be able to, often showing examples of what are bugs/buggy features as “proof.”
People who think SPAAG killing tanks is being massively overreacted to, and should be seen as normal.
We can’t please both of these groups simultaneously. The reason I oppose the former *because they will just jump to complaining about something else not long after whatever their target is that gets nerfed. They can literally NEVER be satisfied. At some point you gotta stop listening to people who shout “nerf” every time anything defeats them, or the rest of us will be left with an entire game where nothing works well at all. If no amount of nerfing will ever satisfy camp #1, why are we still listening to them at all?
Because I see that this cycle of “just keep nerfing the SPAAG” will go nowhere, that is why I (albeit quite angrily) propose a total paradigm shift on the matter. Embrace and enhance their tank-killing ability, while intentionally moving most of them down in BR expecting them to hunt tanks, and if applicable give them currently-missing ammo types to do so with.
Now, addressing the bugs/buggy features that allow SPAAG to pen things they damn well shouldn’t is a totally separate issue. I see no reason NOT to address all of that, but all of that has no easy fix.
To address armor holes, the game needs to convert every single vehicle to use volumetric armor on its entire structure.
To address buggy netcode enabling autocannons to overload the server requires either artificial RoF reductions to what the server can handle on the egregious ones (likely not happening) or upgraded servers (expensive).
To address the “bounce 4x and shell ignores armor afterwards” issue, just remove that feature, as a round bouncing should lose a lot of penetrating power if its a small-caliber round striking a thick plate.
To address “SPAAG dominance in city maps,” we gotta have maps that aren’t pure cities as standard. Yet knowing the game’s history, many of the same people complaining about SPAAG now were also the ones complaining Maginot was too big. I miss the full-size version of that map in my Panzer IVs and Shermans…
Historically nerfing APHE postpen so that autocannon APHE doesn’t go nuclear when it pens. Unfortunately the same people whining about SPAAG now voted AGAINST even TESTING this…
To address “SPAAG not bothering to shoot at aircraft,” this demands several things. You cannot expect average players to use something rather bad at its intended role and also be paid shit when it even works in that role.
Greatly increased rewards for SPAAGs bagging aircraft.
Give all radar-less ones a shorter-range version of the Arcade lead marker that is modified by Crew Skills. 0-1km for stock crew, 0-1.5km for aced crew. All Heavy SPAAGs classed as TDs, all SPHs with HE-VT shells, and quite possibly all tanks with commander-mounted MGs could get this feature, too.
Address cases of radars not working right like on the AMX-30 S DCA (apparently) or of lead-tracking features being missing like on the Falcon.
Broader reforms of how CAS is implemented so that SPAAGs have a steady supply of CAS to shoot at, and are not sitting there bored out of their minds waiting for planes to spawn.
None of these have easy fixes. Thus snail is merely throwing a rug over the rotten part of the floorboards instead of addressing any of this.
And to be useful as spaa they need to drop the BR. Was raised to 8.3 because of APDS. Fighting 8.3+ aircraft with guns and no radar is a problem. Needs to go down to the introduction BR of 7.7
Without the APDS it’s frankly worse than the Coelian or Kugelblitz. I’d argue it belongs as low as 6.0 where the Zerstorer 45 is. Sure its fully turreted with no weird blind spots and is technically closed-top, but it can be casually .50cal’d to death by literally anything.
Like all non-radar gun AA, it runs into the same issues of being pretty much wholly dependent on the enemy CAS having no brain cells at all and flying straight at the Falcon to be killed by it. And the Falcon is so thin-skinned it will likely at best trade with a plane that does this.
What that seems to show is nothing special - they don’t carefully define what “efficiency” truly means in terms of kills/death, kills/battle, win rate, or RP/SL per game. Thus while this post was probably not intended to sound like such, it reeks of politician-grade doublespeak to me.
But that post does not outright state what the cutoff values are for considering something “yep, that one there is too good and needs moving up” or vice versa to move it down. Plus more generally snail doesn’t publish actual vehicle stats from the game either so players are left guessing how good or not some actually are via 3rd party sites like Statshark.
Not really worth posting cutoff values when we don’t have their stats either way. At least we know the basis of their balancing system and what values they look for.
SS is definitely the best tool we ever had for looking at how vehicles perform in global.
Yeah…I really don’t understand why snail doesn’t make their stats regularly available - is there some technical hurdle they have with doing so (you’d think there’s a program or script to just “print current vehicle statistics to Google/Excel Sheet”) or is there something proprietary they’re trying to hide? I just wish I knew, it would shed much-needed light on so many different discussions.
Just looking up the Falcon’s global stats for Dec 2025 on StatShark, the stats are better than I was expecting them to be. I had previously snipped the “global all time” ones.
Be that as it may, it’s still not great either.
especially as of late.
Cheers man, for some reason kept taking me to random A** forum posts from the old forum. Though it is kinda vague on how they balance it if not through the earnings RP/SL (economic) then how does it relate to frags and earnings.
Though the mention someone else made of cutoff points be released would be pretty daft on gaijins part.
Logically it would mean folks who try hard to keep vehicle BRs lower as they know the cutoff for it going up
Falcon has ~8x more ground kills than air ones, which is pretty much the biggest difference you’ll find among your listed group. This might indicate that others are much more often trying to shoot down CAS and get minimal results out of it before they’re killed. Falcon lack any sort of air tracking so people might not even try and just focus on farming ground, especially as Marksman has one at the same BR.
Also, Falcon might not be uptiered as frequently as many others in that list because ZA-35 fills that 8.7 - 9.3 void. It is also the only one that has APHE + APDS rounds in one belt if we don’t count DCA in as it lacks a stabilizer, which is a big con.
Every frag you make is giving you a certain amount of RP/SL which is the thing they track.
They probably do some funny business with minor nations’ vehicles as I’m sure they’re aware those will perform better than same things found in major trees.
I’m gonna keep it a stack, everyone: It has more ground kills than air kills, sounds a lot like:
Falcon’s stats are more of a ground-focused vehicle than of an SPAA, so at least adding SP cost to each spawn and bumping it in BR should ease griveances.
