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Because it has the L.48 instead of L.43, also Arcade reallly?
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The Italian Pz.IV G is functionally just the Pz.IV H but a bit more mobile since they have the same gun.
The German Pz.IV G has the inferior L/43.
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L/48 does not provide any significant advantage over L/43, certainly not enough to raise BR
See what I said above.
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Well, who knows what the snail is actually thinking
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I find it far more outlandish that any Pz IV is at the same BR as the M4A2 lol.
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Why can’t PZ4H be the same BR? Pz4H can railgun through the shermans armor while the sherman has a stabilizer for quicker reactions
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Pz IVs in the game are basically tank destroyers masquerading as medium tanks. What holds them back is not any one factor, but a combination of factors. Yes, the gun is amazing at its BR (and remains competitive well above). However, they have no armour, (more damningly) terrible targeting speed, and (worse of all!) atrocious mobility. This promotes an incredibly passive gameplay and is probably the reason why you see so many German mains hang back and hug the spawn instead of pushing objectives when they get to the Tigers/Panthers/KTs down the line.
In WT’s map rotation, which is increasingly skewed towards CQC and where the way to win is more and more to push objectives and win the resultant knife fights, a tank that gets there later, shoots later, and can’t get shot at just won’t do. You are much better off just playing the JPz IV, which is only 0.3 BR above and actually allows you to push the enemy much more aggressively.
Pz IVs are good at getting kills but not at winning matches.
In any event, this is just about Pz IVs and Shermans in general, but the comparison I made was narrower than that. I specifically mentioned the M4A2. This was already a bully at 4.0 and as meta a vehicle as they come. Now, the round of decompression we just got in the low tiers is a good thing, but it “forgot” the M4A2, which is now at the same BR as the Pz IVs and the M24s and is only 0.3 higher than the M4A1. Skilled M4A2 players are gonna be eating good the next few months, not much to say about that.
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They are just medium tanks.
Extremely common for medium tanks… this is not some outlier factor. Their hull armor on the front is pretty decent even for their BR. It’s just the side armor and turret face that is bad.
This is overstated. It’s worse than the T-34 and M4s but not by the amount you’re implying. The Pz4 has more than enough mobility to do the job of a medium tank and get to positions it needs to or reposition.
It’s good, but it’s not some menace. The M4A2 is good because it has a stabilizer, aphe, decent mobility, and decent armor. The only standout quality here is the stabilizer. The other 3 aspects are found on plenty of other tanks and often in higher quality such as the T-34 being faster with more armor. I have always considered these 3 to be sidegrades of one another.
There was no decompression. For decompression to happen, you have to move EVERYTHING upwards. Not just one bracket. They just compressed the mid war tanks into higher brackets.
This has always been the case.
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Look. I recently spaded the Swedish Pz IV J, wisely finishing it before it went up in BR. It was a horrendous experience and you could not pay me enough to spawn it at 4.0. You know what other 3.7 medium tank is in that lineup? The Sherman III/IV. I did much better in it than I ever did in the Pz IV J. Yet guess which one of them is going up in BR?
(Just for clarity, they should have both gone up, and the M4A2 should have gone to 4.3).
Of course you don’t expect great armour from a medium tank, but the problem with the Pz IVs is that they don’t get any benefit out of their lack of armour (even by medium tank standards) because they are also the slowest mediums at that BR and the clumsiest to fire if you’re not already set up.
I am absolutely fine playing something with no armour, so long as you get the mobility in exchange.
They are moving everything up though, they’re just doing it in stages. We got a higher top BR in ground and they’ve been steadily working their way downwards since then.
No? The M24s are going from 3.7 to 4.0. The M4A1 is going from 3.3 to 3.7. The M4A2 is staying at 4.0.
You don’t have to convince me gaijin makes really dumb balance decisions. I don’t agree with the Sherman 3/4 being this low either. That said, I don’t agree that the Pz4 is some weak tank that can’t compete with the other 2 mainline mediums of ww2 in the early BRs.
They have never, not once, ever, done this before. Why do you think they are doing it now? They plan to leave the BRs as they are for another year then do another random no-thought uptier to a bracket. They did this to rank 4 a few years back to if you recall. Do you remember them going back and raising rank 5 tanks to compensate, or later rank 4 tanks above the ones that were raised?
If you mean 12.7, this is far from adequate and it was overdue by about 2-3 years. We need ~14.0 minimum currently to fix ground BRs as well as to better integrate air into GRB again.
The previous BRs were M4A1 at 3.3 and M24 at 3.7.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree. The increase in firepower is imho simply not worth the cost you pay in everything else in the current meta of WT. This is especially true of the J variant, which is basically an M10 with a roof, a worse reload, and a higher BR.
Because they first added 12.7, then worked their way down in stages. Note that you yourself are describing this process. Your gripe isn’t that this is not happening, it’s that it’s happening too slowly. Which I agree with. And I might add, leaving out certain tanks creates problematic localised spots of increased compression. But on the whole it is still decompression. A while back several 5.3s were sent to 5.7, several 5.7s became 6.0s, some 6.0s became 6.3s and some 6.3s went to 6.7, etc etc. So of course now it was the turn of the 3.0 - 4.0 bracket.
The 6.7 - 7.7 area was decompressed in summer 2023. I remember a time when the Leo I was 7.3 and so was the IS-6. That area of the game was a compression clusterfuck before, and now it is a much smoother experience.
The bracket just below saw upward movement later, like I already mentioned. And now we’ve gone down to this one.
Complaint about the pacing of decompression is not the same as complaint that there is no decompression.
Brother, this is literally what I said, what are you objecting to?
Before: the M4A2 was 0.3 above the Chaffee and 0.7 above the M4A1.
Now: the M4A2 is the same BR as the Chaffee and 0.3 above the M4A1.
So why do you say that
when clearly the gap between these two vehicles and the M4A2 has decreased?
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I’m not really referring to the J variant. It’s a very particular Pz4 with its own problems.
Where did they do that? Where have you seen them decompress?
My gripe IS that its not happening. You can’t decompress the game by raising random brackets, compressing them upwards into their own BR ceilings. That just creates new problems while alleviating old ones. You HAVE to raise the entire ceiling and move everything up. That’s the only way it works.
That is not how that went. The Leopard 1 was 8.0 prior to that change. It got downtiered due to “germany” in the same vein that gaijin wanted to move the german M48A2, and ONLY the German M48 (not the near identical USA one) down to 6.7. The Leopard 1 was simply made undertiered, and then reverted later when they “realized their mistake”.
Raising the BR ceiling about 10% of the time that it actually needs to be raised is not decompression. It’s just that they literally can’t keep adding new variants and upgrades of existing tanks to the same exact BR and get away with it in the long term. They routinely do this. They add straight up entirely new brackets of meta tanks to top tier which near invalidate the older ones, then don’t move new tanks upwards for a long time until it gets so bad they are effectively forced to, then they do the bare minimum. I mean, we have the 2A5 at 12.3 currently and the 2A7 at 12.7. We have like 2 entire brackets (2.0 BR) of airplanes smashed into 13.0 because they can’t figure out how properly do top tier.
This:
The M24 has always been only 0.3br higher than the M4A1, except for the time it was the same BR, but it’s been 0.3br higher for a long while now. I read what you said as implying this is a new problem.
I was not referring to the M4A2
M4A2 is the tank I use to bully KV-1.
Essentialy, it can bounce KV-1’s gun all day long.
BTW when properly angled even 75L48 struggles/fails to pen M4A2.
It has a great mobility, gun depression, excellent ROF and that lovely stabiliser.
Turret of M4A2 is very tricky to pen. Hull - if you park on uneven terrain and add even very tiny amount of angle, and angle the tank right, even 88 will fail to pen.
I see KV-1, I just drive towards it, aiming just below the barrel. Works for every KV-1 variant other than L11 and KV-85.
And regarding mobility - KV-1 basically has the same mobility as Pz IV, so there goezs Pz IV doing medium tank things.
When playing Shermans vs Pz IV I feel like an absolute bully.
Edit: did they move Composito up, or is it still 3.7? It absolutely does not belong at 3.7, just like M4A2 doesn’t really belong at 4.0
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It’s been a while since I’ve played this BR for a long stretch of time, but it would seem to me that there is no situation where a pz4 cant either pen your side armor if you try to angle the front, or at the very least just go through your turret.
I have never said the M4s are anything but very good tanks.
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Most of the turret is non-pen fiesta, so GL firing at that, and hull can withstand 75L48 when angled at 500m all day.
If you get like 1,5 degrees of angle from terrain or maybe even 1, 75L48 just can’t go through the hull even at 50m.
And also you have to guess the angle perfectly when firing, as the margin of error vs M4A2 on level ground is absolutely minimal.
Meanwhile M4A2 can just fire at most Pz IV variants on the move from a few hundred meters away as all you need is center mass hit.
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When I started playing the game, the Tiger H1 and the Jumbo were both 5.3, just 0.3 above the KV-85. Now they are both at 5.7. With the pre-production Tiger II going from 6.3 to 6.7, this means that tanks that originally shared that 5.3 BR (ARL, EBR, Comet, M4A2 76) no longer share the same BR as those former 5.3s and don’t get to fight the early Tiger II at all. This is obviously a good thing.
Now the Pz IVs are going up, but they’re still not going to see Jumbos in uptier (as once used to be the case) while no longer getting to club a newb in a 2.7 vehicle.
This is pretty much decompression working downward in stages. It is slow and it is incomplete and it forgets some vehicles it really shouldn’t, but it is happening. IS-2s no longer see Leopards, Comets no longer see early Tiger IIs, Pz IVs no longer see Jumbos, now the 2.7s no longer see the late Pz IVs.
At the time that happened, the matchmaker was closed, meaning that while the M48s were identical, they were not fighting the same enemies. Of course the level of the playerbase was also a factor, but it’s not been enough to stop them from moving up the Tigers, Panthers, and now Pz IVs, and I’m pretty confident the German mains playing Pz IVs are much worse than those who got their way to 8.0.
The changes in summer 2023 affected a massive number of vehicles. The BMPs went up. The T-54s went up. The M48s also all went up. So did the IS-6 as already cited, a tank that was spammed to hell and incredibly oppressive when it was at 7.3. The Leopard was the more outrageous example but that was a massive round of BR changes.
Of course it’s decompression. Definitionally. Too cautious and of little impact? Sure. They clearly prioritise the MM over game balance as is to be sadly expected of an MMO.
You are simply describing the MM economy of top tier. There is no organic incentive to playing vehicles 1 BR bracket below the top tier meta monsters, you just get punched in the face over and over. This is why Gaijin sells so many premiums just 1 BR below that bracket. People buy the prems and act as food to the players in the top tanks, on the unspoken promise that some day they’ll get to top tier and do the clubbing themselves by bullying the new wave of players buying top tier premiums. Keeping vehicles compressed near the top is also part of this strategy.
Fortunately, there is a lot more to WT than just top tier, and playing any BR below 8.0 is a much nicer experience today than it was two or three years ago.
Oh, they have figured it out. It’s just done in a pretty anti-consumer way. It’s one of the many reasons why I won’t touch top tier with a ten foot pole.
Ah, I see, you misread my sentence as the M24 is only 0.3 higher than the M4A1. What I was saying with that sentence was: the M4A2 is now the same BR as the M24 and (the M4A2) is now only 0.3 BR above the M4A1.
Especially in a downtier it’s almost a heavy tank.
If you try to push and be aggressive in the Pz IV, you just die.
Even when you know better, it funnels you towards a passive playstyle. That’s why I detest it so much these days. Playing that way is simply not going to win you matches.
To my knowledge it’s still 3.7.
The old Swedish 3.7 lineup felt such a joke when you had to choose between the III/IV and that pile of garbage. Now at 4.0 you get to choose between still taking the superior III/IV, the T-34, or the Pz IV. I haven’t reworked my Swedish presets yet but I think I’ll leave the Pz IV out of the lineup altogether. Or if I keep it, it’ll be only for full uptiers on the rare map with longer sightlines. (Gee, will you look at that? Almost the same reasoning you would apply to a tank destroyer!)
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Lower front pennable
As soon as you angle enough to make lower front not pennable, the side armor becomes paper
I have once made an entire topic about how German tanks teach you horrible habits.
In Shermans you want to close the distance, use the reload, stabiliser and great gun handling to outmaneuver the enemy, and armor greatly helps in this.
In Pz IV you just know you’re getting out-brawled by a goddamn Stuart.
The only tank that was close.to Shermans/T-34s in playstyle was Pz IIIN. Which of course got hidden behind paywall, because why the hell not.
So people learned to stay back/be passive and wait for a shot, because if they don’t, they usually just die.
So of course TD playstyle it is. And as TD Pz IV works a bit worse than M10. I know M10 can be HE’d to death, but the reload and post-pen damage are a big thing.
Composito at 3.7 will now bully even more than it already did. But I lost my Chaffee seal clubber 3.7 lineup. What do???