The current situation is far better than whatever damage bug we had for the past 6 months. And it’s far better than the past where there were only 2 types of viable guns in the game with everything else effectively being RNG.
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It’s not new.
It has vastly increased in popularity. That doesn’t mean it did not happen before.
It’s like… Hispano had 50% HE in belt and MG151/20 had 60%. If 1 HE shell has f.e. 60% chance of removing a wing, then 3 shells to kill on average is exactly what is expected.
Remember, shells to the fuselage do nothing, shells to the engine are not instakills. So if anything, 3 shots to kill is perfectly normal. Remember even 37mm to the fuselage is perfectly survivable in WT.
Watch the replay and count the actual HE impacts.
You can see that the the shell fragments are quite longer on the sides meaning that anything next to the shell if very likely to get punctured.
If the shell exploded in “wide” parts of the plane like here
The damaged to the fusellagage and anything on the other side is made by tiny shards that might not be enough to damage controll cables
However when things are more close by…
The shards tend to act like a bigger lump increasing damage.
Still, you are right saying that even a mine shell is hardly a 1 hit 1 kill. However the damage dealt is often enough to criple a plane. Before the last patch, he hits did mostly… nothing. You could hit an enemy plane with HE just for him to have slighly more drag. This was frustrating and unhistorical.
If I am forced to choose between everything hitting harder or what we had before, I choose the first option. If time to kill was to increased, dogfight monsters would massively benefit from it since other planes would have an hard time to keep the guns on them long enough to deal enough damage to seriously impact their flight performance (or kill them).
That’s not a Mineshell though.
You can tell by the shape and the fact that there’s no fragment dispersion at the tracer assembly, while Mineshells have a rounded bottom with explosive inside. So the explosion would be basically like a circle.
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oh yeah for the bottom part it should be, but the top part should look pretty much like the one in the picture.
I’ll try to see if I get an actual mineshell pic
Where exactly did that “problem with HE kills” occured?
While I’ve been playing Ground RB, I scored ridiculous amount of air kills, because I am an Air RB guy, I sit in a tonk to spawn a plane and kill clueless people. The aircraft that were not dying were almost exclusively Soviet. Of course sometimes 30mm and 37mm did negligible damage, but that was the normal case of getting gaijined, nothing new, reallu
Although mineshells doing less damage than other gun had been going for… well basically the second iteration of realshatter, cannon damage was broken in the leviathan update.
Some guns were less affected than others. The Mg151/20, the soviet 23mm (on jets) and the 30mm on the sagittario 2 were the ones most affected.
Mind you that Sagittario has an HE only belt and I got only “hit” multiple times with it so there’s no chance for it to be just “getting gaijinned”. Obviously sooner or later I’d kill the plane, but most of the time it required multiple hits before even getting a crit.
In grb it was less of an issue because most of the times CAS people aren’t prepared to counter a competent fighter so you had ample time to hoes them down.
That most likely an FI-T shell. You can tell because even on impact there are already fragments from the back of the shell that hit the fuselage and the black smoulder on the impact hole from the incendiary and tracer composition igniting in an instant.
There are also much fewer holes on the other side due to larger but fewer fragments, while the Mineshells peppered the back with tiny fragments.
The impact hole is also too small to be from a Mineshell.
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I mean, I had no real issues, MG151/20 was performing about the same as always. I still have old screenshots where I have landed 8 shells (6 M-geschos to P-51H wing and it didn’t even go black. What was indeed weird was large caliber HE underperforming horribly, but I haven’t been really into SPAA in 2024. But I have screenshots where MK108 did little damage despite 2 solid hits to Yak-3 wing.
But seriously, that was it.
Everything else died normally. But mind you - I never got into real sh*tter 3.0 1-shotting bonanza, I instead learned to land consecutive rounds on target and to set up my kills instead of going for snap-shots and expecting wonders.
I think our ultra competitive collegue FeetPics is doing exactly that - going for some super tricky shots, and when he doesn’t get his dopamine hit, he gets angry. Snap shots should be a gamble, a last ditch effort, not a norm. Kills can be set up and then you can land several shells on target and even if 1 of these is “weaker than it should” you don’t care cause you land more.
Also with 2 out of 5 shells being AP, one has to lower his expectations.
At the same time I had 0 trouble 1-shotting people with Shvaks. So this whole “cannons don’t work” thing - I haven’t even noticed it.
Regarding fragmentation:
M-geschoss should be:
- fragmented nose going forward in some bigger chunks
- small fragments going in all directions
- a few thicker fragments around the rear
That’s assumign the Stutzring is steel reinforcement for the guide ring. If not - then basically only nose can produce a few significant fragments and other than that, nothing worthwhile. Nose seem to carry quite a bit of weight, though.
I absolutely agree with your assesment of the hit in that picture. I just wonder if there really shouldn’t be any bigger fragments going forward… I have no idea how does the nose part fragment.
It seems that most people are happier with cannons doing extra damage then compared to the past 6 months.
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Of course people are happy that their vehicle is now up to standard.
„No one“ would complain when AP or HESH would suddenly one shot tanks like overpressure APHE.
Except a few cry outs from people who think it’s unrealistic, even though it was just as unrealistic before, just wanting to have an advantage over others.
APHE overperforms, therefore AP underperforms, even when AP damage is a lot more realistic.
So you either nerf APHE or bring AP to the same level as AP.
The result is the same but in one instance people are complaining while in the other they are happy about the change.
Because players don’t care for realism, they just want to play a game that is fair for the most part and most of all fun.
So if you have someone in your sights you want to click them out of existence.
Except when you buff AP and now a Cromwell slaughters tanks like it’s a T-34, with by far the best mobility of any vehicle, without adjusting the BR, players will complain about it.
Since how is that fair that a tank that outperforms others is also so effective in killing others?
And that‘s exactly what happened when ShVAKs went from the worst 20mm to almost the best.
Every undertiered Soviet prop was now suddenly god like.
The same guy who is happy about MG 151/20 damage also says it’s an absolute joke that the Yak-3U is 5.7 and not 6.3.
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Of course they are happier, since MG151/20 went from absolute dogshit to just dogshit with 40% useless shells and ridiculously bad ballistics even on AP, FI and IT (this one makes no sense).
It’s a big positive change for people using this weapon.
People were not complaining when MG151/20 was the hardest hitting gun in game, despite dealing exact same damage as it did pre-line of contact while also suffering from plywood bug since beginning of the game till December 2023 (yes, it used to be “unreliable” because HE was hitting hard but not THAT hard and belt composition was what it was, hence P-51H getting 6 M-geschoss in a wing and still flying simply happened, I have an old screenshot with it happening, though I remember I set him on fire because I also raked his engine, so there’s that).
Now, after Real Shatter 3.0 in July 2023 it went from the best (I’m not saying it should have anywhere close to the advantage it had at certain moments in time) to absolute dogshit for good. Then in may 2025 Gaijin introduced plywood bug 2.0.
Now after line of contact MG151/20 is actually the only 20mm not suffering from PWB 2.0 (because 0,001mm fuse sensitivity) and HE power is now EXACTLY THE SAME as Shvak 20mm.
It’s like you were forced to jog at 10km/h when everyone moves at 40km/h on arms and legs after “Real Run 3.0” mechanic in a jogging simulator (just like real shatter introduced unrealistic damage but also made fragmentation even less realistic than it used to be, lol). When your own speed gets buffed to 33km/h you are not complaining the entire realism and immersion went out of the window. You’re just happy your disadvantage is smaller than it used to be
EDIT: I recently deleted like 300 of screenshots and that P-51H must have been cleansed. I hate myself for deleting it (it was a very nice screenshot), but it is like it is.
But I still have things like this, US jet after taking MK108 HEI-T to the wing, late 2024, the point is, if anyone is claiming “HE got worse around May 2025”, must have slept through last few years:
Or sea fury casually tanking M108 to the middle of the wing with some minor damage, january 2025
Or G55 taking MK108 to the wingtip, October 2024,
almost 0 damage to the aileron.
3 MK108 to the right wing, including 2 around wingtip wing stays attached, April 2024 - I’m not even angry about this one, it just shows that there was no special 2025 bug, the damage has always been all over the place.
2 MG151/20 M-geschoss to the wingtip module, stays attached, October 2024.
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@FeetPics
Found it.
And I mis-remembered:
It wasn’t 6 M-geschoss. It was 4 M-geschoss + 4 AP-i/IT (I was using Air BElt at that time), but looking at that damage, it would be able to take 2 more, as the wing in this screenshot is already damaged by fire, without the fire the root had less damage. 3 HE struck the outer part of the wing, wingtip is kinda red but still attached.
July 2023.
If you actually watch the videos… you’ll see the issue with gun damage was not just limited to German cannons. It affected pretty much every cannon in the game for the last 6;months.
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Pretty sure that the inconsistency was just Gaijin changing something with realShatter that made the damage very inconsistent.
Because fragments cause the structural damage (makes no sense) and they were randomly generated, each shot could deal different levels of damage.
I mean I posted screenshots before, and even reported, that 12.7mm HEF could hit a wing and simply not deal damage at all, because they produce so few fragments that it was possible they would all spawn pointing away from the impact.
And it was the same with 20mm cannons.
You could turn a wing red, black and it was still attached or simply remove it in a single hit.
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I had 0 problems, seriously, what the hell happened to everyone else?
Yes, I’ve been farming EZ air kills in Ground RB, I flew Yak-3U and Yak-9UT for a dozen battles, decided it’s disgusting and stopped.
But again - I’m fully accustomed to landing long bursts, moving the point of aim while firing to land multiple hits (a lot of people find the lead and just fire there hoping enemy will fly into one of the shells and die, BTW I used to do that too for a loong time, with pretty good results BTW) and I avoid “snap shots”, because with MG151/20 there’s a 40% chance I’ll fire AP which will most likely fail to do anything substantial. So for me what you consider “inconsistent” was just “OK, I got this kill 0,16s later than I expected, nice”.
And as you can see - Mk108 dealing very little damage was happening years ago even with “old damage mechanics”, so why are we assuming it was just real shatter, and not just some kind of desync/server side load-related problem, and I for example played at different hours and mostly succesfully avoided the issues?
If that Liniyka guy was playing with .50 cals for 6 months, then I feel sorry for him, because 20mm were better than these anyway.
But I was also fully aware of plywood bug 2.0
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Liniyka’s claim of some supposed .50 cal meta and that only American props were usuable is probably the dumbest thing i’ve heard. Yes, prepatch the German 20mm was in a poor state but that was not the case with Hispanos, ShVaks, AN/M2 and other lethal guns of that caliber.
Honestly, this is just a bafflng take that literally no one else was experiencing.
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A .50 cal meta I never noticed, lmao.
And remember, Liniyka or @FeetPics had 0 idea about the existence of plywood bug 2.0 - that’s how far their “awareness” goes.
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Lmao, yeah it’s funny. I remember in the old forum where players were rightfully decrying that overshatter 1.0 broke cannons. A poster complained that Gaijin should break .50 cals as well rather than fixing cannon damage.
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