You don’t seem to quite understand - we have been waiting for how many years for average players to “use SPAAG correctly.” They haven’t. and clearly never will.
The only SPAAGs which get used well are the ones that have sufficiently powerful guns to where they functionally become WW2-grade IFVs, where they kill tanks mainly and planes when opportunities to do so arise.
All the SPAAGs incapable of being such proceed to sit uselessly in spawn, spray & pray from too far away to be effective while their front line is explosively disassembled in all directions, get swarmed by multiple planes, and then whine on here and Reddit for still more CAS weapon nerfs we don’t need.
And this is not practical to use, as the vast majority of tanks have more than 38mm side plating. Lack of its historically-accurate APCR shell (which ingame on the Stuka G1, Stuka G2, Bf-110G-2, and Hs-129B-2s pens 108mm, and in reality penned 142mm) makes the Ostwind hopelessly defenseless vs all but the thinnest-skinned tanks.
And what exactly do average players proceed to do if they use it? They sit uselessly in their own spawn and fail to help their team much unless the CAS is equally stupid and tries flying right at the Ostwind. After which enemy tanks encroach on their spawn seeing the 37mm tracer stream and kill them, or the Ostwind gets swarmed by multiple CAS, after which the Ostwind’s driver proceeds to screech about how “overpowered” CAS supposedly is, leading to more CAS nerfs we don’t need.
KVs are anything but slow, man. Their top speed is medium tank range, they accelerate more like medium tanks in my experience, and their guns are more suited to flank shots than frontal ones barring memes with the KV-2. I use mine like I would 75mm Shermans and they work quite well - I don’t trust in the armor of anything anymore thanks to the existence of barrel damage.
Heavily-armored tanks should be immune to SPAAGs (barrel included) from the front. But practically anything regardless of weight class should be melted from side shots, and already is against the majority of tanks. Unless it has truly exceptionally thick side armor like seen with the Maus (180mm), E-100 (75+120mm), IS-4M (160mm), IS-6 (120mm), and Tortoise (152mm).
Panthers already are fodder for Bofors autocannons in side shots. They actually have less side armor than Panzer IVs (45mm vs 50mm).
Even the best SPAAG ammunition the game currently lacks mostly tops out around 150mm penetration, with only the missing APCR from the ZSU-57/2 exceeding that at nearly 200mm. And unlike proper tank shells, those rapid-firing AA rounds lose penetration much faster over distance than larger-caliber tank shells would. For common WW2-era guns, they max out at 130-140mm point blank vs flat plate (Flak43 and Bofors L/70). Why should we punish SPAAGs for the fact that most tanks’ side armor tops out at 80mm, with only a small handful of (primarily Russian) exceptions?
I genuinely don’t see how SPAAG melting tank sides they can pen as “overpowered” in any way whatsoever. If that M103 with exceptionally thin 50mm hull side plating gets penned by a single long 88 shell or by 10 40mm Bofors shots, is it not dead either way?
It does help solve the CAS problem though. The player opinion part, specifically.
Half of the complaints about CAS concern game mechanics. The other half concern player perceptions of it being too difficult/impossible to counter. SPAAG in prop tiers are the latter.
What making SPAAG more powerful, through the combination of (restoratively) buffing their anti-tank ability AND ALSO giving all WW2 ones a short-range lead indicator out to no more than 1.5km max for an aced crew does is it makes SPAAG as practically easy to play and use as every other tank and CAS are.
This nullifies the arguments about SPAAGs being too difficult to use correctly, and helps make CAS a lot easier to counter. This shuts down a lot of the onesided whining about CAS, because now the average player can counter it with about as much effort as using any other tank requires.
Anyone trying to still complain proceeds to get their complaints thrown back in their face, because now they have the tools to help themselves and are willingly choosing not to use them. Thus they are trapped in their own whine until they cease being part of the problem. By no longer being able to claim they are “helpless victims,” they can no longer justify more CAS nerfs that bleed into and harm the playability of Air RB.
THAT is my “goal” - to shut down the ability of onesided whining about CAS to keep inflicting boneheaded nerfs on CAS that then get applied to all game modes. Some people will always find something to whine about - there is no “solution” in the usual sense for this beyond make what they are complaining about look like the fault of the complainer. Just like History Channel-inspired Tiger drivers - nobody listens to people going on about that anymore for good reason.
