The IS-3 didn’t deserve to be moved up to BR 7.3 from 7.0 in the recent changes. It hardly ever gets downtiered into tanks that has trouble penning it, and at it’s now tier of 7.3 and those that it face upwards, its armor may as well have been made out of wet tissue paper.
It has a basic reload of 26 seconds, compared to that of other tanks its BR which has half of that. It carries the BR-471D round with 230 mm of pen, but it doesn’t have the speed to go around enemies it disables, and even if it did, the reload doesn’t allow it to finish someone off as it takes too long before more enemies show up.
At BR 7.0 it was sitting comfortably with it’s mediocre yet powerful cannon, but at BR 7.3 it is completely powercreeped by other soviet tanks with more speed or faster reload as they carry the same shells.
If it must stay at BR 7.3, then please for the love of god, do something about the reload speed on it.
EDIT: Take the T34 for example: It is BR 7.0 and has a 120mm cannon with a basic reload speed of 19.4 seconds and has 306 mm of pen with its T17E1 shell and 283mm of pen with its T14E3 shells.
my brother, you can’t kill the IS-3 from the front in MOST vehicles under 7.0 if you don’t have HEAT or SABOT. The Tiger 2 struggles against it, as does every US tank 6.3-6.7. APHE doesn’t work outside of side shots. It was massively undertiered at 7.0.
IS-3 is just yet another victim of Gaijin’s poor balancing methods. To be clear, this isn’t just an IS-3 problem, since most of higher tiers heavies suffer from the same thing.
We simply don’t have enough BR brackets in the game currently to properly spread huge amounts of vehicles that are in the game, and sadly, higher tier heavies are probably screwed the most by that.
Most of them are on a knife’s edge at the moment, you put them even a tad bit lower, they would probably stomp everything in their way, but if you put them even a tad bit higher, they become XP pinatas and quite honestly, aren’t even worth playing, since most of their advantages are simply gone.
This has been said hundreds of times so far, but Gaijin is still refusing to increase the number of BR steps.
T32E1 reloads in 17 seconds, meanwhile IS-3 takes 23 seconds to reload. I would say those extra 6 seconds are more than just “comparable”.
Also you forgot about gun handling and gun depression, which are almost non-existent on the IS-3 while T32E1 has it “plenty”.
Like the Churchill Mk VII. Super slow, 100mm penetration but 150mm armor.
IS-3: Bad traverse and depression, very slow compared to mediums, 200mm pen with BR-471B and 300-350mm of effective armor against AP.
They can work as long as their armor works, meaning downtiers in general but at the same time you have to struggle with severly low damage output with solid shot 75mm or slow reloading 122mm that might not even get the gun on target.
Both vehicles are not very threatening and you can just track and ignore them while they play repair simulator.
Might as well buff the reload to 20 seconds then like @YUi_Takamura suggested won’t really change the performance IMO if you don’t kill what you’re shooting in the first hit you’re going to die unless they don’t have HEAT-FS researched
Is anyone here doesn’t bother by the fact that the IS-3 has some really shitty optic/sight zoom? I’ve been using the binocular to land shots instead of the gunner sight because all I see is a dot should the enemy >700m away.
I have a crazy idea: give tanks health points, like in WoT (no, don’t stop reading yet): Call them “structural integrity” points and make so that every non-penning hit subtracts a certain amount (hits that actually pen the armour will still work like they currently do). This way high caliber guns, like the soviet 122mm and 152mm, will be able to destroy tanks with repeated hits, despite their low-ish pen, as they did IRL.
One of the problems with this statement is that the barrel of the turret is not immune to conventional rounds nor are the tracks, so it is extremely easy currently to disable a IS-3 for good.
On top of that, the front of the turret has 250ish mm armor, with the sides having 180ish, but the back side of it only has 100 mm of armor, so with a disabled IS-3, it is easy to go around and knock it out.
No HP bar is the one of the causes why people choosing war thunder. But i heard about mechanics of metal fatigue, it was discarded by gaijin but who knows? Maybe sometime they will add it as soft balance mechanics for heavies.
Not sure, if it’s the fix for the IS-3 we’re looking for though.
It would more be a fix to the FV 4005 not completely wrecking a tank in one shot sometimes.
Yes. Good times. This whole vehicles survive getting penetrated business is honestly quite dumb.
The only time it makes sense is to balance large caliber guns.
Like when you have 20s reload with 152mm it would be pointless over a 75mm with 6s when the 75mm knock out tanks just like it.
Otherwise a vehicle that kills any other with a penetrating shot is way more enjoyable than vehicles surviving getting shot over and over.
One time, I shot a Panther D with the 2S3M, knocked him out from 50m while he destroyed my engine and set me on fire. After that I was getting shot for a whole minute by some other vehicles until I was finally taken out.
Being able to survive that kind of punishment is just dumb. And it’s not like you didn’t have to destroy a vital internal component for hullbreak to work.
They could have just called it overkill mechanic, since it didn’t really have anything to do with hullbreak, unless it was with HE rounds.
I noticed that AP rounds are much better at damaging a cannon breech, since the fragments from APHE deal no or very little damage to it, while the spalling from AP deals a lot mroe damage.
If tanks would be knocked out from destroyed breeches, it would significantly buff AP and APCR.
This is the problem, at least with IS-3, I don’t play lower tiers enough to have extensive knowledge of the Churchill though.
IS-3’s armor is either really good, on the edge of being OP or really bad, to the point of being useless since most stuff you face will just go through you without an issue. Vehicles like that were (I suppose) made to negate conventional AP shells and I guess they succeeded in that feat, looking at how hard it is to frontally pen higher tier heavies like IS-3 and above with just conventional AP shells.
Since there isn’t any “middle ground” this is tricky to balance, because quite literally you are hero or a zero, depending what vehicle will you face.
I agree.
Having fire rate of 2.6 shots/min isn’t something many will enjoy, especially since the round fired is quite mediocre for it’s BR.
For comparison, earlier vehicles that have several crippling factors (like early German TDs) like long reload, no turret and no mobility will always have exceptional round that will basically demolish everything it hits. Also, they will have some “gimmick” attached to them in most cases as well, so plenty of those vehicles will, for example, have hilariously good gun depression that enables them to shoot over pretty steep terrain.
It is frustrating to hit something pretty light with your large caliber cannon and damage only a single component.
This happened quite a bit on 152mm HE/HEAT shells on US’ M60A2 and M551.
I doubt something like AMX-10RC would survive a side-on shot from it with getting only it’s turret ring damaged in the process.