Yes, but the thing to me is, not all costs scale the same way.
The Sturer Emil for example dies just as easily no matter at what BR you’re playing it. So long as the gun works, and you know your map positioning and marksmanship, you can make it work at higher BRs too; the primary change you’ll feel is that enemy reaction time is much better and chem rounds make even glancing hits potentially lethal, so you have to be even more careful than usual.
On the subject of the IS-6, let me make a comparison with another heavy that sits at 7.7 and that I do have a lot of experience with, the Maus.
It’s one of my favourite vehicles in game, especially in SB, but in RB as well. In many ways it’s similar to the IS-6: long reload times (longer in this case), lots of armour, a turret cheek weakspot (though the Maus is harder to one shot with it).
Where they diverge primarily is the fact that the Maus has a better gun if you only look at the performance of a single round. When you take rate of fire into account, I think it’s pretty much even. The reason why the IS-6 has a less-performing cannon is that it has advantages elsewhere, better RoF, better mobility for example.
But that higher potential for a single round fired means that the Maus is actually viable to play as a sniper, if you’re in a full uptier. You can hide, peek out, take a shot that has a very high chance of being crippling or lethal, and quickly reverse back. The IS-6, compared to the Maus, is now paying the balance cost of having a somewhat worse cannon, without getting to really benefit from the better ability to push the enemy.
That’s without even touching on the Maus’ single best feature, the 75mm coax with 5s reload, which at 8.7 can exterminate light vehicles you meet and even careless helicopter players.
Again, that is not to say you can’t do well in an IS-6 in an 8.7 match, I’ve done stuff like that too, like flanking C from the south on Maginot Line winter in a fully uptiered Maus (lol) or holding B on Seversk with the Jagdtiger in an 8.7 match. I think there’s something I find gratifying about defying the odds like that.
But I guess if you look at it purely from a balance perspective, if you or I had picked something else from our 7.7 lineups to spawn in that hypothetical 8.7 game, wouldn’t we have been better off, perhaps performed even better?
And that’s fine, we have the lineup system for this reason, no? It’s a toolbox, a different tool for every job. But the great prominence of uptiers sort of disincentivises to use heavies a lot of the time, and balance-wise I wish this was corrected tbh.
