No argument there. I did say every vehicle should be competitive, after all, that is the only reason to have them in-game. Otherwise it’s a waste of 3D assets and storage.
Though when speaking about balance in general: the current situation of heavies vs lights is simply incomparable. This is a related, but distinct issue from how the Obj 279 does individually, though. Like I said, I don’t know too much about how it performs, but I’ll still give you my two cents - but I’ll start with general observations first.
Mobility is always an advantage. Doubly so when the game is built around capping points. Teams start with 16,000 tickets, each kill is 100 tickets dropping, whereas caps drain tickets much faster and more efficiently. For this reason alone, vehicles that can cap will do more to benefit the team’s chances of victory, than vehicles that can score a lot of kills.
That’s a massive advantage already, but there are more.
You can mitigate lack of armour (don’t be seen, don’t be hit) but you can’t mitigate lack of mobility. Armour is useless up to the point it actually bounces a round. It’s dead weight otherwise.
And yet, light vehicles in game currently (not at every BR) also have the advantage of comparable or better guns, able to frontally cheese their way through the frontal armour of the heavies they encounter. And they typically have much faster reload times.
If that weren’t enough, they’re also more survivable, due to their questionable damage model. You don’t know what true existential pain is, if you’ve never landed a Jagdtiger shot from 900 metres on a racing AML-90, hit it broadside to only take out its engine (or even worse, it bounces on the tire), load HE for your second shot in the hope to survive the coming 18 seconds, only for the AML to casually look your way and take out your crew members, one by one. So you sit there for about a minute or so, in an endless cycle of repair and gunner replacement, just mostly waiting to die.
And let’s not forget scouting, and the discount on spawning CAS.
In other words, many lights currently outperform many heavies on all relevant performance metrics: firepower, mobility, and protection (!), plus all the “soft” bonuses that win matches, like ticket bleed and CAS.
You say lots of players outright quit rather than play against multiple 279s, and I believe you. But let me tell you, before 6.7 was decompressed, playing heavies was a nightmare, because every time you were at 7.7 (quite often), it just wasn’t worth to spawn them. That, too, was a big temptation to go back to the hangar.
You maybe started your evening gaming session with the intention of playing them, and then are almost never presented with a situation where they would actually be competitive, so you have to choose between having fun, or spawning in vehicles that might actually help the team win the game.
Let’s not even comment on the obvious schizophrenia of “it’s a 7.7 game so I won’t spawn in a Jagdtiger, I’ll take LeK or JPz instead”. These are 6.3 vehicles, and yet they perform far more competently at 7.7 than any of the 6.7 vehicles I field them with. Go figure that one out.
Besides, players go back to the hangar for lots of reasons, CAS being probably the most famous example. So that’s only indicative up to a point.
Now, the 279.
You cite issues like reload and pen, but Gaijin has long since uncoupled theirs from reality. They set reload on grounds of “balance”, not realism, and they use the DeMarre formula to calculate their own pen (not sure if they also fiddle with it to get desired results, but it seems quite probable).
What I find more concerning based on your description, is that 279 is not a brick of a heavy, but a tank with near-MBT mobility and reload. So, it’s not exactly comparable to Churchills, Jagdtigers, Tortoises, Tutels etc, in that it completely relies on armour to stay alive. To a lesser degree, this happens to other tanks too, the Tiger II is a heavy but has okay mobility and great gun handling. If it was frontally invulnerable, it would be unbalanced.
So maybe the solution is to balance Obj 279 like an MBT, not like a heavy.
