Is it not obvious? because the ability or lack thereof to penetrate an opponent frontally is ONE aspect of how tanks are balanced. Other aspects of balance include gun handling, gun depression/elevation, mobility, utilites like scouting/uav/arty, ammo rack locations and size, crew number, survivability upon penetration, along with lethality of munitions upon penetration of an enemy, armor or lackthereof (in some cases being more survivable than thick armor), and optics/zoom/thermals/lrf. Saying that tank A can lolpen tank B and vice-a-versa makes them balanced is nonsense.
And your heavy tank getting lolpenned by almost anything at its BR, let alone above makes that advantage COMPLETELY NULL!
Like hell it aint, being able to pop into and out of cover very quickly to take shots is super important to prevent return fire from smacking you back to the hanger.
And they often fought each other and got to enjoy smashing their faces into each other without some time traveling light tank popping up and deleting them from existence with lolpen rounds.
Bruh what? I bought this on release, it was never particularly well armored. It’s a good tank don’t get me wrong, but heavily armored is not what I would ever describe it as.
Ah see you’ve made a grave error here, the ins and out of a tank and its abilities are not used to determine BR. The only thing that determines BR in this game is “Statistics!”, which is obviously a stupid way to balance and you end up with situations like the CL-13 sabers getting continuously uptiered because hypersweats who make up the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of all players decided to skew the statistics of that plane because they were the only ones left playing it frequently and doing well in it despite the BR changes because the players were just that good.
Play any map with thick underbrush and lots of small bits of rubble, debris, and scrimscrams that is large enough to conceal a tank partially or fully and you will understand just how much thermals make spotting people a trivial matter.
My brother in bias, no matter how you angle the front hull of the 279 it will always have the same resistance to heatfs/atgm/apfsds (that is to say, almost none).
The only way to truly make the 279 nearly invulnerable to penetration is to do a reverse sidescrape, but you can still be shot in the turret ring neck and through the ass of the tank if you are not careful.
I have shot enough IFVs to know that when the APHE does not explode, the round does almost no damage to anything it does not directly hit.
just some quick examples from protection analysis.
