Lets Talk About The Object 279 Issue. Currently 5.8+ KDR on Average

I play France and nothing above 7.7 as I don’t like top tier games.
But even at 7.7 I get uptiered a lot and always end up facing that monstrocity. And good luck penning it with solid shots.
I don’t doubt that some guns can pen it, but that means you have to change nation or stick with an ally that can pen it (which is absurd).
If no tank that I can use can reliably pen the 279, then either you change the br of the things that can’t pen it or you change the 279’s.

The thing is if it moves up (maybe by 0.3 is ok) then most things can reliable defeat it’s strength. It does however have speed unlike the Maus. In contrast the Maus right now is pretty easy to kill but still takes 2-3 shots minimum with most guns due to how spacey the interior is. 279 can be 1 shot if a shot with enough pen can get past not only the armour but detonate the ammo which is the entire tank or you 1 shot the turret crew. So 279 doesn’t get the benefit of moving up but having some chance like Maus but does get mobility. I personally think a 0.3 increase wouldn’t bury it while giving some more tanks avoidance of it altogether.

Agreed, but then again the best way of dealing with weird tanks like the Maus, 279 or T95 would be to simply implement a BR lock so it can’t face ennemies that don’t stand a chance against it.
like -0.3/+1

Boss there isn’t Russian bias for one. Two the tank is selling for 650+ because it is rare and it was a highly difficult event. Also people are playing it because it is a tank.

Yeah of course, it’s always the best to have as many vehicles as you can in the game, but then the balancing can become pretty tricky in some situations, and if devs can’t handle that, things will simply break and people won’t be happy.
As I said, plenty of heavies are either pretty damn strong or borderline useless. I guess this game was made with WW2 tech in mind, since it feels like anything newer than that simply isn’t very well balanced, and in my opinion, cold war heavies suffer the most, at least in most cases.

So many vehicles are losing their niche because of the map changes, which it’s quite sad to see.

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Don’t quote me on it, because I wasn’t there - I only started playing around 2022, so most of what I know about game development in the early days comes from pure hearsay. But on the old forum and sometimes here as well, I’ve often seen it mentioned that the original vision for the game was to not go past the end of the Korean War.

Intuitively it makes sense given the maps we have and the way gameplay is like, but obviously that doesn’t automatically make it factual. That said, there is some logic to the idea, tanks until the Korean War were still designed with WW2 lessons in mind, it also explains why Germany (which unlike the Soviets and the Americans didn’t have Korean era domestic designs) got the Maus and the paper vehicles to make it viable at what was then top tier.

(An approach I don’t think should have been abandoned, but that’s a different discussion).

Btw, in my last match I finally achieved another nuke with the Jagdtiger (and the Sla for the final stretch), so for a little while at least, I’m in a state of blissful zen with the game 😁😂

You can see from the maps themselves, playing 11.7s on vast majority of them feels very cramped, no wonder since those things can cruise at 50+ km/h so you will run out of room very quickly.

At one point, vehicles like Leopard I were top dogs and to be honest, they can’t even hold a handle to top tier tech nowadays.
Our tech progressed so much, but maps haven’t progressed alongside and that’s one of the biggest problems we have.

It’s especially nice to get nukes in niche vehicles.
One of my recent nukes happened while playing T92 at 6.7, which is a vehicle that many don’t like because of it’s 76mm HEAT-FS firing gun that deals “no damage”.
I think I’ve destroyed like half a dozen German 6.7 TDs in that match, it’s really hard for them to survive while hordes of HEAT slingers are roaming around the map, so getting a nuke in Jagdtiger is quite a feat.

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Yes, and the other is the stale mission types, I think.

Haha, my second-ever nuke was with a Dicker Max (well, not all of it, but the first 7 kills of that match). Frozen Pass, 5.7 lineup in a full uptier. That was really bizarre :D

I’ve obviously only played against it, so I have no direct experience, but I was really surprised when I started reading that people dislike it. Usually when I encounter it, it’s being used by very competent players, often at the top of the leaderboard in their own teams.

Granted, I imagine it presents a similar struggle to other similar vehicles like the JPz 4-5, no armour, and the calibre here is even smaller, so you’re basically throwing darts.

Yes, though I was honestly lucky this time. It was a 7.0 match for starters, and Israel was on our team, so I think we had more HEAT than they did. I mostly encountered IS-2s, arty pieces (2S1/3M), M26A1, T-44 and T-34-85, stuff like that.

The other two nukes I got with it in 7.3 matches had a lot more HEAT slingers, and thus feel “more earned” to me, although this one came completely out of the blue, I had played 5.7 all evening and realised I hadn’t touched my 6.7 lineup in a while and did a handful of games in it right before bedtime. Bam, nuke. Then you try for 100 matches straight and don’t get it… it’s a funny game, WT 😂

It’s funny that I never got one in a full downtier. One more thing to corroborate my feeling that I legit do worse in full downtiers with 6.7 than I do in uptiers, which is also weird.

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Quite a lot of people dislike those low-caliber HEAT slingers because of low post pen damage. Yeah, they can go through stuff with ease, but it’s quite a different experience when compared to WW2 shells like APHE, those things will basically delete everything when they pen.

Going from APHE to HEAT will force you to aim for specific crew members or ammo, instead of aiming for weakspots.

I think JPz is harder to play, yea it has a bigger caliber gun, but also has a lot of drawbacks as well.
Regardless of vehicle, 76mm HEAT won’t have good post pen, but I think it’s more than manageable, at least when you learn where to aim your first shot at for different vehicles you can face.

I don’t even go for it, ever, if it happens, happens. Probability of a nuke is pretty small for your average player, so it’s for the best to not even think about it, unless you are one of those crazy skilled veterans.

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My problem of these shells is the inconsitancy of the damage coupled with high reload times and bad balistics.

Hit a side skirt, you get no damage, volumetric spot ? no damage, optics ? no damage, weirdly shaped armour ? no damage and so on …
The only way to be sure to deal damage is firing at a perfectly flat surface with nothing on it such as bits if tracks.

For example, the only way to pen the 279 with a 90mm HEATFS is the small flat surface of the turret on the right cheek. But that leaves it plenty of time to retreat and get a new gunner.

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While I agree that the Obj-279 needs something done about it, but my God can we stop injecting every discussion with these juvenile snide Russian Bias remarks?

Yes, the game has problems that need addressing and discussing, but you troglodytes are incapable of discussing any topic without descending into your own idiotic nationalistic biases. Which end up having the discussions shift from the problem you are addressing and towards the flame baits you always start.

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We could if they weren’t in game … call it bias or whatever you want but most, if not all, soviet vehicles always massively benefit from any changes.

Take the latest br changes for example which massively the IS family except for the IS-2. Or the volumetric changes; the ones who massively benefited from this are the russians and mostly again the IS series.

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Me too tbh, I was trying to sound pithy for the purposes of the joke, and sacrificed a bit of clarity in the process 😁 I try to play well, sometimes playing well can lead to a nuke; the bit that I found funny is that around August and September I played that 6.7 lineup a lot and ended up narrowly missing nukes multiple times in a short timespan, which in that instance did make me want to try that little bit harder, but no cigar. Then, having played at a different BR for a month, you casually go back, and boom. Literally :D

To be fair this happens with APHE too, and maybe it’s just my impression but larger calibres of APHE seem more affected, the 128mm of the Sturer Emil for example is comically bouncy for me. How many times an M18 gun barrel, a T-34 optical sight, an M24 turret or a weird bent shape around the hull of some tank has sent that shell into the shadow realm… 😁

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This happens quite frequently, at least in my case. I’m at like 2300+ SP, but sadly enemies are completely wiped of the map so there’s nothing else to do.
Even worse, you can get your 2500 SP but won’t have time to drop the nuke.

Oh yeah, volumetric isn’t picky, I’ve got meme’d by it while using literally every shell type in the game. Also, didn’t noticed it occurring more frequently with HEAT than with APHE, I guess it’s impossible to say for sure.
Optics in general are notorious for being shell “eaters”, one time my friend shot a really large HE at Italian R3 and it’s optic ate the whole round, without doing any damage to that thing.

I found lower caliber HEAT to be pretty consistent at dealing damage (albeit low), unless you try to go for some weird angles. Obviously, you need to have precise aim to get desired results, especially for side shots.

Pretty much depends on the vehicle, some do have longer reload and worse ballistic performance than AP tanks found on their BR.
But, you also need to consider a bunch of earlier HEAT slingers will have outright better ballistics and reload times than stuff at their BR, while others might have on-par stats.

As I said above, I haven’t experienced noticeable increase of dud shots when compared to normal, AP rounds.

Never had an issue going through Tiger IIs/Panther UFP or going through sloped armor of things such as German 6.3/6.7 TDs.
HEAT might have bad post pen, but it isn’t APCR where you explicitly have to aim for flat armor.

All things considered, I think lower-tier HEAT is decent enough and they can have multiple pros over normal AP shells, depending on what vehicle we’re talking about.

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Flat doesn’t mean perpendicular. I meant witout optics, tracks or anything else that the shell might hit and therefore be completely nullified.

My reference in low caliber HEATFS is the EBR 1963 which, for some reason, sits at 7.3 while only having decent menoeuvrability. Bad ballistic, bad reload and no stab.
I find it way more reliable to shoot a tank from the front than from the sides.

The intitial balancing was fine, IS-7 at 8.0 and 279 at 8.3. Tanks with APHE should only fight other tanks with APHE and similar technological equipment. A Tank without APFSDS and LRF or Thermals fighting enemies that have such features is plain unfair and dumb. How would you feel if I gave you a spear and a shield and then whipped out a Shotgun?

The occassional HEATFS is fine.

Lol what a great idea.
Your analogy is wrong in the sense that the OBJ 279 is a spear filled with poison and a shield made from vibranium. So yes, i’ll take the spear and shield while you get your shotgun.

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Weirdly enough, I don’t recall something bad happening while shooting through Panther/Tiger additional track armor. Some shenanigans are bound to happen due to volumetric, but, at least in my experience, haven’t really noticed the difference between HEAT and AP in terms of occurrence of dud shots.

It’s 90mm cannon have on-par reload with most other 90mm cannon vehicles at that BR, so I wouldn’t call it’s reload to be bad per se.
Although we can agree that round have sub-par velocity.

No wonder, there’s always much more empty or non-critical space presented to you when you are on the side. I almost always go for the turret shot to disable breech and kill as many crew, since loads of vehicles have 3 crew in their turrets.

Agreed on everything.
For the reload however, the time isn’t bad per se but coupled with the lack of stabilizer and the very bad suspension you have to add the time required to aim

What makes fighting heavy tanks fun is the fact that they give up something for their armor or gun or whatever. Amx-50 Surbaisse has great pen and reload but next to no armor and only fires solid shot. Maus and T95 have great guns and armor but are slow as hell. Jumbos are fast and have good armor but their guns are awful. 279 doesnt. At its BR It has the best armor, the best kinetic pen outside of specialized tank destroyers, the best post pen, perfectly serviceable gun handling, a full stab, a higher top speed both forward and in reverse than many of the mediums around it, ect. 279 doesnt sacrifice in any way yet still outperforms many of the other tanks at its br in others. Im not necessarily sure it needs to go up in br but it definitely does need to be artificially nerfed in some aspect

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