It’s an amazing tank and I love using it. I got a positive win rate and 3 K/D and honestly what more can you ask of a 7.7 heavy? In fact those are surprisingly normal stats for a rather abnormal vehicle.
Keys to using the Maus well are: knowing when to spawn it, when not to, using the coax (including smoke), knowing when to use the APHE or the APHEDS, knowing how to angle, making good use of its reverse. Master these elements and you’ll be perfectly competitive in it, anyone can do it.
Having said that it is situational, and the lineup around it is a bit weird, so giving some thought to supporting vehicles is worth your time.
The main things I would want that it doesn’t already provide are:
Undoing the old nerfs to AP, APCR, APDS, HEAT, big HE, and HESH that make its opponents often struggle to kill it, because this artificially props up its stats and thereby its BR to where everything is always frontally penning it the moment you try to turn your turret to shoot something.
Deletion of the barrel damage mechanic entirely - this would both help and harm the Maus, but it would finally give it some situations where it can aggressively push using its armor and not just use it as an emergency save against morons. I will gladly give up the ability to barrel people with the 75 coax if people can no longer just poke my 128 and leave me sitting there helpless endlessly.
A BR reflective of both its capability and its era now that its opponents aren’t unfairly gimped, and the Maus no longer has bloated “survivability” since stuff penning it would kill it about as easily as every other vehicle.
All of that is possible, as we have debated in the past, but I don’t see it on the horizon any time soon.
Moreover such a large change to ammo would lead to many, many BR changes (much like the APHE nerf would have), so it’s really hard to look at one vehicle in isolation, you’d have to see how the entire cookie crumbles.
With all that said, the Maus right now works just fine. Yeah people will barrel you. You can out-toxic them by tracking and barreling them or doing even sillier things with the coax (my personal favourites: kills T-54 gunners, occasionally kills T29 turret crew if you hit just next to the mantlet, and the most absurd of all, it can one hit kill an IS-3 through the driver port… God save us).
Not to mention the coax does unspeakable things to all the light targets you meet in uptier, and you reload every 5 seconds.
For me the Maus is more map dependent than BR dependent. You can still do good work in an 8.3 or 8.7 match on Arctic for example, but even in a full downtier you should never spawn it on Fields Of Poland if you value your sanity lmao
I am indeed expecting such, but can already guess how it will play out.
Big slow tanks will lose their ability to “tank penetrating shots,” will die more, and see their BRs correspondingly plummet like lead sleds.
Fast armored cars with HEATFS or APDS will finally go up to where they belong in BR.
L7-grade MBTs will be required to be fully separated from the late-WW2 and Korea-era tank generations before them, because suddenly that L7 APDS is annihilating your tank cross-map exactly like it is supposed to.
All the low-BR HEAT launchers will go up considerably in BR because HEAT no longer sucks.
People will spam the rebuffed HE launcher SPGs even more than now because those will be not just strong, but consistently so.
APCR being restored would require considerably more BR space pretty much all throughout most nations’ trees. Though obviously Germany and America would benefit the most due to having most of the rounds of that type.
HESH being good again would only further make the case that L7-type tanks would be criminally undertiered. The derp guns lack the fire rate to be all that threatening.
Essentially, restoring all nerfed ammo will mandate we see the BR system increased by at least 5-7 entire BRs, if not outright doubled.
How in the fuck did you manage to kill an IS-3 with the coax?
Now imagine that with un-nerfed HEAT.
I’ve spawned mine on Fields of Poland and out-sniped T32s with the APHEDS actually. Two of them were dumb enough to just sit there and let me walk rounds to their lower front plates.
Literally by mistake. I take no credit for that shot lol. I was trying to take out bro’s barrel (we were in the Eye between A and B on Finland and my main gun was out). I aimed too low, missed the barrel, hit the driver port, and the HEAT nuked the entire crew.
Forgot to address this - sure, it’s GRB and everything goes, sometimes you are rewarded for doing something dumb. One of my fondest Maus memories is also on Fields Of Poland, I flanked A and it worked wonderfully, because in the 5 business days it took me to get there, the enemy had taken the cap and was spawn camping. Suddenly they had a Maus on their flank and it was a massacre.
But when giving a fellow player actual advice I would always say stuff like, “don’t spawn the Maus on Fields Of Poland”. Because when you do decide to do something dumb just for the hell of it, you should at least know why it’s dumb, so you’re making an informed decision. A less experienced player might not know that (or be able to compensate for the disadvantageous set up by say, having great aim and knowing weak spots).
If you spawn the Maus on Fields Of Poland what will usually happen is that you will be unable to influence the match, the first engagement will be largely over by the time you get anywhere useful.
Two times out of ten you’ll run into an enemy team stupid enough to not punish you for it, of course!