Pbv 302 (BILL) should it go down to 8.3 / 8.0?

Machinery of War Discussion Ground Vehicle
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should the Pansarbandvagn 302 (BILL) go to 8.3 or 8.0? or does its current performance actually justify sitting at 8.7?

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American M3 Bradley sits at 8.3 with a 25mm chaingun and two Direct Aim TOW missiles, And has way better damage on its Autocannon with 80~ mm of penetration, Yes i have heard the damage consistency is a mixed mag, But the TOW missiles seems to rarely dissapoint-?

German Marder 1A3 sits at 8.0 with a 20mm autocannon and one Direct Aim Milan missiles, And decent damage on its Autocannon with 60~ mm of penetration, Yes the limited missiles are a drawback.

Soviet BMP-2 sits at 8.7 and that thing doesent really have any downsides at its br, except for the armour in someplaces being weak to Autocannon-Fire, Overall a great Attack tank.

Great britain, Warrior and Swingfire sits at 8.3, The Warrior has a pretty bad Reputation as far as i know but i havent interacted / Met the Warrior in battle so i will leave that one out, The Swingfire is a meme vehicle with pretty insane missile arcs and can manage pretty well against enemies

(China, Japan and Italy all has vehicles but none that i can correlate to the Pbv 302)

France Mephisto sits at 8.7, a pretty good TD for the BR packing enough HOT missiles to deal with most enemies, (The AMX-13 (HOT) at 8.3 is also pretty good with a good gun and missiles for heavier targets.)

Sweden Pbv 302 (BILL) sits at 8.7 and has the Top-Down mounted in a tube like 1m above the tank letting it sit behind cover, But its a Top-Down war head that detonates on hills and dead enemies, or if it does any damage to begind with- Its size is that of a small Bus and the 20mm Autocannon might on some occasions (Point blank) penetrate the side of some light tanks / IFVs

But hey its pretty fast i guess?

Stat comparison for you all that need it,

Sammanfattning

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So anybody wanna try to explain this one?

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Imma pull a page out of @Pheonix_RX01’s book and say “but it Swedish it OP should be 14.7 ” to mock the devs

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I feel like Sweden players don’t complain much because top tier has been meta for ages, but that doesn’t mean everything else in tge tree is fine. Some of the recent br changes have been really negative and a lot of the cold war vehicles suffer from power creep.

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As long as nobody calls Swedish 40mm Guns OP on either the Lvkv 42 or VEAK 40 i am A-okay, The L-62 Anti II or Itpsv 41 as it should be named, is pretty good in terms of a Light Tank SPAA

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Personally, I think it need to go to a much suitable BR to face more equal enemies in arm and armaments.

  • 8.0 ( or even 8.3 ) BR would be more suitable because:
  • It has a 20mm cannon.
  • A top attack ATGM ( nickname: tracks taker )
  • a very…interesting…top speed.
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You are comparing a missile carrier to IFVs, though for some reason the 302 one has a goddamn autocannon so maybe it’s not so different. To be fair, IFVs are almost universally better vehicles so the missile tractor BR increases that didn’t hit vehicles with secondary missile weapons were ridiculous.
A comparable vehicle does exist by the way:
CM25
It’s a M113 TOW-slinger at 8.7 simply because it dares to have the funny awful dev placeholder 2B.

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The Pbv 302 Is a IFV designed by Hägglund & Söner in service within the Swedish Army 1966 - 2014, The Pbv 302 (BILL) was a one-off test mounting a Rbs 56 on it, The Pbv 302 should have a multi-purpose HEI/AP round, but its stuck in the “Forwarded to devs” on the bug report site. slbrhpgr 95

And no its not APHE - Its a HE chell with a AP inside it. it has 50-54~ mm of penetration so marginally better than its current ammo

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Practically irrelevant, the devs slapped the missile carrier label on it so that’s what it is in the game. Vehicles don’t always match their real life use, without the missiles it could have been put in the SPAA category instead

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Except its Turret rotation speed and elevation angles are Abysmal for a SPAA so even if they slapped it as an SPAA it wouldnt do the job of one, and it would only be useful against tanks with its current Ammunition at 1.7 - 2.3, Basicly another Pbv 301 but larger and with more crew, and a stupid fast Top speed and mobility for the rank lol, But yes i get what you mean

Edit: I think the Pbv 302 is actually partially more survivable and slightly more protected than the M113 not to mention faster and more agile

a true comparison for the M113 is the Pvrbv 551

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Basicly when the swedish army looked at the M113 and thaught hey that could be good for our Armoured Convoys, But we could probably make it better

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Why yes i do want to concern myself with top-down attack ATGM when playing my 7.0 tank, threat so alien to the idea of warfare for which my 7.0 was designed for /s

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I did suggest it atleast go to 8.3 since it faces enemies lanes ahead in performance to it, And again 40~ % of the time using the Rb 56 BILL the War head detonates over corpses or ridges / bushes etc. So its not like the missile is blatantly OP, Christ the thing mostly kills tracks if it hits an enemy or at best knocks out the breech. if you aim centraly on a tank

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Im not saying it is, im merely saying that top down attack missile has no businees seing 1950s vehicles, just by logic of it.

Its the same issue with Pzh2000 at 7.7 with LRF.

This need to make every vehicle competetive leads to some dogwater balancing decisions. Community needs to accept some vehicles should remain as gimmicks in format of warthunder and how the average match plays out.

Artillery is king of the battlefield IRL, but its IRL deployment is nothing like that of warthunder. But since we fight on octagon sizes maps, it gets pushed into direct line of sight fire role. And to remain competetive, they are pushed to BRs where they have no business being.

Its dogwater approach that should die off.

Pushing Pbv302 down in BR in order to make it competetive is going in the opposite direction.

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You’re arguing this from a realism standpoint, but that just doesn’t apply to War Thunder anymore. The game already mixes completely different generations of tech, so singling out top-attack missiles as something that “shouldn’t face 1950s tanks” is pretty arbitrary.

More importantly, you’re treating the Pbv 302 like the missile is inherently overpowered or that its too technologically advanced and would ruin immersion? Something that is pretty laughable considering the amount of modern things and ammunition/Vehicles found in the lower tiers of the game, ATGMs can already face WW2 tanks anyway. Again, The BILL is inconsistent, often fails to secure kills, and you only get 7 missiles total — after that you’re basically left with a lightly armored APC with a 20 mm that struggles to do anything at this BR (around 40–50 mm pen) . So it’s not some dominant mechanic to begin with.

Dropping it down wouldn’t suddenly make it OP either. It would still be fragile, still get shredded by autocannons, and still suffer from the same map design issues. The only real difference is that it wouldn’t constantly face vehicles it can barely affect, like BMP-2s or more modern MBTs.

What your argument really comes down to is that some vehicles should stay underperforming so others don’t have to deal with them. Calling them “gimmicks” doesn’t change that- it just means accepting that certain vehicles are ineffective a lot of the time.

And that’s not really balance. That’s just wanting to decide which vehicles are allowed to be playable.

Side note: I actually agree with you on stuff like modern howitzers (PzH 2000, Bkan, M109, etc.) — their implementations is questionable. But they’re already in the game and not going anywhere, so they don’t really change this discussion. As they are not in the same class and playstyle as a Light tanks / Agile TD.