Nothing makes sense with them to me. I’ve been playing them a lot for the past year, and I just can’t find a way to play them correctly.
They weigh 60+ tons, so they must have a lot of armour, right? Nope, despite being some of the largest tanks on the battlefield, they have useless armour that gets penned like butter from enemy MBTs (though incredibly efficient against light vehicles from the front, I must say)
Well if they doesn’t have armour, then they must have speed! Wrong again, it has a decent top speed but accelerates at a snails pace… how ironic.
And how about their gun? That must be good, seeing their downsides! I’d have to say no again. Their shells are decent, but their reload is pretty much slower than every enemy MBT you’re going to face when playing them, so if your first shot doesn’t kill, you’re in a tough situation.
Combine that with the ass armour and bad acceleration, and you get a set of tanks that I don’t understand.
I’ll point out the good sides with these tanks that I’ve noticed over the past year:
All iterations of the Merkava have a LWS, which can come in handy when trying to find enemies or when getting targeted by helis.
The rear side of their hulls can be incredibly useful when peaking corners if you bring a smaller amount of ammunition (say 15 rounds), as you can peak your ass to try and make them shoot the near empty rear hull, then continue and shoot.
To enhance the point above, their reverse acceleration isn’t half bad.
The amount of smokes these things have is insane, incredibly useful when you want to run to safety
or when you’re damaged.
As said earlier, they have incredibly good frontal armour against light vehicles! As long as the enemies don’t have ATGMs, you can take constant fire from them and be relatively fine, say for a busted engine, transmission, and a fuel tank.
If anyone can give any feedback on anything I’m saying, I’d love to hear it.
T’is a shame indeed. A little off topic, but I wonder why the Mk.2D is still at 9.7 as well, the extra side armour is nice and all but isn’t enough to up the BR. The initial reason was that the Mk. 1 and 2B only had M111, but now that they all have M413, it feels odd that the Mk.2D is higher in BR.
Legacy BR? Minor nations BRs don’t tend to change over time unless is a very broken vehicle, maybe, during the next round of BR changes a suggestion could be made to downtier the 2D.
Or with more decompression (10.0->10.3) it could remain at 9.7
if you look at all the Magach’s and Merkava’s, they are designed around HEAT protection.
Lots of spaced armour (Merkava) and ERA (Magach).
at 9.3 the Magach’s have M426 (DM63) & the Merkava’s have M413 (DM33) used to be M111.
The Magachs are in the same Boat as the Strv105, Olifant and CM-11.
all are either pimped M60’s or Centurion’s, all have poor mobility, and in other area’s fall short to the Leo1A5’s, AMX30 & OF40’s, that why they got a better round.
After some time the Merkava’s with 105 were upgraded to DM33 equivalent from M111(DM23), they still lag behind in mobility although better then the Magach’s.
The Merkava 2D, it received M413 (DM33), but was raised to 9.7. A “dead” BR in the IDF TT.
the only benefits it gets over the 2B is a 50 cal coax, added composite screens which add nothing for KE protection, and a mine protection, which just adds to the overall weight, all other stats are the same. So why the extra BR step?
I was thinking about maybe giving it M428 Sword, so it can be used as a back up for the 11.0 Merkava 3’s, but now the RAAM Segol is here that’s also not really an option
It just feels like it isn’t in the right spot, being in constant uptiers fighting Panzerbataillons and TURMS-Ts that absolutely obliterate it. Its weird, they were made to counter the T-72, and historically did incredibly well against them, but they just lolpen the Merkava.
I’ve actually had decent luck with 2S38s when it comes to fighting them frontally, they might take out one or two of my turret crew and my mobility, and leave me stranded for a while, but they usually can’t kill me before I land a shot or two on them and take them out. Now if they’re on my flank, however… I think we both know what happens when one of those freaks are on your flank.