I’ll just try to amplify what others have said already:
m26 - has no business going up. It is straight up worse than it’s heavy cousins, and you want it to sit at the same br.
IS-2 (both models) - same. Why are they going up? They are not some meta vehicles, the armor is very pennable, reload is long. why punsh them? 6.0 is already too high in my opinion, but who’s going to play it at 6.3?? And the 44 model - Yeah, it’s ufp is better, but who’s gonna shoot there anyway? It is NOT a valid counterpart to tiger 2H, and all the tanks that can penetrate IS-1 ( more than a full BR bracket lower) can deal with it frontally. So why are they getting moved up? It won’t make lower BRs life much easier, while still ruining experience of playing them.
KV-1(zis-5) moved to 4.7 is also weird. All other up-armored KVs stay at 4.3 and 4.0. It’s armor is barely better than kv-1e, and it is now 0.7 br higher? why?
SPAAs moving up - why?? Planes at the same br are not moved up. are poor CAS players really suffering that much? Is it because they are still somehow able to down some planes now and again?
SPAAs are the most skill intensive vehicles in the game, and are still punished. please explain your rationale!
char-25 and amx-50 - personally, i welcome fix, but i do not think they should move up. It destroys french 7.3 lineup and crowds 7.7 too much. Besides, they are still worse imo than lorraine and 100mm amx-50. Yeah, aphe is cool, but the penetration is so much worse. I’d rather have a shot of frontal penning the tanks I encounter, rather than more reliable OHKs from the side. Reload buff is nice, but the tree is too compressed to move them up.
On the plus side - I fully support moving wheeled TDs to 9.3, where they belong. They should not be able to bully early cold war unstabilized tanks.
Also, an addition request - T-62 should be dropped to 8.3. It looks very underwhelming compared to it’s lineup and most of other 8.7 vehicles. It’s an iconic mbt that’s getting replaced by obscure prototype. Only thing it has going for it is a stabilizer, the “darts” are just apds in everything but name. They bounce a lot, have quite a poor pen and non-existing post-pen damage. It’s not better in any way than t-55a, and should share the same br.
It’s the same with the Churchill Mk VII or the KV-1 ZIS-5.
The whole reason why the Tigers and Panthers went up was probably because of that.
The KV-1 ZIS-5 constantly gets changed from 4.3 to 4.7 and back because it’s either useless in uptiers or clubs in downtiers.
Also I would be more concerned about meeting an KV-85 or IS-1 than a Tiger, which you can shoot in the cupola at all times.
The whole BR system honestly sucks. Just let players choose from pre-selected vehicle line-ups like in SIM and just change the reward modifier based on performance instead of constantly changing BRs that only results in other vehicles start over or underperforming.
The game experience would be so much better when players can decide whether they want to club worse tanks for little reward or need to play more carefully but get higher rewards.
Having random battles with a gamble of up- and downtiers just isn’t fun.
Thing is the Churchill VII meets the Tigers, and the Panthers, and the 76s, and APDS, and has a poor gun, with the head-on top of tracks weakspot (for filler rounds, they ohk the turret), with the clearly superior heavy only two steps above it.
So a heavy meeting another heavy in a full uptier it cannot do much about (IS-3 and Tiger E) is bad but a Heavy quite easily pennable by vehicles a full BR lower (3.3 Mediums), then at 5.0 they meet a gun making its armour even worse, then 0.3 higher another one with better armour plus the first Tiger, then at 5.7 the E (before these BR changes), is fine?
Work from the bottom up and E facing the IS-3 in a FULL uptier does not exactly sound like anything new.
Overall I now have no idea what they are doing/attempting. Without the top changing the juggling of everything below feels like a fool’s errand.
Independent A1E1: Down to 1.0, it’s the worst vehicle of all the “landships”. Terrible gun, far worse than the 2-Pdr all the other low tier British tanks have. Terrible armour, worse than some nations reserve vehicles. Terrible mobility, and it’s a massive target.
Churchill Mk. I: Down to 3.0, with the 3-Inch Gun Carrier going to 3.0 the Churchill Mk. I should go back down to 3.0 to match. The Churchill Mk. I is useless at 3.3, the 2-Pdr is hopeless at this point. Especially considering the Churchill has no mobility to flank. So the trade off becomes, the Churchill Mk. I gets a turret but the 3-Inch gets a far better gun.
Churchill Mk. III: Down to 3.7, worse turret armour than the Churchill Mk. I. Faces far better opponents making its armour less effective, and it’s slower than the Churchill Mk. I.
Churchill NA75: Down to 3.7, it’s a side-grade to the Churchill Mk. III not an upgrade.
Crusader AA MK. II: Remain at 3.7, I don’t see why it needs to go up. Just directly compare it to the Wirbelwind. You have half the guns and the Oerlikon has a worse rate-of-fire, worse velocity on the AA belt, and worse penetration on the AP belt. The only advantages it has is being enclosed and better mobility. I’d argue this justifies it sharing a BR with the Wirbelwind, one has better firepower, while the other is faster and fully enclosed.
Skink: Should be coming back down to 4.7. It going up really doesn’t matter, as there’s no 5.0 line up anyway and no-one was ever going to uptier the British 4.7 line up just to play the Skink. However, I don’t understand why it isn’t coming down. Again, just compare it to the Wirbelwind. Unlike the Crusader AA Mk. II you now have the same number of guns but the Polsten suffers the exact same issues as the Oerlikon. I don’t see how this justifies a 1.7 difference between the Wirbelwind and Skink.
Black Prince: Down to 5.7, same effective armour as the Churchill Mk. VII but faces far better opponents. Same firepower as the A30 Challenger. Even worse mobility than the Churchill Mk. VII.
Tortoise: Down to 6.3, there’s no line up for it. It’s armour is easily negated with APHE and it’s one of the slowest vehicles in the game.
The soviet 9.3 lineup does not suffer because of a lack of TVDs, they have powerful guns with decent reloads, as well as MBTs with impressive survivability and armor. TVDs would be awesome to have on these MBTs, but it isn’t necessary. Just because the early T-72s and T-64s do not have Thermals does not mean that contemporary vehicles have to be increased in BR.
I go back to my point that TVDs are more of a commodity than a necessity, unlike a laser rangefinder, or the trait of good survivability.
There is now, but they locked it behind a paid Event that is now over. Bring in a non-Premium Cent 2 for the tech tree, just like the Tiger, Comet, Firefly, then do it for the EBRs, then for all the other Premiums that should be in the tech tree and not locked behind the Marketplace!
It’s funny to me how, in this community, people discussing German players will agree that they’re absolutely terrible and laughably easy to win against/be relieved when they’re not on their teams, and then go on to describe Tiger H1s and Tiger II Ps as “clubbers”.
Moving Tiger H1 to 5.7 probably makes sense, but the E to 6.0 doesn’t. It will never play as a heavy at that BR (which admittedly Tigers barely do already), and will face IS-3s and T29s in the frequent full uptiers. As for Tiger II P, it has an incredibly good gun for its BR. But it is also awfully slow, in a game mode where mobility is what’s “meta” for a reason. It also has 100mm thick turret cheeks, whose effective protection varies according to the exact spot targeted, but is often as low as 106mm, and 140mm in places. I don’t think I need to explain how in this game, turret armour is always more important than hull armour. In real life you’d aim centre mass because of the way targeting works, in this game we have the time and fine motor control (so to speak) to aim a lot more accurately. You can mitigate hull armour with cover, you can’t do much to mitigate a paper weak turret front.
What makes absolutely zero sense is decompressing everything above 6.7 by 0.3… and then turning 6.7 into 7.0.
Yeah. I’d put both at 7.0. LeK at 6.7 is still undertiered. As is the JPz 4-5 at 6.3, lower than both Ferdinand and Jagdtiger… which is just ridiculous.
I’d like to see which stats you’re backing up this assertion with, since unfortunately and imho incorrectly, Gaijin doesn’t publish any. If we go by personal experience, I don’t see German 6.7 performing any better or worse than most other BRs I play. I like their tanks there, but in terms of teams, it seems quite average to me. If you mean that heavies in general are dominant, then I’ll have to respectfully disagree. Most late war heavies are in a really bad spot balance-wise.
If we go by the imperfect sources we do have (because, for example, we have no way of determining whether the sample is representative of the wider population), Thunderskill reports the following winrates for the past month for some of the vehicles being discussed in your list:
Tiger II P: 50.02%
Tiger II H: 46.76%
Tiger II Sla: 49.4%
T26E1: 48.63%
T34: 55.23%
T29: 57.6%
Maus: 58.03% (though from a much lower number of battles)
As for WT Data Project, 6.3 and 6.7 don’t look like particularly good BRs for Germany.
I think the Maus is an excellent vehicle, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it described as dominant. I find that very puzzling. It’s fine at 7.7.
I think they’re fine where they are tbh. The game may class them as heavies, but they don’t really play like ones.
Ah, almost outside. So I guess that when I do take out a Tiger E and happen to meet an IS-3 on a postcard-sized map that funnels us in frontal engagements, I will almost not get the shot trap, and the IS-3 will almost send me back to the shadow realm. Good to know. :D
It should go 6.3, yeah. As should the Ferdinand, which is its sidegrade in gameplay terms. It should not get to bully 5.0s.
True. Although most will be situational tank destroyers, with all the consequences that that implies, in a game where more and more it’s all about cap and fly, and every map where you can effectively use said tank destroyers effectively is being rapidly changed.
VK and Panther D will be the backbone of that 5.3 lineup, until they’re moved up as well, probably the next time they review the BRs.
That doesn’t really make sense. Max 4 players per team can be top BR, and it’s often fewer than that. This means that, by design, we are all uptiered 75% of the time as a baseline. Other factors can slightly lower or slightly raise that number.
I play Germany ground RB a lot, and if you asked me which BR I saw the most full downtiers in, I would say 7.7 without hesitation. At 6.3, the most common BRs I play are 6.7 and 7.0, and full uptiers to 7.3 are more common than full downtiers to 5.3.
That’s the same boat everyone’s in.
Tiger Porsche is also unchanged at 5.7. Understandably, they are reluctant to touch premiums.
Yes. It’s another heavy that struggles with balance.
Never said it was. You’ve read enough of my posts to know that I think most heavy tanks in WT are getting the short stick, though there are exceptions. When you see people in thread celebrating about heavies going up, and asking for more heavies to go even higher, I begin to understand why that is.
Me neither. Is this stat based still or have they changed how they evaluate BRs, as others have been saying?
I also sort of accept it in the case of Churchills since they are basically infantry tanks, not tank killers. Balancing 10 nations with constantly changing performances of rounds etc. is never going to settle down I do not think!
Perfection is not possible, and every new vehicle and vehicle type added, complicates the equation. There is also no realistic way to “segment” the tanks that get to play against one another because queue times etc etc etc.
But if you really must have everything sort of thrown in together to keep matches populated, there are many ways you could mitigate that problem. Having more varied mission types and much more varied types of maps would make different vehicles more relevant and worth using in specific situations. Going beyond the nation-based matchmaker (you already know my proposal about tree foldering) would simplify the matchmaker’s job so much that you could implement massive decompression and still keep queue times at zero. Even a system like SB, with lists of allowed vehicles, would work better than the current system imho, especially if you further diversified spawn point cost into more steps than just “heavy, medium, light” etc.
EDIT: the issue is that it feels to me like Gaijin isn’t really even trying. That the game is about collecting tanks, and whether they’re balanced and fun to use in matches is a secondary consideration if that. Tank pokemon.