Those heavy tanks will tank multiple HEAT shells or missiles, while those HEAT slingers/missile vehicles can most of the time be MGd to death.
They die easily and quickly, deal miserable damage, their shells get caught by any objects. They are fine.
The launchers on it are easy to target and shoot out. I spaded the Type 64 ATM and it was pure agony.
Plus, more moaning about the M-51? All it has is the gun, and the HEAT is inconsistent as hell.
Excellent matches!
I just played my FIRST Ground match in days. I am not a good player by any means, even less so at these unfamiliar BRs (I mainly play Top Tier) and even less so with this unfamiliar vehicle (only ever played 16 matches with it, counting this one, the tank wasn’t even half-spaded when I played this match). In fact, most players who disagree with me when it comes to game matters state that I am “dogshit”, “a noob” and “useless”, so there’s that…
…yet this was it:
Now… how come a “dogshit player” has got a 10 kill match in such conditions with a tank that presumably is “so bad” as according to those who advocate for it to have such a low BR? May it possibly be because, I don’t know… maybe it’s actually damn good for the BR it is at?
Maybe it’s because there’s literally not a single armor plate your gun can’t penetrate while not having a worse mobility compared to its counterparts?
Maybe it’s because a tank that’s virtually a slower AMX-30 is facing these opponents?
Wow! My 400mm shell from 1962 hit a WW2 tank protected by a 100mm thick plate! That’s SUCH a display of skill! It literally took sweat, blood and tears to manage to kill those Panthers and their 80mm thick front armor plates! (Or 60mm, in VK 3002 (M)'s case).
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The M-51 is the size of a house, is about as stable as a bowl of jello on a mechanical bull, and has no armor. Couldn’t you also have just gotten shot by the opponent and died instantly? It’s not like your 400mm pen comes with a cloaking device, 2-plane stabilizer, or 800mm mantlet. They could have paid better attention and done just as well.
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It’s not bigger than a Panther, a Tiger or even any other Sherman, and it’s smaller than a Tiger II.
Its mantlet (AKA most of the front turret) can withstand Tiger I’s shell at point blank range. Sure the hull isn’t the greatest, but… why should it be? Does the tank with 400mm of pen ALSO need to have an immune armor as well to be considered to be good enough?
As stated before- it may not be 800mm thick, but it is 156-200mm thick (some volumetric spots reach 300-500, too). More than enough to withstand Tiger’s shells and even Panther’s at point blank.
No one at its BR has a 2-plane stabilizer either, but what it does have is a faster gun and turret traverse speeds than most of its opponents, such as Panther (all), Tiger I (all), and, by an ENORMOUS margin when it comes to Tiger H1, and let alone Panther D and VK 3002 M.
So… what’s your point? “It’s not the best in each and every single category, therefore, it’s mediocre even though its advantages surpass its opponents by an enormous margin”?
But it is still a mistake to keep those vehicles at a Br similar to those of WW2, in fact they are where they are because of this horrendous damage pattern they created. Simply give the HEAT and ATGM more consistent damage and you can raise the Br to separate them.
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Nonsense.
They are good where they are now. You can give a consistent damage model to something shooting 250mm pen low calibre HEAT that can be killed frontally by a 7.92mm MG, and bring it’s BR to where it will face ERA, composites, stabilizers, etc. Should be fun, right?
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Precisely. With more consistent HEAT and a 6 second reload, M-51 would be more than perfectly fine at 7.0 so that having it stomping on mid-WW2 tanks wouldn’t be justified anymore.
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Simple: It has very little armor and the performance of the tank has way more to do with the player in it and the player fighting it than the tank itself and the tank its fighting. This is how all light tanks with big guns fight big tanks with weaker guns in the entire game, it’s no exception. It is how the game is balanced.
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What
Is
The
Point
Of a Heavy Tank that puts emphasis on its armor
If it can’t withstand fire at any angle of from any distance from a lighter tank
Because said lighter tank can penetrate 4 times its maximum armor thickness
Because it’s 20+ years more modern?
This shouldn’t be this way.
Furthermore, M-51 would still easily lolpen each and every single one of its opponents at 6.7: it would just stop ruining matches for 5.0s and 5.3s which are worse and weaker in every way.
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Let’s see, for example you are not going to upgrade the M51 to Br 8.0, but you can raise it to Br 7.0 or 7.3, in the same way that you can also raise those vehicles with a recoilless cannon to a similar Br, facing Br. 7.7 and 8.0, where there are few tanks with stabilizer (with better maps the stabilizer would not be so important) and there would not be many tanks with ERA armor either.
On the other hand, mention that this topic has a lot of depth, since apart from the problem of the damage and penetration model, there is a huge error in the issue of Br in general, especially the Br between 7.7 to 9.0 caught my attention. more or less. In those Br you can find yourself facing tanks that are 20 years old, for example using the Leopard 1 from 1965 you can easily find yourself against the T-55AM-1 and AMD that are from the 80s and that have better armor, stabilizer and laser rengefinder.
That isn’t what armour is for. Aside from heavy tanks with absolutely crappy guns for what armour they have, like the Churchill Mk. VII, all armour is meant to do is to force your opponent to take a longer time aiming or making them have a high possibility of not penetrating in a panic shot.
The M-51 also isn’t anywhere near being just a A.M.X. 30 that’s slower. It worse hull armour, a worse gun, a worse reload, worse mobility, worse aiming speeds, and worse secondaries. They don’t play similarly at all with the A.M.X. 30 being a better brawler which the M-51 is otherwise mid at, at best. The only thing they have in common is that they share ammunition, but the M-51’s D1504 has a 800 m/s muzzle velocity compared to the 1,000 m/s muzzle velocity that’s achieved by the A.M.X. 30’s 105 mm F1.
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Just having consistent damage would be enough, since almost the first shot would kill or almost disable an enemy tank.
It must be taken into account that the damage of HEAT projectiles is based on the excess penetration that remains after detonating. As a general rule, a HEAT that has 100mm of penetration left after piercing counts as lethal damage, in a nutshell,it could perfectly destroy a tank with the first shot. For example, the M51 pierces 200mm at 60º, and the T-54 has 100mm at 60º, so the damage from that bullet should be lethal for a T-54 (there’s a reason all the Western HEAT-FS had that similar penetration), on the other hand an M48 with its HEAT-FS of 160mm at 60º, not reaching that excess of 100mm, would have a more difficult time destroying a T-54, becoming necessary in many cases more than one or two shots in the hull. Apart from that, if the devs used that method with the HEAT, for example, the 105mm recoilless cannons would have good damage to compensate for the low speed of the bullet and the slow reloading.
Atp, just play sim
Well, except you don’t really need any second to aim at all when your shell can penetrate 4x times the max thickness of your opponent. So, as I said… armor is rendered entirely useless. You may have 10mm, or 100mm; won’t make a difference against 400mm pen.
It’s literally the exact same gun and shell… the gun’s barrel is just a tad shorter and has 200m/s less. Other than that, same penetration.
Proportionally relative for its BR? Yeah, it is. Keep in mind it’s 2 entire BRs lower…
Just as in real life, heavy tanks were a failed concept. Mobility and tactical use of your resources always trumps depleting mobility for the sake of a slight improvement in toughness. This is why casemate tanks disappeared or evolved into SPH systems. The heavies at 6.7 exist in the final moments of the world of “heavy tanks”, where the glaring issues if their design were reaching the boiling point right as the extremity of their design reach their zenith. These tanks feel woefully inadequate because they are. No matter what ratio of realism/gameplay you view their existence under, heavy tanks always hit a brick wall of insufficiency once they get to a certain level of technology.
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Except 1942 Heavy tanks didn’t have to face 1962 guns and shells. That probably doesn’t help ingame. Tell an Tiger I in 1942, or a KV-1 in 1941, that they were “a failed concept”…
Many years later.
This would already be the case when facing their contemporaries or a bit later tanks; which further proves my point that they do NOT need to face tanks 20-30 years more modern ingame. It’s literally the least thing they need or deserve.
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Yeah, let’s bring a huge, slow, paper armored tank to 7.0 where the only thing it has is raw pen, and in every single stat it is worse than all the others.
Recoilless cannon vehicles are smaller and they are fast, plus they are light tanks, not mediums.
The M51 is already a bad tank. You don’t have to make it even worse.
Production year is irrelevant.
Vehicles are balanced by their capabilities.
Have you ever played the Concept 3? Do you know what BR it is? I will tell you: 4.3.
Do you know what atnks does it face? Panzer IV, Sherms, T-34, just to name a few.
Is it a good tank? No. It is meh at best.
Now, do you know when was it designed? In the mid '70s!!!
Do you know what would it face? T-64, T-80s, Leo 2s, etc… With the gun of a Comet. Without stabs. Without LRF. Without thermals, or even NVD.
Oooooor, a Panzer II would face KV-1s, and the worst of all, the french H-39 would face T-55s…
You know, that reserve tier H-39 that is absolutely useless against other reserve tier vehicles.
Should be fun. Oh wait.
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If you want to apply that ratio of realism/gameplay, then sure, you won’t have to fight tanks that weren’t in that era, but then you probably should have to deal with the other balancing issues heavy tanks actually had. Bad logistics, maintenance/reliability issues, constantly being outnumbered, non-penetrating rounds deforming the armor, damage to the mantlet/track forcing a mission kill and abandonment of the vehicle, etc.
It wouldn’t even be symmetrical in terms of heavies vs heavies. You’d have 32 man lobbies of shermans going against 3 tiger 1’s, a couple nashorns, and a meatwall of Stug III’s and PzIV’s. Or worse, 2 Jagdtigers against an entire battlegroup of IS-2’s and ISU-152’s. This imaginary world where heavy tanks chuckled like superman watching a gang of mobsters bounce tommy gun bullets off his chest never happened. Every heavy tank, from the perspective of its total service record, lived or died on its reliability, crew training, and lethality advantage of its gun.
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I mean, should we talk about how one of Sweden’s early SPAA is a cold war one?