It’s been a few months since “Severe Damage” mechanic (SD further in this post) got introduced for aircraft. I personally quite like it and I also heard a lot less shouting and frustration over “kill stealing” while playing with my friends. It’s so nice to see a plane falling down burning with a wing missing and no one diving after it to “steal” the kill. While it isn’t perfect it helped put the focus of a match back on track a lot, I feel like.
In contrast to ARB, I still hear a lot of yelling and frustration about kill stealing while playing ground.
Imagine this situation: You are at a corner brawling with an enemy. You have a numbers advantage because you have a teammate next to you/behind you. It’s a stalemate, no one is pushing the corner. You decide to push and you take out your enemies breach and/or gun. Only then does your teammates pushes and “steals” the kill from you while you are reloading.
This kind of situation happens quite often. Maybe not the exact same one, but a situation in which you expose yourself to enemy fire, win the engagement and only get scraps since your teammates get the kill while not exposing themselves to any danger.
I think SD could be adapted to help these situations with ground vehicles as well. Rewarding needs to be slightly changed. You are not rewarded with 80% of the reward immediately after inflicting SD, since that damage can be repaired rather quickly. You are only rewarded SD if your target gets destroyed while it is severely damaged (by you). In that case you get 80%.
I propose following conditions in which a vehicle is counted as severely damaged:
Main armament cannot be operated or fired. This means at least of the following:
a. Gun barrel is destroyed.
b. Gun breach is destroyed.
c. All crew that can man the gun is dead unconscious.
d. Ammorack shot resulting in a blowout, and leaving the enemy with no more shells. (expires once the enemy picks up some more ammo)
Vehicle is set on fire by you and has no more FPE.
Both vertical and horizontal guidance is destroyed, on turreted vehicles.
Both tracks are destroyed on a casemate vehicle.
Transmission and/or engine is destroyed on a casemate vehicles, rendering it immobile.
While at least one these is true, vehicle is “severely damaged” and it getting destroyed in such a state will get you 80% of the reward, as well a kill on the board.
A slight delay might need to be added before SD kicks in, to be fair to people that fired at the same time.
Would you like to see this “Severe Damage” mechanic for ground vehicles?
That being said, I think a more limited version of hull break ought to be reintroduced.
Specifically for any vehicle with a turret, impacts of sufficiently large-caliber shots (especially artillery-caliber rounds) should tear turrets clean off even if the shot does not pen.
Why? This is because the turret ring cannot withstand the force of the impact and breaks.
The reason this comes to mind is because ever since the tuning down of overpressure with the arrival of the Sturmtiger, sometimes it works and sometimes it only destroys a gun optic. I always found it silly how a frontal turret shot on something can semi-reliably splash down into the hull roof of a tank, but a hit to the side or rear of the same tank’s turret does sometimes nothing at all.
Maybe this should be its own separate topic, “Turret Break” for all turreted ground vehicles.
This would technically apply also to bombs, but at the distances where it would apply, blast radius would already kill you, so its irrelevant. Large-caliber rockets would be substantially helped by this, but the main beneficiaries are the various artillery tanks.
The larger a vehicle’s turret ring, the more force it takes to break. Multiple shots with enough force to damage it can add up to break the turret off and insta-kill the tank.
Effectively, it’s a realistic but limited alternative to the ideas for armor deformation which would be too taxing on the game engine (and many peoples’ PCs).
Mhm - imho you describe simply the ignorance of most casual players, as they have simply no clue how “severe damage” actually works.
Kill or stat driven players claim that the new mechanic is BS in it’s current implementation status, because it supports actually kill stealing - whilst casual players are unable to read (and if the read it there are often unable to understand) the fine print of the SD mechanic.
No, either you play in alternate universe or you have (like me) a biased view on things. A burning plane with a missing wing is in most cases not automatically a SD - and players still swarm those aircraft…
From a holistic pov the only guys which have actually a benefit are rather clueless pilots or tankers which got killed previously by a dead (=black marker) aircraft - and more casual players like me, which now see at least a task progress if a severe damaged aircraft gets stolen by a greedy team mate.
I am actually not sure, if you have realized that SD resulted (at least for prop BRs) in:
Less SL/RP income due to less critical hits, max income of kills with an assist had a 166% payout - now reduced to 120%. Crits became so rare that gaijin deleted tasks based on crits.
Less mission score due to less crits (and subsequently less assists).
Clean kills of the past (=100%) are now just “severe damages” (=80%) - so you lose 20% if you are not want to waste ammo on an already mortally wounded enemy.
…and is rather dealing with another totally failed attempt to solve the issue of delayed kills.
The issue is quite simple - as soon as an aircraft is damaged enough (and unable to make it back to his airfield to repair) the guy who has inflicted the damage has done the majority of the work.
The problem is when enemies in blue (called team mates) try to benefit from efforts of others. So if you damage oil/water coolers of a low enemy fighter 25 km away from his next airfield you might get not even a SD - as long as the engine is running he can be “stolen”.
Outside fires there are no delayed kills in Ground RB.
I strongly recommend to read some analysis of the fellow player @_Poul to see that SD in it’s current state is nothing more than an income nerf of 10-20 %…
This mechanics basically makes it harder to kill planes. If you severely damage the plane, most of the time that plane would already be dead in the old system, so you would already get a kill credit for it. That’s why you can’t talk about fixing kill stealing. This mechanics actually created more opportunities to steal a kill (in service records only the person who finishes the plane gets +1 kill).
In the old system severely damaging the plane would give you a full kill credit already. Now you have to not only severely damage the plane, but also finish that plane to get the same full kill credit.
You can read more about the details of the severe damage mechanics in this topic:
I personally am not terribly uppity about “kill stealing” in the first place so I really don’t see the need for this. Yes, the occurrence where you shoot knock out the breach and allow your teammate to finish the job happens all the time, but I just take it as teamwork playing out. Sometimes this is for the better too since you are in a light tank or something and that split second save is what you need to save yourself from dying to 50 cal.
That would be interesting to experiment with, in all honesty. Suddenly the lackluster postpen of rounds like APCR, HESH, and HEATFS would not mean as much if repairs were a non-option outside caps.
Unlike Air, Ground does not have a delayed kill mechanic. If the person is still alive in ground, he can continue to fight- a man with no barrel can run away and repair it wherever. In air, however, that is not always the case- a pilot missing a wing in a flat spin has no chance of repair, as he cannot go back to the airfield.
There is also, no need for an SD mechanic in ground. Rewards are already based there, IIRC, on how much damage you did. So if you kill a tank with only two crew left and no components, you get less than you would for a fully functioning tank anyways. Which is practically the SD mechanic we have for air right now anyway.
So I fully agree, this is well said. Just figured I’d add my two cents.
Also It would give recovery vehichles a chance to shine, we could see bergepazers and so on. Probably with like a really low spawnpoint cost like 10 sp for example, whiout costing a slot in your deck just like a Nuke-plane. They may should be able to decap points but to not capture them. That said the current system is just more fun for the players.
The kill should be awarded to the person who achieved the first penetrating shot that disabled either the engine/breech/barrel or killed at least one crewmember.
Thus in that sense, the “severe damage” mechanic could feasibly be implemented. I get the OP’s intended purpose here.
No it should not. If you get a guys engine and he kills you back, that’s a you problem. And if your teammate gets him? That’s teamwork at best, skill issue on your part for not one shotting him at worst.
Plus, plenty of tanks IRL have functioned without or with significantly less than the intended number of crew members. This mechanic is, at its core, a cope for a skill issue because you couldn’t finish your shots.
I sharply disagree here - if your machine in question is saddled with low-postpen rounds that rarely if ever reliably one-tap anything, yet you did achieve a crippling first shot only to be deleted by either his teammate or in some cases melted by coaxial MGs, you should get that kill even if someone else finishes the first guy off.
But that’s just my opinion here, you are in no way required to agree with me.
Also no need to level dumb insults like “cope” and whatnot. They don’t make you look any “superior.”
Part of the game is learning where to shoot to deal the most damage. If someone shoots better than I do, or knows how to finish off a tank, then they deserve the kill.
Cope was not an insult, but the truth. Getting an assist does not affect the average player in a negative way. Only those who really care about KD or who cannot get a kill at all are complaining- in which case it’s simply the truth that the problem at hand is a skill issue and the person who “desperately needs” this mechanic is coping with their poor skill.
And in my opinion, no ammunition type should be saddled with such poor postpen in the first place to where discussions on topics like this become even an issue.
If we saw APCR, APDS, HEAT, HEATFS, HESH, and small APFSDS properly un-nerfed, then such a mechanic would not be remotely necessary.