Many people rant about SPAA being OP (such as Flakpanzer 341) and should not fight against tanks, but that is false. Their argument being that “SPAA will eventually find a weak spot in the front and penetrate” as if that is unrealistic or anything; quite the opposite, it proves the realistic behavior of SPAAs and autocannon tanks.
In real life, autocannons are even more crippling to tanks than in the game, as optics actually mean something and turret rings/FCS can be jammed even with a indirect shot (see Tiger 131 or recent tank vs tank actions)
Even modern tanks are vulnerable to 25mm autocannons with HE shells (not even armor piercing shells)!!
But the bullets having to ‘find’ the weak spot, takes way longer than a single shot, from, say a 120mm gun or something.
That’s fair the Flakpanzer 341 is kind of a special case. It’s basically a Panther hull with a twin 37 mm turret slapped on top, so it’s naturally tougher and hits harder than your average SPAA. But that doesn’t mean all SPAAs are like that. Most of them are on very light chassis and die instantly if a tank even looks at them.
I think Gaijin just needs to treat the 341 as an outlier, not a baseline for the whole SPAA class. Balancing it separately would stop people from painting every SPAA as “OP” when in reality they’re glass cannons with limited roles.
I think it’s most noticed on SPAA due to the high fire rate so any tiny bit of reverse speed for a fraction of a second is enough for one or two of the shells to penetrate where they shouldn’t. When it’s bigger shells the odds of the target reversing when the shell hits is far smaller and thus less noticible.
I have 2 Issues with auto cannons, their ability to find pixel sized armour holes or just spam you so hard the server gives up and just kills you so it doesn’t have to deal with it anymore. Barrel/ components could use the amount of damage they take from auto cannon fire tweaked to make them a little more survivable, I find it a bit excessive that a cannon barrel snaps in half from a couple of 20mm APDS rounds.
The other issue is SPAAs being up-tiered due to their anti tank capabilities to the point they struggle to deal with planes, the ZSU-57-2 and Falcon being the 2 best examples. If the ZSU got the same VT round as the Chinese one and went up to the same BR it would help.
If those 2 issues are addressed I would have far less issue with the SPAAs AP rounds.
it’s not just that, sub 57mm rounds don’t have volumetric so a single pixel gap in the armour and you get this:
It’s not an issue with the slow firing guns due to how hard it is to hit, when you are spraying 18 rounds per second however the chances of one slipping through go way up.
No . . . not even close and it’s so very easy to see just playing the game.
Top to bottom there are MANY examples of how this is not even close to the truth.
ROF and cumulative damage done by SPAAs is not realistic, the calculations are off
Damage modelling against SPAAs is ridiculous the majority of the time(this same poor modelling is also seen with all these ridiculous “artillery” pieces they have pumped into the game)
There are many other examples, but those two alone skew the entire process of every engagement of a SPAA vs any other land vehicle
Just my opinion and what I experience nearly every time I cross paths with a SPAA
And playing this event, I have now also noticed that with the current 341 mess, many other players are now spawning in first spawn with SPAA and trying to do the same thing with a lot of other SPAA
The whole thing is detracting from the overall game play in ground battles
Weren’t tigers and panthers literally built with an anti air cannon because previously that was the only armament that could efficiently destroy soviet tanks?
I remember reading that somewhere
What’s aggravating these kinds of issues is Gaijin’s map design. Typical tank-on-tank engagement ranges would make autocannons somewhat ineffective due to a lack of accuracy.
Because some anti-air guns at the time were used to launch big flak munitions to very high altitude to engage bomber formations. Like an “anti-air artillery”.
Bombers were designed to go higher and higher to avoid ground fire to the point that even those were useless.
The problem with the 341 currently is the ability for it to NOT aim for weakspots and still kill you through the strongest section of your upper plate because of a bug.
