Sorry but T-54s have ~14HP/t and M48 have it at 18.0 HP/t, so if you aren’t holding W for minutes at a time, M48 will actually be more mobile overall.
This is fairly situational. On any inclination your turning will be affected and having no neutral steering means you’ll have to be careful when turning in tight areas.
There are very few vehicles at ~7.7 that won’t have APDS/HEAT.
Yes, careful aiming and moving your hull constantly to offset your godawful turret traverse goes hand in hand.
Indeed, yet another flaw of T-54s.
Stabilization is a huge deal for basically any playstyle, it allows you to have much better reaction times. He can just keep driving and get totally accurate shots on you, while on the other hand, you’ll have to fidget your hull and also fight the bouncy gun.
I personally had a very acceptable time spading the Type 59 and 69 at 8.0.
And that was a fairly long time ago, before many of the BR changes that were very positive for them as many vehicles in the 6.7-8.7 range went up while they stayed at 8.0. I think they’re even better now. Very solid vehicles.
You just need to get used to pre-aiming because of the slow traverse, otherwise they’re a perfect MBT with very decent mobility, armor and firepower.
Gun depression>>>>>>> speed. Big reason why BMPs, PT76s, and other tanks on that chassis are mediocre despite speed and good weapons. Also, slow turret traverse+ speed means you are going to throw your aim off with any maneuvering, especially on any hill. French, T54E2, and M48s all have depression that the T54s lack.
Even the worst 7.7s don’t have issue with 200mm armor. Holding the T54s armor up as a benchmark is a bit odd. Even the IS4 at 7.7 isn’t difficult for most tanks to deal with. Without depression, you can’t hull down in 90% of situations and your turret is your weakest point so you can’t hide that. At 8.0 your average tank has 400 pen HEAT that make a mockery of anything on your tank.
If you are questioning if stabs are important, you really haven’t played this game enough. Especially when you are saying you want to be playing a mobile gameplay with the T54. That gun is going everywhere when you are mobile and hitting weak points with your 240 pen aphe on even remotely armored tanks at 8.0 is going to be hard.
You have M48 at 7.7 while M60, T-54 and Leopard 1 are 8.0.
There’s obviously something wrong going on.
It’s probably a combination of APHE being too effective and the advancements in technology being too rapid, since anything above 8.0 gets stabilizer and better ammo.
T-54s didn’t have APDS and HEAT-FS for quite some time but when they received them they were technologically outdated.
If you need HEAT-FS in a T-54 you might as well use a M-51.
At 6.7 there are tanks with HEAT, APDS, APCR or big AP rounds that can deal with T-54s with either mobility or armor/firepower.
Yeah, they’re not great. Worse in many ways than the Centurions and equal to the M48. But with the compression at the BR they can’t just straight move down in BR.
It’s also strange that we have essentially a prototype (1947), pre-production (1949), and then the first production model (1951) but not the most common model (T-54A) or the later T-54B.
What I’d like to see is the 1949 lose the 1967 3BM-8 and move down to 7.7. Then, unfolder the 1951, and add the T-54A foldered under it also at 8.0. This would provide two T-54s each at 7.7 and 8.0, with the T-54A’s vertical stabilizer providing improved performance in an uptier, but without being too powerful in downtiers. The T-54A ought to be added anyways for historical reasons -it was the second most common T-54/55 variant (when including foreign copies).
The real problem is BR from 7.7-8.7 are very broken and need to be extended much more.
for the WW2 br from 3.7-6.7,leaves enough room for the difference of firepower,armor thickness,rangefinder,while in 7.7-8.7 is like the downtier hold DM23 with laser rangefinder shoot an uptiered is4 or T32E1 from 500m away,
IF 7.7-8.7 BR is extended like 3.7-6.7 did that would be much fun instead of broken as it is now
i understand 7.7-8.7 is too compressed. I agree. but why do ppl keep saying the T54s can’t be moved down to 7.7?
US 6.7 is a bunch of HEAT light tanks. T34 pens half the T54 turret at 1km and most of the hull. 7.0 is mediums that have 320 pen HEAT. These can deal with a T54 even in a full downteir.
6.7 german is Tiger 2s and the JT. over 500m the Tiger 2 has difficulty, but can pen the side turrets and can OHK at any range with a cupola hit. The pike of the ufp and lfp is pennable at almost any distance.
These are FULL DOWNTEIRS. Most 6.7s are going to be able to frontally pen T54s with only some mediums and lights having to resort to apcr.
The other 7.7s are equivalent or better than the T54s. There really is no reason the T54s can’t be moved down.
To honor this, I played US 6.7 with the T34 in like 7-8 matches with either 7.3 or 7.7 uptiers.
Now I have depression.
And the best part, I didn’t run into a single T-54 (Kinda forgot that I only meet the 1947 at 7.7).
80% of the time I get killed fighting Tiger IIs, the other time from light tanks.
Solid shot with 15s reload is so painful.
Also Tiger IIs can actually put their gun on target very quickly and are quite stable, so I probably would have fared better against T-54s them than Tiger IIs.
So there’s really no reason for the T-54 to be 8.0 with some artifical reload buff.
They are basically TDs with their bad traverse speed and armor that is quite effective at range.
Other than that they could be way lower. They don’t even have bore evacuators.
Just basic WW2 tech with the classic Russian design philosophy of best armor for the lowest amount of internal volume.
So yeah. T-54 1949 and T-54 1951 could be lower and the T-54 A and B added at higher BR.
oh yeah, 6.7 US is bad. Just strictly worse tiger 2s getting slapped by everything they see. No idea how they justify keeping a lot of those vehicles at those BRs but US is nearly universally higher BRs than they should have.
Well, I quite like the M26 and the T26E5 is basically the same but can survive getting shot by a long 88.
I just wish that I didn’t need to hit a tank twice with 120mm AP that even 90mm APHE is simply better due to having a better RoF and more effective post-pen damage.
There could be a lot more balanced achieved, if there wasn’t this huge performance gap in shells ability to destroy vehicles.
A freaking M46 would kick a T-54s ass by just using HVAP vs. the T-54s low RoF and slow target acquisition, if it wasn’t for APHE damage.
It’s not really random but it requires good shot placement and sometimes you don’t have the time for that or simply can’t hit the target in a way that would knock them in one shot.
If it had the same RoF as the long 88 it would be about as effective, trading damage for the ability to knock out targets that you couldn’t have damaged otherwise. But with twice the reload time it’s just not competetive.
I said before, the M46 and M47 with the HEAT-fs can easily destroy the T-54, so what I would love to see in the game is, first, a rebalancing of the projectiles so that the APHE are not overpowered and give it better damage to all other bullets, the AP a little lower than the APHE, the tungsten bullets with a lot of fragmentation, the tungsten alloy bullets with a little less fragmentation, the HEAT that depend on the excess penetration to do damage being this increased. This way you can match an M46 with the T-54 1947, since with just one APCR or a HEAT-FS in the turret it could cause the destruction of the T-54. And so you can separate the T-54s giving them approximately the bullets that historically used, also to fill the gap in the Br the T-54A can be added using the HEAT-FS as the best bullet. It would also be interesting if the M48A3 were added as a counterpart to the T-54A.
It needs urgent, serious decompression, especially after so many mid tier tanks went up to 5.7 and 6.0. There are 5.7s that should not be meeting Tiger II Sla, but the Tiger II Sla should also not meet the VIDAR, etc etc. You can only solve this logjam by decompressing. Localised decompression is only moving compression spots around, and this is the result.
Others have already commented on the weakness of the American 6.7 lineup. I’ll talk a bit about the German side of things. I played 6.7 a lot when the T-54s were frequently met in full uptiers. The real problem the German 6.7 lineup has, is that there is a huge prevalence of heavily armoured vehicles, and a relative lack of the sort of vehicles you would feel more comfortable taking into a full uptier (emphasis on mobility).
If I can pen you, and you can pen me, the tank that does everything else better is the one you’d rather be in. In your example, say I’m in a Jagdtiger, I try the cupola shot against a hull down T-54 and like you mentioned this should work, but we all know what the live game is like about these things and so maybe I only kill the commander instead. Now I will have to patiently wait for 18.6 seconds and cede the initiative.
What makes the 6.7 German situation somewhat frustrating, is the fact that most of the time, the vehicles you can spawn will simply not be meta. You are presented, map after map and uptier after uptier, with situations where the most competitive choice would be to just spawn in a LeKPanzer anyway, get points and maybe get into CAS if you’re a pilot. I stubbornly still play these heavies, but even when I have good matches in them, I have that little voice at the back of my head saying that if I had gone with a more meta choice, I would have done even better.
But back to the T-54.
I still found it viable at the time pre decompression. What I mean by that is that when I faced T-54s in my Jagdtiger or my Sla, I felt like I could come out on top if I played my cards right, and also at the same time, I was a worse player then than I am now. I recently narrowly missed a nuke on Normandy using the Tiger II Sla in a full uptier, so it’s definitely a vehicle that can work in a full uptier environment, meta notwithstanding.
This discussion may be somewhat moot when the Tiger II inevitably moves to 7.0 with the next round of BR changes, but I suppose what it comes down to for me is this: the T-54s are not the kind of enemy that has powercrept German 6.7 into a frustrating spot, and the less competitive versions at least would be fine at 7.7 in the large scheme of things. But also at the same time, playing 6.7 is often depression-inducing, and for that reason alone, I still feel like the best solution for everyone involved would still be to just do some damn real decompression. That way, Tiger IIs don’t meet T-54s outside of the very earliest versions, and T-54s don’t suffer in the current 8.0 - 9.0 compression hell.
This came out ramblier than it sounded in my head, but it’s hopefully understandable all the same.
The first three t54 variants without stab are some of the worst vehicles you can play in game. My advice avoid them like plague and strive for t62,bmp2,t10m at least