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
Like other said, it a victim of BR ‘gaijin’ decompression.
Personally i would skip it if this is the state T-54 get.
You should grind through it using sth like obj 906.
What they should do is give those T-54s the bullets that they historically used, lower the Br to 7.3 and 7.7, and instead add the T-54A in Br. 8.0, using the HEAT-FS as the best bullet, and to improve even further by separating the T-55 into two, a more initial one with the best APDS bullet and a more final one with the APDS-FS.
Problem is that round is the same round the 6.3 su-100p uses.
Also the armor of the 1949 is more trolly then other 2.
From my view, they just need another BR decompression, the proper one, move all the stablizer with laser and apfsds to at least 1., keep the non laser but with heat and stab as a gap before them.
You also have to keep in mind that the SU-100 should only be able to carry the first bullet, the rest are post-war (1953).
I am in favor of tanks using the bullets they really used, but you are also right that the tanks need to be separated better. I think it would be good to give the real bullets they used to the tanks and at the same time add more tank models to extend the Br and thus separate the vehicles more, for example by adding the T-54A and the M48A3 you can separate those two lines more.