The logic can be used in reverse. If Russia is losing as frequently as he claims, then German Win Rates should still be tanking when you pair with Russia. That’s not the case though.
Russia has the best top tier lineup and many of the best vehicles in the game. It’s only natural they’d win more often.
The problem with spall liners isnt in frontal engagements, thats fine that they improve survivability and making planned shots to wear down an opponent thats all fine.
The problem comes from side shots mostly.
Lets look at how you kill a russian/chinese tank from the front.
You can go for the breach of course.
You can go for the driver port to kill driver, maybe more crew or the gun if you aimed directly at the ring to create spall or aimed high enough to get the gun breach. Or you can shoot the lower front plate to go for ammo which can one shot them easily.
From the side you can go for both the crew in the turret as long as the tank is looking forwards or backwards, is he facing you/away from you, then you wont hit both crew. In which case you will shoot ammo in most cases or you can shoot the breach to disable them. But you will most often go for ammo in russian/chinese tanks because it is more often then not a reliable one shot (which is why people complained about the T80BVM being so bullshit sometimes, because it felt like it had a spall liner since there sometimes was 0 spall when shooting at the ammo).
So TL:DR, most kills will come from ammo being hit.
Western tanks most often have blowout panels so hitting ammo in most cases makes no sense. Although there are some cases where this isnt true like if a leopard carries so much ammo that the frontal ammo storage next to the driver is used, but you wont go for this first in most cases since its a wasted shot if they dont carry alot of ammo, or have used it. Therefore you almost always go for crew or a shot to the breach.
It depends on the tank where you shoot on western tanks like neck on the abrams or like the driver port on a challenger or leopard, but you will go for crew or disable the gun.
Side shots will again target the crew in 95% of cases if not more if you are actually going for a kill shot.
So, does spall liner help when targeting ammo? it can if your shot is poorly placed, but if you actually place the shot correctly spall liner wont help vs ammo on the russian and chinese mbt’s.
When you go for crew? That depends on the tank and where the crew is sitting and the angle that the turret is facing, but in most cases when facing a tank with spall liner from the side? i dont think you can reliably kill any of them in 1 shot.
So i now have to wear tanks down from the side too? Or i can go for a breach shot and hope volumetric dont fuck me this time around.
Thats the issue with it, ruins what should be a garuanteed kill depending if its still there or not, which i wont know wether its already been destroyed or not.
And no this isnt coming from some 1 nation only player.
I wasn’t going to attack you if you don’t do it first.
While I agree that Spall Liners are frustrating at times on Western Tanks, I think they show more potential than disadvantage.
For one, they slow down the pace of top tier. One of the biggest issues is that Top Tier simply goes too quickly and there’s barely any skill to it. Sure, a good player will do better than a new player, but most of top tier is just pressing W and finding targets unlike the majority of this game.
Personally, I’d prefer to bring top tier down to how the rest of the game plays. Throughout this game, the player is taught to aim, learn positioning, and grind down their opponents. At top tier, none of that is relevant. All that matters is how much attention your tech tree gets and if you have a faster reaction speed.
For me, I have low blood pressure and my hands don’t exactly work right. I find it hard often to be as precise as quickly as some players. It’s certainly not impossible and as you can see on my player card, I’m not a bad player by any means. I just don’t believe holding W should be the key to winning a top tier match.
As for Leopard survivability, it’s not that insane. The only tank that really causes me issues is the STRV122 series, but they were like that long before Spall Liners. My issue with them is having a hard time punching through their armor to begin with.
I’d like to talk about this because I believe this is okay. Tanks like the Leopard are much heavier (20 tons) and have worse ground pressure making them significantly slower than the T-80U and BVM series. Due to being slower on average, they should be harder to kill. Before Spall Liners, Russian teams would sweep every game, but now, because Russian players can’t just fire at you blindly and eliminate your entire crew, you can survive a hit or two.
As a person whose favorite Top Tier tank is the Merkava, I can comfortably say that Spall Liners are not bad. They’re just a bit rough around the edges and need adjustments.