I know what will. But I got muted a few too many times on here already recently, so I won’t elaborate.
Good.
Now let’s leave this and return the topic to M-51.
Hyperbole is poor argumentation.
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This was attempt to show that removing tech tree is not good using reversive psychology
Tsk, but mutilation isn’t, or what.
4 vehicles (3 of which not real) vs whatever rant he went on about.
Though again, I’ll quit here.
Still odd how the m51 is the tank that is complained about and not a 4.0 with 400mm heatfs
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Guy. If you have problems with M-51 you re probably using SPAA, just take any medium tank from 5.0-7.0 aim at center of the hull and fire. I promise it will work iust fine.
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Don’t give them ideas.
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Or M36B2
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Japan has a rank 1 tank whose hull has like 300mm+ of chemical protection. Saved me from a lot of panzer 75 heat rounds.
Can make a lot of vehicles sound op if you only focus on a single stat
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The boat thingy right? I instanly regretted that I dumped all Ap rounds when i faced one in my Stug3A
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That is the game
The Ho-Ri is getting removed?
Hello there, OP!
I’m a German main - in fact, a German only - and since I play a lot of 6.7, I face the M-51 very frequently. I would like to offer you my thoughts, and maybe let you consider a different perspective, starting with a seemingly unrelated question.
Have you ever seen a Dicker Max go 14 kills to 0 deaths on Volokolamsk?
Like the Dicker Max, the M-51 is a vehicle of no half measures. It will either absolutely dominate, or absolutely suck. The reason for it is simple. The Dicker Max, and the M-51, are extremely one-dimensional vehicles. They do one thing incredibly well, so well in fact that it almost feels broken, but they utterly suck at virtually everything else.
If you think of the M-51 as a tank destroyer rather than a medium, you might start to see things differently. Like the Dicker Max, the M-51 is useless on the move, poorly reactive to unexpected threats, slow, and cursed with atrocious gun handling. Like the Dicker Max, it dies to anything that looks at it wrong. And like the Dicker Max, if it gets into a power position, it can single-handedly carry the whole match.
The positions in question differ, of course. For the Dicker it might be the hill west of C on Volokolamsk, for the M-51 it might be the southeast rocky elevated position on Middle East. I’ve seen an M-51 drop a nuke from the northern rocks overlooking A and C on Karelia, and I’ve dropped a nuke in a Dicker Max from the southern rocky platform on Frozen Pass when playing it in my 5.7 lineup.
When the stars align - right player, right position on the map - these vehicles are mega strong, but neither of them is “meta”.
There is another important way in which the M-51is like the Dicker Max, because of this one-dimensional nature. They are both relatively BR agnostic.
Almost at any BR where you place them, the hull and mobility will always suck. So long as the gun works, the vehicle works.
(I honestly would like to test the M-51 at a higher BR for the sole reason that I feel its gun would be a lot more capable of one-shotting early cold war vehicles than the stuff it faces now, but that’s a different tangent from this thread really).
As next, I would like you to consider that the M-51 will often be played with level 1 crews.
But maybe the most important bit…
Look at this thing that you wrote:
Suppose that we did as you say, and lowered the penetration to 360mm.
What would actually change?
I am being perfectly serious. I always say that clarity is the most important thing in life, and clarity often begins by asking the right questions. Would my Jagdtiger be frontally immune to an M-51 with 360mm of pen? No! It’s not immune to a T29 with 256mm of pen, so what exactly are we talking about here?
You’re focusing on the “headline” figure of 400mm, but the truth is, a penetration is a penetration. It doesn’t matter if it’s by 1mm, or 200mm, it’s still going through your armour. If you re-frame it like that, can you honestly tell me the M-51 is atypical? Like the Dicker, Sturer, Waffentraeger, Nashorn, it can pen everything it sees, and can die to everything it sees. Just another glass cannon. They’re a dime a dozen in this game. Even more so, now that we have a division’s worth of M109s in the game.
I’ve talked about this subject very often in the past. Consider this thought experiment.
Let’s suppose, hypothetically, that this was still 2014. You want to implement the PT-76B in War Thunder. However, you face a problem. Where to put it in game? The PT-76 was never intended to be a light tank the way WT understands it (duh), and cannot fulfill the job it did IRL, because War Thunder is not a combined arms game.
Therefore, you are faced with three choices.
-
Don’t include the PT-76. Gaijin clearly dismissed this option.
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Include the PT-76, but put it at a BR where it can be competitive. After all, if a vehicle exists, it’s for players to play it, and no one will touch it if it’s uncompetitive. This means you can’t put it with its Cold War contemporaries, it would be massacred. So, WW2 it is.
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Include the PT-76 in a historical scenario of some kind, and draw players in with features other than balance, for example by going hardcore on realism/historicity.
If we were recreating the Battle Of Smolensk, I as a German player would have to take Pz.38ts vs KV-1s. Excuse me for not being thrilled at the idea. On the other hand if the game includes a map that replicates that terrain, has soft-balancing like for example the ability to do what was done in Barbarossa IRL to defeat Soviet armour (German tanks working closely together with towed AT guns and their squads), I might be willing to play it because of the experience.
Option 1 limits you to a small list of vehicles. Especially because you will need a contained number of variables to keep such an asymmetrical set up balanced.
Option 2 balances itself and allows you to introduce all the vehicles that have ever existed.
Option 3 requires a lot of work with uncertain benefits.
Are you surprised Gaijin selected option 2?
In fact, you seem to be fine with time travel so long as it only pertains WW2 vehicles. Puma at 3.3 doesn’t raise your eyebrows, let alone Pz IV F2 at the same BR, yes? Why is the Puma allowed to go down based on performance reasons, but not the M-51?
On a final note, and just to clarify.
I am obviously in favour of balancing by performance, not date. At the same time, there is obviously a correlation between date and performance, it’s just not always iron tight. There is a very severe issue of powercreep in the WW2 BRs, that is caused by the presence of vehicles that on performance grounds, should not “travel back in time”.
But the M-51 is not one of them.
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Hey, I joined the game in Feb 2022, and I’m not over that either! :D :D
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360mm pen and 400mm pen arent that far from eachother, also vehicles are balanced by their charasteristics, not by date/era.
Have you actually played a game in it? You will have no crew skills as a newbie for Israel at 6BR and face 7.0 much of the time. It’s big, it’s slow and its made of glass.
Just get it and go out in it and see if you get 10 kills in a every game then come back and tell us how OP it is. In GRB you won’t even have CAS because your only plane will be 3.3. Until recently simply adding a stablemate took you to 6.7 right away.
The Era stupidity of this game is across the board and not resting on the M51.There are far more stupid future vehicles to face in WW2 tanks believe me.
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In a thread complaining that M51 is a Sherman tank with a 400mm HEAT round…
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It doesn’t have the gun laying, speed, or armor performance for 7.0 even.
As said before in every single M51 thread, it operates like a TD. You can’t really play it like a regular tank, and it depends heavily on map design. Flat maps are particularly awful when your vehicle is a high profile brick with armor that’s only there to trigger APHE fuses. And oh yeah APHE is and always will be the best ammo type in the game, the fact that M51 doesn’t get it makes it straight up worse than M36 GMC.
Also M51 is a terribly boring vehicle sitting in a terribly boring techtree
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