Got bored at playing the game but my fingers are itching so gonna write some nonsense about PUMA that probably nobody even cares.
Since the addition of PUMA with wooden pallets is around the corner, me as a casuals who played the 10.3 PUMA to Ace, here’s my personal opinion about PUMA’s usability/survivability on various maps bros
# 38th Parallel | I find the PUMA is pretty dogwater here, there is almost no place to camp hull down, any place you can open fire you are completely exposing your hull, also map is pretty small so most engagement are cqc so you can’t utilize the 15x gunner sight to snipe and bully enemies with bad optics. Don’t use it here
# Abandoned Factory | The PUMA is completely useless here, it’s another stupid cqc map for orange cats to brawl head-on and the only thing PUMA has a chance of killing head on is enemy light tanks, if you wanna be useful might as well just spawn a 8.3 Gepards in this map bro or you just sit at spawn and use scout drone I bet you’d be more useful. Don’t use it here
# Advance to the Rhine | Another orange cat cqc map like the above, the PUMA is completely useless/garbage here so don’t use it here. If you insist wanted to use it then roll a dice and pray to god to give you enemies who blasts loud music and they also completely blind or they are weebs who play with one hand so you might find your chance to drive around and appears behind them and shove apfsds up their asses, thats the only chance you will perform remotely well here else don’t bother.
# American Desert | Compare to the orange cat maps above, it’s a slightly better map for PUMA due to the terrain patterns, I can drive the PUMA around outside A and C and exposed only my turret to engage the enemies, at least you could avoid head-on engagement like the cqc maps above.
# Aral Sea | You can camp your PUMA here and easily score >1000 mission points, F4 is the best spot since you can watch the entire C from there and it’s hard for enemies to hit your tiny turret, and you can also look into their spawn directly to perform spawn killing, or mark every one of them moving out of spawn so your CAS buddies can nuke them easily. PUMA is usable here, you can easily kill a few enemies then decide if you ready to die then drive to the objective point with at least 2-3 kills/assists instead of going 0-1 like a loser. Had a few nukes here from just sitting in one spot so not bad IMO.
# Arctic | An alright map for PUMA since you can hide your hull everywhere and scout for the enemies and pick the target you could kill or farm kill assists without risking permanent damage like crew loss. Map size is not ideal for PUMA as most useful spots either doesn’t buy you enough time to repair and reload after cook off so enemy easily push you after they see your fireworks.
# Ardennes | Pretty bad map for PUMA since its complete garbage at cqc offense and the objective points is in the middle of the city, certainly not worse than the first three maps above since there are areas you can hull down. Rarely had good game here so no comment.
# Breslau | PUMA is garbage here, don’t use it here unless you wanna suffer or you have an iq of my orange color cat. Stay away from city maps unless you use teleport cheat.
# Cargo Port | Pretty garbage vehicle to play A or B. I’ll go to C since there are good opportunities to flank the enemies going after B driving next to the main road, enemies has to watch two directions so your odds are usually good there.
# Carpathians | No comment here, in short the PUMA sucks here.
# Battle of Hurtgen Forest | This map is good for flanking, just don’t enter the city you’d have a PUMA that is well fed. Edge of the maps are all good spots for the PUMA to deal a lot of damage via flanking and only risking minimal damage like ammo cookoff, your PUMA will easily survive very long with good score as long as you don’t enter the city.
# Fields of Normandy | Pretty good map for PUMA to camp hull down watching C point, you can also shoot through thousand of trees to kill marked enemies. To find their hit box, simply spam the range finder until the commander says the target. Once you got bored from all the kills and kill assists, then you can drive around like a headless chicken and die, at least it’s very unlikely to go 0-1 in this map making the PUMA looks like its completely useless.
# Maginot Line | Pretty good map for the PUMA to deal a lot of damage before you decided feed it to the enemy, especially the large variant. You can sit back, mark the enemies going after B and C, on the south side you can even shoot into their spawn at 2km to kill their SPAAs. In this map there will be a lot of kill assists.
Spot 1 is pretty broken if you decided to camp your PUMA there, because the only thing that could kill you is Spikes or CAS, don’t mention HE because you have to sit there not moving for 2 hours for the low velocity HE to even hit your tiny turret. The blue area is basically your coverage.
** # Fire Arc ** | Didn’t play much so dunno, probably playable if your team from south side and managed to secured B point domination mode, you can look into their one of their spawn to spawn kill their asses at around 1.6km. I often just simply leave without even spawning bro
** # Fulda ** | Playable map for PUMA since you can hull down everywhere bro
** # Red Desert ** | Dunno, rarely spawned here, probably decent since you can hull down, engagement range is up to 3km and you have 15x optic and thermals so you are good.
** # Serversk ** | Pretty rubbish in this map, too few useful camping points for you to watch the hot spots.
** # Pradesh ** | Good map for PUMA to camp, to scout and to deal damage, engagament range up two km and plenty of spots to hull down, as long as you are aware of how much your hull is exposed then you simply cannot die if you get shot in the turret.
TLDR/water is wet/poop is smelly version: The PUMA sucks to play in many maps that doesn’t allow it to hide its hull (if you going to drive around in this thing, might as well just grab your gepard because PUMA is garbage at this), but extremely annoying to play against on large maps that it could hull down. The PUMA is also very capable of defending itself against missiles attacks like Spikes or ATGMs because you can shoot them down with the AHEAD, so always activate your thermals and be aware of CAS so you can see them to intercept their ammunitions. The PUMA probably has one of the lowest DPS in the br bracket along with other IFVs with similar weaponry like CRV block, unlike these poor guys the PUMA is more survivable because it doesn’t blow up when getting hit in the turret, low DPS means you gotta take a long ass time to kill your enemies, so you are going to expose yourself longer to enemy fires for a lon so don’t bother drive around and die to every mbts and cry about it like I do, its a vehicle that invest all the points into hulldown camping perks.
So anybody here discovered any other ways to play this thing without going 0 kill 1 death every matches then do let bros know your tricks.