Why is Germany doing so bad - quick overview of WW2 BR range

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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639

Being able to imagine a situation you arennot experiencing yourself is a measure of one’s intelligence.
I don’t think you should participate in this discussion if the only view you’re capable of is your own select sample of using only low and high pen guns.

Meanwhile even if I followed your steps, I would have no problem thinking about other players and weapons a Tiger encounters.

You downplaying the armor due to some extremely limited perspective is hilarious, as we’re not talking about “Tiger vs that single guy”. We are talking about how Tiger performs. And Pay2Win Tiger allows you to get a much better tank at the same BR and spawn cost.

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Pay2win Tiger has only small weakspots that are super hard to hit on UFP. LFP is entirely covered with tracks vs entire front being essentialy a weakspot.

Frontal shot?
Sorry, only cupola, everywhere else - too much armor.

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Mind you - 26 degrees still means you’re aiming 1 degree down, as the plates original angle is 25 degrees.

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West has better UFP (even more tracks and some are angled!), but weaker LFP, but LFP is normally stronger than UFP anyway, so there’s that.

640

I think Tiger I is both an excellent sniper and an excellent flanker. I play it one way or the other depending on what the map requires, really. The joke I always go for on maps where you can flank with it is “play it like an M18”.

Yeah, it’s a pretty weird thread ngl.

I would like to resume our earlier discussion about this, when we were talking about Tiger IIs and you were saying that doing well in them required “superhuman aiming” or 0.1% type gameplay. Yesterday I got a nuke in the Tiger II Sla on Campania, conquest (B being the only objective). You can watch the salient moments of what I did here:

Which of those kills required incredible aim? Every one of them happened at point blank range. Out of those 10 kills, 8 were scored against people who weren’t even looking at me. There is no shot I took in this match, that you also would not be able to pull off without much trouble. And yet, note, this is a post engine nerf Tiger II Sla brawling around a cap on a city map in an uptier (though not a full uptier), the sort of environment where you would expect it to struggle.

I also made two (in hindsight very obvious) mistakes that got me killed the one time I died.

What’s more, I invite you to consider the following thought exercise, which one of those kills could not have been achieved in, say, a Panther F? All the broadside shots would have been kills with that too. Ditto for the MG port shots. The only thing the Tiger II did, which the Panther F would not have been capable of, was survive that rushed shot from the T26E1 towards the beginning. But note, the Panther F has a faster reload, so I likely would have survived anyway because I would have been able to shoot his lower hull when he peeked, while in the Tiger II I was still reloading…

Universal Ground RB skills are far, far more important than statcards. German lineups allow you to do good, if you play them well.

641

And today I had another 13+ kill battle as Italy and before that I had a solid 8-9 kill battle. And my Italian WR is not great, so it’s not like we’re steamrolling the enemy. Far from it.
But somehow I’m at 3,5 K/D in Composito and pushing towards 4.
It’s like US tanks at this BR (I’m using M24 and M4) were wicked OP.
Then I have really solid WR as 5.0 Soviets. Just like Su-85M and soviet CAS were wicked OP.

What German lineup is OP?
5.7 Pay2Win Tiger lineup - hell yeah. But how many people actually bought the Pay2Win Tiger Pack? And how many of these are only interested in quick grind and the tanks from the pack are what they were… Learning to play WT essentialy. At 5.7…

642

So?

It’s not like I claimed it’s hard or impossible to do well in Italian vehicles, so this is not new information to me. It does not contradict any of my pre-existing beliefs.

I’m bringing up that match and that video for a much narrower purpose - you don’t need to be super turbo elite to get a nuke in a Tiger II even playing it in the 7.0 - 8.0 BR bracket. That’s why I made this specific observation:

And why I pointed out that I played far from flawlessly.

Any heavy that allows you to get a nuke outside of its BR range by playing well-but-not-exceptionally is a very good vehicle in WT. It is not struggling at all. The lineup has deficiencies, sure. But not so bad that you as the player can’t work around them.

It’s an incredibly strong tank, I’ve made that same argument myself when comparing its stats to those of the IT Pz IV back in August.

In case it needs reiterating, I’m no big fan of Pz IVs. They are too one-dimensional, great for getting kills but if you care about winning matches they put you on the backfoot. But that’s just a Pz IV issue, not a wider “German tech tree” issue.

I much prefer playing 5.3, 6.0 and 6.7.

Sure. That’s major nation syndrome, but it’s not a problem of the vehicles themselves.

643

I would like to again mention: this game is only PART aiming.
My aim is horrible, I score 10+ kills over and over in Italy.
On some maps I even wrap it up nicely playing Germany.
Why?
Because spotting and positioning beats good aim.
Of course it’s preferable to have all 3. But in a good position you have easier shots and get shot less often.
That’s how this game is played.

Now, if enemy doesn’t know the map as well, it gets pretty bad for them even if you are in a relatively slow but still superior pay2win Tiger II variant.
If enemy knows the map and positioning and has access to f.e. Su-100P, well, it gets a lot less enjoyable.
In theoretical engagement when you both run into each other each at 60 degrees to the other, Su-100P will be first on target due to great turn, even if its turret is slow.
And Su-100P doesn’t “run into Tiger II”. If the other guy is as skilled in map positioning, he’ll be in position to snipe you to pieces before you get anywhere.

Can he be countered with M41?
Sure.
But M41 with its pew-pew gun is not exactly the survival expert itself and it has a lot of trouble staying alive while fighting for map control vs fast hard hitting mediums of the enemy team. And it’s often a game of numbers.
German team will have 1-2 guys in light tanks and rest in heavies, enemy team will have a ton more fast tanks that can and will deal with German light tanks and lock the map down.
But that’s assuming fairly equal skill and not 1 guy with vastly superior positioning and spotting ability (and also superior aim) vs clueless randoms.

That’s the only truely OP lineup reduced to uselessness because of lack of availability (so 1 guy out of 30 has it, for the rest 5.7 lineup is just “OK”) and average skill of its user.
Meanwhile Su-85M and Su-100P are rarely crewed by scrubs and can absolutely dominate.

644

Ad hominem will get you nowhere in an argument. Neither of us making claims on the other’s intelligence or potential lack thereof is going to win the other side over or help them see the other party’s argument.

The avoidance of answering the question I have asked three times now and have had no meaningful reply to outside of still trying to turn this into a “premium vs tech tree” debate, whilst acting like the base TT vehicles are vastly inferior to the competition, or have gaps in lineups, and now resorting to petty name-calling, has answered nothing as to why Germany’s tree is less optimal than other nations. Aside from early Germany’s terrible light tank gaps and less lethal CAS capabilities, their lineups are competitive and rather versatile with good, high velocity guns, decent mobility, comparable armor usability, good optics, gold standard gun depression on 90% of the vehicles, and decent gun handling thanks to the smooth suspension.

I legit can’t see anywhere other than 4.3-4.7 where the TT falls short of being well-balanced, and that’s because almost all of those vehicles got moved down in the first place, and can still do well there because the guns can handle most of the threats that they would face at that BR.

2 Likes
645

When we began this discussion, you were discounting my arguments about Tiger IIs doing well by saying that the opinion of an elite player (which imho I’m not) with superhuman aim has little general impact for the playerbase.

So I have brought you a match where I got a nuke by aiming at enemies at ranges shorter than a football match’s and very little in the way of pixel hunting.

Your counter to this is to say:

But what you’re saying is tautological. You are essentially saying, “in order to play well, there are at least some things that you need to do well”. Yes, hello, of course that’s true. But a bad vehicle/bad lineup requires more than just doing some things well. Instead, you can do great in Tiger IIs even by just playing competently, no need to be a monster. Hence the judgement that the vehicles are perfectly adequate.

I was not in an especially clever position. The enemy in this instance lacked situational awareness, not map knowledge.

I encounter plenty of them playing this BR. They’re a threat, but no more or less of a threat than any fast moving TD with a great gun.

Tiger II has great targeting speed, and the Su-100P has a large exposed ammo box that you can hit even by accident from the frontal aspect.

To me that tank is a constant source of disappointment. However,

A nuke-printer heavy. More than good enough if people bother to learn to play it. And we’re back to major nation syndrome.

I got that nuke and several more and so can you.

That wasn’t vastly superior positioning. It was good, but hardly uncounterable. And what spotting ability and aiming? It was all point blank.

Nah. 6.0 is goated. 6.7 is too if you’re mindful of its mobility deficit.

Makes it all the more satisfying when you kill them.

1 Like
646

It got me exactly where I wanted.
The problem is - you simply refused to discuss the topic at the same level as other people. Instead you made remarks like this:

No, the wood, sparce addon tracks, and camo net do not add any meaningful enhancements to gameplay

You did not write "for me it makes no difference as I either can’t pen either way or will pen anyway (which is not entirely true even for 17 pounder BTW).
You wrote “do not add any meaningful enhancements”.
Why?
Because you simply didn’t bother to imagine a scenario where somebody is not playing like you and not the same tanks as you. All you can discuss is your own narrow experience.
In other words - you can’t/are not willing to assess the capabilities of a tank, all you can do is assess how it performs vs the shots you take.

Hilarious.

US have 10 degrees and it makes a difference. 8 is good. 10 is better.
Also the vehicles that actually would greatly benefit from it lack it: Nashhorn is absolutely hapered by 5 degrees gun depreesion. It’s the only fairly mobile glass cannon. But it’s only “fairly” mobile, and no gun depression means it’s overal just bad.

I don’t exactly find Panther to wobble less than T-34 or KV-85.

Germany has issues all the way from 4.3 to 6.3, and even at 6.7 it has problems because M41 is so soft, JP 4-5 is totally unappealing, so almost always it’s the German fast tanks that are on a losing side.
It’s a game of numbers.
Vk3002 is excellent, because it’s fast., but it has no reverse.
No reverse + no support from other mobile tanks pushing forward + horrible turret turn rate = suboptimal average performance. I still do way better in Vk than in Panther D.

1 Like
647

Still stand by this opinion.
But it’s also superhuman spotting and superhuman map and tank knowledge.
It’s a full package.

Still aimed faster than them, more precisely etc.
1 v 1 vs Su-100P I lose. You hear him coming from a mile away, sound-scout his vehicle type, since you perfectly know the map you know exactly where he’s going and when he appears, you shoot him in the ammo and not just “somewhere around the middle” which results in negligible damage and Su-100P blasting me to pieces.
Being able to confidently win the “speed contest” vs 99,9% of players, not whiff and hit every weakspot faster than they can hit your turret front is how you win.

No.
Lets say there’s a team made of 4 Ju-288, 2 Do-335 with bombs doing lawn-darting and Me163_Komet and me in Ta-152Hs. Enemy team is mostly F2Gs, F8Fs and 2 P-51Hs with some AD-4 thrown in.
Match ends in 5 minutes with me and Komet having 7 kills total and 1 guy dying to Ju-288 gunners.

By your logic our team composition is “just fine”, “perfectly OK”, “not an issue at all”.
By my logic our team composition is ASOLUTELY DOGSHIT.

If enemy team learns to play their tanks, we’re back to square 1 with Su-100P ambushing German team and laughing his butt off while doing it.

I’ve seen German 6.0 team advance in a coordinated fashion, supporting each other along the wide front on one of the more open maps with frozen lake and hills around B.
It was a glorious assualt, I felt like I have my own arc to protect and my Panther F did a perfectly fine job eliminating all threats. It was fun.
But it took a team that somehow spread out, positioned itself correctly and then proceeded to smartly advance without exposing flanks.

And we’re back to opening post - nothing in German TT teaches you this.
You learn to stay back and snipe, because otherwise you’ll get roflstomped by Shermans/Chaffee (Soviet and British tanks are fairly reasonable opponents, even if Soviet 76 removes any resemblence of protection from poor Stug IIIG).

648

My “narrow experience” is based off of not only playing against the tank from multiple nations, but also playing in it and watching other people play it. As well as my clanmates who also passed on the information to me. When you play a tank, you either learn pretty quickly where the weak points are thanks to the experience each death brings, or write it off as the vehicle being awful/misrepresented and ultimately learn nothing about it.

I do concede that I should not have stated it as absolute gospel that the addon armor adds nothing to the vehicle. I do personally find it to be trivial as all of my personal experiences where I lost, for head-to-head fights, have ended in myself being shot in the cupola, or under the sponsons. The place where the gunner or ammo is, and where the armor is weakest/easiest to hit when the Tiger is angled. I do recall the one time I was angled perfectly and penned by a Japanese tank in that upper corner in a full downtier game. It was so out of left field, never happened again and every time I tried doing that with a similar gun it just non-penned.

I also have slightly overexaggerated the 17pdr’s ability to pen it, though not on purpose and I concede on that as well. At least my faith in it isn’t completely misplaced as it almost does the job.

The Pz.IV H’s power to weight is a little over 11hp per ton. The M4 at the same BR is a little over 13hp per ton. I would say this is barely noticeable, but I won’t make the same mistake of stating this as absolute fact. And finally the T-34(1941) is almost 18hp per ton. That one is a more than noticeable difference. It is worth noting, however, that every single Pz.IV before the H keeps the same horsepower numbers, but is lighter whilst still using the same gun. This does come at the cost of less effective armor, but that does bring those two variants up to the 13hp per ton range of the M4A1. StuH/StuG’s even at their heaviest are a little over 12hp per ton, so their mobility is still decent.

All of the Pz.IV’s have 10 degrees of gun depression, as do the Pz.III’s, and the StuG F. They do make up the backbone of low-tier Germany’s lineups until you get to the 4.3-ish to 6.7. 8 degrees is still very good for the rest(I wish I could pretend the few TD’s with 3-5 degrees of depression didn’t exist).

And finally, Panther platform wobble definitely feels like the oddball since most of the other vehicles are fairly smooth. Tiger I’s and II’s feel smooth, Pz.III/IV’s feel okay. I adore the StuH/StuG gun handing. Some reason I do better in those than their turreted counterparts. No idea why. Play them nearly the same way. As for the M41… it’s one of my favorite US lights, funnily enough. It’s my go-to for anti-Maus duties. Got my first ever nuke in it, though sadly didn’t drop it. And the Vk/Panther D I just can’t stand, which is funny because they are basically just higher tier M10’s with better armor and a better gun, and I like the M10. The reverse is definitely something I despise on them and is something I am being reminded of thanks to getting to high tier Russia.

649

They’re fine where they are. But unlike what some have said, they really don’t belong at a higher BR. And their support vehicles need to be addressed, why is the StuG III G 4.0 while the Pz IVs it shares a gun with are 3.7, and with a turret? Pz III M isn’t worth 3.3 either with the 50mm plinker; Chaffee is much better than a Puma.

No APHE so it’s the odd one out.

M4 accelerates way faster. I’ve timed it before and it is VERY noticeable. It can also traverse much faster and on more inclined ground.

3 Likes
650

I’ve gotten plenty of games like that with Germany. Heck, I got a nuke in Tiger H1 when it was basically stock. Didn’t get to drop, but still.

Getting lots of kills at 3.7 is not impressive for any nation.

651

I don’t notice the acceleration too much, but the pivoting in place I definitely do agree. That one I can definitely feel.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also agree they are fine where they are at. I think there are far bigger fish to fry on the game balancing side of things.

652

Germany has “big funny gun”, that’s pretty much it. Most of their tanks have pretty terrible armor, aren’t that mobile, and don’t really lend themselves to the close quarter combat maps GJN keeps giving us. On top of that, their CAS is horrendous.

I’ve been playing a ton of Japan, spading their vehicles. And German tanks can “lolpen” you quite often. But as Japan, so can most US and Soviet vehicles. And Panzers are very, very easy to destroy in turn.

4 Likes
653

Around 15-20% difference (will look up the exact numbers later) barely noticeable? Well, trust me, it makes a difference, even if you don’t feel like it.

And if people around you aim for cupola at distance/vs moving target, when there’s entire UFP to hit on non-pay2win Tiger, it’s on them.

You get hit under the sponsons cause you angle too much.
You angle too much because front is super weak.
In case of Pay2Win variant all you need is 25-30 degrees, where the side remains impenetrable for everything but hardest hitters.
Generally, Pay2Win Tiger is so good I’m seriously thinking about selling my Class 3 P and buying the pack.

654

Exactly.
When there is a big open map and Germans are not actually outgunned heavily (6.0 Panther vs Su-85M at distance is a matchup heavily in.favor of Soviets), they perform very nicely if the team is kinda OK.
Damn, it’s super entertaining when Tigers and Panthers advance in an organised fashion, Ostwind IIs blast enemies out of the skies (unless they feel like tanking a few 37mm M-geschoss without taking serious damage, which is very common nowadays). But it requires very specific set of maps and conditions.

655

There are many important things, but What matters is new rank3 light tank. It’s only that.

656

Well, we’re not getting any I’m afraid, because Gaijin is way too greedy to put Pak Puma on the techtree.

657

It’s not just their CAS aircraft — their fighters are terrible in Ground RB as well, with almost no dogfighting capability. Any Yak, Spitfire, or Zero would wipe the floor with them.

2 Likes
658

I believe the optimal alternative among the proposed vehicles is the “7.5 cm Selbstfahrlafette L/41 Modell 2”.
Additionally, it is possible to add a variant of Pak Puma equipped with the 7.5 cm L/48 kwk40.
8011_rn

1 Like