there was a poll where half the people didn’t even want performance nerfs, just CP nerfs
And the other half did want performance or cost nerfs. The CP increase will help for 3v3s and 4v4s and maybe a bit for 2v2s, but this increase alone will do absolutely nothing for the heavy meta in 1v1 because the average time for a heavy as the first tank in 1v1s is 14,9 CP on average. Even in 2v2s the Tiger as the first tank came at 12,5 CPs on average.
Since cost increases are awkward (there's basically no room there between what heavies cost now and what superheavies cost) and because Relic doesn't want heavies side-tech (bar as a last resort), it was deemed necessary to tone down performance a bit too. The Tiger got some of its most oppressive stuff (scatter vet, tank commander arty) replaced with other goodies (turret rotation vet, Command Tiger ability buff). Only near AOE was changed for all the heavies which should merely result in fewer OHK shots while still retaining good AI performance overal.
10/10 I don’t know why the bother with the previews when they never test.
Well at least now heavies will be consistent.....ly bad
Do you actually have any test results indicating that they will be bad or are you just being a hypocrite? Because I've actually tested the new AOE (specifically for the Tiger) in more realistic scenarios than Tightrope's one-off test (more targets to increase the validity of the sample size, more clumped up targets because that's what happens most in a real match and letting the Tiger use all of its MGs) and based on those, the Tiger still seems to have excellent AI. I don't know what happened in Tightrope's test (really bad RNG rolls I guess), but in my tests the Tiger does not overshoot nearly as much and consistently kills squads in about 3-4 shots. I'll upload a video once YouTube is done being slow.
Furthermore one of the Tiger's main traits is that it's the best AT heavy because of its range and DPM advantage, which is only going to become even more significant after the IS-2 gets its armor reduced a bit and with the new vet 2 turret rotation speed bonus.
And ultimately I'd like to emphasize once more that balancing complicated issues like these is always a work in progress and there's no way we can get everything right at the first try. Especially since there has been very little feedback based on actual test games with the preview mod. As always, we're going to have to launch the patch with some changes based on some guess work and see how it turns out over the thousands of live games. And as always we'll immediately start work on follow-up patches to fix whatever turns out to need fixing.