That's easy.
34/85 is not a stock tank, you're committing yourself to a doctrinal choice.
Plus, when the tank was single call-in without tech, it had costed 140 fuel and its balanced like that, having to tech to get doctrinal unit already puts some strain on the eco, play USF or soviets once in a while, you'll see it.
I can use this exact arguement to advocate for a buff to OH and OKW tank call-ins. I.e. committing to a doctrinal choice. I don't see any axis call-ins performing above their cost like the T34/85 does.
The T34/85 is in 3 of the more widely used soviet doctrines, including the most used doctrine in the ESL tournement.
And no, 34/85 does NOT perform better AI-wise, that still goes to P4.
Well that is just not true. The T34/85 has better scatter stats and because of this gets much more DPS from it's main gun. I believe this negates any recieved acc. buffs from vet. Comparitively, it's also much better against 4 man squads and it gains more advantage from squads clumping up. Killing models is more important than DPS.
Evidence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr7h0txMUPw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4koTutTHuHE
And last but not least, while if your panther is 1-2 hits from death against singular 34/85, you might want to actually move and micro it next time as each 34/85 shot have less then 50% to pen it, while it will always pen 34/85 while not having that much longer reload then 34, so you're talking either, horrible micro case or extremely bad RNG.
This is a straw man arguement. I've ran numerious samples on exactly this. The point of the testing is, that if the two tanks are able to attack each other, what is the comparible difference in performance in AT. You don't consider the difference in accuaracy as the panther has much greater scatter and the t34/85 is a smaller target. Overall the T34/85 may penetrate less but it hits it's the panther more often than the panther hits it. The panther's poor DPS against infantry, the lackluster DPS against AT, and high scatter (effects accuarcy) make it overpriced by any emperial metric when compared to the t34/85.
The choice to go panther over stugs or P4 is represented in it's loss of AI capabilities and therefore should have greater AT dps to account for the loss of AI utility.
I will conceed that the position that I'm taking does infer that the IS-2 has a serious cost issue aswell. It should, for it's cost, get a damage buff. It's 122mm kanone, although inaccurate, is a beast and any penetrating shots should be devesating. It should have high scatter, high damage and high penetration.
You're also completely ignoring designated role of the panther.
You're supposed to use it vs heavily armored units, which 34/85 is not, StuG excels vs meds and below, Panther excels vs heavies, if you're fighting opponent who spams meds, don't go panther, go StuG, unless you're poor on micro, then go for panther.
Whose definition of designated role? Yours? The panther is a Tank Hunter, for it's place in t4 and the cost of the unit, the performance should represent that. If a panther is designed to take on heavies, it would follow that it should be even more effective against mediums, which it is not.
You also didn't answer my question about the opportunity cost of the panther to stugs and P4s.
And since I've been playing Coh2 casually since it's release (my adhd keeps me form playing seriously), I have been reading the forums since then and noticed that you have always had an anti-axis bias. I'll admit, I've played pretty much strictly as axis regardless of wether they're OP or UP, mostly beacuse I've gotten my fill of ww2 games from an american perspective. But your shameless 9000+ post of fanboying for allies with out compelling arguements to support your positions has to stop. It's incredibly destructive to the community and even to the game if any of your bias posts were ever taken into consideration for balance.
Here's my player card:156428225
Let's see yours.