6th elefant in top row. Compared to 3rd elefant in top row. That's half a tanks worth of health in an RNG gamble.
That result is not a gamble, it is not RNG. It is rear armor vs front armor. The first 5 targets left to right got hit in the rear armor (see impact craters), the last 5 got hit in the front armor. The first 5 targets took more damage. These results are exactly what we intended with this change, to make armor and direction of attack actually mean something so slow but heavily front armored vehicles can't get deleted from every angle. These results
are reliable. Damage against front armor is consistently lower than damage against rear armor.
If you want it to deal less damage one could always simply make the damage less...
No. If you'd just decrease damage then it would also affect performance against medium tanks. That's not the intention of this change. Medium tanks can decrease damage the of this ability with their mobility. Heavy vehicles can not. The penetration change has the effect that the damage decrease against mediums is minimal, while the damage decrease against heavies is more significant. It's exactly the same thing that we did with AT Overwatch and that turned out exactly as intended. To a certain degree mediums can escape it, heavies can tank it. This lets the ability stay good against both, but no longer disproportionally powerful against the latter.