Sorry, but that is simply not true. Armor gets eliminated at a lot of situations or at least gets next to eliminated.
First exception: TDs and SHTDs that work reliable against the front of a lot of targets (especially with vet or abilities like HVAP).
Second exception: ATGs that work reliable against the front of a lot of targets (especially 17pdr/Pak43)
Third exception: Howitzers
Fourth exception: Multiple offmap abilities which deal reliable (consistent) damage from all approaching angles or from the top (penetration = 100%)
Everything might have been a slight hyperbole, but the general point still stands: Attacks from the rear are meant to be more effective so that armor matters. Armor still matters in most of the setups, especially in those involving heavily armored tanks and in next to all involving the Elefant which was taken here as an example for debate.
From a design and intuition stand point, it is good that the attack direction matters because it intuitively makes sense that shots at the front armor do not penetrate as often.
So don't get it worse. A damage reduction (although not wanted as Sander93 said) would nerf rocket strafe equally at all game modes for example. I'm not in for allied nerfs that hit 3v3/4vs4 harder than 1vs1/2vs2. Thats the wrong direction.
I am not sure if I am missing something here, but unless you have been pushed back heavily or pushed the enemy, units generally stand in the middle of the map. So it should not matter that much if you attack from the front or the back, or what am I not getting here? Why is this more special for 3v3/4v4 than for small modes? Large modes generally have more delay on plane based attacks, I just don't get why the direction is that important if units are fighting in the middle of the map anyway. If you could elaborate on that, that would be good.
Just to be fair: He has a point. Compare 5th tank to 7th tank in upper row. Both get hit from the front. Thats a huge difference already. Reason: low penetration vs high front armor = RNG
You can compare second to third tank in upper row too. Both from the rear, not such a big difference, but RNG still leads to situation where the Elephant will get destroyed with some other hits or can escape depending on RNG of rocket strafe despite some other hits.
My main issue with the pentration nerf is that the penetration nerf leads to the situation where you want to attack from the rear always. This will lead to a longer approach time in many situations and will make the attack more predictable (you know the direction it is coming from). Especially at the big 3vs3/4vs4 maps. A faster tank like a Panther or PZIV may escape completetly in this higher time window. So this is a bigger nerf to the big game modes than the small ones. Don't like that, because Soviets struggle there while doing absolutely fine in 1vs1. We don't need any futher nerfs to 3v3/4vs4 allied performance, its bad enough already.
So the ability now works like everything else in the game: reliable against the rear, RNG from the front. And this is bad because?
If you want it to be always reliable then armor does not matter at all, eliminating one of the core mechanivs of vehicle combat.
The approach time and the respective differences between modes/map sizes are a different issue. The parameters should be set to a common ground where every mode can live with it, but at the very core this issue is not fixable.
While I can understand that you see the buffs it got as "not enough", in my opinion you are not giving really good arguments for it.
It doesn't matter which buffs the other heavies and which ones the Tiger in particular got. You can use other heavies as a "benchmark" for comparison but only if you assume that your benchmark is decently balanced or if the comparison is useful in some other way. But how does the general power level of the Tiger in OST correspond to the general power level of the Pershing in USF? Hard to determine, yet it would be important for your points, since the power level is what you're actually talking about.
You criticize that USF can build only one RE in a viable build, which is not enough to repair the current Pershing? Balance team then did exactly the right thing: Make repairs with one RE quicker. What is your point on this?
Heavies in general might come a bit too late? Pershing goes to CP11? Looks like the correct call from balance team. It doesn't matter that the Tiger gets the same buff, they're not meant for a 1v1 shoot out. Unless you wan't to say that a CP11 Tiger were OP, but that again has nothing to do with the Pershing. Or you say that the Pershing is still too late at CP11, which in turn has nothing to do with the Tiger.
As to your last point: Sander literally posted a screen showing he played heavy cav recently and still is top 10. I trust him enough to not fake this, so yes he apparently did exactly what you were asking for and I assume he even picked it vs good players.
Instead of adjusting the 10% DR to accomodate the stug, you could simply increase stug health to 600 or 640 like a proper medium. (why its 560, I fail to understand).
Back on topic.. This version of mark target is fail because
1: Pak already has very very good pen and allied tanks short of is2 cant stand pak fire for long so armor debuff makes no sense to me. Panther has 220 pen already and stug also has 180? which is good enough
2: The only usable scenario I see is maybe marking the t70 so that the pak can reliably hit it, but this defeats the point because by then you already have a higher tier and tank out.
Like I actually want to know what scenarios you guys have in mind concerning this tank and this ability.
personally.. id like the cp4 to call in flares like that command panther will. no need mark target no smoke no thing else is needed.
The StuG survives three shots but then dies to a snare, which makes it slightly weaker than a medium that would survive a snare and three shots. At this strength, the StuG can reliably fight mediums while being weaker when a snare threatens it.
Regarding the CP4: The ability will still come in handy for T3 P4 builds as well as when facing Soviet doctrinal armor as well as late game UKF. If it is worth it for the accuracy (which will help in almost any setup) alone is debatable, but it fits the role of complementing other units. It'll make a medium only rarely miss its target, at least when stationary
yeah, i agree 15% might still be a bit too much and something odd like 13% is kind of questionable. I guess the only way around this would be to give tanks and infantry a flat HP bonus instead of a relative increase (i.e. 160 HP for tanks and 10 HP for infantry).
I'd actually love to see the day1 rage of everyone that loses his tank because it survived with 160 and then leaves the CP4 aura, causing instant death. I'd bet money on the code glitching out and that happening.
Personally I see little issue with Panther surviving an extra. Invest manpower power, fuel and pop in a CPanzer should helpful even for unit like the Panther.
Panther survives already an extra shot (even a snare won't kill it), the question is more if it should survive two extra ones or not, which - judging by my gut feeling - could be very problematic since this would boost it's survivability above any heavy in the game.
15% damage reduction (and the previous 20%) are super strong buffs.
Even at 15%, a Panther would survive two additional shots, and a P4 would need 5 shots with not even a penetrating snare being sufficient to replace the last shot.
The only way to achieve the result of the StuG surviving a fourth shot without screwing with other units too much would be a very quirky 13% reduction.
This would mean that:
- StuG survives another shot (and runs away with a frustrating 3 HP, not sure how great this would be for a fair feeling of the game)
- P4 survives another shot like it does now, a snare could still kill it but only in the case that it penetrates (in contrast to now where even a bouncing snare should kill apart from bugs). If the snare bounces, the P4 now runs away with 15 HP.
- No change for the Panther.
So overall, yes it would achieve what it should. On the other hand I feel it would be a huge source of frustration for all Allied players, especially more casual players that do not know the stats (when I started back in the day I did not even realize for some time that all mediums can take the same amount of hits, as well as that damage does not depend on range). I'd rather go with a utility ability like the balance team does now.
I thought that was already the case? I could be wrong though.
Friendly fire damages are completely inconsistent across all factions.
You can run straight into some abilities and only get little damage, while others will kill your own units fairly quickly as well.
Most abilities don't do much damage on your or allied units though, so most of the time you are fine charging into your own arty.
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Pershing is heavy infantry support only in 1v1s and 2v2s. Good luck supporting anything with 45 range and 270 armour that gets penned by pretty much everything (hell, yesterday P4 had 3 pens in a row on mid range vs my pershing, RNG but still, the armour is low enough for RNG to be effective).
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Pershing needs 300 armour OR better AI through MGs (or maybe introduction of pintle MG) OR through AOE/scatter profile. Best way would be to give it 300 armour, buff MGs by a tiny bit and call it a day. At least in my opinion.
The pen chance for medium vs generalist heavy is one of the lowest you can get (Elefant/JT/etc excluded, these are even lower) with late game units. With the RNG base of this game obviously everything could happen. CoH2 is a lot about reliability. Fighting a Pershing with a medium is extremely unreliable and therefore uneffective, not "effective" with RNG. If your complaint is that RNG were too effective, an armor buff to 300 would do next to nothing in that regard.
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