Zinegata wrote:Kill rate is not that relevant honestly, particularly since there are many situations like a Tier 8 heavy killing a Tier 5 medium that is kinda meaningless. A better benchmark is to calculate average damage (total damage divided by the number of matches) with the ideal goal being to equal or even exceed the HP of your tank.
At the crudest level, you could probably be safe in assuming you take 100% damage in every losing battle and something like 50% damage in every battle you survive, which on your M103 would probably tip you back to a 1:1 ratio.
Anyway, my theory behind using kill:death ratios is that it
should more or less average out, especially for someone who mostly plays Tier 7±1 tanks. On the one hand, I am often that M26 Pershing killing a KV-1 or a Panzer IV, which is not very meaningful. On the other hand, I have so many many times
been that M4 Sherman being killed
by that T29 or Tiger, which is not very meaningful but still counts as "you died and took eighteen quadrillion points of damage lol."
I would have to go digging to find damage ratios. It's not as heartening in my case, I'll admit, although I wonder how artillery kills should be factored in (easy to one-shot for little damage, very important targets). Also the ability of tracks to act as ablative armor for flanking shots and just
absorb hits; I don't know how that's counted but I suppose it affects everything across the board.
Artillery players in general would have very favorable damage ratios if they ever manage to hit anything at all, because they often have so much raw damage output that they can do than their own HP in damage with one shot. They die easily when they die at all, so getting killed in an SPG only counts as "taking" 400 or 500 HP, whereas the same SPG can deal twice that amount of damage in about two shots without even killing anything.
Which also usually means that
everyone else has a lower ratio, because the artillery are dishing out a big share of all damage, but aren't taking very much of it.
Tanks like the Easy Eight, on the other hand, have to hit about seven times to do their own HP in combat, which is rather more difficult. Even given the E8's ruinous rate of fire and accuracy, which give it excellent DPS against targets it can penetrate, you have to do a good deal of scoot-and-shoot to get seven shots in before someone with a 100mm+ gun tracks on and obliterates you. It's very much possible, but... hell, this is a Star Wars forum, I can say it. For average players, the Force has to be with you.
A lot of other things are in the middle; an IS-2 (IS with 122mm) does about 400 points of damage and has about 1200 HP, so it can break even if it scores three penetrating hits in a single match. And it's tough enough to survive a shot from just about anything, usually without crippling module damage (or such is my feeling), which makes getting those three shots off a lot easier.
I would also look at hit rate as an indicator of overall skill - for bigger tanks (Tier 7 +) there is no excuse to not have a hit rate of 80% unless you're a fast medium in which case 70% is the minimum. Even at lower tiers I'd say people should aim for 60-70%. It makes a big difference in upping the damage value.
Personally, in most of my tanks (except my IS-2 with its thousand-credit 122mm shells), I take quite a lot of 'off-chance' shots: at targets that just vanished from the radar but that I figure are still
probably where I last saw them, at light tanks that present crossing targets, and so on. I know damn well they won't hit most of the time, but sometimes I get lucky and score an extreme-range kill. Or, hell, at least give that bastard AMX 13-90 something to worry about while I relocate, for the price of a 76mm round for my Sherman.
So a significant fraction of all shots I fire are shots that I
know will probably miss, at lower tiers: even looking at my T20 and Pershing I do that some of the time with the 90mm gun. Which is 250 credits/shell, not that bad if you don't do it several times a match. If you're not immediately threatened the reload is relatively short and the payoff of getting a penetrating hit at a soft target from long range is totally worth it in my opinion.
Again, about the only exception I can think of is my IS-2, where the rounds are so expensive and the gun so inaccurate that I usually don't fire shots I don't seriously expect to hit. I miss a fair amount there too, but it's mostly because I haven't gotten around to installing ventilation or a vertical stabilizer (600k credits per), which for a tank that plays peekaboo with a 122mm gun means unhappy big aiming reticles.
) to get a T20 and it's fun - oddly the mobility and the firepower of the 90mm gives me more opportunities to hurt the enemy so even if i die horribly, I still manage to eke a profit, while my poor panther kind of just dies after plinking the enemy and leading to a net loss. I suspect it would be more enjoyable to get the Panther II and enjoy 88mm death dealing, but why would I do that when I already have a Tiger w/L71...
