World of Tanks Mark III

[Vendetta]

Welcome to the weekend.

Fridays and Saturdays especially require platoons for sanity (though I always try and take a day off on Fridays

Also, this weekend's special is garbage on EU. 25000XP for a piddling 75k credits (you get that at the moment for getting 4 kills and living, I've been making an easy half mil a day), and only in Japanese tanks (though they also get triple XP for all battles if you're in the top five, which isn't hard in the seal clubbing tiers, so maybe my chi-ri will get to come out.

[Marko Dash]

9.0 test server is up, time to pop some RU turrets off

[Agent Sorchus]

Ive been using the 122mm HE on the KV-1 again, I feel it is pretty decent nowadays especially if you see td's, since only stugs and su85's don't die in one shot to it at that level.

But seriously

Defeat
Battle: Fjords 3/21/2014 9:28:03 PM
Vehicle: KV-1
Experience received: 1,030
Credits received: 36,520
Battle achievements: Top Gun, Steel Wall, High Caliber, Reaper, Spartan, Mastery Badge: "1st Class"

6 kill reaper.

and if I had been faster that would've been defender instead of steel wall and possibly a raedly and bombadier (though I just don't think I could've done shit to the churchill that was at full still, but a wounded crusader next to an M4? Potentially delicous.)

[The Infidel]

Don't think I'll bother with screencaps from Wot-replays.

Here is a nice game with my BT-2 on Malinovka where I ended up with 9 kills and damage to some more. This is how you play the BT-2 and put its mobility to use. I wish I could have games like this more often.

Victory!
Map: Malinovka
Date: 22.03.2014 13:17:47
Vehicle: BT-2
Exp: 4 887 (x3) Credits: 20 916
Achievements: Top Gun, Mastery Badge: "Ace Tanker"

[The Infidel]

Heh. This guy in an E100 started calling half my team gold noobs, but claims he has no mods and can hear the difference between AP and HEAT. I call bullshit, but is there really different sounds ingame for those types of ammo?

[Vendetta]

There's no audible difference between AP and APCR, but HEAT has a very distinctive sound (listen for a hissing sound after the impact)

(people who complain about gold are noobs)

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

Man, I love my T92, just for the rage it inspires. I picked off a Foch 155 about 3 or 4 minutes into a match the other day, and I swear, the player almost had an aneurysm. "Fuck you arty, get raped to death," and other shit like that, for the rest of the match. I just told him that, win or lose, his rage made the game worthwhile to me, which made him rage even more. By the end of the match, even his own teammates were cracking on him about it. It was glorious.

[Vendetta]

Just as long as you understand playing arty makes you a terrible human being who is going to the special hell.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

Yes, yes, I'm a scumbag, worse than Hitler, a circle of hell tailored specifically for me, heard it all before. I think the hatred arty gets is abso-fucking-lutely hilarious, so it discourages me not one bit.

[Vendetta]

Fundamentally though, artillery is bad for the game, it has excessive alpha "balanced" by excessive RNG. and whilst people attempt to justify it by saying that it breaks up camping but actually it does the opposite, it discourages aggression by marking vast swathes of every map as "do not use because of occasional random death". Campers are the last people arty will hit because the arty never sees them, it only sees the aggressive players who are actually trying to win the game, and so arty creates campers rather than removing them.

Also, when playing any other vehicle being able to attack an enemy tank without being attacked in return is a matter of skill, for arty you just click. Counterbattery isn't even a thing any more since the changes to arty dispersion makes it not worth trying.

Some people say that you should play "arty safe", but what that actually means is "I sit behind a rock and wait for someone else to win the game for me, you should too". (This is probably why arty rage increases among the higher w/r players, because they get the wins by being aggressive, but aggressive play gets punished by arty).

Arty makes the game worse, if you play it you are a bad person and are going to the special hell.

[The Infidel]

Just as long as you understand playing arty makes you a terrible human being who is going to the special hell.

What about us who only enjoy low tier arty? I hardly ever play my GWPanther anymore, but my SU-26 never gets dusty.

[Simon_Jester]

I suspect that this changes nothing. Also, in my admittedly imprecise experience, low-tier artillery is more likely to land a penetrating hit on an enemy tank assuming it hits the target at all, because there are more open-topped and thin-roofed tanks at low tiers. Plus, lower-tier tanks often have inferior gun accuracy. So you have lightly armored tanks that have to stop to fire effectively (unless they are very short-range brawlers).

Unless those tanks take hard cover against artillery they have nothing to protect them. Which if anything makes the artillery a bigger deterrent to aggressive but intelligent maneuver warfare, while rewarding people for parking in artillery-free zones, and on the other hand for lemming rushes that make them immune to artillery targeting because of how hard it is for artillery to hit moving targets.

[Vendetta]

I'm sure when I go back and fill in my remaining ace tanker badges at low tiers I'll have some choice words to say about low tier clickers, but since I don't play much below tier 6 anyway they don't affect me much.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

Fundamentally though, artillery is bad for the game, it has excessive alpha "balanced" by excessive RNG. and whilst people attempt to justify it by saying that it breaks up camping but actually it does the opposite, it discourages aggression by marking vast swathes of every map as "do not use because of occasional random death". Campers are the last people arty will hit because the arty never sees them, it only sees the aggressive players who are actually trying to win the game, and so arty creates campers rather than removing them.

Also, when playing any other vehicle being able to attack an enemy tank without being attacked in return is a matter of skill, for arty you just click. Counterbattery isn't even a thing any more since the changes to arty dispersion makes it not worth trying.

Some people say that you should play "arty safe", but what that actually means is "I sit behind a rock and wait for someone else to win the game for me, you should too". (This is probably why arty rage increases among the higher w/r players, because they get the wins by being aggressive, but aggressive play gets punished by arty).

Arty makes the game worse, if you play it you are a bad person and are going to the special hell.

I think a lot of this is overstated and overestimated, and most players are just cowards. The fear of arty does more to keep them camping than the effectiveness of arty. For every shot I take that decimates a peer opponent in a single hit, I take six more that just go... somewhere, two that do half or less of my rated damage, and another two that hit, but do sweet fuck all for damage, 200 or less. My average hit is for about 800 damage, and I generally get to shoot about once a minute, a moderately fast tank can get to the other end of the map in that time. On the other hand, my roommate has a JgPzE100, he reliably does around 1000 a shot, reloads twice as fast, has more than double my pen, is three times as accurate, and aims three times faster. Since he's driving a TD, he often shoots at people who don't get to shoot back, too.

But arty gets the special hell. Yeah, ok.

[Vendetta]

On the other hand, my roommate has a JgPzE100, he reliably does around 1000 a shot, reloads twice as fast, has more than double my pen, is three times as accurate, and aims three times faster. Since he's driving a TD, he often shoots at people who don't get to shoot back, too.

But arty gets the special hell. Yeah, ok.

Yes, because the Jpz is large, slow, amazingly obvious, you can tell where it's looking, you can tell when it's shot, and in order to shoot you it has to have actual line of sight, and then when it's missed or shot someone else you can shoot it back, or if it's extended too far get around its side and kill it. Even with the romulan cloaking device equipped Russian TDs you can know where they are likely to be and it takes far less cover to approach them because a slight rise in the terrain will do.

But these are not things which apply to artillery. Artillery shoots you despite intervening terrain unless you're actually hugging it (and not even then for British arty because of their high arc) and doesn't need to expose itself to do so because it's at the back of the map.

When you hit someone with an artillery piece you generally haven't applied skill barring "can put dot over box and wait", you just got lucky. And the vast majority of arty players don't even have the skills which actually do apply to arty (reading the battle and effective target prioritisation)

Which is everyone with a soul hates arty, if you get shot by a JPzE100 it's because you fucked up and let him have the shot or he was better than you and outplayed you and was able to make the shot, if you get shot by a GWE100 it's because the dice said so.

[Simon_Jester]

Honestly, I think the Waffletraktor line is overpowered at the moment, although that may partly be me. They're manageable, but the sheer firepower of those guns is rather overwhelming. So some complaints might apply legitimately to them; I do not know for certain.

I think you and Philosopher are sort of talking past each other to an extent. Vendetta's point is that artillery's actual effect on gameplay is relatively small, or would be if people had a realistic appreciation of how dangerous artillery really is. Your point is that it's still an effectively random element that drops out of the sky and kills you with little or nothing you can do about it.

Speaking from my own point of view, I can often say the same of the Waffletraktors, because they can be cloaked in a bush 350 meters away and murderize my tank. I might get a chance to shoot back, or I might not...

[Zwinmar]

Well, stats wise it is looking like I am getting better but, still not very good.

As for arty, people really don't realize how powerful it really is. There is a reason it is called the King of Battle.

[Agent Sorchus]

Defeat
Battle: El Halluf 3/24/2014 1:07:42 PM
Vehicle: ELC AMX
Experience received: 1,449
Credits received: 36,052
Battle achievements: Pascucci's Medal, Mastery Badge: "1st Class"

Poor old Loraine 155 51, even with the elc right in front of you at 5meters you don't have the gun depression to hit it. And I come on the pro arty side of things but an ELC really does have a hard time in T8 battles against KV-4s.

[Vendetta]

No, 1500 damage clear at the top of the table in a tier 9 game isn't enough to convince me the Chi-Ri is good. Sorry.

It also isn't enough for Ace Tanker, who's driving this thing, wizards?

In tanks that are actually good news:



T-54, communist jesus, saviour of our base.

And that's not even enough for first class, let alone Ace mastery. Want to know what is?



Try nine and a half thousand spotting damage, two thousand personal damage, and four kills.

[Xess]

So I was trying to finish that month long mission where you'd get a Tetrarch, but with 1-4 victory/loss ratio tonight I have stopped caring. I couldn't buy a fucking win if I wanted to.

[xthetenth]

There's no audible difference between AP and APCR, but HEAT has a very distinctive sound (listen for a hissing sound after the impact)

(people who complain about gold are noobs)

Gold as a shell you can just fire at will is terrible mechanically because there are tanks that are balanced around being well armored, hope this helps. It's a sloppy crutch to make the tier spread palatable.

[Jub]

There's no audible difference between AP and APCR, but HEAT has a very distinctive sound (listen for a hissing sound after the impact)

(people who complain about gold are noobs)

Gold as a shell you can just fire at will is terrible mechanically because there are tanks that are balanced around being well armored, hope this helps. It's a sloppy crutch to make the tier spread palatable.

For pure game balance it kind of sucks, but historically APCR and heat rounds were out there (in tiny numbers).

[Simon_Jester]

When gold rounds cost real money it was less of a problem- granted, it's not practical to fire nothing but premium rounds unless you're very very good, but the point is that any competent player can keep up enough of an income stream to supply them with premium ammunition.

Before, I had to make the choice: with gold costing roughly one dollar per 200 gold, and premium shells costing ten gold, is it worth spending a nickel of my own money to put a hole in that enemy tank? Sometimes I'd do it, but not often.

Now, I am far more likely to try it because I have a couple of decent mid to high tier premiums and can bring in a fairly steady credit stream if I choose to do so. Even though the premium rounds cost thousands of credits apiece, thousands of credits is STILL a lower perceived cost of doing business than five cents of real money.

[Vendetta]

There's no audible difference between AP and APCR, but HEAT has a very distinctive sound (listen for a hissing sound after the impact)

(people who complain about gold are noobs)

Gold as a shell you can just fire at will is terrible mechanically because there are tanks that are balanced around being well armored, hope this helps. It's a sloppy crutch to make the tier spread palatable.

On the other hand, tanks which are balanced around durability also tend to have high HP pools, meaning they are still tougher than equivalent vehicles, and many tanks can use sidescraping to get more protection from HEAT than they would have from AP. Armour became a thing you had to use, especially at higher tiers, rather than something that just sort of did it for you.

They could balance premium ammo better now it's not supposed to be the pay to win option, but letting yourself get shot then qqing about gold is what noobs do.

[Marko Dash]

so i finally build up the credits to get the tier 9 patton to find that you need the tracks to even mount the pershing 90mm, and it doesn't even have the ability the mount the suspension upgrade equipment.

so i'm stuck grinding out most of 23,000 xp with the 160mm pen 90mm from tier 6........



...fuck