StarDestroyer.Net BBS

The Vortex Empire wrote:Not really, the spall liner description says it reduces HE damage by 15% or whatever, but what it actually does is make the effective armor thickness against HE 15% thicker, which will save you maybe 100 damage, if you're very lucky. Spall liners are maybe viable on the Maus or E-100, but on everything else they're pretty much worthless.
But yeah, T57 is completely ridiculous.

You missed thepart where I said I was fuking about over on the test server. The new heavy spall liners do a 25% bonus. One of those on tier ten heavy or TD and arty does fuck all unless the shell hits you directly.

Yeah, though direct hits are really the problem with high tier arty, especially for the super heavy tanks.

At the moment, if you're driving your Maus and a Gw. Typ E lands a direct hit on you, you're looking at taking 780 average damage. A spall liner now only reduces that to 747, the new super heavy spall liner which gives 30% armour effect will reduce it to 714.

Even the biggest spall liner on the heaviest tank's thickest face only gets you an addional 66 points of damage reduction, and that's linear so it doesn't matter how big the shell was in the first place or how far away it lands. For a spall liner to reduce a damaging splash hit to no damage it has to be about 2/3 of its splash radius away, at which point the damage it's doing is pretty insignificant to start with (because you're still only reducing it by 66 points)

When I was rocking the AMX40, adding a spall liner turned it from something I easily died in into a plodding bunker. That's pretty low tier though.

I suspect that's partly because you're receiving very few HE rounds of caliber larger than 75mm. Raw damage capacity on such small shells isn't so impressive, so flat damage reduction from the spall liner is very useful.

At least, that's if I'm understanding everything correctly.

Well, this has to be a new record for stupidity:

I'm on my M5A1 Stuart (Tier IV) in a Tier 8 match. I do a fast scout run and manage to spot 8 enemy tanks (including both enemy artillery), and then dropped into the shallow lake to be able to keep on spotting the arty while evading enemy tank fire.

An enemy ELC desperately jumps down the lake to try and kill me. He hilariously fails as I side-scraped him until he drowns. Then a T26 Super Pershing jumps down too. Just as he is about to shoot me, my team's arty blow up the enemy artillery. I then finally drown, followed by the trapped Super Pershing.

Thus, my little Tier 4 tank was responsible for wiping out the enemy tank park, and then killing both a Tier 5 and 8.

The stupid part? My team still manages to bloody lose.

Team managed to lose despite getting 4800 damage in my Caernarvon yesterday. Not sure what the rest of the entire team was doing, but it certainly wasn't shooting effectively at enemies.

Vendetta wrote:Team managed to lose despite getting 4800 damage in my Caernarvon yesterday. Not sure what the rest of the entire team was doing, but it certainly wasn't shooting effectively at enemies.

At least you didn't have to watch the rest of your team. I had to watch as they completely bungled the rest of the match and went coward against a team they were 4 > 1 against.

I decided to mess around with America TD's and the T18 is an OP murder wagon.

Victory!
Battle: Mines June-04-13 12:24:54 PM
Vehicle: T18
Experience received: 2,382 (x2 for the first victory each day)
Credits received: 14,266
Battle Achievements: Top Gun, Master Gunner, Reaper, Mastery Badge: "Ace Tanker"

I didn't even have to try. That 75mm derp is see tank, click tank, move to the next soon to be hulk.

That the T18 hasn't been nerfed is an atrocity. It's fast, extremely well armored, and that 75mm howitzer is OP as hell at tier 2.

The Vortex Empire wrote:That the T18 hasn't been nerfed is an atrocity. It's fast, extremely well armored, and that 75mm howitzer is OP as hell at tier 2.

Imagine running it pure heat with 100% crew and all the fixins.

So, I've been grinding my Type 58, 59-16, and Black Prince lately. Those tanks are a blast to play. They also attract bad teams a fat kid to a chocolate bar. Only my 59-16 has a win rating above 45%. The Type 58 and the BP has a 41% and a 33% win rating respectively.

It's not even that I do bad in these tanks. I do fairly well in them in the average match. But inevitably, my team just falls apart around me. It's getting to be rather depressing.

Jub wrote:

The Vortex Empire wrote:That the T18 hasn't been nerfed is an atrocity. It's fast, extremely well armored, and that 75mm howitzer is OP as hell at tier 2.

Imagine running it pure heat with 100% crew and all the fixins.

Why would you run pure HEAT? At tier 2, the only thing that isn't going to have good odds of taking good damage from the 75mm HE is a Matilda or French heavy which will be rare, or maybe another T18 from the front (though I've had good luck counterkilling them with pure HE).

Grandmaster Jogurt wrote:

Jub wrote:

The Vortex Empire wrote:That the T18 hasn't been nerfed is an atrocity. It's fast, extremely well armored, and that 75mm howitzer is OP as hell at tier 2.

Imagine running it pure heat with 100% crew and all the fixins.

Why would you run pure HEAT? At tier 2, the only thing that isn't going to have good odds of taking good damage from the 75mm HE is a Matilda or French heavy which will be rare, or maybe another T18 from the front (though I've had good luck counterkilling them with pure HE).

Even the low armor at that level reduces damage to like 50 a lot of the time, so heat would be a 100% damage increase. Plus it isn't as if you'd ever have that as your credit farmer so it shedding some silver isn't a huge deal.

Jub wrote:

Grandmaster Jogurt wrote:

Jub wrote: Imagine running it pure heat with 100% crew and all the fixins.

Why would you run pure HEAT? At tier 2, the only thing that isn't going to have good odds of taking good damage from the 75mm HE is a Matilda or French heavy which will be rare, or maybe another T18 from the front (though I've had good luck counterkilling them with pure HE).

Even the low armor at that level reduces damage to like 50 a lot of the time, so heat would be a 100% damage increase. Plus it isn't as if you'd ever have that as your credit farmer so it shedding some silver isn't a huge deal.

Oh, I love my T-18. Perfect for seal clubbing. I have 8 HEAT for those moments when you meet an AMX40 or another T18. It has improved ventilation, enhanced gun laying drive and binocs. Crew is at 100% and commander have sixth sense. Also equipped with small repair kit, medikit and fire extinguisher. I have 39 top guns and 43 cool-headed in that thing. It also holds my record of killing 10 enemies. It is a monster!
The 75mm can be a bit tricky for newbies, since the travel time for the shell is so long. It's not terribly accurate, either, but I have used it to snipe from great distances with success. Noobs often don't move when shells start raining around them. It does have a large weak spot in the front: Hit the gun or the hole in the armor around it.

I refuse to club seals in anything lower tier than a Matilda.

Tier 2 and lower is no sport.

Plus this means I am safe from Province. Though not El-Halluf.

My lowest seal clubber is the M2 MT. It's fun to use to fuck with tier 5s too.

And honestly, I hate being top in it. Low tier play just doesn't go well with me. I suck in any tier two vehicle, even the T18.

By about tier 4 though people have generally started to pick up what to do and don't all zerg around the map.

Plus, being able to humiliate a field full of tier 5 and sometimes 6 tanks whilst only doing 55 damage a shot is hilarious in itself. Some of the seals the Matilda clubs are KV-1Ss.

Simon_Jester wrote:I suspect that's partly because you're receiving very few HE rounds of caliber larger than 75mm. Raw damage capacity on such small shells isn't so impressive, so flat damage reduction from the spall liner is very useful.

At least, that's if I'm understanding everything correctly.

On the other hand the damage reduction itself is so much less. A spall liner on an AMX-40 will save you 11 points of damage from any arty splash (on your strongest face). Against arty your best protection usually comes from the fact that they have much smaller splash so near misses reduce the damage by far more.

For reference, the HE Damage formula is

0.5*ShellDamage*(1-ImpactDistance/BlastRadius)-(1.1*ArmourThickness*Spall)

However, the formula is always calculated to produce the maximum effect, so the armour thickness might not necessarily be the flat armour value (an explosion to the front of a T14, for instance, will use the armour value of the machinegun port even if that's not the closest part of the tank to the shell if that produces an overall higher result)

The spall value at the moment is 1.15, in 8.6 it will vary from 1.15 to 1.3 depending on which spall liner it is, and which you can fit depends on the tank weight.

As you can trivially calculate though, the value of armour against HE is negligible at higher tiers, and a negligible bonus to a negligible thing is, well, a waste of time.

This is also why I don't rely on skills or items that increase module HP, because the module HP is so low compared to the damage that module is likely to receive if hit that it really doesn't make a blind bit of difference. Even tier X modules don't tend to have more than 350HP with possibly the exception of ammo racks which might have 500 or so (module hp is on wot-news but not ammo racks. You are, however, more likely to have your rack damaged than blown up outright even from tier X hits except the big nasty TDs, so 500 feels about right). Even stacking wet ammo and safe stowage will only protect you from instasploding, you'll still take rack damage if its hit by the average tier X I reckon.

Doesn't the game use a different formula for module damage from tank damage? I remember reading that the higher tier gun used, the smaller percentage of damage it inflicts upon modules as some weird workaround for the vast difference in HP values as tiers go up.

Grandmaster Jogurt wrote:Doesn't the game use a different formula for module damage from tank damage? I remember reading that the higher tier gun used, the smaller percentage of damage it inflicts upon modules as some weird workaround for the vast difference in HP values as tiers go up.

I've never seen anything like that. Remember though that modules have a chance to take no damage even if hit, and high tier guns tend to fire slower so you're not rolling the dice as often.

I still can't decide if the wotlabs forum experiment will work.

I was checking the stats of "Xensation" (EU server), and he has about 76% win rate, but I can see no tank below tier VI. Where are the stats of the low tier tanks? The stats are still visible for a tank even if you sell it. It seems to me that he's been able to "cheat" the stats by only showing the tanks he excels in. How is that possible? I've seen this with other players as well.

He likely bought a tier 8 premium and used gold to convert free xp from it in order to skip all the low tiers.

The Infidel wrote:I was checking the stats of "Xensation" (EU server), and he has about 76% win rate, but I can see no tank below tier VI. Where are the stats of the low tier tanks? The stats are still visible for a tank even if you sell it. It seems to me that he's been able to "cheat" the stats by only showing the tanks he excels in. How is that possible? I've seen this with other players as well.

1. Buy Premium tank
2. Convert XP from that tank to "Free" XP
3. Free XP up to what ever tank you want to start at

So you looked at the vehicle history and didn't notice how he did it?

He has a Type 59.

He simply hasn't played any lower tier tanks on that account, he got good enough at the game on another account, started a second acccount, immediately bought a Type 59 and played exclusively that until he had enough free XP to skip his way to the higher tier tanks he wanted.

Also, it's a reasonable bet that anyone with above about 60% winrate has platooned for a lot of their battles.

(In fact, it's a good bet that most players with very high winrates and WN7/eff stats have used a lot of free XP to skip low tiers and never play stock vehicles.)