MK_Regular

I don't know how good the GAU-8 is, so I can't say for certain if the Merkava in the chat has a point or not. It's tier 10, so I can't really fault anyone for playing to their full ability when everyone else on the team should have a decent understanding of how to play the game unless you're constantly playing something that's T-15 levels of OP (particularly in a platoon), at which point it can vary between tryharding and "actively trying to be a dick to your teammates" (tryhard platoons are closer to "actively being a dick" territory). IMO, I'd say you're probably fine unless the GAU-8 is even more OP than the T-15 (which, iirc, it isn't). Looking at the post-battle results, I'm tempted to say that you aren't the issue, and that the guy who called you out has the issues. Let's say that instead of having you in the GAU-8 on the team, there was a T-15. If he got those results with a T-15 on the team, I'd assume there was something wrong on his end that prevented him from doing better than he did (especially when you consider that the Leclerc did nearly as well as you did and the PL-01 did pretty well too). It might be a technical issue (i.e. potato PC, running 30 chrome tabs in the background, dial-up internet, etc...) that needs to be fixed, at which point he probably shouldn't expect to be competitive if his technical issue is that severe. It might also be an issue of skill relating to something that the player did or did not do (constantly out of position, bad reaction time and shooting dead targets, missing or bouncing most of his shots, etc...) at which point, unless he has a medical condition that prevents him from being competitive (at which point he shouldn't expect to be competitive), I'd say he should probably practice his skills and get better at the game (the classic "Git Gud"). In either case, I don't really think that he's in a position to call you out for being selfish if he is the one with an issue. The only other thing I can think of is that the guy might be trying to get infantry damage (for example) for a mission of some kind. If this is the case, the only way he might have a point in calling you out is if he said something to the effect of "I need infantry damage for a mission" at the beginning of the match, and even then that's still iffy unless you acknowledged him and proceeded to roflstomp everything before he could get his infantry damage. TL;DR: Unless you're driving a stupidly OP vehicle (even more so if you're in a platoon with other people in said vehicle) to actively be a dick to your teammates by killing everything before they have a chance to do anything, you're not the asshole. The only exception to this is if someone requests that you change your playstyle to allow them to do something and you agree to do so, but you either don't change your playstyle or change your playstyle to screw them over.

The using a gun breech or barrel liner on the Shilka or GAU-8 doesn't give any significant (>0.1%) increase to sustained DPM. With the way the overheat mechanic works, the primary limiting factor to sustained DPM with continuous fire (i.e. holding down LMB) is not the RoF, but the cooling rate of the barrels. Every shot that is fired increases the temperature of the barrels by a specific amount, and while the barrels have a non-zero amount of heat they will cool at a set rate. As such, the amount of heat the barrels can disperse in a given period of time determines the sustained rate of fire of the gun system, which in turn determines the sustained DPM. Because the gun breech and barrel liner retros do not increase the cooling rate of the gun, they do not have any significant effect on the sustained DPM of the Shilka. You're better off using just about any other retro instead.

I found files that appear to be gun sounds in \gamesdk\resources-0011.pak\sounds\weapons\: there were also some ...\sounds\weapons\ folders in resources-0010.pak and resources-0020.pak, but these don't seem like they'd be what you're looking for.

So, I finally got around to trying the new and improved T-15... Half of the damage I did came from just right-clicking on squishy enemies and holding down the fire button. This kind of firepower only belongs on something that has paper armour, but despite playing rather aggressively with very little regard for my own safety (I repeatedly exposed myself to farm more damage and died twice), I still managed to get decent damage mitigation stats: Of all of the damage I tanked, over half of it was from large-caliber guns and missiles, so any claims that the T-15 "only has armour against autocannons" are completely wrong. The T-15 needs a nerf to be even remotely balanced in PvE. I'd recommend starting with reducing the autocannon's rate of fire and/or reversing the recent damage and penetration buffs made to the T-15's missiles. Maybe give players the choice between having hilarious RoF on the 30mm and the buffed missiles with a new either-or upgrade choice?

Welp, looks like I'll be sitting out the next few days while they fix everything....

I think so Brain, but where are we going to get rubber pants in our size? Haha TD arty go brrrrrrrr

To their credit, the devs did try this with the escort mechanics of Arabian Nights and the delivery mechanics of Moscow Calling. However, it turned out that escorting an AI that is dumber than a bag of bricks is more rage-inducing than it is fun, and that only having a single delivery item that could result in mission failure was prone to griefing. Personally, I think the delivery mechanic is salvageable if they increased the number of items that could be in transit at the same time to prevent one or more players running off with delivery items and throwing the match (e.g. infinite ammo drops for the turrets in MC4, the team only needs to deliver 1 to each turret). An "over completion" mechanic for the daily "do X 10 times" mission would be welcome. However, given that the goal of these missions seems to be to get players to play more matches, I could see the "over completion" requirements actually requiring a point total that's about 50% higher. Several possibilities include: Get 3 times more of the specified value (e.g. 6000 spotting damage instead of 2000), but you only need to do it 5 times Get 5 times more of the specified value (e.g. 10000 spotting damage instead of 2000), but you only need to do it 3 times Get 7.5 times more of the specified value (e.g. 15000 spotting damage instead of 2000), but you only need to do it twice Get 15 times more of the specified value (e.g. 30000 spotting damage instead of 2000), but you only need to do it once The higher point totals for the over completion would (at least in theory) give players an incentive to actively participate in several matches rather than just brute-force the completion requirements before abandoning their teammates in 10 different matches. High quality gameplay is less likely to get players to burn out than high quantity gameplay. Another possibility would be allow players to have a single match count as multiple matches towards completing the missions based on how much they went over the minimum required amount. For example: 2000 spotting damage gives you 1 match worth of completion 6000 spotting damage gives you 2 matches worth of completion 10000 spotting damage gives you 3 matches worth of completion 14000 spotting damage gives you 4 matches worth of completion etc... Again, the idea here is to encourage players to be an active participant in a smaller number of matches rather than a passive participant in a larger number of matches. Quality, not quantity. On a side note, the Semper Fi contract is absolutely terrible. It is the only daily contract that forces you to use a game mechanic that is unavailable to most of the vehicles in the game. Every other daily contract can theoretically be completed by any vehicle in the game (every vehicle in the game can at the very minimum proximity spot and deflect 7.62mm MG ammo if it hits at the wrong angle or from far enough away), which gives players absolute freedom of choice in the vehicle they use without making the mission impossible to complete (maybe improbable or extremely difficult, but not impossible). I absolutely despise this contract because it forces me to use specific vehicles and sacrifice useful active abilities (speed boost, designate target, super APS, etc...) for a game mechanic that requires me to alter my playstyle for minimal (if any) gain.

Muahahahahaha

I regularly end up being at the top of my team for base XP at least 2 of the other stats that are shown in the post-battle results of PvE matches (damage, kills, assists, assist damage and targets spotted) in a bottom tier MBT. While I would like to consider myself to be a good player, I'm not that good. The MBT meta is alive and well. The most you could say is that AFVs perform better than MBTs when there is a big enough skill difference (e.g. unicum AFV player vs an average-ish MBT player, average-ish AFV player vs a potato MBT player, etc...) and the map allows the AFV player to make use of their higher level of skill. The fact that you need 2 qualifying statement before you can truthfully say that "AFVs perform better than MBTs" indicates that the situation is nowhere near as clear-cut as you say it is. If anything the Terminator-like vehicles are the true "kill and damage kings" because they have levels of firepower similar to an AFV, but their armour reduces the amount of skill required and eliminates the need for favourable map conditions to use them effectively. And this is why we don't always use real life as a guide. An SPG meta would be an extreme change from the current state of the game and would be widely disliked by the playerbase (think the old SPGs in WoT, except less RNG dependent and just as capable of ruining your day). In addition, this would be counter-productive to the MBT meta you seem to want for "realism" since a "realistic" SPG would roflstomp any MBT (which would mean that MBTs aren't actually meta). The whole "X class is meta because realism" argument seems to be self-defeating at best and a terrible idea at worst.

I can see where you're coming from, but I can understand why the devs made this decision. Think of the gunship in BSI3, with it's 100k (ish?) HP. If you're in any vehicle that doesn't have an autocannon (MBT, LT, gun TD, etc...), you will struggle to shoot it down in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time. However, if you DO have an autocannon, you can just right click on it and hold down LMB to farm damage on it until your team pumps enough lead into it. If the damage dealt to the gunship counted towards the players' results, you would never hear the end of the complaints from the MBT, LT, and TD players that only managed to do 10-15k damage while the AFV (or termi, or T-15) on their team farmed 40k damage for virtually no additional effort. This is one of the more extreme cases though. A slightly less extreme case would be the bunkers. These babies only have 2-3k health, and can be taken out by most vehicles in a semi-reasonable amount of time. Extreme autocannon DPM is still an issue here, but it is less extreme than with the gunship (seriously, aircraft are nowhere near as durable as that thing). The kicker with this one is that the very concept of what the target is (it's a block of concrete that is supposed to resist incoming fire) should actually solve this issue. Giving the bunkers a non-zero armour value (armour angling can potentially be ignored here) of ~300mm (this might need to be made tier dependent) should prevent them from getting shredded by autocannons and instead force players to use larger ammunition (large caliber guns, ATGMs, anti-tank or mortar squads, etc...) to deal with them. This should have the effect of making the ttk for bunkers more even between different classes of vehicles and could serve as the starting point for making damage to bunkers (or other such armoured [non tank] enemies) count towards the player's damage total. Edit: another option would be to give [non tank] enemies a scaling weakness/resistance to smaller/larger ammunition (e.g. shots above a certain caliber deal double damage, shots below a certain caliber deal half damage, etc...). You don't necessarily need to give individual bonuses for completing primary or secondary objectives, but a reward system that encourages players to use their vehicle to its strengths discourages playing it in a way that the strengths don't matter would be a good thing. I'd suggest that each stat or checkbox that is used to calculate XP and credits earned should have a modifier based on the class of vehicle (or in some cases the specific vehicle cough Terminator cough T-15 cough) that the player is using: Completing primary objectives (small bonus for MBTs as this usually requires capturing or defending certain locations) Completing secondary objectives (medium-to-large bonus for AFVs and LTs) Dealing damage at close range (small-to-medium bonus for MBTs) Dealing damage at long range (small-to-medium bonus for TDs) etc... There is also the possibility of certain classes of vehicles (or individual vehicles) having substandard modifiers as a way to discourage players from performing certain actions. The player would still earn some XP and credits for doing these things, but it would not be efficient to earn rewards. This seems more like a way to give players a gentle nudge in the direction of the way the game is intended to be played (yes, I'm looking at you MBT sniping from the back and not moving the entire game) rather than a way to properly balance rewards (which should probably be balanced based on how a player of at least average competence would be expected to perform if they play their vehicle as intended by the devs). With this in mind, some metrics should only have very small bonuses because there is mostly only a single class that can reliably perform that action (e.g. deflecting incoming fire in a MBT, designating targets in an AFV, etc...) or the action is extremely easy to farm (e.g. deflecting incoming fire in a MBT), however that's not to say hat such actions would need to give minimal rewards. Using deflecting incoming fire as an example, deflecting autocannon fire is trivial in a MBT but significantly more difficult for other classes of vehicle, while deflecting large-caliber rounds in a MBT takes a bit more knowledge and effort (but is still comparatively easy) but is quite rare to see in a vehicle of another class. As such I would argue that in a hypothetical PvE economy rebalance, the reward modifier for deflecting large-caliber (>80mm) rounds should be the same for all vehicle classes, the modifier for deflecting small-caliber (>80mm) rounds for AFVs, LTs, and TDs (and SPGs, not that they can actually mange this with any real success) should be the same as the modifier for large-caliber rounds, and the modifier for deflecting small-caliber rounds in a MBT or heavy TD (termi, T-15, etc...) should be significantly smaller than the large-caliber modifier.

This is hilariously degenerate and I love it. I probably won't use it in favour of a meme mod though.

I prefer crock pot myself, I don't find instant pot to be that much more convenient compared to my crock pot (I usually have plenty of time before or between classes to throw stuff in it). I find that there's something about knowing that your dinner has been slowly cooking for the past 4-6 hours that makes it taste better, ymmv. Edit: obligatory recipe for making in a crock pot Chicken Tortilla Soup Ingredients 2 chicken breasts (I use boneless skinless to make things easy) 1 can (796 mL) diced tomato 1 jar (650 mL) salsa 1 can (540 mL) kidney beans 1 can (540 mL) black beans 1 can (341 mL) corn 2 cups chicken broth 1 cup diced red pepper 1 cup diced celery 1 cup diced onion 1 finely chopped jalapeno 5 tbsp (75 mL) tomato paste 4 tbsp chili powder 2 tbsp lime juice 1/4 tsp oregano 1/4 tsp garlic powder 1/4 tsp cumin (optional) cilantro Directions Place chicken breasts at the bottom of the crock pot, add all other ingredients on top Cook for 4-6 hours Remove chicken breasts from pot, shred (a pair of forks work well for this) Mix shredded chicken back into the pot, reheat as necessary Serve Serves 8 (or 4 if you're hungry), leftovers can be frozen

Yay, maximum dakka confirmed for the Shilka! It will be interesting to see how they dicide to balance it for tier 4. Are they going to go with higher burst damage (15-20 damage per shot) and give the clip a longer reload, or are they just going to give it less burst damage (~10 damage per shot) with a shorter reload on the clip? I'm leaning towards wanting the high clip damage with longer reload for the instant death memes.

Honestly, it seems functional if underwhelming. It has the misfortune of being tier 8 and being compared to the Ramka, Termi 2k, and Termi 2017 which completely wipe the floor with any and all missile TDs of the tier. Disregarding the termis, comparing the other tier 8 missile TDs (except the trashsat): TL;DR: the M1134 is kinda bad, the VCAC is OK, the Khrizantema is a bit meh The more I look at it, the more the Khrizantema looks like a knock-off VCAC. Yes, it gets some of the features of the VCAC (in some combinations that the VCAC can't get), but as far as we know it doesn't get a lot of the other features that the VCAC can (360 smoke, hard-kill APS, no camo penalty for moving or reduced penalty for firing, auto-homing). It's like someone decided that the VCAC could get better vision control and both options of the top firepower choice (HOT-3s and double-shot) as long as it sacrificed the 360 smoke, auto-homing and all of options for the 2nd-highest choices (hard-kill, moving/firing camo penalty reduction). Personally, that's not exactly something I would consider to be a fair trade since I generally avoid double-shot and almost exclusively used the HOT-2MPs on the VCAC (yes, even after 0.33, fight me). Unless the Khrizantema gets some really interesting overprogression upgrades (I suspect that the double-shot will be one of these) I can really only see myself saying "meh" and playing something else.

The 9P157-2 "Khrizantema-S" seems interesting, if not particularly effective in the current game environment. The interesting thing about the AT-15s (9M123) that the Khrizantema gets is that, compared to Kornet (AT-14, 9M133), they're faster (400 m/s vs 250-320 m/s) and have a bigger warhead (8 kg vs 4.6 kg). Not sure if this will be represented in-game though. As for the Shilka, I'm thinking that if the devs give it the full 4k RPM burst RoF they might end up giving it the "weight of shot bleed-though" mechanic that rotary cannons have, but replace the spin-up and cooling mechanics with the 200 round belts. In this case, the 100mm pen that I previously guessed might be a bit high considering that the T249 gets 150mm at tier 9. Additionally, the damage per shot and the reload time for the belts would need to be sufficiently poor to prevent the Shilka from getting the near-constant face-melting DPM that the other low-tier dakkas have (if 12k sustained DPM is the target, I'd suggest 15 damage per shot for a 3k damage burst in 3 seconds with a 12 second clip reload).

I found a better comparison for the SA-18s warhead: the HE round fired by the BMP-1. They're both 73mm, but the BMP-1 has 730g of TNT filler in its HE shells compared to the SA-18s 390g of HMX (which is equivalent to about 660g of TNT). If the Shilka gets SA-18s, expect them to have a warhead that has similar (probably slightly worse) damage and penetration the he BMP-1s HE rounds

hmmmm, Shilka.... 4x 23mm autocannons with a combined RoF of 3400 to 4000 RPM Fires HEI, HEI-T, API-T and APDS-T ammo in 50 round belts (times 4 guns for a 200-round burst), enough for a 3-3.5 second burst Has a radar in a collapsible mount (toggleable radar ability?) Mobility is meh (14.7 hp/t, 50 km/h on-road, 30 km/h off-road) Armour is no Can mount 6x SA-16 or SA-18 Igla surface to air missiles, but I'm not sure if these would be useful as a secondary weapon because they have fragmentation warheads (HE, not HEAT) that are relatively small (390 grams, about 13% of a 125mm HE round) I'm not sure what to think of it yet. I'm tempted to say that it will be like the T249, but with lower RoF, damage per shot, and penetration (maybe something like ~20 damage, with the API having ~100mm penetration and the APDS having ~120?).

Just here to confirm that this is still the case. Leo 2 Evo, Stryker, and Dragun still do not have unlock tokens, meaning new players will not be able to unlock all 5 of the Wolfli tier 9s (this does not affect players who used an unlock token from one or more of these tanks before they lost their tokens). Either these vehicles tokens need to be given back their unlock tokens, or 2 of the tier 9s (probably Cent 120 and Draco) need to be unlockable using the same unlock token similar to how the tier 9 SPGs were a few patches ago.

In all seriousness though, a 152mm gun with a not-quite-TTB-style ready rack (clip and reload times average to be about the reload time of a single-shot gun of the same size) could work, and might be something interesting for the Devs to look at. Assuming it uses the same gun as T-14-152 or Obj 490B (both have a 11.4 second base reload, T-14 gets a 7% RoF upgrade), something along the lines of a 4-shot ready rack that can cycle in ~6 seconds but takes 15-17 seconds to load a new shot could be interesting. It wouldn't quite have the burst DPM that would make it cancerous to play against, but it would still have enough burst capacity (4x 1050 damage AP rounds) to trash most enemies and would struggle to fight back if it got attacked after emptying its ready rack - kinda like an MBT that specializes in abushes. If you wanted to give it a gimmick active ability, you could give it the option to toggle between single-shot (with the same 11.4 second reload of the other Russian 152s) and ready rack modes (although this ability would probably need to have a long cool-down period to avoid abuse, probably at least 2 minutes). Edit: Optionally, make a152mm gun with a 4-shot magazine loader with ~6 seconds between shots and a ~28 second reload. This would probably be easier to balance (both as a base weapon system and for the active ability gimmick) than the ready rack, and would certainly be unique and potentially useful.

The problem is that it doesn't seem to be working consistently. Some vehicles end up having their armour overmatched, while other vehicles with the same (or sometimes even less) armour thickness don't. From the players' perspective it's strange, unexpected, and probably requires a bit of dev attention to verify that it is (or isn't) working as intended.

I'd be a bit cautious about adding a lot of 152mm Soviet concept/testbed tanks as premium or reward vehicles, but only because there are actually enough of them that the devs could make an entire progression side-branch of Soviet/Russian MBTs with 152mm guns and I'd rather see the tanks released as part of a comprehensive upgrade path rather than a bunch of premiums. To give an example, if you wanted to focus on bigger guns and more mobility... Tier 6: T-64BV/BM/BVM coming from T-64A 1976, featuring Kobra gun-launched ATGMs and either Kontact-1 ERA (T-64BV), a 1000 hp 6TDF engine (T-64BM) or both (T-64BVM) Tier 7: Obj 292 coming from T-64BV/BM/BVM, a modified T-80B hull fitted with a new turret and an experimental 152mm smoothbore gun Tier 8: Obj 292A coming from Obj 292 and T-80U, hypothetical upgrade to Obj 292 using a T-80U hull and additional turret protection Tier 9-10: Obj 195 and Obj 477 (and possibly one of the more conventional Obj 490 concepts) seem to be good candidates for the end of a new "big-gun" MBT branch, but I'm not sure which vehicle would be best at which tier, more (possibly unreliable) information on them can be found in this external forum thread There are plenty of Obj XXX vehicles that the Soviets built and tested but didn't introduce for various reasons (usually cost) that would be excellent candidates for high-tier progression, premium or reward vehicles, but I'd really like to see some (not all, the devs still need to make money) of them added as progression vehicles that F2P players can get their hands on. For those of you wondering what the Obj 490/477 program gave us: The final prototype/concept/mock-up (Obj 490B) is the one we have in-game as the Obj 490 Edit: Also, supposedly there has been an Obj 195 model in-game for over a year, so there's that...

I can't actually find any pictures of production Abrams with the stepped upper glacis (as seen in-game), they're all single slope with a very shallow angle. Additionally, many of the pictures (particularly of later models) seem to have the lower glacis a little bit farther forward, although the slope seems to be about right. Edit: it seems that the gun mantlets are actually wrong as well. They should be smaller and have the gap underneath them that the old models (and the current hitbox models, see Haswell's series of threads on the Abrams hitbox inconsistencies) had/have, instead of the larger ones we currently have on the 3D models. I am honestly baffled by the changes they made to the Abrams models....

Yeah, the event (and the lootboxes) could have been handled better if the devs wanted to introduce people to the lootbox system with a positive experience. The example I'll give would be to have the BVP-80 come in lootboxes instead of the ZTQ and make sure that players are all but guaranteed to get enough lootboxes (either through sheer volume of lootboxes, or through tweaking the odds to be more favourable) unless they only do no more than ~70% of the event. For the players that either have very bad luck or didn't complete the enough of the event, making the BVP parts tradeable would give those players an incentive to join an active clan (if they aren't in one already) and would provide a demonstration of the trading function. I'm sure there are other ways that the devs could have done it, however we ended up with with an event that should have been seen as generous but instead left a bit of a bad taste in the players' mouths.

I have not context for this. What happened, when are the tanks being removed?