Azdule

Give the shit storm that occurs when the upgrade path was mentioned for the Hades, I don't believe they would be re-introducing them, however I would still like to see them in game as it would make the premium versions of tech trees different to the standard ones. If they were brought in, not sure how they would play with the rebalance as now most tier 9's tend to be closer to tier 10's then they were. I'd welcome more Hades tanks, to be fair I am no where near getting any of them, but will keep plodding along on the grind for them and one day I'll own them all :)

The contract mission resets in Feb / March time

Nah, you just worked out how to hack the game didn't you...spill the beans! Interesting though, is it only on that map? And I take it the end panel of the video was for something else?

So latest update from SS - SPG will be tier 9. Also the grind will be more.... Now come the questions over how much 'harder' it will be. I fear they'll increase the grind by 10% but not increase the rewards. This means that 2 hour booster won't get you 1 level every time. It make require a fair amount of cheesing the frick out of it if it's harder. EL was around the limit for me to be able to play and actually get the rewards without detriment to my personal health of being sat in front of my PC all waking hours of the day.

Looks really good! Was this hard to do?

For me, the do X 10x I tend to do tier 1/2 PvP battles. Spotting at that stage or dealing damage is relatively easy as you have tricked out commanders and retrofits so farming 2k damage or 1.5k spotting is relatively easy once you know bot paths and can designate targets or spot for the other bots on your team. I wish that they would complete some 'over completion' mechanics so you could one shot them (like raid missions) to take away some of the repetitive nature of missions, but I suspect this won't be picked up because, the more missions you have to do, the more players in game for longer. I mean, if the mission was to get 6k spotting, but if you got 10x that amount it completed it one, it would be great (not sure if you physically could get 60k spotting damage in most maps) I do disagree with the playstyle of getting your mission completed and then just dying and going again, but that's personal choice.

My free form answers. Mostly I like Spec ops, prefer hardcore (Heroic level) content and would love more of it. I mostly play solo because getting a platoon to do normal PvE maps is a waste unless it's being used to farm raid / BP missions Some of the options didn't really fit my choices For example, I mostly play solo, but prefer to platoon up for harder content. I normally run heroic at least twice a week and assist in carrying others through it. Ideally I would like more heroic content, but understand the constraints on development mean this is unlikely. I like the maps being reused / changed up providing they do form a bit more of a challenge / different play style. I'd like to see more maps opened up & Tiger claw (or that base map) be brought back in to rotation. At present it does feel that the map rotation is very limited and I play the same 5 maps every day of the week. If editing existing maps brought more PvE maps into rotation, I'd be pleased with this. Regarding the spec ops, most of the time I am a solo player because it's easy just to drop into a game for 5 for an hour or so. I much prefer the more difficult content that requires a platoon, however at present most of the PvE content is relatively easy. The difficulty comes for artificially making kill mechanics (SH chapter 4 ship guns for example) which means that you can die simply because of being in the wrong place, or getting stuck on some piece of terrain that you should be able to get over. It also means that sometimes you have to die as you either have to avoid an instant death mechanic, or drive out in front of a swarm of enemies. I'm not a huge fan of this type of mechanic as it can just screw you over due to RNG - hell it can even be used to kill team mates (drive behind or around them as the ship fires so they take the shot for you). This can lead to quite large levels of trolling as your team can in essence, kill you. The idea behind picking up and moving a character so they can be transported, is nice, but again is open to trolls. I think the worst offenders of this occur in Moscow Calling chapter 4 when either they pick up Magus or the ammo, and drive the wrong way / suicide so it just makes the game an auto loss. This happens a fair few times every time the chain comes onto rotation, so pretty much requires a full platoon to avoid trolls. The story line aspect is ok, but I have been playing this game for 5 years so at this stage the story arc (in all of it's forms) is pretty stale and old. I enjoy it for new seasons, but the repetition means that at this stage I normally skip it all the dialog. Regarding the skins, I like all of them really - I like the new Fantasy skins, the Enigma Legacy skins and realistic skins. In general I think they are all to a high quality (certainly more recently they keep going up in standard). I acknowledge they are not everyone's cup of team, and certain ones do have an effect on frame rate, so appreciate the ability to disable all skins from view

Because you love it so much you'll now never leave the garage? :)

SS has said that this is a single mission and will remain for 3/4 months - so appears the 'old' spec ops chain (4 missions per spec ops) will be a thing of the past. The new 'chain' will span 2021 and from other comments appears they may have names of the 4 horseman of the apocalypse (or similar theme)

HESH and PISH have different weakspots on most tanks when compared to AP. And where you can pen, you can wreck the internals of the tank - for example you can pen the T-14 in the mid point, below turret, with PISH and you have around a 95% change to blow the ammo rack and destroy the turret ring and kill 1 or 2 crew. If you shoot there with an AP shell, it might knock out 1 of those things. If you aim just below turrets on Bradley's you'll likely blow out an ammo rack, knock a crew man out and blow the turret ring out. One thing that's REALLY nice about PISH / HESH, is if you are face hugging a Abrams, XM1A3 specifically, you can aim down onto the upper front plate and if you hit the right spot with the right set up, you kill the entire crew in 1 shot. That's a 3.xk hp tank taking one in 1 shot. That's the advantage of Pish

Yea. Wonder if that is what has been tanking everyones FPS recently! Wonder if it'll fix the deply infantry and lose 1/3 of your FPS bug

I think a fair amount of ATGM changes are a reduction in chip damage (from the info) which would be welcome. 200+ damage from not being penned was annoying AF. High tier being countered by soft kill less is nice as it makes some of these tanks better to play. Also makes some of the lower tier ATGM tanks slightly better with better pen, but still the camo reduction factor is the killer. It does seem like some of the .33 changes that were being brought in are being slightly rolled back. Other changes I just don't see why they are being changed K21-x is one & the M1128 - now the base gun is best gun? Why?

I think with the comments previously, it would appear to be following the same route as EL - in so far as only BP tanks can be used to complete the BP. And there was hinting at deduction missions making a come back, which could be....terrible. Fingers crossed if there are deductions, they are minor (like 1:1 ratios rather than 3 or 10x) - so for example, deal 10k in SPG, for every point of damage you take, remove 1 point of progress.

Mmm...so 4 tanks from the chain and 1 purchase? Or is it a case that the final prize is a rank 50 / chain 4 reward rather than skins? Interesting take for an SPG being one of them given the limited game modes they can be played in

Non pen Pele, unlock later, is gonna be powerful. That's like the VBL pele so will be strong..

For me it was a VFM (non-skinned version) Bradley Sentinel Skin (seem to have been a lot of those recently) and a 99a2 140 rental

...So this will be a PELE Gau? I mean....Find it's counter in PvP & Profit, or else it'll rip through everything! Remember a tier 5 York can full pen tier 10 MBT's on the side from ANY distance...

True... But I'm like 75% sure this will be a 152mm Russian MBT top tier reward tank and will have some niche to it

SS confirmed that it'll have around 3400rpm so not sure what they decide on how it fires, I'm imagining rapid fire like terms / ADGS?

I'm thinking a slightly worse York Dakka Slightly higher DPS, lower pen / mobility

Overall I think it was a good idea, but execution was flawed. It could do with some improvements overall. A thing I heard some while ago - was the juice worth the squeeze? In this case no. But there is potential for it to be. *edit* I also thought - the reason I did slog through the chain was because it was easier to farm the raid event - often Spec ops are required to stand a chance of completing event missions or some of the harder contract missions

I think it was a nice idea, just the way the game runs didn't make it work well. Which is a shame. I was lucky that I 'picked up' a group that were running on the same spec ops as me, but when I missed their game, it was 40m wait times. Due to it taking 6-7 hours on the lower tiers (under 8) I decided against even trying the tier 9/10 as the mission failures you get on those would result in me smashing my face into a wall...and I kinda like my walls to be in one piece

An interesting idea. I like the idea of long reloads on it. Ages ago Devs said that the 152 guns were not meant to be front line tanks as they'd have long reloads so they couldn't brawl, so they'd be forced to shoot and pull back a little. Now I appreciate that their reloads are "long", but they used to be longer. I think around 14s originally on the T-14, where as other tanks had 8s. I think the problem with a RR on it would simply be that it could just delete anything it faced, so would be very difficult to balance in any reasonable way. So as it's a Russian themed BP, we know that something broken will come out of it...so yea, problems a 152 RR monster that'll require several nerfs to push it to become basically unplayable! *Looks at CATTB*

At first glance, it looks very life like! I'm not a huge fan of the wet look over it, it looks sticky to me, but overall very very good!

Could be that - also SS hasn't said ALL loot boxes are going away, only this BP's ones.