BumbaX

UPDATE: From the Discord channel I got that that issue does not happens only to me and happens also in the Destruction mission, both have a progress counter in the form of x/100, but not on the missions with a counter in the form x missions with a certain requrement/10. Eisenherz wrote that it will be fixed, but probably only after the Xmast holydays.

I have a problem with the Exile Elite Mission Colossus: I completed the previous one and then played 3 PvE matches with tier 8/9 vehicles, if I get it right I have to get 100 assists or kills a higher tier tank in any mode, with any class of tank with at T8 or superior tank. In those 3 matches I surlely got some kills or assists vs higher tier tanks, but the mission counter is still 0/100, I can't understand why. It is a known bug, a bug that is happening only to me or I misunderstood what is the mission requirement? By the way I am sure that I claimed the previous mission reward, that is a pre requisite to start the Colossus one and does not happens automatically and in the last mission with the Crab I got 11 kills and 14 assists and I did damage only to higher tier vehicles (as I tried to figure out why the conuter was stuck to 0 and I wanted to be sure that all the kills and assists was vs higher tier enemies) so that mission only would had increased the counter by 25. I post some screenshots about the issue, can anyone help me to understand what is happening? Thank you in advance, BumbaX.

I have a question about the Ophelia's skill Rally1, does it mean that the speed is increased when over 30 kmh or that the hull traverse rate is increased? I find "increases hull speed rate by" ambiguous. Anyway I recently bought her in the Battle Path shop (she costed me a lot of BC but I feel that are well spent BC) and I am still grinding her. I am planning a different build where I favour acceleration, she gets a 17.58% increase if spotted and on offroad environment and on repair speed, she gets a 45% increase if below 50% HP at the cost of not Having Rally or Bersek skills. A faster repair speed can save you if you are low health and the repair consumable is spent or in cool down time, this can be true both in PvP and PvE, but before I go for that route I want to be sure about what Rally1 really does.

Welcome

IMHO the problem is not to pay or not the access, I did it with some gold and not with RL money and got the access only, without the 42.5K BC, the real investment can be our real life time. The BP is at its very begin, and I begin to feel bored to play it, as if I want to progress trough completing missions I am forced to play some specific tanks, the new BP ones for the camo missions, and the mid tier MBTs are not exactly my first choice if I have to play for fun and not for grinding, and the ones required by the repeatable missions, and if it can be fun to play some specific class at some specific tiers it becomes boring, at least for me, if i have to grind trough 25k xp or 300-450k damage, things that can need up to 30-40 games depending on the specific class you have to play and how you are a good player. To think that for the next 3 months every time I log in the game I have the choice to play whatever i feel in that moment, tier, tank and mode, so play for the fun, or play what i have to play to complete missions, not only having to play the same class at certain tiers many times, but possibly to have to play in a not natural way, ie stealing kills from my team mates as i need them for some mission, so i have to work and not play as my goal is grinding and not having fun makes me not happy at all. This is very subjective, some friends of mine seem to disappear from the game when a BP is not active, as they have little other left to grind, so for them grinding is a reason to play. For me it is the exact opposite and somehow I regret to have purchased the BP access, even if I payed it with some gold I got playing, not purchasing it with RL money, and if I am happy to have more active population I am not happy to see how most of that population play in a not natural way, and the more the BP progresses so the not repeatable missions become demanding, ie we will need games with a certain number of kills, they will play less naturally. To me deciding to play the PB the problem is not if to invest $8.25, that in many countries is what you earn working an hour (more or less depends on the country and your work, but let's take it as average for the rich countries) or less then what you pay a pizza and a beer, is if invest hundred of hours of our precious spare time, do we do it because we really like to play that way, focused on the grind, to get some new shiny tanks made of pixels, or we do it because we really have fun grinding so the more grind the best? Yesterday I played less then on an average not BP day, and today I don't feel much to play at all, possibly I will log in only for the daily reward. It seems that PB is having a strange effect on me, it is more a poison then an healing potion for my motivation to play AW...

Yep, for a player at the beginning of the grind and willing to spend huge real money in the game it is probably worth it to start again with a Russian account, then he can buy for much cheaper good commanders and some high tier premium tank and he will get plenty of credits and reputation to grind fast trough the tiers, spending a lot less RL money. For a player that has spent years grinding a EU or NA account to start again from the beginning, as you can not transfer you tanks and the rest from an account to an other, it is probably to a too harsh price to pay, even if a player playing since some years that has few to grind in his main account to start a Russian one as secondary account can be a good idea, I have some friends with more then an account. When the servers was split in regional areas and AW and the Russian game was 2 different games, even if mechanically identical, to play with a Russian account was possible, but had a price, more ping and to have to deal with other players that communicate in Russian language, now that the server is the same for all the players and we have players that use Russian and English to write in the chat anyway to start with a Russian account is surely better. If it is fair that the same product is sold at different prices I would say no, as the criteria used is more "this is a Russian game so Russian people should have an advantage" then "let's give to what we sell a price compared with the average income a person has in that place". Players not living in the rich EU and NA nations, let's say in some nations of Africa or South America, can actually have an average income lower then the ones in some parts of Russia, but have to pay at the same price of the rich USA. Germany or GB citizens. The world in not fair at all, there is some people that eat to much and throw away the food and other people that is starving. But what makes the system used here not fair is because of a bias based on nationality, that gives to the players that share the same nationality of the publisher roughly 50% discount. Like if Apple would sell at 50% if the customer is an USA citizen or Rolls Royce would grant you a 50% discount if you are a subject of Her Majesty...

As long as the repeatable missions don't have a reduced reward I don't see how it can be a problem to shorten the refresh time. If you get 600 BC for them you get them if you play the mission in 1, 2 or even 3 or more days, depending on how much you can or want to play, possibly not forgetting that you are using very valuable RL time and to use it to have fun playing or to suffer playing, to grind pixel made tanks that you can probably live without if you don't have fun grinding them, are completely different uses of your spare time. Shortening the refresh time is an advantage for who can/want to play a lot of time and better if he is also a very good player, as in PvP being able to get very good results some missions are not so long, for who almost constantly get 7-10 kills in Glops it is way faster then getting kills in PvE as they should be 35-50 each mission. For those that need more time the reward is anyway 600 BC, at the rate they feel to play. Now if 600 BC are a good enough reward for missions like doing 450K damage is the real problem, does not matter how short is the refresh time. Playing PvE, as some players can not or don't like to play PvP, it is 20 missions with an average of 22.5K, pretty high for an average player and perfectly possible for a good one, so is probably 4 hours of playing, and as you have 3 different missions active and only some times they overlap, you can do 2 or more of them playing the same tanks, it can mean 12 hours to get all 3, for only 1800 BC, not even half of what is needed to progress one single rank. having 40 ranks (as the first 10 ones are easier to get) it is more then 80 days of full time (12 hours/day for a good player) work if the BP should be completed with the repeatable missions only. But as also other sources of BC are there, not repeatable missions, BC boosters and the rest, not necessarily including spending RL money, the time to complete the BP can be a lot less of that, there is plenty of time for doing it even without making playing AW a full time work, surely not playing AW for less then an hour only some evenings, but to have to complete the repeatable missions fast so you don't loose the ones that you can get the next day is a completely fast problem, let the people that has a lot of time to play do it, and if you can't or don't want to play so much time it is still possible to get the last BP reward. As the BP this time is in the spring/summer time I suspect that I will have more fun driving my motorcycle then shooting at pixel tanks, so probably I will not reach the highest rank, but it is a deliberate choice of mine...

I have seen at least a Pindad in game, so I suppose that for people willing to pay it is not a problem to get it fast. For those not willing to pay it should be anyway pretty easy if they have some time to play and some friends, as who had played the last BP can have BC Boosts left from it and will get more in this BP, so to get BC should not be a problem. Why friends? Because it seems to me that if the first missions are quite easy to do alone, even if some of them can be a boring long grind, like to do a lot of damage with low tier/low dpm classes, but then to rig the mission in a full platoon makes the further ones much easier, while alone can be a problem for the 95% of the players. 30 kills in PvE with a T5 MBT with randoms is something well beyond the skill level of most of the players, but is an easy task rigging a Spec OP with a full platoon, and it is true for most of the not repeatable missions I would say.

I did try the progression Ramka and in PvP the missiles, even with all I could do to make them precise, crew, commander and retro, had a terrible deviation vs anything that had APS, and vs T10 tanks like T15 or Merkava almost all my missiles was missing the target, while in PvE they are quite reliable and seem to don't suffer APS. So it is possible that the missile bug is also present for the Ramka, not only for the new bmpt, and happens only when PvP is played. I am only guessing it as don't owning the new tank I can not make a real comparison, but with the Ramka it is as, if not even worse, when the APS was buffed too much some time ago, at that time at least stacking all you can to counter APS some improvement was obtained, now I don't even know if those things work or the missile deviation is so high no matter if a commander or other means to improve it used. I did not try to unequip retro and change commander, it is enough masochistic to play with them in PvP.

I don't own the tank so I can not tell it trying myself, but this is true with the tank like it is or also with sting like a bee crew specialization, a commander like Rasheed optimized to reduce AGTM deviation and the retro that does the same?

@TeyKey1 I agree, in PvP and mainly in Random Battle it is not a bad tank at all, GLOPS are somehow closer to PvE as people can respawn so care less of their life so high dpm becomes more relevant. There burst damage becomes much more relevant then dpm, as you any way will shot much less, the damage you do is 3-5 times less then in PvE-GLOPS seeing both my statistics and the ones of the really good players, but to be able to let's say kill an enemy AFV with double missile while your hard kill aps stops one of the missiles that Bradley fires at you or pack 4 missiles in a weak spot of an MBT in a short time is a real advantage as at best he will be able to shot you only once, if he sees you, before you pop out smoke and hide. In PvE, even if I got my share of blue stars with it, it is an other story... And even if I agree that the tanks should be mainly balanced for PvP I also think that this can be obtained without unbalancing them too much in PvE, thing that sometimes happens, surely in this case happens. A shorter real reload time, for real I include the animation time, and maybe disabling the double tap or making the missile less good could have been ways to have the tank not OP in RB but more viable and interesting in PvE as in RB the real goal is to kill and in PvE is to do damage. @Travlla the double shot is really powerful in PvP, for the reasons mentioned above, but probably is not the best option in PvE for a couple of reasons. First, given the long reload time it is very annoying when you have to fire at a low hp BOT to kill it, and you have to do it if he is focusing at you, and you waste 2 missiles to do little damage. Second to maximize the tank performance, as you can fire about 8 AGTM each minute, you should really want that every missile does the maximum possible damage, the double missile is marginally useful vs BOTs with hard kill APS, but not so much as even if you land the 3 other missiles that T15, Merkava or other tank with burst and high hp will be anyway alive and will kill you, so you have to shot at them in a situation when they don't retaliate, so you can anyway fire the 4 missiles at them one by one and get 3 hits. But to be able to shot individually each missile to a target that has enough HP to take the full AGTM damage is the way to deal with the low dpm, you have only 8 missiles/minute, but they all pack the maximum damage, for that reason is also better to don't shot at moving targets or targets that you may not penetrate, and firing each AGTM individually makes it more easy to do.

No threshold means that if player A does 1% of the damage and player B does 99% of the damage and kills player A still gets the assist? In other words if I shot a single AC round to an enemy and there is only an other friendly around that can deal with that particular enemy I can then focus on other enemies that maybe can flank my team mate and still get that assist, or from a more selfish point of view doing little damage to all the enemies i see hoping that some of them are then damaged and killed by only a team mate can possibly give me assists?

That is even harder if you want to do a partial reload, if you fire for some reason a single missile you have to wait forever to reload it. The same is true for the Bradley AAWS-H that other ways could have been a semi decent T8 premium. The reload animation can be cool from a purely aesthetic point of view, but makes me hate the tanks that use it, i am so happy that all them are full grind with crew at lev 5 for me, both could have been interesting tanks, the Mephisto missiles are good and the Bradley KEM are interesting in GLOPS, maybe also Random Battle and in few selected PvE missions, but the very long reload time due to the animation and the cost of risking to loose chances to hit if a partial reload is done puts them among the tanks I enjoy less to play.

Yep thermobarics are also an option, and not only i have to avoid to destroy the vehicle, but also to avoid that other people do it, my Zaisev commander has now roughly 60% bonus to crew damage, but still it is not easy to kill all the crew with a single or at best few shots, my best bet is to find some tank with reduced crew and hope to be lucky, ie a Kornet is a good target, but still even with Phish from an ADTU or thermobarics from a Termi it is not granted that I will kill both commander and driver before destroying the tank, or before some other player uses my spot to kill him. When I did try the last time I had that mission, failing, my commander had way less crew damage bonus, I hope that this can make the difference, but it is not an easy mission and being a PvP only one you can not rig it with a full platoon of friends, thing that can make PvE missions hard to complete alone very easy, we usually complete the 20K damage or 20 kills/assist ones with all the hits doing damage in 1 or 2 games when in full platoon and vocal chat. And is also a mission that you can not complete easily at T1, thing that makes some other PvP only missions quite easy. When I accepted your friendship you was not on line, or at least I could not see you as online in my friends list, and the request popped out immediately after I logged in, so I would say that you can ask friendship to some one not on line and he can accept even if you are not online, but I don't know in this case if the person that has done the request gets a pop up as he logs in, I would say no, but he can anyway see the new friend in his friends list.

A larger clip surely would help, but as long as you pre set the other weapon before firing the loaded one you still can fire a missile, 2 ac clips then an other missile over and over getting a good cpm. Let's say that you have the missile on the 1 key and the ac on the 2 key, as the missile is loading you press once the 2 then as it is loaded you fire the missile. the ac then is ready to fire, you use it and as the second clip is loaded or loading you press 1 and fire the clip so the missile is automatically ready. This way you have only 1 ac reload time more then having a 12 rounds clip, but there is not a so big difference as the reload is fast, you get only a marginally lower dpm. As I am playing the Warrior very few nowadays as is full grind and is not one of my preferred tanks, so is not one of the tanks i pick when I want to play for fun and not for grind purposes, it is hard to do it in a real battle, but in the Alabino testing it seems to work fine, it is just that you have to do it often enough to make it almost automatic as in battle you have also so many other things to focus on.

Windows 7 here and it is happening also to me.

I agree with you and TC shared the same thing of Frostbite, must avoid to cap 1 early to win. But the fact that with randoms I had almost always some one running in cap 1 in TC and still happens in FB is a clue about having a problem that can not be ignored. I mean, when there is people that ask in chat to don't do it, when you are playing at T10, so with people that has gone trough the grind and so has played that mission so many times and still it happens almost every time we have some kind of problem, even a little baby learns that is better to don't touch the flame of a candle after the first time that he gets burned, but here we (as average of the players) are at a level of intelligence of some night insects that just can't avoid to fly near a lamp and get burned by it, 100% primordial instinct and 0% usage of brain and learning from experience. Why this happens? IMO it happens because most of the PvE maps are designed to be played with primordial instinct only, "i see da bot, i shot da bot" too linear, too easy to beat once you learn a couple of tactics that work for you, i can safely snipe from that spot and so on. So if the players seem to be not able to deal with maps that need some (very basic) tactic, like send some one to defend a cap before you cap the previous, probably it is due to developers decisions, as i refuse to think that the bulk of AW players are idiots with a 30 IQ, so I am not happy when I read that maps that require some basic tactic and party coordination are completely removed, when I see decent maps transformed in boring one way only corridors like happened to Ricochet or are completely changed to an easy form like in Snake Bite. We have no control over our team mates with randoms, but the developers can have a lot of control on how we, on average, use our brains, giving us missions that compel us to use them or linear and more boring ones that allow us an artificially too high win rate, and I am not found of the way the developers use it, it seems to me that they prefer a short time result, making our life easier, but more boring, instead a long term one, compelling us to learn how to think tactically and collaborate, and giving us in the end missions more fun to play. And it has to be done making the easy and linear missions less linear and boring, not having a bunch of easy missions and only a couple that require brain, other way it is sure that those missions will be skipped or lost almost every time you go with randoms, this is why i am fine with removing temporarily TC, but I am not fine to have it discarded forever. I really think that the PvE mode has some potential to be more interesting and challenging, maybe not as the PvP ones as AI is somehow always exploitable while human players make each battle unique, but still a lot better then now. But even if i have seen something in this directions, now some bots use dead tanks as cover and show some sign of intelligent actions, while some times ago we had mostly bot lemming trains to the caps spamming AGTM, i don't see the same care in how the maps are dealt with, with the ones that had some potential to be interesting discarded or changed to an easier version and no change to the linear and easy ones to make them more challenging. EDIT: Cerebrus is an other of the few examples where the missions are made more interesting as now we can have the bots push forward or stay more in the back, when you start the mission you don't know for sure how you have to play it, you have to react to what the bots do. This to tell that not all the changes that the developers do are in i wrong direction, i see when a change in the right one is done and i give credit to it.

I apologize, I also checked and I was wrong, the forum user that I had already met in some battles is an other, sometimes the memory plays some strange tricks... But I received your in game friendship request and accepted it, so if we meet I am glad to help you in your goal, by the way yesterday I received the same mission, but having both Sergeant York and Murder I think it is not a problem at all for me to get in any way in other moments. The other one I received yesterday is to kill a tank in PvP by killing the crew, last time I had it was a big problem and I had to pay it with gold, but now I have a commander with huge crew damage bonus and so with Wilk and PELE or ADTU and PHISH is easier to get it for me, let's see... I would like to get at least 1 more crate, but I am not willing to spend my gold for it.

Welcome!

I never had this issue, Windows 7 64 bit here, but I noticed that with small wheeled vehicles mainly, but I would say not only with them, I have other issues, similar to the ones we have when a high ping is there, even if the shown ping is pretty good. My internet connection is far from prefect, but it is the only one I can use in my particular situation, so some times I have ping problems that are on my side, but it happened only some evenings, with high shown ping value, but after the last patch it is almost always present and even if the shown ping is pretty decent, between 35 and 50 ms. For me it is not a repentine change of the view angle, but more a delayed response of the video to my commands, that makes very difficult to move wheeled vehicles in a fine way, so i drive against obstacles when relocating an often when I want to pop out from cover to fire I find myself many meters out of the cover with plenty of time for other players/bots to fire at me. As we use different OS it can be, or can be not, due to the same bug/issue that cause your behavior, as it seems to be a problem due to the video response, not to a general delay in the connection, i can fire or move without delay, only the feedback I have on the screen is delayed as far as I can understand, so I write it here.

@Komitadjie you are certainly right, that would happen again. But that happened because there are basically 2 tiers of maps, the easy, boring, linear ones (named the bad ones in this post) and the ones that compel to use some brain, tactic and coordination (the good ones here). Now what happens to the good ones, 2 of them, Tiger Claw and the old Snake Bite, have been removed or completely changed to an easy and linear version and 2 of them, maybe 3 remain. Riding party, that is not so difficult after all, but is the less linear, the party can decide to stay together or split and has complete freedom of choosing what gates destroy first, killing or not killing the bots there by the way, and you must have some tactic or a very good dpm to do it before the timer expires, and Tsunami, the 3rd possible is Harbinger, that is perfectly possible, also with randoms and without MBTs but needs at least a spotter vehicle or MBT that knows what to do to survive the first BOTs swarm. All the other maps are very linear, Leviathan, the most rewarding, included as also there you have to run from a cap to the other, you can even loose caps and as long as someone is alive the mission is won as the bots in the middle don't really fire at the Aurora missile. Ricochet has been changed to utterly linear and boring, and was one of the few maps that gave to the party options of different tactics and Frost Bite still is often lost if the second cap is the far one as most of the players, after years, still fail to understand that to cap 1 before sending someone to defend the far 2 is not safe as after many bots spawn in between. And this happens because the players in PvE are baby sit and encouraged to use less brain then the one an average ape can use. So I agree with you, Tiger Claw needed too much brain compared to how the average of the maps need, discouraged players, was deserted and had to be removed, even if there was an hope that the players not skipping it would have learned how to play it. But if it is in a trend of making the PvE more easy, or at least less tactical, basing the difficulty only on the number of the BOTs and their magic abilities, like to fire rockets at weak spots of moving tanks with 100% accuracy, ignore many module destruction and so on, or it is in a trend of having the bad maps re howled to be less linear and more challenging because they need some tactic, some understanding of how to beat them and not only learn an easy way and following it all the times (thing that defeats even the Heroic difficulty) makes all the difference. If Tiger Claw is temporarily removed because the players are not ready for it (and on the lower difficulty it was not so hard, and this brings the other problem, we don't have and hard and easy PvE setting, we have an easy and an idiot level* that also is almost not played) in a trend that makes the bad maps more challenging, tactical and interesting i am fine with it. But as it seems that is removed forever in a trend that makes the other maps more easy and linear i am not happy of it. I am also personally not happy of the change in the match making that now make impossible to play without at least a MBT in the party as even if I did not have a high win rate for me was very satisfying to beat maps like Harbinger and Riding Party with all squishy tanks, and I have done it many times, only Tsunami is border line to impossible in that way, unless at least 2 of those squishy are a couple of Ramka or T15 that know how to play their tanks. As @TeyKey1 wrote it is not every time possible to play the PvP modes, acceptable queue times happens only in some hours and some players are so far from the server that their high ping make to play PvP almost impossible, so to tell: "you want challenge? go PvP is not an answer to the PvE problems, is is not always possible and PvE should be challenging in its own way, even if not a dumb one, for those that can not or for some reason don't want to play PvP. It can be way more then an almost infinite, but easy and boring way to grind. *NOTE: I am not assuming that those that like to play the easier PVE difficulty are idiots, there are many possible reasons to do it and there is nothing wrong in doing it. My intention is not to judge other people, only to point out how the easiest mode is so easy and almost not used.

Yes, it was introduced for testing purposes and their intention is to bring it back to GLOPS, let's see if it will happen and with which changes. Bu I was only commenting on what the OP wrote, stating that the buffs (or new rounds, does not matter) was the same for PvE and GLOPS and that at now arty is no more available in GLOPS, while the OP assumed the opposite in both cases.

I remember that in the tournament EU server battalions vs Russian ones, before merging the servers, it was one the few AFVs used, and this tells a lot on his former quality, usually was the other team AFV killer. Now, after the nerf, is not so good any more, but still is somehow playable. His armor, if used properly, has interesting characteristics, how you use it is the key, but can bounce much more then the one of the other AFVs of the tier, the missile is single, but good and with a fast reload and it is possible to use 1 or 2 AC bursts as you reload it, so it still can have a good dpm, firing almost continuously. I don't excel playing it, but I think is a problem of mine, I should play it more and adapt more my play style to it, learning better how to use at best its armor and weapons, still I think that it still has potential to be a good tank, even if not so good as before. After all not all the tanks have to be Ramka or T15 like, with a super high dpm to be effective and fun to play.

The infantry-command system will also probably be very useful with AT Squad, as you can instruct it to destroy quickly tanks that are an easy target for them instead of firing on something that they can not penetrate and will anyway make the whole infantry more tactical as you can somehow control what they do instead of just deploy them and accept that they do what their AI script tells them to do based on the relative position of the enemy tanks. I suspect that this can give too advantage to the tanks that can deploy infantry, I have mostly PvE experience using it, but I would say that also in PvP it can be really annoying for the enemy team, I had some Random Battles when a mortar made my life, in a MBT, almost impossible while i had a very good hull down position to face some enemy MBTs, without that well placed mortar I could probably have hold that flank while doing some good damage to those MBTs as they was not able to damage me, while i was putting shots on them every time they tried to reach me, scaring them. But as there was the mortar and even if I was untouchable I was spotted so took some huge damage from repeated mortar hits, then I had to retreat and the enemy won the flank. This happened because the mortar was well placed and did focus on my tank that was the key of the defense of that flank, but with the command system the mortar can be instructed to fire on every tank in his range as long as the one that launched the infantry can mark it. I don't know if retreating briefly to not be spotted any more breaks the marked status, so if the tank that has deployed the infantry has gone elsewhere and can not mark you again you can take back your previous position and continue to fight or if you remain marked and as soon as you are spotted again they keep firing at you, so your only chance is to relocate and find something useful outside the mortar range, we will see...

And no more in GLOPS by the way as arty was introduced only for a short time in them for testing and if will return there or not is uncertain. So, even if i fail to see the sense of the OP post, as "Why can't we have the Arty buffs that are in GIOPS, in PvE?" imply that the arty is now in GLOPS and that that the arty changes done to make arty GLOPS ready are not also working in PvE, and both the things are not true, i assumed that the OP referred to those changes when he did talk of arty buffs. If receiving new ammo types, that by the way use a separate reload time, you can swap to the new ammo types and fire without slowing your reload of the regular HE ammo, that have some (little) damaging capability, some de capping one, more noticeable, and some protective one, almost not useful in PvE, is or is not a buff is something we can debate. For me as they add more capability to the arty, allow to increase the damage done, and if you place a phosphor round where 3 or 4 bots sit, if the rest of the party don't kill them fast, does some noticeable damage, and the aoe of that round is much larger then the HE splash and continues for many seconds so it is more useful to de cap blind IMO it is a buff. The counter of every bot that is in that aoe or that dirves into it while the phosphor fire is active is reset and some arty have then, immediately, 3 or 4 HE rounds to cover the rest of the cap area, it is much easier for an arty now to reset a cap that is filled with bots, both if you front liners spot them, but can not hit them easily while surviving or if no one is spotting. but if for you buff is only some improvement in the stats, like more resistant armor, lower reload time or more penetration and damage, then the changes are only new features and not buffs.