Preview: Autumn in Armored Warfare

[Haswell 290]

https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/preview-autumn-armored-warfare

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The summer’s all but over with September bringing most of us the usual things that come with autumn – cold, falling leaves, rain... that’s the bad news. The good news is, it’s also bringing the opportunity to play Armored Warfare and participate in all the content that’s coming up. And better believe there’s going to be a lot of it – Update 0.37 will be chock-full of features, improvements and fixes. Today, we’d like to tell you about some of them.

Update 0.37 represents the final part of the Apocalypse season. A new Special Operation will be available upon its release in late September, 2021:

 

Special Operation: Death

 

The final mission of the Apocalypse arc takes place in Batumi, a city that froze over following the supervolcano explosion, which took place at the end of the Spirithaven arc. In it, Igor Kopylov and Ivo Rinaldi encounter another person from Rinaldi’s dark past.

In this mission, your squad will be separated into two teams that have to cooperate with each other to survive. Coordination is the key to success, making this mission easy to learn but difficult to master. As usual, this mission will come with its own set of new achievements and rewards.

The following feature will also be available upon release:

 

New Contract

 

Update 0.37 is also bringing a new Contract with a special new reward – the Argentinian TAM 2IP Tier 7 Premium Light Tank replacing the T-90A Burlak. This Light Tank will come with a brand-new special ability called Laser Lock, significantly increasing your accuracy over a short period of time. On the downside, activating this ability will make the TAM 2IP illuminate its target with a laser visible to all players on the battlefield even if you aren’t spotted.

However, please note that this is all just preliminary. We are still testing this ability and may change its functionality significantly. Furthermore, this contract will not bring any changes to the actual Contract Missions – the requirements will remain the same as for the Burlak acquisition. We are, however, working on a deep analysis of the Contract system to improve it for future contracts.

Tier 1 to 6 Overhaul

 

In the past, we’ve overhauled Tiers 7 to 10 and rebalanced all their vehicles completely. In Update 0.37 (albeit not directly at launch), we’ll be doing the same to Tier 1 to 6. Right now, everything regarding this overhaul is very much classified as Work in Progress, but as the actual results crystallize and become clearer, we’ll be sharing as much of our vision as we can with you.

Naturally, this overhaul doesn’t mean we forgot about higher Tiers. The long-awaited CATTB buff will finally be coming to Armored Warfare, as will a number of corrections and improvements.

But is this all? Of course not, far from it.

 

Events and Content

 

This autumn, we’ll be running a number of special events, in which we’ll be celebrating communities, holidays and, as usual, the Armored Warfare anniversary where YOU get the gifts:

• September 15: Storyline Campaign Episode 1 will begin with its epic story and rewards
• October 3: German Unity Day with its own set of rewards
• Early October: We’ll give you the opportunity to win a brand-new Tier 10 Premium vehicle (which, admittedly, we’ll also be selling)
• Mid October: Riders on the Storm (a special Vietnam War-themed anniversary event with another brand-new reward vehicle)
• Late October: Brand-new Raid with a set of high-tech sci-fi skins for your favorite high Tier vehicles
• October 31: This year’s Halloween will get really spooky
• November 11: Polish Independence Day with its own set of rewards

There will also be a series of smaller events and contests to participate in. And as for our plans beyond Update 0.37 – we are already hard at work on those too, including a set of major improvements to Armored Warfare’s PvE, which we hope you will find most satisfactory.

That’s it for now, commanders. We’ll get to you soon with more info on the upcoming features, but until then:

 

Looking forward to the rebalancing, but also scared to hell knowing the mess that is 0.33.

More vehicles, yay. Lootboxes, boo.

[Schlock 10]

"set of major improvements to Armored Warfare’s PvE" seems ominous.

[dfnce 27]

The game needs to introduce new mid and long term goals (individual and group ones), so it could better engage and motivate players to play the game. For now annual events/contracts/BP/Raid are quite repetitive and boring in their mechanics and nothing seems to change in this scope.  

Tier 1-3 PvE was dumbed down several years ago with balance 2.0 introduction and further simplification. Tier 4-6 PvE is not in healthy shape either and i have very low expectations they can make the vehicle balance in pve right (and devs never pursued such goal). What once used to be adequate gameplay on low-mid became most silly, trashed version of its own past.

True and satisfactory CATTB re-balance is never late, except I heard these promises several times already.

[knutliott 41]

3 hours ago, dfnce said:

True and satisfactory CATTB re-balance is never late

I don't think that improved side armor and the Burlak's ready rack system counts as "true and satisfactory" since it's still going to have a 15-second reload and that god-awful bloom every time it fires.

[Katsumoto 11]

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True and satisfactory CATTB re-balance is never late, except I heard these promises several times already.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't really understand what is wrong with the CATTB.  Is there a list somewhere?

By the time I get home in the afternoon, the window for PvP is closed, but even when I use it in PvP it doesn't seem to be too problematic.  In PvE it isn't king by a long stretch but I can see where it can be abused.  I know that they nerfed the gun and the ready rack system on it but nothing really stands out.

[Quantum_Ranger 14]

Is it just my imagination, or does the TAM 2IP chassis look a bit like a CV90??

The T1-T3 economics were already painful, but are now even more so now that T3 can't be used in Hardcore mode. Sigh.

@dfnce  is right - the mechanics of most of the events are becoming quite familiar. I'm hitting saturation with the current BP... tempted to throttle back until the storyline goes live.

DVC,

QR

[Schlock 10]

10 hours ago, Quantum_Ranger said:

Is it just my imagination, or does the TAM 2IP chassis look a bit like a CV90??

 

TAM is built on Marder IFV chassis so that's probably why it seems familiar.

Speaking of, it's still weird we don't have Marder or AMX-10P in game (I know, AMX used to be ingame as tier 2-3 IFV but was removed) and both of those were built in thousands, while we have a ton of weird one-off cold war prototypes (*cough*XM247*cough*)

Edited September 9, 2021 by Schlock (see edit history)

[knutliott 41]

21 hours ago, Katsumoto said:

Maybe it's just me, but I don't really understand what is wrong with the CATTB.  Is there a list somewhere?

I can't speak for PvP, but off the top of my head the problems in PvE are:

1. 15 second reload is beyond crap.  The XM1A3's 140 has a 9.8 second reload.  It should probably be 12 seconds.
2. Ammo is worse than the XM1A3's despite being the same ammo.
3. OMGWTF bloom after firing is insane, and lingers for a second or two before aim time kicks in.  Thus the infamous "double-tap" that's allegedly what makes this tank good is crap.  The second shot could land anywhere, and by "anywhere" I mean anywhere on the map, not on the target vehicle.  You have to experience it to understand.  The aim circle becomes as big as the HUD.  So to effectively use the double-tap feature, you either have to be within about 25-50m of your target (and pray to RNGesus), or you have to wait several seconds (4-ish, I would guess) to re-aim after the first shot which kinda defeats the purpose of a double-tap feature.
4. A long time ago during one of the 5-6 nerfs (I'm not exaggerating, it was nerfed twice during its BP, and then again immediately after), its armor vs HEAT was reduced and its armor vs AP was allegedly made more uniformly strong in order to give it a distinct feel.  I.e. you were supposed to need HEAT or ATGMs to defeat it, which presumably gave it character in PvP where most people only carry AP ammo.  But that made it beyond bad in PvE where ATGM-spamming AFVs and TDs are the majority of the vehicles that you face.  This problem has better and worse during various patches as they've balanced armor and ammo in general, but mostly worse.  It seems like every adjustment to any kind of ammo somehow manages to hurt the CATTB.  Right now, IIRC, it's armor vs HEAT is somewhat functional but not great and vs AP it's just bad (for a Tier 10).  The 0.33 armor rebalance seems to have hurt the CATTB yet again.

[Haswell 290]

From the TAM article, we can now revise our estimates for 0.37 to be pushed out on 21-23.

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... the tank itself will not be available (even on the Alabino map) right upon the launch of Update 0.37. Instead, the Burlak contract will be prolonged by 9 days with the TAM 2IP contract only launching after September 30, 2021.

 

[Zafir 9]

On 9/9/2021 at 8:13 PM, knutliott said:

A long time ago during one of the 5-6 nerfs (I'm not exaggerating, it was nerfed twice during its BP, and then again immediately after)

The initial nerfs were needed, CATTB was immune to HEAT/ATGMs from the front and largely immune to AP, the turret / hull sides were fairly resistant against HEAT/ATGMs.
Add to that resilience 4000+ HP and fairly good speed/agility and you go deleting stuff ≤ 3500k with the 150 mm double tap for days.

The introduction of significant bloom between shots was necessary to actually make it a short range thing, as well as reduce armour a bit to not let it just drive up to stuff (this was also pre-shipdamage from HEAT MP/ATGMs → No pen = 0 damage).
Then nerfing reload, armour, hp, damage, penetration again and again was pure overkill.

[knutliott 41]

On 10/16/2021 at 3:24 PM, Zafir said:

The initial nerfs were needed, CATTB was immune to HEAT/ATGMs from the front and largely immune to AP, the turret / hull sides were fairly resistant against HEAT/ATGMs.

Oh, for sure.  The thing was stupidly OPAF when it was first released.  I was just pointing out that it has been nerfed 5-6 times and - AFAIK - never buffed, this despite the fact that the multiple nerfs have been overkill and the tank is now craptastic.

On 10/16/2021 at 3:24 PM, Zafir said:

The introduction of significant bloom between shots was necessary to actually make it a short range thing, as well as reduce armour a bit to not let it just drive up to stuff (this was also pre-shipdamage from HEAT MP/ATGMs → No pen = 0 damage).

I don't recall them ever indicating that the CATTB was supposed to be close-range only, so I'm going to disagree that this was necessary.  The stupidly ridiculous bloom after firing effectively negated the one thing that was supposed to make the tank unique, because if you can only use that one unique thing at 25-50 meter range it's not useful.  (Remember: balanced for PvP, not PvE.  If you have to get to 25-50m range to use your special thing in PvP, you're either about to be dead or the game is already won.)

As it stands now, the CATTB is pointless.  Which is pretty sad for the ultimate reward from a Battle Path.  If they would give it a competitive gun then its sad armor might be okay, but a 15-second reload for ammo that's strictly worse than the XM1A3's identical ammo is a double penalty where neither were necessary.  Actually give it the XM1A3's ammo that it claims to already have and reduce its reload to 12 seconds as a starting point... that might be enough, but honestly I doubt it.