Source:
https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/development-artillery-overhaul
QuoteToday, we’d like to tell you more about our plans to change the Self-Propelled Gun class of vehicles that we’ll be implementing this summer.
To understand why these changes are needed, we have to go way back to the very beginning of Armored Warfare development where it was decided to bring indirect fire to the battlefield because, well, there are players who like this sort of thing – to sit in one position, point, click and... boom goes the enemy tank without any fear of retaliation.
Not that there aren’t such vehicles present in PvP even today – you can absolutely take your 122mm Buratino and trash a few MBTs by a stream of rockets. The difference is, driving a Buratino always puts you at risk of being immobilized or knocked out. In case of indirect-firing SPGs, there was no such danger in PvP except for occasional counter-battery fire where SPG players would target each other and trade shots across the map in a game of hide and seek.
The veterans of this game might remember the SPG class being repeatedly tweaked but the conclusion we came to was that no matter what we did, artillery in PvP was simply a failed concept that wouldn’t ever be fun. And so we restricted the class to PvE and left it there essentially unchanged except for an occasional change of high-explosive shells that led to its current, impotent state. Indeed, the SPGs are barely played these days (despite being one of five main classes in the game, only roughly 2.4 percent of Tier 9-10 matches are played with SPGs). We aim to change that.
And so, long story short, we’ll be making the following changes:
- Artillery vehicles will be overhauled to fire directly
- Afterwards, artillery will be allowed in all modes
This is not an unrealistic change – artillery has often been used this way in recent conflicts. There are, however, some challenges to this task. First of all, artillery generally lacks armor. Secondly, artillery typically cannot fire kinetic shells.
That is why we are planning to overhaul the current artillery vehicles into highly nimble and fast (roughly similar to Light Tanks of the same Tier), lightly-armored machines that will typically fire powerful HE and (newly added) HEAT shells. In other words, they’ll rely more on single shot damage than on their rate of fire.
They will retain their Smoke and White Phosphorus shells and will be able to switch quickly between this utility ammunition and damage-dealing rounds, but every ammunition type will use a direct fire aiming reticle similar to the current TOS-1M Buratino (with a flat, horizontal-oriented aiming circle instead of the classic tank one). The accuracy will, naturally, not be all that great and long-range fire will resemble bombardment rather than sniper shots. Lower calibers (122mm) will have a rate of fire advantage while higher calibers will focus more on damage. Additional shell types will also be available for various individual vehicles.
And that’s pretty much it. The last thing we’d like to mention are the Premium SPGs. There are only three in the game at the moment – two Abbots and Msta-S – which makes things easier. These will initially not be overhauled and will stay as they are (including their restriction to the PvE modes). After all, players purchased them the way they are now for a reason. We will monitor the post-release feedback and, if that will be the wish of their owners, we’ll change these too.
Several comments and replies from SilentStalker on official Discord server:
- Regarding the potential burst damage from a 4-shot clip PLZ-05, "Well obviously that's going to need tuning. Like, removing the PLZ clip or making it more manageable."
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He turned down the idea of scrapping the class and relabelling SPGs to TDs, saying "TDs come with some design expectations, like high accuracy."
(Side note: the idea of a class merge, specifically combining LTs and TDs into Fire Support Vehicle or FSV class, had also been rejected before) - Having both indirect fire and direct fire modes is also a no-no, "Because we specifically do not want indirect mode in PvP."
- TOS-1M Buratino's 220mm rockets somewhat influence SPG's future direction
- It's not possible for SPGs to behave differently between game modes; "I don't know the details, I am not a programmer. But assigning more than two POV to a vehicle breaks the game."
- Overhaul is still at proposal stage, "right now it's basically a "we'd like that" stage, nobody started working on nit."
- "The change is not supposed to appeal to the players who are perfectly fine with the way it is. It's meant to appeal to other players who don't have SPG vehoces yet and maybe make them more active."
- "There are more reasons for the overhaul than that. For example, SPGs actually actively decrease low-Tier retention of new players. They decrease its average because arties now suck on most maps."
The idea of changing artillery into direct fire only had been tested in Balance 2.0 PTS before:
The results were apparently not up to expectations, and this idea was dropped. In Update 0.19 SPG as a class was limited to PvE only, and bot SPGs were removed from all existing maps at the time (Spec Ops was not out yet, as was Desert Path which had a chance to spawn an SPG in an off-grid location in relation to a specific secondary objective). Illumination (free spotting in a designated spot) and smoke shells as well as counter-battery pings (the ability to see the approximate location where an enemy SPG fired a shot on the minimap) were also removed. From an anecdotal experience, the SPGs' firing arc was greatly reduced, and the splash radius was also made smaller since then.
SPGs were reintroduced to GlOps mode in 2020 together with smoke shells. White Phosphorous shells were added instead of illumination shells, but for some reasons they do not help reset cap in that mode (they should) as they would in PvE even to this day. These utility shells now have very high firing arc, almost mortar-like. At some time high calibre HE shells dealt tremendous module damage, and while this was a problem mainly associated with high tier MBTs, SPG also benefitted from this, but it was largely reversed for Update 0.35. Otherwise they more or less played the same since 2017's Update 0.19: relatively low firing arc, small splash radius, map/terrain restrictions, and generally low utility caused some players to re-adapt and play such vehicles in direct fire mode, and this is the direction that the developers are currently going for.