Yes that would be a buff to the MG of the Panzer IV and Panther.
Why?
Because the Stug and Stuh MG (which is MG42 Vehicle same as halftrack) deals
25% more damage and double suppression.
(you see the latter I nerfed a little in one of my lists.)
Additionally, Stug gets 1.15x health bonus and Stuh gets 0.85x received penetration.
Panther and Panzer IV get nothing at all. Just a crappier MG. People that go for tank veterancy with Tier 4 units are not being rewarded properly for their investment.
You know why pIV/Panther gets just a "crappy MG" on tank vet 2 and StuGs get better bonuses?
Because those tanks have better guns,
a turret, better speed/maneuverability than the StuG and 600/742 base health compared to 400 for the StuG.
Tank vet offers StuGs additional bonuses to make them scale against AT guns, Paratroopers with RR and M10. Since they have no turret they get this additional survivability instead.
It's just like with infantry vet. If you want to get the real bonus you have to tech all the way to vet 3 tanks. Those armour skirts make axis t4 tanks ridiculously hard to take down.
You know how you can fix this easily? Just switch the mg42 slot items from pIV/Panther with those from the StuG IV. Problem solved.
Puma I agree with you, it's seems a bit random and i actually already mentioned to remove the 5 procent green health crit. Other than that it's a bit tricky to change Puma crit tables, given it's a combination of a burst weapon and a tank weapon.
But I definitely agree the damage spread needs to be more even and I was already playing around with a few ideas in my mind. Something with less damage, less cooldown
One thing I would/will remove certainly is the cooldown modifier on the move. It's a system that fails.
Tier 1 changes hmm ... I don't know, maybe cutting some corners on the volk scaling like their insane sight range bonus at vet 2, and that capping bonus if tier 2 is reseached, a bit tuning on their mp40's ... . And slight sniper nerfs. Other than that I really can't see a thing to be changed.
Or one would have to redefine volksgrenadiers, cheaper and weaker. But I wouldn't make such drastic changes.
Why change so much? Just increase Volks reinforce cost back to something like 26 instead of these ridiculously low 22 mp they cost at the moment to reinforce. Volks were meant to have higher reinforcement costs while having low upkeep, riflemen the other way around.
I have no idea why someone thought this 28->22 mp change would be a good idea at all.
About snipers: Sure, increase their reload/cooldown values by 1second. It makes the snipers less strong without hurting too much.
About the puma: The puma gun is incredibly hard to tweak. I've spent weeks in the past to balance the Panzer II Luchs gun for the Ostheer (uses the same 20mm autocannon as the puma). It's a nightmare really... If you don't want to test for hours I'd suggest you just leave it as it is.
Howver, just an advice if you actually want to do it: I'd go for lower burst duration + changes to reload time/frequency + tweaking the cooldown multipliers for different ranges. It seems like those are responsible for the weird squad fuks on close range in > 2 seconds.
Hmm, maybe. Maybe we need to look at zeal (and ftfl) instead. Or maybe we need to look at mortars, flamethrowers and such things.
Btw Croc is an absolute beast vs tier 2 strats. Just sad no one build it in the broadcasted games.
Zeal doesn't really affect volks, the main bonuses are concentrated on values that lmg42 grenadiers and kch utilize. About ftfl: it's sort of fine I think, just nerf Volksgrenadiers
Edit, just to make my point more clear:
The fact that t3 is so overwhelmingly strong atm is also a result of Wehr t1 being strong also. It has always been the case with wehr that you could fasttech to t3 when you got more than 4 t1 units onto the field. Now, with bikes, volks, mg42 buffs it's much easier for wehr to apply pressure to US than the other way around, because US sort of needs BARs/grenades to fight your infantry properly. This delays fast motorpool which would be a decent counter to a puma. So, for Wehr there's no need to get t2 instead of t3. And if a Wehr player already has t3 he won't need t4 anymore, because t3 and t4 contain similar units - more powerful, but much more expensive, so it's not worth to invest 100fuel into t4, because you can just get another stug + tank vet 2 for that, which will be better in a 1v1.
Also, t2 is sort of bad because of snipers being super efficient against grens.
So, in order to make t4 attractive again, you need to nerf Wehr t1 to create an urge to tech to t2 and nerf snipers.