+1000club for Mg42/ Is it balanced?

Since the role of an MG is to pin it will NEVER get as much efficiency as a grenadier unit fx, which roll it is to kill. Most players will immediately retreat if they are stuck in MG fire.
The Unit is fine, just cant compare it to units which are made for completely different purposes!

Efficiency is more or less damage done divided by unit value. Mgs are area denial units (except for maxim which is an UBERSTRUMGEHWER).
Although some adjustments are needed for all MGs I think. Like manual reload and better player control over garrisoned MGs.

Efficiency is totally not a good metric to base any decision on.

Efficiency of unit A is calculated via (HP of damage inflicted / total target squad or vehicle HP) * ( target adjusted cost / unit A adjusted cost ) and divided by the number of unit A's that were built.

Squad wipes are not taken into account. It makes no difference if you kill 5 rifleman models from a single squad, or 1 rifleman model from 5 squads each. Obviously there is a huge ingame difference.

Repairs are not taken into account. You can have an AT gun shoot at a KT, KT repairing, rinse and repeat, and AT gun having zero kills by the end of the game. The AT gun will have insane efficiency.

Recrews are not taken into account. Only the number of units built matters. If you build 2 Paks and recrew a teammate's the results will not consider the third one.

Time spent in a match per unit active is not taken into account. If you have 2 the whole game, then in the final moments of the match you get a third Sherman, the efficiency will be calculated "per Sherman built", so in this case the cumulative damage made by Shermans will be divided by 3 when calculating Sherman efficiency, skewing the results.

MG42 is a piece of crap compared to pre-nerfed MG34 and Maxim in terms of damage;
in terms of suppression? 50 cal beats it again.

It might need a small dps buff, as it is the most balanced hmg in the game, average suppression, average damage. That or the crew is a bit too fragile (being 4 men doesn't help, obviously). I find it decent at its job, except it doesn't really stop blobs in their tracks (and even lone squads are hardly suppressed when they enter in the cone of fire).

I like the mg42 very much, the surpression is good, the damage too and it has a big arc. My biggest problem is that even when the mg42 isn't firing the enemy can run through the sides of the arcs without getting pinned. So.. i think the turning speed of the mg is a little bit too low.