Seriously, spending ammo on units doesn't (or at least shouldn't) mean that they become immune to their supposed hardcounter.
If you blob and run into an HMG AND YOU DON'T STOP to blob those squads shouldn't win without any action from the player.
Unfortunately, PTRS allow players to do exactly that. Blob, run into HMGs and destroy them without any effort.
4 squads of anything (except Obers) running into an M2HB in green cover will also get suppressed. The difference is that you still need to use nades or try to move your squads out of the firing zone. You still have to do something.
I found out that 4 Obers will wipe any HMG in green cover within seconds. Suppression should have a stronger negative effect on accuracy IMO. Suppression should also reduce range of grenades by ~50% (or completely disable them?).
A 'hard counter' is not the same as 'immune to the thing it hard counters in any number forever and ever'
A PaK 43 is a hard counter to mediums but gets swarmed. Same with Jagdtigers, Elephants. All hard counters, all get
overwhelmed.
Overwhelming is a very real thing and is always going to happen. One 'hardcounter' to blobs does not mean, for example, you can plant down 3MG's on Minsk Pocket but that does not mean you get to say GG and go home.
Just because you are a unit designed to hard counter another unit does not mean you can just carve through any absurdly exaggerated disparity of forces.
MG's are not a one unit hard counter to blobs anyway. They are a blob suppressiog tool that mean all your screening infantry- which should take the first volley of fire anyway, can mop up the straggelers. Infantry SUPPORT weapon, not rambo. If you left a lone MG on a flank, you did it wrong.
The best thing to balance PTRS would probably be to revert the accuracy buff and increase penetration instead so that PTRS feel more like AT weapons.
It makes me laugh when I read the patch notes and see how Relic intended to "encourage combined arms" and "reduce the effectiveness of blobbing". They did quite the opposite.
Lordy no. Even more pen in tow, the PTRS is going to be a horrible AT weapon because of how low its overall DPS is. Not to mention all the crying about how 'Omg AT rifle am pen my bootiful Krupp Stehl' that would invariably happen.
The PTRS was changed, if you read the patch notes, because guards were vastly under-preforming at their role of elite infantry. They came at a high cost with
terrible DPS and even 120 muni didn't make them worth a damn, and now button has also been nerfed into oblivion
(Whilst glorious axis Target Weak Point remains a one click kill on most all tanks in the game.)
It was expressly to make the PTRS a potent support weapon for guards riflemen, able to engage infantry and lightly armored targets (scout cars, cars, halftracks, and yes, weapon teams) effectively. Just like, you know, an AT rifle. The predecessor to the anti materiel rifle. They're now working like they
always should have done. And frankly, guards have always done this to team weapons anyway, it's just nobody noticed because they were god awful.
The only problem, as before stated, is the ready availability to conscripts. Guards you can't wander round with dozens of, conscripts you can.