The inconsistent performance of Piats

Piat have the following characteristics:

• cost 40
  
• 2 available to most infantries
  
• weapon type ballistic
  
• range 45
  
• damage 120, deflection damage 80
  
• penetration 130/120/110
  
• accuracy 5.8/4.3/2.9
  
• DPS 17.1/ 17.1/ 15.3/ 13.1/ 11.0 (vs size 20)
  
• trajectory ballistic high angle
  
• projectile velocity medium to low
  
• scatter max distance 6, less with attack ground.
  
  

Problems:
Imo currently the weapon either perform extremely good or very poorly. Extremely good vs slow stationary/targets bad against fast moving targets, making the weapon rather frustrating to use or to be used against you.

Point 1 and 2 make it extremely spammable , any improvements to performance should have cost and availability (limit to 1 per squad? remove availability to team members?) revisited.

Point 5,6 and 9 make it extremely good against heavy armored vehicles since it has decent penetration, chance for rear hit even when firing from the front and very good damage on deflection.

Point 8 show that it on paper it has the highest DPS than other held weapons.

Points 9,10,11 shows that it can be used behind shot blocker, that it is micro intensive (since players best bet is to try to predict vehicles position and use "attack ground"), the luck of collision greatly reducing actually DPS compared to other weapons.

Suggestions:
reduce spammability (see above)

adjust cost and DPS, having the highest DPS weapon being the cheapest makes little sense.

Increase scatter on attack ground order.

Reduce damage to bunkers. With high damage and firing behind shotblockers the weapon can be easily used to take out base bunkers with little time for reaction.

increase consistency with one of the 2 next methods:

1) Introduce collision, having a "ballistic type weapon" that has almost zero chance of achieving collision makes little sense.
In ranges 0-10 the weapon could use a lower angle allowing the weapon to hit target via collision. This aim at making the performance more consistent at close ranges.

This can also help UKF protect their ATG from circle strafe or from being crashed and counter weight the limited access to AT snares. If needed one can replace the deflection damage with this method with a small stun affect (which should make the vehicle immune to further stuns for some time o avoid stun lock).

This could even be an fire mode, for the weapon available to the player. When chosen the weapon would have its range reduced to 0-15 and use direct fire with a higher speed projectile.


2)Change the weapon type. Instead of being a "ballistic type weapon" (direct fire) turn it to explosive type weapon. Instead of actually having to hit the target it would be able to damage target via AOE damage and AOE Penetration.

Cover table would have to be used so that the weapon would do extra damage to vehicles similarly to PTRS/Boys.


*(ballistic weapon type is rather bad use of the term from relic since it more suitable for indirect fire weapon)

i don't like the piat because the brits don't have any snares to enable them to hit with it (everyone else snares and/or homing AT). piats are also shit against light vehicles.

with all that said, they're theoretically a very strong AT weapon, they're just hard to use and don't really fit with the mechanics of CoH2 (no other main weapon requires you to aim with it).

Sooner or later they'll realize it's a bad idea that the weapon only performs well when you use attack ground.

Same thing that happened, for example, to USF ambulance.

piat is better at AI than AT lol, you should trust your 6 pounder for AT

Copied from another thread...

From your link:

-Reduce spammability

Sure, but make them worth the increased cost in the first place. Increasing the cost because of DPS isn't one and the same though. Their piss poor accuracy against anything smaller than a heavy makes that somewhat redundant.

-Increase scatter on attack ground order

You shouldn't have to use the attack ground order in the first place. That's a roundabout solution to the issue.

-Reduce damage to bunkers. With high damage and firing behind shotblockers the weapon can be easily used to take out base bunkers with little time for reaction

Since when can static bunkers react to anything? lol. Not sure what you are trying to argue for there.

Point #1 seems like a decent enough suggestion. No issue there.

Point #2 is a bit iffy. That would be be bound to cause some odd occurrences, especially against infantry.

I do think that PIATs will see some sort of fix, though its unlikely to be anything like your suggestions.

Weapons with high scatter should not bypass their scatter with attack ground...(goes for a number of units)

Bunker can not react but piat can destroy them faster then someone can sent troops to protect them.

Piat damage vs infantry can be fixed the same way PTRS has with bonus damage vs vehicles as suggest in my suggestions...

http://www.coh2.org/topic/46274/can-we-discuss-the-piat/page/3#post_id457879

They are very good against heavy tanks and good against all other slow vehicles (damaged engine).

For their costs they are probably the best AT atm.

They should get a price increase to 60 again.
Maybe increase their velocity/ lower the angle to make them a little bit more consistent againt light vehicle but lower their dmg a bit.

I dont know, they are anti-heavytank, they shouldnt perform well agains light vehicles, same as PTRS is an anti-light vehicles and doesnt performs great agains heavy armor

Not sure about the AOE idea... it would have to be implemented well or else PIATs might become too good as AI (might function as mini grenades?) Might be hard to implement too little splash and they are still useless too big and it's just constant AOE on squads. Though this might be a good thing as it would discourage OKW blobs of doom lol

Not sure about the AOE idea... it would have to be implemented well or else PIATs might become too good as AI (might function as mini grenades?) Might be hard to implement too little splash and they are still useless too big and it's just constant AOE on squads. Though this might be a good thing as it would discourage OKW blobs of doom lol

Gamon bombs do 200 damage to vehicles and very little to infantry. Think of it like a mini Gamon bomb...

It's almost as if it's exactly the same problem as from CoH1!