1. American grenade is no longer effective counter play against 2-3 mg42 strat, thats why usf get's mortar.
2. OKW now receive machinegun in hq, thats second reason why usf won't exist in this game without mortar.
Because USF was insta loosing pre-patch, if OKW used luft\def doctrine or ost used and used 2-3 MG
USF pretty much now have counter to MG for 280 and its allow them to skip grenades and get stuar much faster into the game. Fair enouth, OKW will be able to fight this because of Raketen and faust for volks.
But how Ostheer should fight already dominating USF only god knows. Probably the only way you can somehow survive as Ost against USF now - abuse sniper. If sniper is dead or lucky mortar shot got him, you pretty much insta lose as Ostheer now.
I say, give OKW doctinal sniper and no-one ever ever will play as Ostheer now, lol. Because ostheer is so badly outdated and out-of-meta its not even funny.
They are not buffing soviet infantry in general - they are buffing penals which, just for your information, were NON-EXISTANT in the meta for a really long time. That's not going to hurt Ostheer.
And if you haven't noticed it yet, Ostheer gets a drastic decrease of tech cost of t3 (15 fuel) and t4(25). If there´s anthing rolling over anyone - it's Ostheer tanks over USF who just got their captain nerfed.
Soviets buffed in general. The thing is that you can go for T1 and stay on pair with ostheer inf for a long time, and because penals have their vet bonuses, they can scale into mid\late game pretty good. Considering fact that SU-85 and T34 got buffs aswell, you dont really HAVE to pick doctrines with armor call-ins.
So you can pretty much pick even defensive commander, use penals covered by DSHK, mortars and light AT gun against fast light armor and then roll over your tanks. Or used schreck partysans, or even guards. The thing is that, soviets loosing absolutely nothing now if they picked right commander. And they could chose when they want to have advantage.
OKW wont be so badly hurted by thouse buffs, while Ostheer will be toned down REALLY badly in 1v1 soviet vs ost match up.
As I told before, the only and single thing which keeps ost in game - sniper, nothing more.