If you want, i can change title from DPS to TTK
Yes please! Is Time-to-Kill too long?
We are complaining on the forum that the Panther is underperforming for about a year now and this is news?
I have the impression you didn't read the entire chart.
Personally, I am never going to build anything other than Stugs, no matter how much Panther is buffed (unless it becomes bonkers OP). This is because:
- Shit (pathfinding) happens all the, and Stugs are cheap
- TWP is a free-win vs any kind of opponent. The more expensive the enemy, the better
- Cheap, low-popcap spam scales really well with command P4
Let's take Panther out of the context of Stugs though. Try to also compare its durability to that of heavy tanks. For your convenience, I have included the following targets:
- The Pershing (you can assume it's a Vet0 Panther, without loss of generality)
- Vet2 Panther
The Panther needs to kick some serious ass to make it worthwhile (it's quite expensive, and it's not very good in the AI department). However, simply giving decent DPS to the Panther without taking anything away is going to lead to grief. This is because the Panther:
- Is fast (not as fast as Brit tanks, but Brits aren't the only opponents)
- Has long-ish range
- Is equally durable to a Tigers or Churchills (and way faster than either), when the Panther utilizes that range.
Finally, try to also look how Panther DPS compares to the Comet. The Comet has far better AI, but it's not stellar at that either.
You are entirely correct that the Panther doesn't seem to have any real purpose on the field right now. However, what I am saying is that it needs to give something up, to get DPS in return. Such a trade-off will finally carve out a role for the Panther.
So... StuG is OP, Panther(s) need a bit of buffing and Firefly... has basically a useless ability?
To be honest out of the 3 I think the StuG is the best, of course, it can't be compared to the Firefly's range or damage but still, I had a StuG actually strafe around my Firefly and kill it, that's how slow the turret traversal is lol. And yeah I know I could have turned the whole tank but I wasn't looking at the time, I just notice it was low health getting hit by something and then I noticed it got flanked and fucked by a StuG just before dying.
The Time-to-kill table I drew heavily understates the effect of Tulips in securing kills. In addition to dealing a fair bit of damage, Tulips will completely stun the target, thus forcing it to stick around for another shot.
More crucially, by combining tulips and tank commander, this helps Firefly rack up veterancy insanely fast; and as you can see from the table, Vet3 Fireflies kick some serious ass.
Finally, Tulips are, literally, the only non-doc mobile indirect fire you can have as Brits. Snipers/LeFH/MGs pestering you? Try tulips.
The trick to offsetting the turret traversal time is manually rotating your tank to make it more bearable. It works fine.
Finally, one thing with turreted TDs is that they are easier to "blob". When microing turreted tanks, you don't really have to care that much about the orientation (unless pathing causes them to rotate midfight, etc).