Pak Howitzer needs adjustment

Stats seem to show that USF is the strongest faction.

Tournament is tomorrow and aug3-4. We go by those stats

The only thing that got banned was double okw and double brits

The only thing that got banned was double okw and double brits

They banned all 'double' setups:

This is a mixed factions tournament for both Axis and Allies. For instance each Axis team must play OKW + Ostheer, and on the allied side any two of the three factions in necessary,

That said, it will be interesting, although the same size will be quite small.

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If by some 'on the move' power you mean G43s give the best moving accuracy of any rifle in the game, yeah. Basically a 10% DPS decrease; there is no point not to keep them moving around forever. I suppose I should have specified mainline, too, since, as you said yourself, it really isn't a problem for most automatic-wielding infantry. The Garand isn't even comparable. The BAR grants at least theoretically good moving power as well, at least only slightly below half of the normal dps, but you're only going to get two of them on a squad at most, for 120 munitions.

This is getting off topic, however.

Turning the pack howitzer into a 340 manpower mortar isn't going to cut it. The range might make it theoretically still useable versus MGs, but that's 340 manpower (+the company command post vehicle teching) that you could spend on something that isn't completely useless at anything else; you can't even lay down smoke with it as you could a normal mortar, unless you count the WP, which is mostly horrible in that role in this game and generally only used as an incendiary (and good luck vetting up for it with no/useless autofire.)

If you drastically nerf or remove autofire, it'll needs a deadlier barrage, period, and that's something I already know none of you would be willing to give, just like how price nerfs and teardown time increases all got handwaved in every other thread before this. (Which is hilarious considering the pack howitzer physically can not do all this squad wiping it is claimed to be capable of unless deployed in pairs, something a price change would heartily dissuade, as it is already difficult to justify the 700 MP expenditure unless the USF team is already winning and doesn't need that MP for tanks or bleed

And lastly, all this talk of it being impossible to shut this thing down in a team game with M36s and crap flying all over the place just takes me back to the other howitzers and artillery pieces in this game, as you could make the exact same claim that they are uncounterable, and it would actually stand up since, unlike the pack howitzer, they don't need to be right on the edge of the battlefield to operate.

The most I'd take is upping the autoattack scatter to like, 8 or something, and removing the 1.25 RA penalty as a counterbalance so the thing isn't quite as easy to murder while it misses everything.

Preferably I would just keep it as it is and move the price to 400. But again, I already know that won't fly, since the issue of this thread is not and never has been the ability of dual pack howitzers to wipe, but the fact that it can actually pressure axis off of prepared positions.

Tournament is tomorrow and aug3-4. We go by those stats

Why should we give more weight to a tournament that's going to have a ridiculously small sample size than to the stats that were pulled from potentially hundreds of thousands of automatch games?

The range might make it theoretically still useable versus MGs, but that's 340 manpower (+the company command post vehicle teching) that you could spend on something that isn't completely useless at anything else

Theoretically? It'll still work very well; you'll just need to actually control the unit, instead of letting it sit there.

Also you can't factor in the tech cost entirely, since command post also gives you a "free" rifle squad, and access to ATGs and Stuarts.

If you drastically nerf or remove autofire, it'll needs a deadlier barrage, period, and that's something I already know none of you would be willing to give, just like how price nerfs and teardown time increases all got handwaved in every other thread before this. (Which is hilarious considering the pack howitzer physically can not do all this squad wiping it is claimed to be capable of unless deployed in pairs, something a price change would heartily dissuade, as it is already difficult to justify the 700 MP expenditure unless the USF team is already winning and doesn't need that MP for tanks or bleed

The OST mortar was nerfed across the board a while back, and given almost nothing in return, not sure why the PAK desperately needs compensation. I'd be fine with a slight adjustment to the barrage (i.e. faster cooldown), but there's no reason to increase the damage or AoE.

Price adjustments/teardown time/RA would be dependent on auto-fire changes though, since they would need to be relative.

And lastly, all this talk of it being impossible to shut this thing down in a team game with M36s and crap flying all over the place just takes me back to the other howitzers and artillery pieces in this game, as you could make the exact same claim that they are uncounterable, and it would actually stand up since, unlike the pack howitzer, they don't need to be right on the edge of the battlefield to operate.

This isn't a great comparison. Something like an LeFH has no auto-fire (except counter barrage, which is a whole topic on its own), has a long cool down, is inaccurate, and can be heard across the map so you can easily move out of the way. In addition, static artillery can't move, and is susceptible to recon + offmap combos. It's also much more expensive, doctrinal, and usually behind 8+ points. It's more valid for mobile howitzers (preist, sextant), and I'd like some changes there, too (setup/tear down?), but that's a different topic.

The most I'd take is upping the autoattack scatter to like, 8 or something, and removing the 1.25 RA penalty as a counterbalance so the thing isn't quite as easy to murder while it misses everything.

That just shifts the problem to RNG, where now it's going to randomly wipe squads when in pairs, rather than consistently.

Preferably I would just keep it as it is and move the price to 400. But again, I already know that won't fly, since the issue of this thread is not and never has been the ability of dual pack howitzers to wipe, but the fact that it can actually pressure axis off of prepared positions.

No, it's always been about dual pak howitzers wiping anything static. Yes, that's sometimes 'prepared positions', but that's also (most of the time) LMG grens trying to hold off double-bar rifles, PAK43s, and MG42s - a static unit that is core to OSTs design. It's also been about it doing all that with zero user input.

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Lefh and rocket artillery have audio cues; Pack howitzers have a whooshing slow motion shell that requires two hits to kill infantry. Double pack howitzers is most certainly a larger investment than a lefh or most rocket artillery and is required to achieve the same kill factor as any of these other units. That is why this is a valid comparison.

Mortars still work because they are cheap and multifunctional, being highly mobile (critically, being able to retreat) and adaptable in their role, such as providing smoke. For 240 manpower, the grw34 is still the very best non-doc mortar in the game, and the nerfs only prevented it from being blatantly overpowered. (Edit: I forget to mention that timing is also important, as mortars are not only the best, but the only real indirect capability most factions will have for the early and, arguably based on definitions and faction, most of the 'mid' game)

I am confused by your comments on RNG. Are you asking for autoattack to be nerfed or to be removed entirely? 8 is approaching mortar levels of autofire scatter, and thusly the only difference that remains is AOE range. Are you asking for the autoattack to be reduced in power as well as accuracy to mortar levels? This is acceptable for a 240 manpower utility unit like a mortar, but nobody in their right might is going to be paying 340 manpower for a what then amounts to a 40-range better barrage with better AOE but equal damage and a longer cooldown. It won't happen, and the unit will simply stop being produced because the role in question can at least possibly be filled by a mortar, and certainly isn't worth the current cost of the Pack Howitzer. Where the manpower will go instead I can't say, because it is essentially deleting a role from the base USF roster, since the faction has no non-doctrinal rocket artillery.

So either buff the barrage or delete the unit, I guess. If slow death by autoattack is unacceptable, it'll need to be replaced by feasibly comparable ability in the barrage, no 'if', 'and', or 'buts' about it.

Why should we give more weight to a tournament that's going to have a ridiculously small sample size than to the stats that were pulled from potentially hundreds of thousands of automatch games?

That is how it had been done, and the game is healthier because of it. The stats should only take into account the most recent patch. Those stat are from dec to march

The thing about pak howi is that it's shells are heat seeking. Maybe make them take slightly longer to fall if somehow we can't get rid of the heat seeking abilities. Other than that the pak howi is fine. And this is coming from an Ost main.

No. It's already fragile as fuck and one of the very few USF methods of forcing the Axis factions to get off their asses instead of hiding behind schwere and team weapons.

If the pack gets nerfed, so should the lefh, stuka and nebelwerfer. Hell, sturmpanzer too.

As fragile as its autoatack range...

Pak howie remains as an example of a unit boosted by tech rework that never adjusted their brand new versatility. Similar to what happened to OST Pgrens. But Pgrens became easier to get because some *cough cough USF faction were bullying so hard OST team weapons... that includes pak howie.

Turning the pack howitzer into a 340 manpower mortar isn't going to cut it. The range might make it theoretically still useable versus MGs, but that's 340 manpower (+the company command post vehicle teching)

No if you first remove USF T0 mortars...
And tech cost are deniable to the unit actual cost. No one rushes a pak howie and even less on a faction that can have infantry smoke.

If you drastically nerf or remove autofire, it'll needs a deadlier barrage, period

Wrong, because at least in this an the prior thread about the same topic, Pak howies are over performing, no consolation price needed.

And lastly, all this talk of it being impossible to shut this thing down in a team game with M36s and crap flying all over the place just takes me back to the other howitzers and artillery pieces in this game, as you could make the exact same claim that they are uncounterable, and it would actually stand up since, unlike the pack howitzer, they don't need to be right on the edge of the battlefield to operate.

But you keep missing the littlemost detail: Howitzers are doctrinal, pak howie is not. And all long range arty neither have auto attack nor are as effective at hurting manpower as pak howie.

But thanks for bringing in up all the details that pak howie needs to get nerfed somehow.

No if you first remove USF T0 mortars...
And tech cost are deniable to the unit actual cost. No one rushes a pak howie and even less on a faction that can have infantry smoke.

Wrong, because at least in this an the prior thread about the same topic, Pak howies are over performing, no consolation price needed.

But you keep missing the littlemost detail: Howitzers are doctrinal, pak howie is not. And all long range arty neither have auto attack nor are as effective at hurting manpower as pak howie.

But thanks for bringing in up all the details that pak howie needs to get nerfed somehow.

I don't even know why I bother replying to you, given your history of basically calling for any and all allied units capable of challenging team weapons to be nerfed and that x and y axis unit is bullied around by OP Riflemen/Pack Howitzer/Scott/Paras etc. The fact you were on board with the JLI back when that cancer was in full swing last year is enough to throw your opinion out entirely. But I'll bite, and I'll try to be civil.

Basically, you want to remove the mortar, because... because rear echelons and officers have tech-locked smoke grenades, I guess. A weird way of balancing things, removing factional free smoke for the entire first half of the game because god forbid team weapons have to be moved, or something like that. And then, that not being enough, I suppose you want to turn the Pack Howitzer into the mortar, at what is essentially "tier 2-3" (tiers are admittedly a poor indicator of timing for USF, but it does require two tech purchases), and 340 mp a pop.

What I want to know is why you think USF should have to spend so much manpower to produce what is basically, now, after your proposed nerfs, a longer ranged mortar, whose sole capability is the barrage, that, like all barrages of it's kind, is essentially only useful for moving a team weapon a few meters in one direction or the other.

Are you really struggling this much versus a single unit? I offered several possible nerfs, not because I think they are needed, but because we have this thread every other week and I am hoping some sort of agreement can be reached; it is notable that the howitzer was not such a popular topic before the 'nerf' to the spawned squad size (and thusly cost), and so a 40-60 range manpower increase seemed the logical solution to end the complaints. A teardown nerf would make the howitzer even more killable than it already is.

Finally let's approach the note about howitzers (the pack howitzer, seemingly excluded from this by nature of... not being doctrinal.) Can a lefh wipe an entire infantry squad in a single shell? Yes. Can a pack howitzer? No. Mobility: a lefh cannot move, but neither does it have to, as the range one provides is more than enough to cover the span of the map. Does this hinder survivability? Perhaps, but the crew of these guns is more resilient than that of the pack howitzer, and it can be placed much further behind the lines.

If you want the pack howitzer to be a barrage only weapon, why not make the barrage worthwhile? It seems logical to anyone not merely attempting to nerf the unit from existence, and the pack howitzer must still get within range of firing, and, of course, stay there in order to complete the barrage. How would this cripple the poor underperforming axis? After all, supposedly it is the autofire which poses such a threat to the permanently immobilized grenadiers and team weapons which inhabit these twisted scenarios, and it well should be, as barrages beyond a certain level of play are effective only at affecting damage against buildings or prompting, as said before, a team weapon squad to dislodge itself temporarily. Would an barrage AOE increase, or even a damage increase, really be the nail in this hypothetical axis coffin? Even if autoattack were, say, removed entirely?

I for one wonder if it would even be enough for USF players to produce this unit. It is seen now because of the autoattack. That much I will always agree; even the WP barrage is only incidentally used, HEAT and normal barrage really only for attacks on the Schwere Panzer HQ. And that would be the only role in which the Pack Howitzer is still effective, were the autoattack to be nerfed from existence. Even if the USF mortar were removed completely, the pack howitzer would only see use if granted a free smoke barrage, just as the mortar once had, and even then only more rarely, as it is not a timely unit and costs considerably more than any mortar would, its shells slower and the cooldowns larger inbetween. It simply is not the same as a mortar, it fills an entirely different role, like that of the brummbar or AI stug (or, the more popular comparison, rocket artillery, which achieves the same thing via different function), a weapon to push off infantry and team weapons from prepared positions, only, in this instance, from a distance. This role is what the unit is designed to excel at, and I should doubt highly it would perform well in any other role without buffs of some sort.

You really have to ask how many units should be nerfed just because players are apparently incapable of preserving infantry and team weapons. At what point would you be happy with the balance of this game? At what point, riding through the lockdown of the map by MGs, with apparently only munitions-bound smoke to oppose them from USF, does this game become fair to you?

Can you tell me? Do you even know?

Oh, this again

If it's coming up this often, it should probably be looked into.

How is that "often"?

Last time it came up it was from a player that plays exclusively single faction and floats around 7000 rank.
And its the thread you link.

Why should we give more weight to a tournament that's going to have a ridiculously small sample size than to the stats that were pulled from potentially hundreds of thousands of automatch games?

Don't you know it?

A single game with non meta strats is a better statistic then hundreds or tousands of regular games played on a daily basis. If that one tournament game manages to support ridiculous point, it counts for double too!

That is how it had been done, and the game is healthier because of it

The only reason we kind of used tournament stats to get a very rough indication of balance is because we never had anything better. Now we do.

These reactions are hilarious. No wonder balance is always screwed up lol.

Just make its auto attack range smaller. Then reduce it mp cost to compensate. Done fixed.

Stats seem to show that USF is the strongest faction.

Where does it state that?
The data actually states that the game is pretty much balanced at the moment with win rates differing ~2-3%. The graphs are visually misleading, since the bottom line starts at approx 40%, which makes the differences look bigger than they actually are.

The most interesting piece of data is the 2v2 team composition, which shows team win rates based on composition. This is almost the only graph where there are bigger differences.
And here we can see that OKW might be a bit OP, while OST is a bit UP. Or at least OST cannot fill the gaps of the faction's design. Also there is no difference between AT and RT, which further emphazises that. OKW/OST however seem to be alright.
If USF was too strong, you should see that a USF/USF team has unexpectedly high win rates (similar to OKW), which is not the case.

Stats seem to hint OKW is the strongest faction, OST the weakest. Nothing else in that regard.
But I think this was already common sense in the forum.

Stats seem to hint OKW is the strongest faction, OST the weakest. Nothing else in that regard.
But I think this was already common sense in the forum.

Those stats were mainly based on the time before Ost got all the recent buffs. So judging from those stats it´s actually pretty obvious that Soviets are the worst faction at least in 2v2.

Those stats were mainly based on the time before Ost got all the recent buffs. So judging from those stats it´s actually pretty obvious that Soviets are the worst faction at least in 2v2.

That is indeed very true, we should wait for more stats of the current build.

Soviet data is a bit strange in 2v2. My explanation:
Mixed teams with Soviets perform just as well as any other team, be it mixed or not. Just SOV/SOV seems to be underperforming in RT, but not really in AT.
This could be due to:
1. OKW is stronger against SOV than against other factions. SOV was and still is mostly balanced against OST, and we can see this everywhere in the design of both factions.
2. The communication of AT benefits SOV more than others, so coordination and snowballing is more present in SOV strategy.
3. (actually what I think, just came to my mind): The data is skewed. On december 8th, there was a huge CoH2 give away for the base factions, but not for WFA and UKF. This means that there was a huge flood of low rank OST and SOV randoms running around that got also matched vs more experienced players with other factions. Of course they lost. This would also explain why OST's win rate is lower than the rest. Also it would explain the disparity between Soviet AT and RT win rate. AT win rate is fine, the RT win rate might be caused by the new randoms that joined the game and lowered the score of SOV.

3. (actually what I think, just came to my mind): The data is skewed. On december 8th, there was a huge CoH2 give away for the base factions, but not for WFA and UKF. This means that there was a huge flood of low rank OST and SOV randoms running around that got also matched vs more experienced players with other factions. Of course they lost. This would also explain why OST's win rate is lower than the rest. Also it would explain the disparity between Soviet AT and RT win rate. AT win rate is fine, the RT win rate might be caused by the new randoms that joined the game and lowered the score of SOV.

I only look at top 10% elo win rates the rest is meaningless because of how matchmaking works. None of the new players would have played in the top 10% elo bracket

Those stats were mainly based on the time before Ost got all the recent buffs. So judging from those stats it´s actually pretty obvious that Soviets are the worst faction at least in 2v2.

then in 3 vs 3 and 4 vs 4 soviet are same or better than okw