Profile of JohnnyB

That depends if you want to actually win or just play.

If you go for wins, you're forced for shock frontline or ISU as static play with guards therefore guard rifle doc is heavily punished in current meta by indirect weapons and flames.

Sure, you can go hipster and play other doctrines, but only recently soviets can use more then two doctrines on meta level.

Not necessarely. For example, I love that land lease doctrine, it's allways in my soviet loadout and I find M4C Shermann one of the best mediums in game. I like it more than EZ8.
I also don't find "hipster" doctrines those who have propaganda artilery which is cheap and effective especially against okw which is an infantry based faction. But I am afraid we just derailed this thread.

NO MORE FACTIONS. ENOUGH! Don't want another OP abomination, Axis' side or not.

the most meh hmg in the game is the maxim

Disagree.

Does anybody here ACTUALLY play OKW? Do you know that you can already do this by just choosing LuftWaffe or Fortifications Doctrine? It's funny that you're trying to argue against having the MG34 as a T0 non-doctrinal unit because you're afraid of the imbalances it will create, but that strategy is already possible.

It doesn't even really make any sense why Relic decided to make the MG34 doctrinal. There's is absolutely no good reason why OKW's MG is on a commander other than they just wanted to make OKW different.

Yes, I intensively play OKW and I say they need a stock MG34. Being locked in 2 doctrines like I'm feeling now, does not make a faction viable.
Like I said before, MG34 should be the only supression platform for OKW, kubel should lose this ability.

Signed.

With a side note though: it won't be good for OKW to have access on 2 supression platforms (one mobile, one static). Imagine for instance what will happen if we simply switch between kubel and mg34.
Mg34, being a stock unit, will be built almost every game. Chosing one doctrine with kubel, that would give you in eraly game 2 suppression platforms - one static, one mobile - that could give you a to important advantage.
Of course I am aware that you can do this today too, if choosing an MG34 doctrine, but the phenomenon will be so much spread if we make mg34 non doctrinal and just switch the 2 units between them.

So my side note is in fact: make Mg34 a stock unit - in hq or med truck (most appropriate in hq), make kuble doctrinal in luftwaffe and fortifications, BUT remove supression from kubel, give it ability to decap and cap territory and increase its DPS with a small margin to make it still viable in early infantry confrontations.

I think that making MG34 a stock unit would be the safest way to change OKW because this way we won't have to change volks AI performance.