Profile of MMX

unrelated but it was funny how people went 4 of these ATs and the balance team insta nerfed it because it actually destroyed blobbing as a tactic

and in typical axis main fashion they neutered it and left it in the dust to be the worst soviet unit you can purchase for manpower. Would rather buff it's cost rather than to make a pointless change to a unit that NOBODY uses

Probably more because it outranged basically everything except indirect fire pieces, including MGs at which it could fire with impunity. I'm glad this was changed back then, even though I agree the canister shot is rather pointless after the nerf.

The baby AT-gun is also far from a useless unit that nobody ever gets; at least in 1v1s they're pretty decent for the cost and complement certain builds very well.

But balance issues aside and to come back to the original topic: I think the target priority switch as proposed in the OP isn't a bad idea at all. Even though it may only save you an extra click this would still be a nice QoL addition and pretty much in-line with a lot of other QoL changes the game received previously. Not sure why people are getting out pitchforks here but I guess it's the usual bite reflex.

The barrage is what he was talking about. The regular shots have decent time between them. Wich is fine for the brums balance.

His point that the zis was considered op with its 2 secs intval barrage, wich is a very valid one.
The brum barrage is insane compared to the zis one, and i believe cheaper as well. There is nothing you can do once it barrages a team weapon, unlike the zis barrage wich while good wasent a wipe ability.
No cost justifies not being able to have a chance at escaping/dodging.

yeah i'm aware he was talking about the barrage, that's what i was referring to as well. my point is that the interval between the shots of the bunker busting barrage isn't around 2 sec, which would truly be insane, but closer to double that. now don't get me wrong, i think this is still a very strong ability, but the comparison with the pre-nerf zis barrage is pretty far fetched imho.

Interesting. I think the 50% reduced cooldown of "Not One Step Back" could come in handy. Not sure how much of a DPS boost this equates to exactly, but probably something in the range of 20 - 25%... not bad at all, even though the additional 20% RA debuff can be absolutely lethal in many situations. Can't see any good reason to ever use "Hold The Line" on a sniper, though.
Anyway, considering this interaction - unintended or not - is rather of situational usefulness I'd also say there isn't really much of an issue.

can you elaborate on that?

[...]
Normal people (meaning everyone that didn't have to take a statistics to get their degree) often underestimate how common "uncommon" results are. Take the normal heads or tails. Theoretically it's 50/50. Would you ever expect to roll 9 tails in a row? You can simulate this in Excel by putting "=rand()" in cell A1 and "=round(A1,0)" in cell B1, copy that down 99 cells. Rand will recalculate every time you hit F9. If my Sherman had a 50/50 chance of penetrating a Tiger and I fired 100 shots, I would've got 9 bounces in a row on my third recalculation. Streaks of 9 are somewhat uncommon, but 5-7 are really common.

This is a good point IMHO. While getting 7 bounces in a row isn't exactly likely with a bit under a 1% chance, it's not astronomically improbable, either. Yet the perception about how rare such occurrences are often depends if people find themselves on the receiving end of RNG or not.

[...]
The two counter arguments I'd make against just looking at the numbers in Excel are about the effect of alpha damage and time to kill being irrelevant. In a RTS, alpha damage has an outsized effect because it greatly increases the risk of losing a squad. That was a lot of the problem with the old IS2. It seemed to go miss, miss, wipe on squads a lot, but sometimes it started with the wipe. The other problem is that people like to argue about the time to kill. I've seen multiple comparisons where people are comparing TTK times in the 20-40 seconds and trying to use that to make a point. In an actual game, 20 seconds may as well be an eternity, as nobody has reactions that are that slow. The bazooka was once nerfed because Relic thought the TTK was too short.
[...]

TTK is certainly not the only and most important performance figure, but I'd argue it is also far from irrelevant and can be quite suitable to prove a point (at least as long as it is put into the right perspective). It should, however, more be seen as a surrogate for DPS/DPM that also takes things like over damage into account than as a simple measure of 'how long does it take A to kill B'. After all, the fact that firefights usually don't last more than 20 s doesn't mean it can't serve as a good benchmark for comparing the relative performance of different units against a similar target.

In the end, though, you're of course right in that TTK shouldn't be taken as the only measure and things like alpha damage or the variety of mobility and other non-combat relevant stats also play an important role.