Profile of rofltehcat

It is a consequence of its lower than normal scatter distance and its narrow scatter angle. They "miss" the infantry but their shot still lands very close to them. It has a rather small explosion radius so it really should never hit more than one guy but it still happens that it kills 2 men, which takes the PGrens out of the battle and is pretty cost intensive to reinforce.

The devs talked about having a scatter multiplier for moving tanks on the test server. When they release it, I think it'll fix some of the problems. It'll surely still hit from time to time but it'll probably happen less often.

If there are shot blockers you can put your PGrens behind, you can protect them as well. Most green cover works but some fences and even uneven terrain can help.

What about increasing the crew size with 1~2 men that stand outside the sandbags? Because they don't receive the cover, they'd die to small arms fire very easily and it makes the Pak43 more resilient to lucky tank hits and precision strikes.
The Pak43 also didn't receive the buff to support weapons in which they increased the crew size for nearly everything else. Kill 2 men and the thing is decrewed.

The 3 crew men are often bunched up extremely closely together, making them basically insta-kill by a precision strike from a mortar. I'm fine with things like a Katyusha, an off-map artillery barrage, normal mortar barrages or a heavy artillery piece destroying or decrewing it but lucky tank hits and precision strikes currently feel a bit too good against it.

Interesting. But there seem to be differences between your values and the graphs on the herokuapp site... now I'm confused

http://coh2-stats.herokuapp.com/small_arms/maxim_m1910_hmg_mp
http://coh2-stats.herokuapp.com/small_arms/hmg_team_mg42_mp
http://coh2-stats.herokuapp.com/small_arms/dshk_38_sokolov_mp

From the little testing I did, plain Irregulars aren't worth it. However, I have just the free commander that can only call in Irregulars and not Partisans, and only the LMG variants. Therefore, I won't be able to comment on those.

They seem to come with either a LMG42 + 3 Kar98 or with 2 DP-LMGs + 2 Mosin Nagants. In theory they could offer some very interesting variety but the LMG-squads need a little buffing. Currently, they are a bit like Grenadier-squads light, as in that they are simply worse in every aspect.

Inadequacies:
Squad count: 4 men (or women). I think they are designed to be the counter-part to Osttruppen (6-men squad in a faction of 4-men squads <-> 4-men squad in a faction of 6-men squads) and this is actually a good idea but this also makes them squishier than Conscripts.
Armor: 1 armor is the same as Conscripts have but Conscripts have a higher squad count. Now, I don't think buffing them to 1.5 would be sensible, after all they are just irregular troops.
30 MP reinforcement cost. While higher reinforcement costs promote the use of Merge, the other factors above combined with this make them uninteresting.
Their weapons: From what I can tell by looking at the stats, their versions of weapons (except the AT weapons) seem to be generally weaker than the original versions. This makes sense (scavenged weapons, limited ammo, worse maintained) but further decreases their usefulness. Of course their weapons don't cost munitions so they shouldn't be as good as the original LMG42/DP-LMG.

So to sum this up, their survivability, cost and squad DPS is too low.


How to fix this? I really don't know. To be honest, I think Soviets already have enough call-in infantry and call-in support weapons. Upgraded Guards Rifles for example come with 1.5 armor, 2 DP-LMGs and 2 Mosin Nagant (+2 AT rifles), have the same reinforcement cost and a higher squad count. For pure anti infantry duties there are Shock Troopers.
For LMG-Irregulars to be special instead of just weaker options to other units, they'd need a niche that they currently don't have and that I don't really see open anywhere.


As for the Partisans (remember I can't play them):
Spawning behind enemy lines is very interesting and gives them their own little niche, for sure.
However, handing them that amount of AT prowess (even if I haven't seen it ingame yet) sounds like a horrible idea. For Partisans, a form of (slow building) mine, detonation charge or IED would have been a more interesting option instead.
Burrying a primed AT grenade sounds a lot more like Partisan tactics to me than toting around several heavy AT rifles or Panzerschrecks. Partisans would probably have been lucky to have even one of those (and enough ammo for them) between several squads.

This is not the case, at least from the game files: The Pak43 has ""ignore_shot_blocking": true," whereas this value is set to false for the Sokolov.
However, there are certain objects like that big hay pile on Langreskaya that can be fired through although it looks like you can't.

It is still very good, though. Around twice the dps of the other HMGs and around 1.5 times of the Maxim's suppression. I really like that commander although I think the mines are too good. I don't think the Sokolov is a big problem but might turn into one on certain maps or when there are too many but to judge whether this is the case, they'll have to fix other things first.