Profile of Shazz

At the moment I feel that a number of units have far too much range. ISU152, Elefant, SU85 are the worst / most common offenders. Pak43 is on the edge but I give it a pass because it's immobile so you'll always know where it is and it's extremely vulnerable to any form of artillery.

As team games drag out they become basically artillery fests between these units and it makes me feel like I'm playing the Scheldt on every single map. Coupled with the supreme ease of scouting (recon planes, cone sight, spotting scope), this just isn't fun for me.

I'd like to suggest a rethinking of how these units work to make them more interesting. The goal here is to still keep the flavor of their being long range heavy tanks but make their practical use more in CoH's flavor instead of backline ultra hard counters.

1.) Give ISU152 + Elefant the ability to switch between AP and HE rounds with a 15s cooldown. AP being what the Elefant fires right now, HE being what the ISU152 fires except with way less penetration and slightly reduced splash. Imagine the Tiger from the vCoH expansion campaign a bit. The thought here basically is to make them require some thought / effort from the player and the cooldown prevents them from being good vs everything all the time.

2.) Reduce their range to whatever 1 screen length is (50?).

3.) Reduce cost of both slightly and slightly increase rotation speed. Since they'll be further up they need ability to react faster and without a turret that means rotation speed.

4.) Leave concrete piercing round with its large range to the ISU152 as a munitions based ability. Fires HE round with improved penetration / splash. Basically what it is today.

5.) Give Elefant a slightly less long range barrage similar to SU76 as a munitions based ability. Fires 4 shells over 12 seconds with standard spread.

6.) Reduce SU85 range to same. This obviously requires some work elsewhere to make Sov AT viable without the SU85 in its current state, but in the long run would be good and is outside scope of this.

Thoughts? Flames? Suggestions? I know it's all a bit of a pipe dream on some level but felt like doing some legwork for devs instead of just the usual bitchfest. Thanks.

I fail to see how high cost justifies its tendency to insta-gib all infantry / support at colossal range. I for one would hate to see Tiger and IS2 brought up to that level because frankly, it's just poor design. Why not just make a unit that costs 1000 MP and 400 fuel and when you click the button the game ends in victory? (Not saying this is case with ISU152, just that high cost doesn't justify stupid power).

There was not a single unit in vCoH that could insta gib squads except -maybe- the tiger firing on a nearly dead bunched up squad, and even then it had to be reasonably close to fire.

Losing the thing is impossible unless you're dicking around or just really bad and have left it unsupported for a 3 mile radius. Oh, panther is making a break for it? lol button, mark vehicle, next?

To end on a fairly unhelpful note, the entire soviet army just needs to be rethought almost from the ground up. Not fun, not interesting / varied, not balanced. This thread is just another in that line.

Why not just disable capping for support teams if they setup?

Because of how fast things set up (in particular the maxim), this doesn't end up having any effect really. I'll just have to be slightly more careful / aware but otherwise the same business continues on.

Making it a flat big reduction in the cap speed would hopefully encourage people to use regular infantry and combined arms more. Regular infantry to take territory, MGs to support and hold it.

EDIT: That is to say, you could do both when deployed = no cap and when undeployed = 25% cap, that might not be bad too.

The panther right now is super worthless indeed .... for the price of the teching up + heavy panzer company + a single panther, I could have brought out 2 panzer IV's which would do a way better job against the su85.

Panther is USELESS against any infantry (on par with german scout car) and just average as an anti tank unit. What incentive is there to even build the panther now ?

My suggestion is to buff the Panthers range to 60 to equal the su85 and make its main gun a bit stronger against infantry. This would solve all the problems with su85's while still maintaing balance (of course with a slight reduction of su85 reverse speed to encourage flanking)

More range is definitely not the answer. It had 60 (I believe?) range in alpha and start of beta and it was absolute godmode. Getting 1 panther out was instant GG to all Soviet armor. Kind of ironic given the SU85 situation, but yeah. Imagine the SU85 but with a turret and better armor/health.

The panther for all intents and purposes is a tank destroyer, so I'm not sure why it's considered illogical to compare su85 and panther. The panther has terrible AI accuracy and very little splash damage. It is a late game unit that is designed to counter armor.

That being said, I would agree that the problem is mostly with the SU85 over-performing more than anything else which has been talked to death on this forum. The panther could maybe use some tweaking but in general I find it satisfactory due to its high durability.