Profile of gokkel

I thought again about this whole situation and I think there is a difference between punishing blobs and killing whole squads.

Punishing blobs would mean that you lose a lot of models from your clumped up squads, which would give you both an economically significant disadvantage as well as make you lose territory because you have to mass retreat all your infantry. Artillery should definitely do that.

But if you completely lose squads, it doesn't have anything to do with blobbing, you could just have had that one or two squads being fired at and would still lose a whole squad, you didn't get any karma bonus chance in losing that squad because you blobbed.

If artillery kills a whole squad, you lose the whole veterancy on that squad and have to buy a new one, which costs you double as much as reinforcing, so that can hurt a lot. This hurts doubly much as OKW, who have very expensive elite infantry like Fallschirmjägers or Obersoldaten as well as an even higher dependence on veterancy than other factions.

I think we all want artillery to punish blobbing, but it shouldn't have such drastic impact that you can lose whole squads so easily. With RNG of course it can always happen if rockets land directly on you, but I think with Katyusha the odds may be a bit too high right now.


The Panzerwerfer while trying out seemed to get it right the best, it seems to kill often several models without killing whole squads so easily.

My experience was strangely the opposite. I found the Flak Emplacements (self built ones) didn't do much against Infantry, because they would keep hitting the terrain inbetween instead, however they seemed to shoot down planes very fast, faster than other sources of AA. Maybe I was just lucky with the AA hits.

Insanely high reload on panther:


Super speedy reload on 34/85:


On average the difference is 0.1-0.2 sec.

The T34/85 is not the fastest shooting tank either though, you could compare it to some other tanks as well where the difference is more noticeable. Maybe even tank destroyers, since it essentially is a tank destroyer with a turret. And of course, in a very close battle even a second may mean the difference between one tank winning or the other.

But considering that the T34/85 costs less and also is more effective against infantry, the fact that the difference is only small doesn't really speak against my statement either that the Panther doesn't really excel at dishing out damage on other tanks. It's strength is its front armor and slightly longer range, which helps it beat cheaper tanks if used correctly usually, but it doesn't do it in such a convincing way as the cost and lack of anti infantry capabiltiy would demand in my eyes, especially if RNG doesn't play along (where a small reload and accuracy buff would help a lot against already).

By the time you have your Panther someone else might already have two tanks as well or be very close to it, and they together would be a big issue for a Panther.

Just tried out the Stuka, Panzerwerfer and Katyusha for several barrages on the Training Grounds against still standing enemy squads. This testing situation is of course though not ideal, because you would ideally test against actual blobs or static setup weapons.

Anyway, in this scenario you guys are definitely right, the Panzerwerfer does better than I had remembered it. Either they did something to it since the last time I used it or I just had bad luck. It still suffers from expensive and weak Tier4 of course, and the Counterbarrage is even more useless than I thought if their missiles really don't do the same damage, but otherwise it seems quite good, it kills several models, however there is always at least one guy surviving.

The Katyusha still got by far the most squad kills though. Since it also has the lowest cooldown and a better ability than Panzerwerfer on Vet1, it still is clearly better.

Stuka seems a lot worse to me now, since first it has a massive cooldown, it costs a lot more for OKW and it several times killed only few models even against still standing infantry when you know you perfectly aimed the missiles already. Sometimes it still kills full squads, when one rocket lands directly on very clumped up squads.

So I apologise to everyone who I didn't believe that said Panzerwerfer is not as bad. Still, Katyusha outperforms now against the other artillery pieces, even though it should be the Stuka being the clear winner here because of cost and cooldown.

http://www.coh2-stats.com/explosive_weapons/katyusha_bm_13_16_rocket_mp
http://www.coh2-stats.com/explosive_weapons/panzerwerfer_rockets_mp

You sure those are the correct ones? There are like 4 different weapons mentioned for both Katyusha and Panzerwerfer, and since I assume Panzerwerfer shoots with Counterbarrage the same rockets as with the normal barrage and COunterbarrage only does 80 damage, I assume they actually use one of those weapons that do only 80 damage for normal barrage as well.