Profile of Aerohank

It's really annoying because there are many times where I want to storm a MG but my mortar won't fire. And it is in fact the only non defensive smoke the Ostheer has to offer (besides the smoke barrage plane which nobody uses).

Officer smoke barrage and Mortar half track smoke barrage are also available to the Wehrmacht.

Hm. Soviets also spam Conscripts because conscripts-en-masse-builds are very strong and have good synergies with all kinds of supplementary Soviet units, most noticeably recently Guards.

While the status quo might be bland, its also somewhat balanced, and if you take out one piece of the equation without changes elsewhere, this balance will suffer, which is all I am saying.

Probably, but the status quo has been a topic of many frustrations. I'm not advocating a change just to mess up something perfect, I am advocating a change because what we have now is bland, spammy and predictable. Having a bit of extra balancing work to do is worth it if it means a diversity of the meta and increasing the viability of combined arms.

Making heavy use of conscript standbags (for that sweet 50% reduced green cover) really helps deal with rifle nade spammers. But Aerohank I think your putting the cart before the horse when it comes to riflenades being OP.

Is it bullshit that the sound/animation doesn't play? Yes it should be fixed.

Is it dumb that they can shoot as far as an MG can fire at vet 2? Oh yeah

Is it shitty that they can be fired while suppressed? You know it.

Those things need fixing, and after those are fixed if they are still vastly over preforming then we could get into the nitty gritty of how much damage they do.

Green cover does help, but you still have to retreat the maxim after the first grenade because now your squadmembers are all at half health and the next one will kill it. The result is that a single grenadier squad can force a retreat on a maxim this way even while they attacked from the front and the maxim was in green cover. This is exactly the type of BS that happened with Oohraing conscripts being able to molotov MG42s from the front. This has been fixed for the axis thankfully, but with soviets you are still far better off just sticking a conscript squad behind that sandbag. There is simply a lot of risk involved with getting a maxim over another conscript squad, and not enough reward; especially when facing Wehrmacht. Part of this is the rifle grenade (too much risk) and another part is the lack of AoE supression (no real reward there)

Don't think I agree.
Replacing rifle nades with regular nades would also simply be a huge de facto nerf. Also, in a 1v1 situation, a riflenade will rarely wipe or kill a Maxim/Ma Deuce.

Cons and Rifles are both obviously better at flanking and close range combat than Grens are, which is balanced out by Grens static DPS with LMGs and their T1 support weaponry. In short, Mgs are auxiliary units for Allies, while they are essential to Wehr.

That is why Wehrmacht has such awesome support units like the sniper and the mortar. These units are good at what they do, better in fact than their allied counterparts, but are hardly used because allied support weapons are not viable. Why are they not viable? Because they get wrecked completely by rifle grenades.

Riflegrenade means maxims suck -> soviets don't make maxims, spam only cons -> Sniper and mortar don't do well vs conspam so Wehr player makes only MG42s and grens. The only way to break this cycle of blandness is to make allied HMGs viable, and that is impossible to do when each grenadier squad comes with a 30 ammo precision strike long range grenade.

And yeah.. Rifle grenades do in fact regularly clear out maxims/50cals/DHSKs from the front in a single hit.

You still haven't answered the fact that if heavy limits are supposed to increase medium play; then why does OKW have no medium generalist tank to play with?

Because Relic tried too hard to make OKW faction different from the others, throwing even the basics of WW2 combat like HMGs and medium tanks into doctrines.

Also OKW panther is close to a generalist tank with how much DPS its machineguns have.

You guys know how small the chance of this happening is right? The reason why it's seen on cons more often like I said is they are you easier to hit combined with the fact they have a high model count.

But the biggest influence of this little bit of suppression is probably that it makes the HMG42 even better. Than the other Machine guns because grens can keep suppressed squads suppressed longer than rifles or conscripts can, allowing the Ostheer player to switch targets more freely.