Balthazars

I have a personal hatred of Mountain Pass, so that will probably end up being my pick to veto.

No, no, no, no, no please no. If there is one thing from the old days that this game does not need, it is getting one-shot by AP firing arty again.

Recently finished grinding this tank. How does it stack up in 2019 for an okay-ish player? On one hand, it's kind of good, on the other hand, it's kind of bad. The good is that is has a massive clip that can do serious amounts of damage to someone if you get them in the right conditions, including in some cases clipping out the entirety of a lower tier tank, or with some high-rolls, even same tier tanks. 1,800 burst damage is definitely something that can make you very dangerous in the right circumstances. The problem is that the right circumstances are rare where you can unload the entire clip due to it being 6 shells. Plus then you're powerless for 45 seconds, and given you have zero armour, you have no option but to cower like a little ***** during the reload, because even pretending to poke is risky because you never really bounce anything and don't have a lot of health. Gun handling also leaves something to be desired, despite decent penetration, you tend to bounce and miss a lot too, wasting shells. Mobility is decent but not as awesome as I had hoped for a paper tank, and while you can sort of keep up with mediums, you won't outpace most of them in a straight-line fight, and can't run away from them too much either. As with all autoloaders you can't really operate independently, but this is especially true with the 50-100 due to the huge inter-clip reload. Basically oscillates between awesome and utter trash, with a bunch of mediocre in the middle. Not really a keeper in my opinion. 110 games, 55% win rate, 1,568 damage per game, which is decent enough for me. Not as good as my best tier 8s but not my worst either.

Would take it just for the reduced damage from splash/non-direct hits and reduced stun duration. Especially on paper tanks (like the Standard B which I am grinding currently, which suffers badly against arty) it could potentially make a big difference. Suffering 400+ hp damage on a non-direct hit is pretty frustrating. However, one of the biggest issues with arty at the moment is tier 6 and tier 5 arty and their rate of fire, which I note hasn't been touched at all. These arties, like the Lef, the FV304, the M44 and the Grille etc. fire so damned fast and do so much damage to low tier tanks that don't have a lot of armour that it is entirely possible for one of these focusing you to kill you inside 3 minutes, with not a damned thing you can do to stop it (especially against those that have very high firing arcs). Low tiers are even worse for arty spam at the moment because of this, in my opinion.

Now finished the grind, it is definitely one of the few keeper tanks at tier 8. Has a very nice all-rounder combination of mobility, a bit of armour, and an excellent gun with a great combination of of alpha and DPM without completing sacrificing gun handling for it. The turret is very good against same or lower tier tanks and is still competitive against higher tiers without the gold-spam. Penetration is a little on the lackluster side but standard for tanks released in the last two years where they are 'nerfing' gold ammo penetration. It's enough for most situations apart from super-heavies from the front. As noted however, it is a painful stock grind with the stupid 175/217 122 gun in the middle for no reason apart from WG wanting to screw with you. The stock turret isn't particularly reliable, and mobility while stock is also not particularly good. Improves immensely once you get to elite status but expect it to shorten your lifespan a bit until you get there. 100 games to complete the grind (with a bit of help from Frontline in there, a game-mode the tank does very well in). 1,507 DPG (bang on my average for heavies except for my IS3), 56% win rate. It's also my only tier 8 without a mastery badge in the grind, despite having a 4.5k damage game in there. Keeper for me, especially with Frontline seasons this year.

So, in early 2019, is this thing any better? Any different? Short answer: no. It is still a steaming pile of garbage, that has also been power-crept and forgotten. The biggest complaint, by far, is that it is slow. Slow, slow, slow. In a world where T95s, T28s, and O-Ni's (you know, tanks with actual armour) can do 30kph, you are still stuck capped out at 20kph (even downhill) and will take forever to get anywhere. In return for this glacial pace, you get... nothing. You get a rapid-fire pew-pew gun with mediocre gun handling and poor penetration, especially against the hordes of tier 8s you're likely to encounter, and poor alpha. You get zero armour that is of any value except against pubbies who still haven't learnt about weakspots and just auto-aim or aim centre of mass (and the latter guys are still 50-50 to pen you). Even worse if you go 'hull down' and they shoot at your turret, which is a huge weakspot. Just utterly painful to grind though. The one saving grace is that is doesn't have much of a stock grind because if you've played any other British line you'll have all the guns unlocked. I finished it in 48 games, a horrendous 44% win-rate, despite actually respectable DPG of 986 (for comparison, barely 100 damage less than my KV-85 which has nearly 60% win-rate and actually more than my ARL-44, which also has nearly 60% win-rate with a similar number of games at 68). It really is the speed and lack of alpha that hurts it, because you can't kill things quick enough or get to the right spot to win games, but can still spit out damage in a landside due to the high rate of fire when all the enemy tanks come to you. Painful.

You still need the time to be able to make it work. Timezones mean that I'm pretty screwed because evening when I get home is usually when the curfew is still active, so knowing that, I'm simply using it has a means to grind credits and free XP, for which it is actually pretty good. I agree that defending is much harder to guarantee a good rank, especially depending on how bad your team is. I've had a defending team capitulate in just over 11 minutes just now, no one in the entire game got over Captain rank (defenders had just 1). I agree with @Jesse_the_Scout that the respawn mechanic does weight things in favour of the attackers because they can yolo, die and then respawn into another zone, overload it, get XP by jumping on the cap rinse/repeat. As a defender, if you get stuck in a lane that gets vacated, you waste a lot of time driving around and may not get any XP to show for it if you fail to find anything to shoot at.

Agree on this very much. As I got one in the loot boxes I thought I'd try out in the IS3A, but in this mode the worse mobility compared to the regular IS3 is very, very noticeable because of a lot of the soft terrain (particularly in the first rank of zones) as it struggles to get up to speed or redeploy around the map. The regular IS3 is much better for this mode. Mobility in this mode is king, I'm pretty much only playing the T-44, the Progetto and the Skorp G at the moment.

I kept my usual gold layout in tanks from randoms (so about 25% gold ammo) and rarely have to use it last time, but I imagine that's enough even with increased heavy spam. Last time around I found any tank with mobility, especially on defence (otherwise you die if the sector falls) is pretty much mandatory. The regular T-44 is a good option if you don't have the premium version. The Pantera probably does okay instead of the Progetto if you don't have that too. The regular IS3 does well, and probably a bit better than the "A" version due to better mobility (and last time I played it with a sub-100% crew and did fine). The Patriot is okay, the Skorp G does very well. Last time I pretty much just used the T-44, Skorp G and IS3. This time I'll be throwing in the Progetto and possibly the 53TP. Also, I found last time around that the Inspire reserve is pretty good for racking up assist if you time it well and hit a lot of allies with a lot of targets, as all the damage that inspired tanks do is counted towards your assist tally, which can be good for ranking up.

So I do have this thing fully upgraded at long last. I really want to like this tank, I enjoyed the tier 8 and I like the mechanic of the auto-reloader. But good grief the game is trolling me hard whenever I drive it. I can't remember the last time I was penetrated for full damage by arty on such a regular occurrence (4 games in a row for 850+ damage just recently), not even in light tanks. While my DPG has been slowly increasing from the abysmal 1,100 with the stock gun (slowly climbing, currently at 1,600~ish), I continue to be stuck at barely 40% win rate after 105 games. So frustrating.

I'm pretty sure neither the 430 or the 430U have been nerfed since they changed it/introduced the mini-branch. The 430 is one of those strange tanks where on paper the gun should be terrible. Bad accuracy, -5 gun depression, poor gold round. But while the gun does troll you on occasion, it snaps shots that it has absolutely no business doing. It's Russian hover-med mobility on a low platform (good camo and useful for going hull-down) with a strong turret, hull armour that is perfectly capable of trolling opponents with some wiggle, and a very good standard round (so it makes good bank for a tier 9 with a premium account). I performed so much better in the 430 compared to the T-54 I couldn't understand why the latter was viewed so highly, especially after they nerfed the DPM gun on the latter.

As @zbran noted above, since they made SOS and BIA work together, girls should basically only be commanders, as you can get 6th straight away and have the free BIA/SOS skill available as well. If you grind whole lines and move the crew, you'll have a solid team by the time you reach tier 10. As for suggestions: Russian meds are indeed good, although I recommend going Obj 430 --> 430U instead of T-54 --> Obj 140. For me personally, the 430 is vastly superior to the T-54 as the latter had a significant nerf to the gun handling of the DPM gun which I found extremely frustrating. But the whole line is pretty good from tier 5 upwards. The IS7 line now probably peaks at the IS3, which if you don't have one is worth having. The T-10 used to be the highlight of the line but it's not there anymore. I haven't bought the IS7 yet so not really sure what it's like in this day and age. I'm thinking about the German armoured TD line (the waffle line is tough to use in the current meta and I hated the Grille-15) myself, not played any US TD lines. Generally, use the girls as commanders in lines/nations where there are several good tanks that you will enjoy playing, or where you intend to grind a whole line.

I would caveat that by saying it is delightful when upgraded. I'm finding the stock grind pretty painful, so painful in fact I couldn't bring myself to finish the last 5k XP for the top gun and used free XP. I was doing sub 40% win rate with DPG of only 1,100 (worse than my tier 8 mediums). At least with the top gun you can actually do some decent damage, but the mobility still feels sub-par with the stock engine.

Yeah, I don't know why aspects of the World of Tanks community are so sensitive about nerfs. When it comes to game balance, there is basically two methods of doing it: either everything is overpowered (see Starcraft: Brood War for an example), or you have a constant cycle of buff/nerfs that take place in order to shift meta around and try and keep things from getting too out of hand (see, Starcraft II as an example). I also don't get the argument about 'we paid real money for it so you can't change it'. In the two games I mentioned, not only did 'things' people paid real cash to get (full priced box plus expansions), with certain units etc. being completely unrecognisable several years down the line after balance patches, but those games also have active professional scenes where some players arguably lost games (and thus prize-money) due to changes in balance. Sure, you see balance whine, but there's nothing like this type of "OMG THEY'RE GOING TO NERF MY PIXEL TANK, I DEMANDS REFUND" rage. I honestly don't get it.