lavawing

I think it needs moar HEAT pen

Obviously the wrong way to go about it, but would the 50M be competitive with like 300 pen AP and 380 pen HEAT?

turret sides got buffed to 130/150 on the E50 and 50M respectively so anything but a clean cheek shot will autobounce - this includes 420 pen HEAT which is pretty stupid/dank

not sure if we actually disagree on anything tank is quite strong with a full tryhard set-up and quite bad if you avoid APCR spam I rate tanks assuming you tryhard and you rate (prem) tanks assuming a semi-poverty set up to maximise credit making I rate everything on the basis you spam APCR (if available), and, in the T42's case, 268 pen makes it better than other tier 8 meds that occupy a similar role (most of which have to make do with 250-ish pen - not enough to cheese same tier heavies in frontal engagements) being expensive to run doesn't make tanks bad

It does have 299 HEAT pen so it can't be that bad in this meta. What does hurt it is the long clip reload which kinda hard caps the damage potential of the tank given how fast most tier 8 games are. The other problem is that for a pure gun-oriented autoloader it's not even a straight upgrade over the Somua SM or the IS-3A, and those have other strengths to leverage (gun dep/clip potential/alpha/armour)

https://tanks.gg/v11010ct/tank/obj-274a?e=V.W.Y&k=0.1.2.3.4.6.5.7.8.9.a.b.c&c=a.-1.-1&l=000001 1200 HP is going to be a pain to play with but the rest of the tank looks very strong. On the one hand, the egg shaped hull means it can't angle on flat ground, but the flip side is that it lets you bait shots by peeking corners beak first. While not intended as such, the fact it has APCR instead of HEAT will make it somewhat passable as a camo sniper.

Thanks to lootboxes I still have like 200 days of prem left . Besides with how generous WOT is with personal reserves these days you can break even with full APCR + food set ups, at least on higher alpha prems. Personally, I hate playing tier 10s, and tier 9s are kind of not as good as they used to be these days what with the tier 10 spam and the general power creep. Tryharding at tier 8 is pretty relaxing for a change, and, again, you can actually break even by using personal reserves. I buy quirky prems because I'm bored with the tech tree stuff, and also because of the thing that's been going on recently where prems gain more from tryharding than their tech tree equivalents, typically in the form of the prems having more pen and/or shell velocity on their gold rounds (e.g. Hwk30 vs 12, Rengade vs T32, CS52 vs 53, T42/TL1 vs Persh) @Rexxie it's not exactly a disconnect, I just think tanks should be rated for their pure combat capabilities. Crew training and credit-making are important for a premium tank, but not more important than how the tank performs if you try to squeeze every last bit of performance from it. Rating tanks mainly as credit earners yield weird, possibly misleading results which don't always reflect their overall place in the game balance. E.g. the Chrysler would be balanced but annoying. The CS-52 is strong-ish but nothing more than that. If you go on the official forums you can see a lot of that: apparently, the Chrysler is ok because you need gold for it to be competitive.

Wow this tank is balanced now.

agreed. it manages to be somehow even less functional than the Chrysler with standard rounds, and you need food to max VR unless you run optics (in which case your gun is not good enough) this thing is better at poking, hulldown, and much better at sniping. the TL-1 will be better at doing medium things. but a lot of the time the T42 doesn't actually need to do medium things since it can just spit 268 pen rounds at mid range while being a pain to bleed due to the troll turret and short exposure times. reading your review, it seems a bit weird to compare it to the T-44-100, a generalist flanker, to this thing, which is a hulldown-poking specialist. they have literally nothing in common other than the standard pen and both being tier 8 prem meds. there do exist quite a few tier 8 meds that have similar mobility/agility, e.g. the Indien Panzer, the Cents, the Panther II, that despite sucking as actual mediums manage to perform decently. tbh I think it was a lost cause trying to salvage the T42 as a medium-y med and that's why the tank didn't perform for you. first, I'd drop turbo because that doesn't work for the playstyle at all, then go with vents, stab and rammer plus food to max out both the VR and the DPM. PS running full APCR will net you at least 2 extra shots of DPG as you all but guarantee a hit and a pen on your first shot, and the massive pen allows you to farm heavies and other heavily armoured targets. from the games I've played, I think it's intended to be played like a Renegade. next to the front line and never present a solid target. good farmer and hard to bleed. with a full tryhard setup, it might even be in the top 5 of tier 8 meds Bourrasque T-44-100 CS-52 Progetto T42? also it's pretty good at winning games due to being able to sub as a heavy, and that APCR, VR, armour is powerful in breaking late game stalemates.

the problem with frontline is that it goes on forever the problem with SH is you don't actually fight anything 90% of the time and 10% of the time it's just a dice roll as to who gets fewer bullshit bounces

That's hardly an exaggeration. To use your examples, the TL-1 has 280 pen on its HEAT rounds + 1,219 shell velocity to slam dunk heavy armour at redline ranges. Raumpanzer fights heavies all day and 208 is not enough. Both the Renegade and CS-52 have railgun APCR modelled after real life APDS, and one can easily achieve a 200-400 increase in DPG by firing full gold and by electing to not gimp yourself by adhering to some fairytale code of ethics in a Belorussian tank game. Making a tank that's mediocre with AP and marginally overpowered with goldspam is not 'pretty well balanced'. It's an example of bad balancing coupled with a thinly veiled intention to make everything more expensive to run.

The T42 is a high pen high armored turret tank Unlike the CS-52, which from the paper stats seems much better, this is actually a very cohesive package where all the stats are min-maxed for a single purpose - hulldown poking. Rather like the CS-52, it also doubles as a decently effective chai sniper. What makes it relatively balanced - which isn't pen - unless you believe that 198 AP on the Chrysler makes it fine - is the low DPM - and that's what really hard caps the carry capacity of the thing. The 280 alpha/220-ish turret/268 pen combo is brutal. You to win frontal engagements against all tier 8 mediums effortlessly, and you the high pen makes you better at farming same tier heavies than most actual heavies in the tier. Sitting at around 2.2-2.3k combined after 50 ish games - fairly good for a permateal baddie like me, and weirdly enough higher than my LIS stats.