What to do in high tier TDs?

[HappyIittlecloud 39]

Hey

I really dislike playing TDs especially in high tier games I feel pretty lost in them.

I don't like Camo sniping since I feel I only get shots in after the flank lost already and they are stupid enough to go in one by one. Playing more like a med backfires a lot since every oppsing med outsnaps you, if they pay attention. Going aggressive backfires a lot since no armor and easily tracked ammoracked or everything at once. So how do I carry with the Grille15 or at least get more consistent?

And how do I deal with those pesky camping TD's (think Mines?)

[Raj 116]

I will first off address camping TDs.

You must think of how these people play, what their advantages are and what their cons are. Obviously quite a few are going to be able to win in situations to their favor even when it's a complete shitlord thanks to how powerful their guns are. High camo TDs will win when you enter any open area and they are behind bushes and have camouflage and most likely vision advantage in this situation. Something like Lakeville when you've taken the city and are trying to push into their base, a good TD player can inflict thousands of damage in this amount of time at almost no risk. Even Prokhorovka they can inflict massive amounts of damage and swing a game from a advantage where the enemy is trying to spot out the 1-2 line camping shitlords, and your team yolos into them and gets blasted by good TD players. I say good TD players because retarded TD players will instantly get lit and rekt. Then other TDs also have the advantage by being able to shoot first thanks to good pre-aiming skills and maybe some help of a LT spotting for them. Something like a FV-183 or any of the 150~mm TDs will be able to utilize this very well, they will always get the initial strike off and most likely a second strike as well. And in cities FV-183, jag100, obj263 will have massive advantages over most tanks in frontal confrontations thanks to massive alpha and strong armor. Even the WT100 if someone pushes too much it can snare them and wipe them completely out. The types of tanks I've said so far that get rekt by these TDs have just played into what the TD can do strongly.

Now lets point out the areas TDs lack in. TDs have no turret obviously, at least most of them. So they can hardly deal well with attacks coming from varying angles. No 2 tanks across a street on opposite sides of the street won't affect the TD much as it's only traversing a few degrees to line up a shot, what one has to do is get at minimum for the TD to have to turn for a whole 2 seconds. TDs have horrible traverse in general, and many are very slow. This is where TDs fail in city maps if they are a thick skinned TD, heavies can easily escape from them and move away. Dealing with heavy TDs just requires some mobility. Tracking them as they come across a corner is a decent play, and will delay them. There is no need to stay there then, you have to re-position because they will likely come off better in that type of frontal engagement. There are so many different angles of approach on almost every map to take against Tank Destroyers I will illustrate this with a few pictures of Himmels.

Now in this image is a common way to defeat a strong TD on the Banana, it is best when you have an ally sponging/bouncing their shells with very heavy armor. Meanwhile you move to this window and start inflicting damage, or if the situation is so in your favor you can wait for the hill to roll down behind it, or D3 can fight it. But in most cases you won't be able to do that. The TD will not be able to attack you, and will either have to move out or bleed to death after a minute or so.

 

The options for fighting TDs as the match progresses grows immensely based on what areas the team controls and what are the enemy controls. For example the TD is pushed out of the Banana into the D line, you have immense amounts of angles to attack with now. The green shows areas you can attack the jag100.

 

But enemy also has many ways to deal with you possibly if you're not careful. In the orange is areas that can counter your flanking play. That is is they can use those areas, be careful which are you use to flank with, and in a timely manner.

 

So that's with heavy TDs in a city. But what about those damn pesky camouflaged TDs with OP camo that every unicunt complains about? Well the thing is they have to counter not only the TD but the elements surrounding the TD that makes them so powerful in defensive play. The defensive abilities of a TD are actually quite easy to counter. They rely on an open area to fire upon enemies, and many times for allies to be spotting for them. Being able to flank enemies without being lit, or in the line of fire of TDs is very important. Also even on very open maps such as Prokhorovka, it is possible to deal with TDs from MANY angles. You have the whole area next to the 1-2 line where you can pop up, you have the A line where there are houses and bushes to flank from, and then even the middle 1 line hill to use. Depending on where the enemy is you may be able to use any of these areas to directly fight the TD. TDs end up being in this case something you deal with last. You want to play trying to not get hit by them the whole game untill then. 

For mines there are 2 things you can do to combat the base hill camping TDs. And since this is such a common area, blind firing some rounds into it is a very strong tactic. On lakeville it is so easy to blind-fire TDs aswell. Learning to blindfire makes enemy TDs almost worthless as they don't stick there so much.

 

Here is an image of the best areas to blind-fire against enemy TDs in their hill camp. They can hardly hope to light you, and they are too horrible of players to know how to blindfire.

 

The options to fight the tanks sometimes is much more dangerous than dealing with TDs first.

 

There is only one good position to fight those heavies, and that's from the northern part of the village, a very risky spot that must be fought for usually.

 

I have homework to do, but I am hoping someone can answer your question about playing them. I know the the obj263 I play exactly like a heavy and I do massive damage, and bounce tons of shots. And the FV183 it's all about knowing where enemies will advance into. They can destroy an enemy push with just one shot. It's so common for me on himmelsdorf for instance to be able to one shot a enemy medium using that middle road by blindfiring or lighting them up and shooting them as they come down it. I've probably killed in 90% of my matches on himmels 1 medium in the first 30 seconds of the matches by doing that. Then I see where enemies come and line up a shot pre-emptively and wait for them to appear. Sometimes I fight along side or near the heavies aswell though to just add more damage.

[ThomChen114 291]

Grille 15? On Mines? Rely on the team, and just sit and hide in the usual bush camping spots and pre-aim.

Ideally you want the team to control the lighthouse area and secure the west beach area, since the lighthouse provides concealment and cover to both areas for whichever team that controls it. 

If you see a heavy line-up of poor gun-dep HTs (Maus, Type 5) or assault TDs (E4,E3), then expect them to try and move through the NE village, and position yourself accordingly to get shots on them.

 

I'm not certain on the camo value of your Grille 15 (taking into account Camouflage crew skill + camo paint), just remember to sit and shoot behind two bushes, just to be safe. Always keep an eye on the mini-map and don't even wait for 6th sense to pop up. By then you'll have given any MTs all the time they wanted to aim and hit you, and any HT and TD to shoot you as well by the time you move.

[WhatTheSkara 345]

Imo TDs should be a second line fire support hanging 200/300 metres behind the front line heavies..

Unless you're driving a 263 which is fast, has good dpm and can take a beating and can stay in the front line, I'd suggest you to stay back and be an opportunistic shitlord, timing the enemy reload and taking advantage of detracked enemies..

How to deal with then: on open maps, have fun outspotting a camping TD with a camo net, the best advice I can give you is to always have some cover between your enemy and the path you're going to take.

On mines I'd use the houses on the eastern side or the ridges on the water side to close the distance (If I spawned on south), and use the rocks near the south spawn or the 1/2 line if I spawned on north..

[Dimi2000 14]

I'm going to talk solely about tier 10 for the purpose of this to try and keep things simple.

First off, all the tier 10 heavies aside from the grille 263 and e4 are very inflexible giving a much lower skill cap. With ALL other tds it is extremely important to just get shots off with your boomstick at medium to long range and rely on your armour or cover to keep you safe from being rushed or the enemies peeking back out at you and returning fire.

the remaining 3 td's all play out fairly differently

the e4 is basically a heavy tank, with its turret it allows you to peak around corners and fire without having to traverse your hull after you have moved your vehicle to your desired firing location on the corner and having to traverse again after firing

the 263 is basically the same as the other td's except you trade off alpha damage for dpm and mobility. this grants you the ability to relocate without wasting half of the game which in turn enables you to follow the battle line and maintain your medium to long range engagements in which the 263 excels at

the grille is the final tank is in my opinion the must fun to play td in the game due to its mobility but also has the highest skill cap. in the grille your job is similar to that of a medium tank at the beginning of the battle in the sense that you have to try and farm a shot or 2 of "cross damage". but that's where the playstyle similarities end. after the initial couple of shots the grille should retreat to a snipping location according to how the battle has played out ie defend the dying flank from a good spot and from there on play out the rest of the game in similar manner to a 263 save a little more passive

any questions just let me know mate

[Raj 116]

Since wotlabs is dead as all hell or nobody cares to explain this I will personally tell you how to play at least one TD. My favorite TD was the SU-122-44 I have thousands of matches in it, and I was on the charts as number 3 world wide for recent wn7, I think it was like 2800wn7 and number 1 and 2 were 3100 and 3000~. Now obviously wn7 is a outdated metric and all, and the SU-122-44 was broken for farming that, but nonetheless I was still a fantastic player in the SU-122-44 even if nowadays you could get kewei to out dpg me by like 700 damage in it.

I wanna talk about a tank however that might be even more broken than the SU-122-44, more OP if you will in the situations that the SU-122-44 was very strong already in. The Obj263. Probably really late in 2014 I was watching this disgustingly good RU player stream. He had almost 5,000 dpg in all his tierX mediums, and had close to 5,000 dpg in his obj263. I always heard of people saying how shit the tank is, but he proved everyone completely wrong. He was getting steel walls in it every other match basically, and pulled off crazy damage. I watched him after a while and basically emulated him. The first thing I learned was that this thing can take on any heavy especially when aiming is important. You do have a weakspot on your gun, but against pubbies this is hardly an issue, especially if you can brawl at a medium range, and do clutch angling. This tank turns very quick for a TD, and it's very easy to quickly turn making an enemy's shell bounce off your immense armor. Your whole front is basically impenetrable except to maybe the hugest TD cannons, and not only that you move around at basically medium speeds, while having a high DPM, high alpha, high accuracy, and high penetration cannon. This tank only has one big weakpoint, and that is if you do not know how to play around arty you can be quickly punished. However if you can figure out how to play around arty well you can do exceedingly well. This tank also has strong view range and camo, so make use of binocs and you can you can outspot mediums even.

How you play it is you just go to a brawling area, you try to find ones especially with a sloped ground so you can move up on the ground to increase your angles even further. You also want the area to cover as much of your lower plate as possible, many of these areas exist. And if they don't, you can always bait a shot by side scraping with your thick 80mm side armor, you can bounce surprisingly a lot of shots. You can also bait them if you notice them aiming at your gun to just expose it for a split second, quickly fire and make a clutch angle making them richochet. Another thing to do is actually angling your gun up, so the mantle's armor increases and acts as thicker, more angled armor.

 

In this replay you see just how powerful this thing's armor is, and how devastating it's gun is.

You can also use it for getting side shots on enemies long away thanks to the tanks strong mobility and camo.

The strong armor is amplified at distances over 100M, it becomes near impenetrable since this thing has such good movement/rotation speed and such quick/high accuracy with damn high pen. In this match alone 263 bounces several E4/E3 rounds, as well as many other shells.