Armor piercing Tank canons need an explosive damage reduction and nerf.

I remember back in 2015 that the AP tanks had very little splash damage compared to now. They did maybe 100 splash damage and you had the hit infantry directly to kill them. AP Canons right now can deal around 500 damage with just explosive splash! That's far is too much for a Canon that's suppose to specialize in killing vehicles. This also makes choosing other canons hard because the AP one can do everything well and are easier to use due to higher velocity of the tank shell. We also have the problem that some AP canons can still one shot a flak armor target, the vanguard titan AP. So I suggest to the devs that they reduce the damage of the explosive to to barely meet the 1k HP damage threshold. Example : Titan AP deals 850 dmg with 500 indirect damage. Nerf that to 850dmg and 150 inderect damage.

Huh, crazy to hear it has splash now, who the hell thought that would be a good idea.

Its 500 up to a meter. This means, that you basically have to hit the ground right next to infantry to do any signifcant damage and do so twice.
Considering how bad hit registration can be making it basically really hard to get direct hits with a tank cannon against a bunny hopping target, this was a needed change.

It has the same explosive splash radius and damage as the HEAT round. Heat has worse velocity and is less Meta against armor. AP has a higher velocity and the same 500 1m splash damage. You can also do more damage to flak targets. I just don't understand why it needs to have high splash damage at 500. It should be if you run the meta anti vehicle load out, it should be weak against infantry.

honestly its projectile speed needs to be majorly nerfed aswell. there are too many players not from the continent the server theyre playing from (EU in NA) and it is so cringe to see them abusing this mechanic as their turrets dont even point in the direction they are shooting from. just yestderday i had one guy who was facing forward but still killed me and his turret finally turned around on the killscreen, i wasnt lagging at all i have good ping too. and there are plenty of times when their turrets are only half turned and i still die by them clearly boosted away from where i think they are going to shoot me and i still die, this does not happen as frequently with the other tank turrets. it happens mostly with halberd and AP rounds projectile speeds.

Why was it needed? Surely the point of having different ammo types is that they specialise in different things.

• AP should be good against vehicles - but rubbish against infantry.
• HESH should be good against infantry - but rubbish against vehicles
• HEAT is a compromise between the two.

If all rounds are decent against all targets - it makes having this distinction pretty pointless.

For example - lightning HEAT and HESH will both kill a vanguard in 7 shots from the front, even though one is supposed to be primarily an anti-infantry round. AP will do it in just one less shot despite being a dedicated armour piercing round. This isn't enough of a difference IMO.

The reason AP has such high splash damage is due to the 2017 Combined Arms Initiative and its haphazard damage model rework.

In the old system, tank shells all dealt 1000+ direct damage, meaning they always killed infantry in one hit and that indirect damage was irrelevant.

In the modern system, tank shells have at most 900 direct damage, meaning that you need to add more indirect damage to cross that 1050 damage threshold for an OHK. In extreme cases like P2-120 AP, you're getting almost half your total damage from indirect (600 + 500).

A second problem was created with something called "blast normalization". Prior to this change, AP shells had at most 450 indirect at .5 meters and dropping to 1 at 1 meter. This changed to 500 at 1 meter dropping to 50 at 3 meters, providing more coverage.

I do agree that there needs to be more of a differentiation between the tank cannons. If I pick an anti-infantry cannon, I should not be able to 1v4 the AP tanks that show up to counter me. Similarly, anti-vehicle weapons should be reliant on direct hits to be lethal against infantry.

I'm not opposed to making AP reliant on direct hits to deal with infantry, but care must be taken with adjusting the damage model. Flat out reducing the indirect damage doesn't work because of how popular flak armor is- the last thing we want is for hit-to-kill values to become even more inconsistent and certain AP weapons like the Halberd, P2-120 AP and Python AP are already inconsistent enough. Raising direct damage values and adjusting indirect to exceed 1050 combined damage would be the cleanest solution, though that'd require a major rework of damage resistances to keep the anti-vehicle/aircraft TTKs consistent.

For now I'd start by reducing the AP blast radius back to 500 at .5 meters and 50 at 1 meters. That's a huge reduction in its area-of-effect, and would be equivalent to the legacy radius.

For HESH, the answer is obvious- drop the direct damage down at least below HEAT's and then rename it back to HE.

I strongly agree with your suggestion. Reverting AP splash damage from 1m to 0.5m is would be a good nerf to start with.

How has projectile speed anything to do with you being killed by a lagger?
I think projectile speed is good as it is. Any lower and it would become impossible to hit anything remotly trying to evade from more than 50m away.

HEAT being useless is another thing. I think in theorey HEAT is supposed to be good against Sunderers and Harassers. The problem of course being, that nobody is trying to activley engange Harassers as a tank and after the Sunderer-update at least Lightnings don't stand a chance against Sunderers that are shooting back anyways, no matter if you have HEAT or AP...

The whole point of HEAT is to have a high DPS gun, but this goal never really understood why AP is so strong- the best way to fight other tanks is to hit as hard as possible while being exposed as infrequently as possible, and quick-firing HEAT guns require the user to sit in the open to maximize DPS. Unless that DPS advantage is absolutely overwhelming, the user is almost guaranteed to lose.

Even when disregarding the design problem DPS-type guns have in armor fights, it wasn't until 2022 that they had comfortable velocities and they still struggle quite a bit against aircraft or infantry with flak armor. Add in the JGX12/Kingsnake/Larion and the HEAT cannons have been badly powercrept in their own DPS roles, so you really never saw a period when they were relevant.

totally false. i can hit moving targets from far away with my d-11 detonator on NSO max. thats just pure skill issue. tanks except magrider all have a projected path their driving, forward and back. lead your shots and they will easily run into it. and yes AP rounds benefit greatly in the hands of laggers because you can dodge that said attack on your screen but still get hit by it because of how fast it goes even though on your client you dodged that round long before it even reached you. with the servers being even more trash now its even worse.

I mean, originally HEAT was supposed to be the middle point, more damage against Tanks than the HE, but still a signiificant splash making it usefull against infantry.
To be fair I don't think that at least the JGX12 is actually replacing HEAT, as that thing has a stupidly low velocity and horrible firing arc.

That's an interesting mention cause Prowler takes approx. a second to unload both rounds.
People say that Prowler has alpha damage but 1200 is not alpha damage, it's a complete joke. I assume pre-CAI it used to do more damage.
Prowler AP cannon deals 20% more DPS than the Lightening/MBT AP cannons.

It is in every conceivable way not suited for tank dueling... Exposure time to unload rounds is longer, it has largest frontal hitbox from all the tanks, an ability which makes it stationary..... It was always by design an artillery platform, that's supposed to get in a good position, deploy and fire.

Based on old screenshots like this one, old footage or even on wiki, the tank used to have a much flatter turret. For some unknown reason we have a fatter version of the turret, with its turret ring also getting stretched upwards.... Searching for a good position to deploy is one where you have least amount of your tank exposed, since you are stationary... aka hull down position. The smaller the turret the better...


What I don't understand is devs can add new turret types like the Kingsnake, but they can't remodel our current ones, even if they aren't bound to any cosmetics.

And also it'd be much better if they scrapped the fishing concept, which IMO was planned to be used on Prowler for low velocity artillery purposes, btw which is not well well thought out anyways... And instead simply bring us original Prowler back, where barrage was part of deploying and whatnot. Like it could be possible that Prowler originally didn't even have a gun stabilizer by design.... bring this design back lol. Make its design straightforward finally.

What was the point of CAI? Why not just revert the entire update (change numbers to original balanced state).

For HESH, what about moving it into the Light anti-vehicle category? Cause otherwise, if the damage would be too low, you will bump into unpleasant, illogical situations where for example you will get wrecked by a Harasser buggy.

Nobody knows what the point of CAI was. Appearently by making vehicles and infantry really bad at killing each other and f-ing up the balance between the vehicle weapons infantry and vehicles are supposed to get better combined fighting experiences.

You know somebody is lost when he claims, that 20% higher DPS than other tanks makes a bad tank.

I didn't say it's bad, I was just giving some info out if anyone was curious cause I did some calculations.
I am saying that Prowler is not designed for tank duels at all. It's literally as ItsJustDelta said, you want the hardest hitting gun and be exposed as infrequently as possible.
Like many times I cannot even unload my second round on target because they duck behind cover before my unload rate. And Prowler has the largest frontal hitbox and no defense capabilities... The devs need to revert Prowler back to its original intended design, cause I have been noticing for years that it's just a liability for TR because people don't know how to use it, they're confused, and ultimately balance issues are covered up with mass zerging and it's a completely terrible experience.

1. The full broadside weight is actually 900 against other tanks and kills in 6 hits, and 720 against Sunderers, thanks to various damage modifiers. The next most powerful weapons are the Colossus Skylance at point blank (1800 against most vehicles) and the Chimera's CT-150 (1350 against tanks, 1080 against Sunderers). If you want to get pedantic you could argue it being a two shot autoloader doing 900 per shot, which is still an incredibly useful thing to have when dueling.

If you want to compare it to the legacy system, a pre-CAI prowler did 1250 damage per shot, but the actual damage dealt was calculated differently, dealing 531 damage to an MBT and killing in 8 hits. This gun fired much more quickly, but as we've discussed earlier, sitting in the open is the worst thing you can do.

You can check out the damage calculations with this cool tool by setting the eras to 2017 and live and then picking a weapon and target: https://cai-calculator.jkbff.com/?tab=cai-calculator

2. The consensus among the top drivers is that the Prowler is, apart from the rare Vanguard using Nimitz Reactor, the strongest dueling MBT. The turret shape and hull profile are actually incredibly advantageous for peek fighting since the projectile originates from the 1st person camera position, which is at the very top of the turret. You can check this gallery to see how much a tank needs to expose itself to shoot in various positions: https://imgur.com/a/planetside-2-tank-peek-angles-4MNARy8

3. Given how little exposure the Prowler needs to shoot when firing over its sides, I don't think shrinking the turret would be a good idea. I'm going to go further and state that outside of the Nimitz Vanguard being a massive outlier, the MBTs are in fact pretty well balanced against each other assuming the drivers are very capable. In the hands of casual players, it's actually the Prowler doing the best by a considerable margin in nearly every metric, which you can check by visiting this site: https://voidwell.com/ps2/oracle

If only we had actual strong fortifications for infantry, then the vehicles and infantry would no longer need to be balanced against each other in a theoretical flat plane with no terrain features. But oh well, you guys got zero vision.