Nice post Surfbird. I echo the sentiments that (unfortunately) engineer kit is much more useful for taking out tanks. 3kg geballte will take out near enough anything with one blast, and Composition B has also been beefed up (in 2.45 you can kill a Panzer IV with one of them to the engine deck - in 2.4, you definitely needed 2, and occasionally required 3). Compared to bazookas and the Panzerschrek, engy kits are the way to go. The only tradeoff is that the rocket launchers can harm from a distance, while geballtes and such require you to get close to the tank, but the tradeoff is more than made up for by the fact that rocket warheads typically bounce off or are unsure kills, whereas a simple toss of a green box destroys the tank. I should note though, that the 1kg geballte could probably be beefed up a bit, since on Crete I have now several times used the cluster grenade, put it directly on the top of a Vickers light tank, and it's only started it smoking. Keeping in mind the Vickers tank can be knocked out with the bare hands kit if you smack it hard enough, the 1kg geballte seems a little weak.
While I can't comment on bazookas (don't use them often enough recently), for whatever it's worth I really want the Panzerschrek to be given it's 2.4 glory again.
My reasoning:
- Panzerschrek is not spawnable, meaning you cannot just respawn if you're killed chasing the tank
- You also can't respawn to finish it off (unless you want to trade your dignity for a satchel)
- Panzerschrek is extremely difficult to fire straight and requires hours of practice to reliably shoot even a stationary vehicle. In my opinion, the least you can do for a guy who actually manages to hit something with it is reward him with a kill (assuming it would have been a kill in real life of course. In 90% of circumstances, it would be)
- Panzerschrek still has only 3 rockets, and it's really frustrating when even 3 hits (supremely difficult to achieve at distance) aren't enough to finish a tank.
- Panzerschrek typically is only found at main bases (eg. St. Lo, Falaise Pocket). Bear in mind this means anyone using a schrek @ St. Lambert flag or Les Foulons, for instance, has traveled for several minutes to get where he is, and done a sufficiently-admirable job of avoiding all mortar, artillery, rifle, enemy tank etc. fire. To do all this and watch your rocket consistently bounce uselessly off a tank's ass like a snowball thumping off a blind girl's face is disheartening.
To be fair, I completely understand that the game needs to be balanced and some things are (and should be) toughened up or watered down slightly to keep the game fun. I also know, and I can't stress this enough, that I'd rather have the schrek/fausts/zooks as they are (weaker than they should be), than to have them all be lazer-guided missiles that kill everything with 1 shot (overpowered), because it means more to make a difficult kill than a bunch of easy ones. If everyone can do it easily all the time, like throwing a grenade into a trench, then it wouldn't mean anything when you do it perfectly. I definitely don't want that. But as it stands now, killing a tank at long range with the Panzerschrek is a noteworthy achievement, it's just that it's for the wrong reasons. It's memorable because now you have the added coin flip of whether it will do the damage it's supposed to or not, when really, just getting your timing right and aiming cherry fine should be enough. I feel like when I hit a Sherman with a schrek from 100+ meters, I should award myself an honorary kill, even though I usually don't actually destroy the enemy vehicle. If you hit the applique armor then fair enough, a good player will learn to aim for spots of the tank without tracks and extra wheels, but there ain't no applique armor on a half-track, despite the fact it seems like every American I see zooming across a field in his Purple Heart Box has re-enforced the armor with ten inches of fucking diamond.
I should state very quickly that for the record, I don't mind the unreliability of some aspects of tanking/anti-tank work in FH2.45. The fact that not *everything* is an instant kill is okay with me. Every so often, as in real life, the stars align in the right way, and what should happen on paper doesn't necessarily translate to the battlefield. But with the Panzerschrek, it happens so rarely as to be thoroughly irritating.
You have to..
1 ) Be on the Germans, which isn't always possible
2 ) Hope no one took the schrek (good luck getting your hands on it with 55 players on your team)
3 ) Sneak through usually a very long distance and somehow manage to stay alive
4 ) Locate a tank before he sees you and one HE shell splatters you across the Normandy countryside
5 ) Take up a good hunting location
6 ) Estimate the tank's movement and trajectory (i.e. guessing where he will be in 5 seconds. Hint: he will probably be laughing)
7 ) Bring up the sights and start counting Mississippis
8 ) Spit out a quick prayer, since you can't see anything besides a green smudge in green grass through your green iron sights
9 ) Fire away, hope you've steadied the sway, hope the tank hasn't randomly stopped moving, and so on
At this point, when you've done all this while avoiding enemy fire (and on the 128 server, the even more deadly teammate fire), it seems just a little unfair that you should also need to trust the game mechanics to grant you a kill, when you have painstakingly earned it. At this point in the story, as you sit in a bush with a giant green dildo slung over your shoulder, watching 88mm kisses bounce off the papier mache side armor of Sherman, it doesn't seem right that you don't so much have to hope for Lady Luck to smile on you, as you instead have to hope for her to strip naked and bend over the nearest hedge for you.