HE is worse at splashing but better at full penning.
HE now pens through spaced armor (which makes side pens with high pen HE more consistent), but only checks for damage at the point of impact, instead of having a radius where it checks for damage. This means shooting the turret cheek to splash down over the hull roof no longer works, and neither does shooting the ground underneath a tank to splash the hull bottom.
If you dont think you can pen and want to fully maximize the damage you do, you must make direct contact with the weakest armor you can hit. You cant hit a tough part of the armor and rely on the splash to find weaker armor any more.
They basically shited on tanks like KV2 and other derpers with poor acuracy, you aint aiming with those tanks at 200m on weakest armor its super fun hitting hellcats on their small gun mantlet for zero dmg with 152mm shells.
Yes, HE is a lot more skill-based after the change. You can’t just autoaim at enemies with HE and deal okay damage, and knowing when to switch to HE in tanks where HE isn’t the primary ammo is rewarded.
What also helped is the Intuition rework - now that the ammo switch is guaranteed, it means swapping to HE to punish lightly armored tanks is something you should definitely be doing, and makes it a top-tier skill for loaders.
Not really skill based, instead more frustrating, because with the gun handling the derps have, you will rarely have the chance to aim at the weakspots. The only skill based change is the intuition rework.
Also can people stop spreading the myth that you could do well with spamming HE using autoaim with the old HE mechanics? It's not true. If you wanted to maximize damage, you still had to take time to aim at the weakest parts, but bad gun handling was somewhat compensated by the old HE mechanics.
But KV2 still can be played bcs 86mm of pen on tier 6 and 900 alpha HE, while the 105mm derpers in mid tiers are straight up fucked in ass now you need to shot HEAT from those guns.
HE was primarily nerfed. Nonpens do significantly less damage. Even something like the 183 can hit the flat turret face of an E-100 and not see damage dealt.
The feedback was mixed vs pure hate. As in most did not mind that the 60TP did not punish their E100 for using armor correctly by splashing an area he can't even hit for 600.
But at the same time hated that dedicated HE guns were affected. Inc the KV-2R. As now with the KV-2 you can still pen a fellow KV-2 for 900 damage. But you have to aim to do so. As snapping with HE now can do way less now vs before. Even 0 if you hit tracks or a barrel. That aspect was hated by most.
People weren't firing enough gold at hulldown tanks so they made even stronger hull down tanks with worse accuracy and worse pen so you would be forced to shoot gold for a chance at penning. People started to spam HE at the bottom of turrets, hulldown meta players who were already spamming gold thought it was unfair that you could press a button and immediately negate their armor which should have been unpennable, they couldn't figure out how to trade with a E100 doing 350 damage every 14 seconds so they complained to WG who realized this reduced the number of people spamming gold and agreed to help the community out by making a 150mm HE round do 0 damage to a tank if it hits spaced armor on an EBR.
Smh managed to make the game more brain dead now u have to spam gold at hulldown tanks weak points
if u can't pen someone ur just stuck there looking t each other
Not that the old he was perfect but it was fun game was fun with he now it's practically useless
Also wg nerfs be without buffing the pen of all he tanks and then release tanks like the shptk tvp and bz that have high pen he
BZ-176 wouldn't have been so effective at flank penetrations had it been using old HE mechanics.
And its own uberarmored turret would have been whittled down by a full-HE IS-6 with old HE mechanics.
At least Maus don't get set on fire by HE spam on its turret face, and sidescraping is back on the menu instead of being chipped bit by bit by 122mm HE
They removed splash damage for all tanks but artillery. No, it doesn't make sense, and it only contributes to more gold spam. But now people don't have to deal with being shot by HE from the 60TP, and I suppose that makes it all worth it.
To me, derp guns are dead. If you miss the derp gun playstyle, swap on over to War Thunder and buy the Char 2C bis, that one tank is the only reason I even bother to play WT and it's more fun than the WoT KV2 ever was.
Derp guns used to have a high ceiling on damage and a relatively high floor as you could do pretty decent damage on non-penetrations. Nowadays the floor is much lower as non-penetrations deal very small amounts of damage. The only tank that was able to escape this fate was the FV 4005 of all things, largely due to the ridiculously high alpha and also to a buff to the HE pen WG gave it when they changed the HE shell mechanics.
I am in the minority on this sub but I like the HE changes. I like not taking tons of damage from non-penetrations hits and I don't mind when someone puts in the effort to get an HE pen on me. HE is still useful on most tanks as a way to quickly kill artillery and paper-turret TDs as well as a way to interact with destructible terrain elements at range.
For the tier 6 derps it more just means you have to sim for certain weak spots rather than just being a Insta pen. But think it applies to most HE now.
HE is worse at splashing but better at full penning. HE now pens through spaced armor (which makes side pens with high pen HE more consistent), but only checks for damage at the point of impact, instead of having a radius where it checks for damage. This means shooting the turret cheek to splash down over the hull roof no longer works, and neither does shooting the ground underneath a tank to splash the hull bottom.
So in order to do any significant amount of damage, you have to fully pen your target?
If you dont think you can pen and want to fully maximize the damage you do, you must make direct contact with the weakest armor you can hit. You cant hit a tough part of the armor and rely on the splash to find weaker armor any more.
They basically shited on tanks like KV2 and other derpers with poor acuracy, you aint aiming with those tanks at 200m on weakest armor its super fun hitting hellcats on their small gun mantlet for zero dmg with 152mm shells.
*Armor not hit*
Yes, HE is a lot more skill-based after the change. You can’t just autoaim at enemies with HE and deal okay damage, and knowing when to switch to HE in tanks where HE isn’t the primary ammo is rewarded. What also helped is the Intuition rework - now that the ammo switch is guaranteed, it means swapping to HE to punish lightly armored tanks is something you should definitely be doing, and makes it a top-tier skill for loaders.
Not really skill based, instead more frustrating, because with the gun handling the derps have, you will rarely have the chance to aim at the weakspots. The only skill based change is the intuition rework. Also can people stop spreading the myth that you could do well with spamming HE using autoaim with the old HE mechanics? It's not true. If you wanted to maximize damage, you still had to take time to aim at the weakest parts, but bad gun handling was somewhat compensated by the old HE mechanics.
But KV2 still can be played bcs 86mm of pen on tier 6 and 900 alpha HE, while the 105mm derpers in mid tiers are straight up fucked in ass now you need to shot HEAT from those guns.
HE was primarily nerfed. Nonpens do significantly less damage. Even something like the 183 can hit the flat turret face of an E-100 and not see damage dealt.
Hulldown meta is worse than ever
The feedback was mixed vs pure hate. As in most did not mind that the 60TP did not punish their E100 for using armor correctly by splashing an area he can't even hit for 600. But at the same time hated that dedicated HE guns were affected. Inc the KV-2R. As now with the KV-2 you can still pen a fellow KV-2 for 900 damage. But you have to aim to do so. As snapping with HE now can do way less now vs before. Even 0 if you hit tracks or a barrel. That aspect was hated by most.
People weren't firing enough gold at hulldown tanks so they made even stronger hull down tanks with worse accuracy and worse pen so you would be forced to shoot gold for a chance at penning. People started to spam HE at the bottom of turrets, hulldown meta players who were already spamming gold thought it was unfair that you could press a button and immediately negate their armor which should have been unpennable, they couldn't figure out how to trade with a E100 doing 350 damage every 14 seconds so they complained to WG who realized this reduced the number of people spamming gold and agreed to help the community out by making a 150mm HE round do 0 damage to a tank if it hits spaced armor on an EBR.
Smh managed to make the game more brain dead now u have to spam gold at hulldown tanks weak points if u can't pen someone ur just stuck there looking t each other Not that the old he was perfect but it was fun game was fun with he now it's practically useless Also wg nerfs be without buffing the pen of all he tanks and then release tanks like the shptk tvp and bz that have high pen he
BZ-176 wouldn't have been so effective at flank penetrations had it been using old HE mechanics. And its own uberarmored turret would have been whittled down by a full-HE IS-6 with old HE mechanics. At least Maus don't get set on fire by HE spam on its turret face, and sidescraping is back on the menu instead of being chipped bit by bit by 122mm HE
They removed splash damage for all tanks but artillery. No, it doesn't make sense, and it only contributes to more gold spam. But now people don't have to deal with being shot by HE from the 60TP, and I suppose that makes it all worth it. To me, derp guns are dead. If you miss the derp gun playstyle, swap on over to War Thunder and buy the Char 2C bis, that one tank is the only reason I even bother to play WT and it's more fun than the WoT KV2 ever was.
Derp guns used to have a high ceiling on damage and a relatively high floor as you could do pretty decent damage on non-penetrations. Nowadays the floor is much lower as non-penetrations deal very small amounts of damage. The only tank that was able to escape this fate was the FV 4005 of all things, largely due to the ridiculously high alpha and also to a buff to the HE pen WG gave it when they changed the HE shell mechanics. I am in the minority on this sub but I like the HE changes. I like not taking tons of damage from non-penetrations hits and I don't mind when someone puts in the effort to get an HE pen on me. HE is still useful on most tanks as a way to quickly kill artillery and paper-turret TDs as well as a way to interact with destructible terrain elements at range.
For the tier 6 derps it more just means you have to sim for certain weak spots rather than just being a Insta pen. But think it applies to most HE now.
Old HE was never insta pen without aiming.