TANKS need some serious improvements! ....also: Why did my first post all of the sudden disappear???

Battlefield V General Discussion
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Hello guys and hopefully DICE,

as a veteran Battlefield player and after playing the beta + BFV on conquest for more then 30 hours, I’d like to give my 2 cents regarding the current performance of tanks. I’ve played the BF franchise since the first game (mainly as a tanker) and the experience has never been as pointless and frustrating as it is now, pulling an tank.

In previous games, the question used to be somewhere along those lines: “From which position can I impact the fight the most and support my team the best?”
In BFV your only relevant questions are: “How far outside the spawn or how close to to a point I dare myself to drive, before getting annihilate by a barage of katyusha rockets PF’s”

Your awareness, skill and positioning won’t matter ones the first PF’s starts flying towards you. Their range, speed, velocity, damage and accessibility leaves us very little to no room for countering and surviving them. If they don’t break your tracks or turret, which happens way to often even in a fully upgrated tanks, you’re left there on a golden salver for everyone else to close the gap and finish you off. I don’t think I need to mention what happens when 1 or 2 assaults happens to come from the side or the rear.

With the addition of character customization in BFV its also became harder to filter out the assaults from the other classes, meaning even if you stumble on a group of enemies on an open field in mid-range, you can’t prioritise your targets.

One third of the current gameplay inside a tanks revolves around playing against peekaboo-assaults, the 2nd part you spend desperately trying to repair and during the third part your trying to spot and snipe infantry from afar if you don’t want to waste your tank in the first 3 minutes driving close to a fight.

I can shorten up the Tank vs Tank experience pretty quick. They don’t happen as often as I hoped but sometimes “…he pushes and I push…Every once in while, we push hard enough that the light breaks trough the clouds…so the world beyond the PF spam glimmers…” …just to end up spamming rounds after rounds to get +3/+10/+14 hits on each others sides, till we both decide that this is bulls*it, call it off for today and drive back to the nearest assault who watched this spectacle laughing his off.

Is this what immersive gameplay should look like? Is it supposed to be like that, where two assaults can out-damage a Tiger by a longshot? Once an enemy group sees a heavy tank rolling towards them, their first instinct is not to take cover and try to outmaneuver him, its usually the other way around. Aren’t tanks force multipliers and should be played and treated like that…especially since their numbers are limited?

I don’t want the tanks in this game to be an unstoppable force that can dominate the match, but they should be able to support and interact on a higher level with the infantry reaching the objective. The enemy infantry should atleast think twice before starting firing at a tank.

I can’t lean to far out of the window, when it comes to suggestion on how to quickly fix this issue without destroying the balance of other aspects in the game and knowing how much work it takes to implement them. A more balanced match up when it comes to AT vs Tank is in my opinion if they would deal the current amount of damage in tank vs tank battles.

Here are a few of my humble suggestions.

1.) PF’s:

  • reduce the velocity and damage from distance
  • hitting diffrent parts of tanks should also be reflected in the damage the tank takes
  • tracer trail should be visible for a longer period of time
  • firing while not aiming down the sights, should make the projectile less accurate (to avoide the current peekaboo meta)

2.) Tanks (literally any improvements would help atm):

  • improve tank survivability through more usefull specialisation (“mine clearing line charges” for the churchill as last upgrade is joke while the other 2 options are both for AT in game where u spend 95% of the time fighting infantry)
  • mine clearing line charge are also blocking the view
  • last 2 Churchill upgrates (AP rounds) are inferior to standerd rounds and useless
  • “Emergancy repair” should just have a cooldown
  • standard grenades shouldn’t cancel the repair process in heavy tanks
  • tracks should only be damaged by dynamite/mines (tanks are already very slow, making them completely unmaneuverable after 1 random hit by a PF is often the end of the tank, facing a group)
  • the turret shouldn’t brake as often, if you have the upgrades equipped
  • splash damage needs a buff (an enemy sitting 100 meters away behind a car that is facing me shouldn’t be able to run away with only 20 hp lost)

To summarize everything up, here’s the TL;DR:
Make tanks a viable and usefull resource again!

Battlefield was always about combined arms, don’t exclude the Tanks from having fun in this game, as I myself would rather keep on playing this game instead of quitting it. :slight_smile:

Chears.

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Couldn’t copy&paste the commets from my first post…

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Also I find even worse than the panzerfaust spam is the support/ assault kamikaze with mines, you can fling all three down super fast and just spray them or throw an impact grenade.

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Agree 100% with everything said. Tanks are becoming fodder much more quickly now than they were just a few weeks ago now that people are figuring out how to easily counter them.
Also, I really wish they’d make the mine clearing line charges very effective at clearing out infantry in front of the vehicle. If the lines could go over rocks, you could detonate them and clear out the peekaboo rocket warriors. It would give them more use.

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Tons of valid points soldier. But DICE knows. They will tweak it. Just be patient brother.

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I miss being a tank gunner like in bf1. If you had to eat or take a break you could,with a fair amount of certainty cruise around and not get killed,picking off players here and there (if you had a competent driver).I have yet to last more than 45 seconds as a gunner in bfV.

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You’ve got a great point here. Getting in the top gun on any tank is an immediate death. Kind of a bummer but not really any way to change it since that gunner is exposed.

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I was planing a post such as this myself.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything said, which is also well articulated and elaborated.

Drove a tank in the very first BF, only in LAN tbh, some of my first memorable multiplayer moments came from the turret of the BF2 T-90, or Abrams, made a ¯_(ツ)_/¯ load of carnage with the same in BC2, skipped BF4 I must say, but then again spent countless hours in the lumbering WWI steel beasts, and everything above mentioned was a joy in it’s own way to play and experience. and now THIS.. !?!

..Let’s not forget we’re back at WWII, the golden age of Tanks, the period when the term “tank” became sort of legendary and object of fascination of many..

I’m not even sure how to express my impressions and feeling I have when driving, more accurately said tumbling around in BFV tanks !?? It’s like a torture of Tantalus of some sort. It looks, sounds and feels so good, and it’s so promising to drive out of spawn thinking now I’m gonna inspire few phobias,.. until you actually make first enemy contact :expressionless: and usually perish in seconds, and if u manage to stay alive, most of your “playtime” is reserved on retreating, dragging halfdisabled machine back to spawn, or nearest resupply point, just to do that all over again and again.. it’s the most frustrating experience I’ve ever felt in my own history of BF :confused:

I mean, isn’t it plain as a day, that limited ammo, and repair cycles are a HUUUGE nerf to the armored side of the gameplay already ?!? Which is IMHO GOOD, I as an avid BF tanker was totally ok with that, since it’s realistic and helps with immersion, but hey it should come as a trade of sort, or at least not with the whole package of other almost gamebreaking, not to say threadbreaking inclusions, that currently make the life of vehicles almost impossible. To address a few:

Assault class is currently absurd and an insult to all other classes - best all round weapons in the game, and a whole bunch of AT and explosive options. Even I am laughing to myself when I carry around scoped Gewehr that takes down in three shots, 2 fausts that take 0 skill to use, 2 packs of dynamite and another AT bundle just in case. I mean really !??? Why would anyone bother with anything else ? In the last BF (BF1) they were at least offset and balanced with their smg, and now!?? But that’s another subject and thread.

Land mines quicky plant and manualdetonation instapawndeath - is really pathetic, is this how AT landmines are intended to be used ??!, or with a cunning and calculated planting to the chokepoints and mainroads ?

3rd perspective is far less usefull than it was before, which is ok I think, I would have removed it completely just like in HC and balance the vehicles that way, but since they need buffs obviously, removing it would be additional salt on the wound.

One other thing that’s most certainly greatly overlooked is how because of the complexity of the modern day (BFV) maps, all the rubble, craters, trenches and whatnot - the firing of the primary and secondary armament of the tanks/vehicles on the move is far more harder/demanding than it was in the previous BF titles.. Not to mention that because of the map design you far more often than before end up in the positions where your barrel can’t reach it’s target and you have to spend additional often critical time to maneuver yourself to position to take the very first shot.

Critical damage shots - are presently ridiculous. From my experience, every second successful shot makes some critical damage that turns almost freshly spawned vehicle into sitting duck. I’ve been hit from 200m with fausts, (twisted steel, in the marshes on D, from the bridge obviously) which is all in itself ¯_(ツ)_/¯, and whole other point, to get disabled tracks etc. And I wouldnt those “just lift high enough” 200m shots call exactly a skillful nor aimed nor calculated. It’s just plain stupid.

Evading the rockets by maneuvering which was the usual practice in most other BF’s is almost non existent, I think I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times did someone miss me with the faust.

Upper statement holds mostly for the Heavy tank, but still, you’d expect since it’s sooo damn slow to evade any rocket, it should be impervious to all but heaviest of AT weapons from the front (if positioned smartly - front facing the enemy) but nah, the merry bunch of a few assaults literally laugh to it’s (front) face and peekshot the Tigers and Churchills to stone age. Sad experience truly. I’ve had a game on an Aerodrome map, where one irritating squad all the time contested our first flag, so I said to myself now you’re gonna get some of that “Tiger” experience, not to mention that I was blown to bits by those 4-5 guys not even leaving the spawn, and so three or four times in a row.. I couldn’t push back 4 guys off our spawn with the Tiger lol … so much for the WW2 immersion. Not to confuse me with the fanboy or sort, I was on the other side of the spectre, and it was almost the same kind of disappointment in that triumph/kill as from the perspective of a tank.. some of the first hours into released game, me and buddy are wandering around the map (as allies) and stumble into a lone Tiger tank, I’m like totally excited to the first sight of iconic tank, even if it’s enemy.. and I’m screaming on the TS to my friend, oh crap, oh crap it’s Tiger blabla, trying to immerse both of us to the fear that we’re suposed? to feel.. then third guy spawns, does something to the tank, everything’s in smoke, the Tank is obviously disabled or something, I pull a faust for the very fist time, and finish it off !?? And mixed with the short felt triumph I’m like WTF was that.. looking almost sadly to the blown off turret bellow my legs.. I even got screenshot of this.. it was almost sad.

Specialisations are garbage ! Zimmerit never noticed the difference, but ok, I’d probably would die even more without it. Reinforced turret ring is a joke, had so many turret malfunctions after I “bought” it, that I really believe it’s bugged. Regular smoke is underwhelming and “specialised” is too specific ( you don’t want most often for smoke to be launched in front of your tank), APCR round felt cool during the BETA, since I remember dispatching Crocs with 2-3 of them, but now seems like it’s doing nothing.. Deflections ??? REALLY ??? I never get defensive deflections from the 100+m fausts vs frontal armor, but my specialised AT round deflects from the medium tank ??? It really isn’t worth switching to it in it’s current state, since it makes you defenseless to infantry, which is the doom of you 90% of the time.

I’m really trying not to mention the Tiger too often but it’s really at the very bottom right now. I’m wondering how exactly is it’s pathetic speed, longer reload and less ammo balanced ? It certainly isn’t with additional armor and lethality 'cause of all above mentioned. Church if all across the board far more versatile tank.. It took me 4 main cannon shots to finish off a staghoud ??? If one let’s say glitched and didn’t register even the 3 is a joke.. In regard to vehicle combat you usually place 2-3 shots on enemy, until it obviously retreats to repair, and then you almost always don’t live long enough to finish it off, or to fight again.. it’s so frustrating, that focusing on enemy tank means you become instant punching bag for ever swarming infantry that launches you back to spawn screen - which of good point is where most often there’s a spare tank waiting since no one in his right mind wants to sit in it… Sapienti sat.

/rant 0ff*

Awaiting on at least some sort of acknowledgement and feedback from the DICE.

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Actually there is, a very efficient way to deal with it; one solutions is allegedly already bein’ implemented for the december update, and that being a “duck” option for the top gunner, and the other solution which should be used in addition to the first one is the put some sort of steel shaft cover behind the gunner’s back or at least one of the sides.