Commanders!
Update 0.38 will not only bring a new season called Exodus, but a lot of new features with it – the Wars of the Past Battle Path, PvE improvement, a new Special Operation and more. But today, we’d like to tell you not about a new piece of content, but about a mechanics change that’s coming as a part of the great vehicle overhaul (the Tier 1-6 part of which was introduced recently). This time, we’ll be overhauling autocannons.
But first a little bit of background. One of the main points of criticism with the way things are right now is the limited capacity of autocannons and the whole way penetration, damage per shot and rate of fire interact with each other. The current system has major limitations that aren’t as obvious on lower Tiers, but become a serious problem on high-Tier vehicles.
When you have roughly the same type of autocannons and give them better and better shells with more damage to compensate for the improvements in health pools and MBT armor over the Tiers for the autocannons to keep up, you end up with ridiculously high sustained damage outputs on Tier 9 and Tier 10.
We tried to compensate this via the introduction of limited autocannon clips (which were also intended to rein in the out-of-control low Tier SPAAG vehicles such as the XM247), but this didn’t really work out either as this solution turned out to be quite unpopular. Those pesky magazines always empty in the middle of a firefight, don’t they.
That is why we decided to introduce the Gatling gun overheating mechanics to all the autocannons in the game.
The general mechanic is very simple and you are familiar with it. Each autocannon will have an overheat bar with two sections. The more you fire, the fuller the bar gets and when you overheat your weapon, you’ll have to wait a couple of seconds for it to cool down.
What’s new is the way the bar will work (even for rotary cannons). The bar is now separated into two parts. Below 60% heat, the mechanic works as you’re used to – you fire and the bar goes up. You stop firing and it goes down, potentially all the way to zero.
At 60%, the gun switches to the Emergency mode. In the Emergency mode, the gun continues to fire until the bar is full and when it fills completely, the gun starts cooling down... until it reaches that 60% threshold again. You can then let the gun cool down even further (even all the way to zero), or you can start firing again using the Emergency portion of the bar. In other words, it basically works like a second, smaller clip. It sounds more complicated than it really is – check out the image to see how it works in the game.
With that being said, we are planning on adding some specific rules to the whole thing.
Generally speaking:
- The higher the caliber, the faster the gun heats up and cools down
- In order to make the differences between vehicle classes more pronounced, we’ve introduced a new module called “Improved Weapon Cooling”, intended for the Tank Destroyer class and unlocked by default, which will double the amount of shells fired before the gun overheats
- Tank Destroyer autocannons take longer to cool down
A few examples, per caliber and class:
- 20mm autocannons (100 rounds, 2.5s full cooling)
- 30mm autocannons (AFV: 50/2.5s, TD: 100/3.76s)
- 40mm autocannons (AFV: 40/2s, TD: 80/2.5s)
- 50mm autocannons (AFV: 40/2s, TD: 80/2.5s)
And so on. Furthermore:
- Some specific AFVs will feature the Improved Weapon Cooling module as well
- MBTs with coaxial autocannons are set individually
- Specific weapons like the 30mm RARDEN (Scimitar, Fox) or the 57mm autocannon of the Begleitpanzer 57 will still use the old clip mechanic
- The rate of fire of practically all vehicles will be adjusted to match the new mechanism (for some vehicles it will be reduced while other vehicles such as the BMPT series will see an increase)
In summation, this change should improve your gameplay experience by not having to mash the reload button ever so often, all the while keeping the gameplay balanced. We are looking forward to your feedback and hope you’ll find these changes satisfactory.
See you on the battlefield!
