I have been trying out BR2 Germany without Panzer III N today, been playing around with my many event and premium tanks - Panzer III M, Puma with 7.5cm HEAT, and even STUG A, and they all got suddenly worth using in their own way, while previously Panzer III N simply made many of those obsolete, well outside of Panzer III M and the Stalingrad Panzer III N ofc.
But then I took the next step used only the TT tanks, here is my experience from today, first I’ll talk about the guns available, I think that makes it easier:
5cm L 60
7.5cm L 24
7.6cm Pak
So the 5 cm L60 gun is found in the Puma and Panzer III J1, which is quite nice for BR2, it reloads fast, has decent penetration and decent post pen damage, it quite easily deals with all targets it faces at BR2, while even being able to fight BR3 tanks though only really if aiming for weak spots and getting a bit lucky. I have found however that it can struggle a bit with penetration drop off at longer ranges, at the quarry map it can sometimes struggle to pen T28E sitting far in the back, which in return will take out Pumas and Panzer III J usually with just a simple hit, but in normal combat ranges, who ever hits first will win usually.
next up is the 7.5cm howitzer, and yes I absolutely felt the lack of HEAT rounds now, because the TT variants will not have access to them, however the 7.5cm howitzer is still an extremely potent infantry support gun. So yeah, my couple of fights using my Panzer IV F1 did make try to avoid enemy armor when possible, if being faced with BR3 tanks its game over, T28E can be kinda frontally destroyed, but only if close enough, some premium tanks like Matilda will have it easy to tank shots - BUT most other BR2 and pretty much all BR1 tanks will get nuked to death by Panzer IV F1! 7.5cm gun AP HE round have crazy filler and will blow up everything with weak armor in one shot, which isnt all that much of an advantage when F1 itself has poor armor, but it should be noted that it does make it useful enough in general.
7.6cm from the Marder is very straight forward - its basically just a long 7.5cm Panzer IV J gun, so it takes out all BR2 and BR3 tanks with easy, but the Marder has no armor and is open top and has to turret. So the Marder does its job even has a MG but still only mostly is a tank hunter, which is to be expected.
So - my conclusions are that the top choices for future German BR2 will be:
Puma - very poor armor and struggles on off road terrain, but has a good gun and is very fast on roads. Fair enough I guess.
Panzer III J1 - kinda weak armor, good gun nice mobility, will most likely be the future top choice and most used tank.
Panzer IV F1 - kinda weak armor, very impressive infantry support gun, rather poor penetration, but if not facing well armored opponents still very powerful. I guess a debate could be held if it deserves HEAT rounds
Marder - yeah, for those who dont like enemy grey zone tankers or being up tiered.
I know this is a HEATed topic ( wow a pun ), but personally I am convinced that Panzer III N was over performing, the mobility, the armor, the top mounted MG, the extra heat rounds and the crazy powerful HE together made it crazy OP, however I do actually fear that T28 E will now have a very easy time dealing with German armor, because they ALL have 50mm for armor max, this could be an issue.
T28 E has just like Panzer IV F1 a very powerful post pen damage gun, which would have equal problems dealing with higher armor tanks, but those no longer exist for BR2, again, Panzer III N was the only German BR2 tank with more than 50 mm of frontal base armor.
I wonder what the majority thinks about this?
