Out of the entire japanese arsenal there is nothing that can confortably deal with everything that BR 4 US can throw at you. The only thing that japan might have an edge over the US might be the smg department but everything else seams to be kinda bad.
Sure you can find some neat weapons to play and still have fun at it but the US will ALWAYS have the PLAYER advantage as they have the largest playerbase and due to tunisia they will always have a backup low BR theater to play if pacific gets a bit rough for them (and all the new players need to go there before reaching normandy first).
Japan suffers from a serious of issues currently after the merge
Lack of incentive to play if only fighting US isnt fun
Matches will be at a player dissadvatage due to the US playerbase beeing massive
Equipment beeing overtiered hard just to have something at BR 4
Opressive US tanks and no tanks to comfortably deal with them in return
Lack of good fighter CAS planes
Like mentioned in point 4 some gear seam to have inflated BR just to have something at BR 4.
The chi nu for example has a gun like the puma (about 100mm pen) and not the panzer 4 with 135mm like they compared the tank to in the devlog. The Tank lacks a coaxel MG to make it usefull vs infantry. Funfact: The M4A2 sherman (BR3) has about 100 mm of frontal armor in a head engagement.
The armor with 50 mm is bad at BR 3 and none existant at BR 4.
You might possibly compare it to a J1 at best but with a bit more HE and minus the MG
The DAY1 might be here aswell as the german 500kg bomber are at BR 2 and im not sure yet if the speed alone can carry it to BR 4 without any meaning full weapons. (but I dont own it yet).
5 round semis in BR 4 are a joke when 6 round semis can be found as early as in BR 2 otherewise.
Did they really try to sell these as “BR4” to us to justify seeing BR 4 in return?
Japan does not get any good CAS fighters until BR 4. Just 2 60 KG bombs ( that somehow are worse than 45 kg 100 lb bombs) arent a got CAS payload if you can compare it to the likes of a P-38.
The Infantry AT cant be entirely relied on as the type 5 lacks a sight to aim and the type 4 lack pen to frontaly pen basic shermans reliably ( i know skill issue but why should I suffer if I could just abandon the faction?)
Questionable desitions made all japanese tanks worse as the Hull MG gunner seat is the most useless thing you could have and actively sabotages you crew management of the tank.
Aslong as these issues exist japan will have a hard time fighting the US on an equal footing and hemorages even more players. But the US can never run out of a payerbase unless enlisted dead so they will always be there to abuse the dwindling playerbase that stayed.
If everytning japan needs to have an tiny edge over the US because of this just to avoid this scenario.
This might sound a bit exaggerated but if japan is not fun to play then nobody does so…
Just put everything from BR4 into BR 3 and you might have it atleased a bit less bad or do something else to protect the playerbase but having the pacific as the new bot farm would be a bit sad.
but at the same time, they may be onto something for a foreseeable future.
( watch them pull out new assets out of thin air for necessity in less than a month worth of 4 / 5 content update of a year. speculation and jackassery from me, but eh… we’ll see )
The equipment balance is currently non existent. There’s no way anyone can think this is okay.
But I doubt they will acknowledge their mistake any time soon. So will end up with this terrible “balance” at least several months.
That’s my opinion.
All faction will supposedly get AR event engineers if I understood it correctly.
Meaning even Japanese will get some ARs. This could help significantly.
Tbh, I didn’t think much would change even if they would postponed this update for months.
At least now it is obvious what doesn’t work and needs to be fixed. Hopefully they’ll not ignore it as long as they did ingnore bipods meme issues.
I used it and it is clunky af to use with that narrow field of fire. It even struggeled to pen a M4a2 that got stuck in a trench with some angled sideshots… so not that powerfull of a gun.
But the thing is I dont believe it would have changed anything.
They completely ignored the most important feedback from 2 last test serves - 2 queues are just not enough, no matter if playerbase is too small for more queues.
You can’t really balance a shtt using only 2 queues. And they basically throw away any historical immersion for the sake of this terrible and non fuctional “balance”.
I really doubt they would change opinion even after 100 test server.
But now, since it is on live servers and everyone can obviously see the “balance” is not balanced at all. There’s eay higher chance they’ll do something about it.
That’s why I think release of this update was needed no matter what.