How to fight a panther or a tiger while playing as Americans.
Blind him with smoke projectiles. Use a smoke screen, smoke grenades. Anything to blind him.
Simple and effective. You can blind him and change position, or wait for the opponent to change position.
The same tactic works well against heavy tanks in Berlin.
Start thinking tactically, and not cry on the forum and forever only whining about balance.
This game is becoming less and less tactical and realistic in terms of weapons, and is starting to take the shape of what is already on the market, i.e. junk.
Balance kills games because they become boring because there is a specific hardware meta and there is no variety.
That depend on skill and information. 76mm M1 cannon can penetrate hull of tiger front on at quite long range in both reality and game, but the problem is when tiger is angled, it become very unlikely to penetrate even at short range. This tactics is written in operator handbook of tiger, used a lot in reality, but it require skill of crew and information about where enemy may come.
I did not play Normandy a lot, but from my experience in Berlin where counterpart of tiger is IS-1, I feel the unbalancing is more likely to come from poor armour of M4A1 76W, instead of firepower. There tiger one shot IS-1 for mid probability at any angle, IS-1 one shot tiger if in most of angle, but IS-1 non-pen tiger almost every time if tiger precisely angle itself in that about 10 degree range.
I do this a lot. Shoot gun first, then shoot tracks, so that he can’t retreat for repair. Then switch to HE and engage enemy infantry, meanwhile keeping an eye on the tank and blast the crew, if they try to repair. Works even better against Jumbos, because they tend to need many shots to kill you.
But could it be, that Panther barrel HP was stealth buffed recently? I had two games a short while agao, where, no matter how often I hit the gun, it never got damaged beyond yellow. I could only track them and run away.
this is not fighting. this is avoiding. and almost every allies player in normandy knows how to avoid panther/tiger sooner or later.
people are whining not purely cause of panther/tiger, but cause of underlying game problems that force direct confrontation with panther/tiger. simply bad map design that allows those tanks to camp in gray zone and be effective at killing enemy. it directly negates most of the anti tank solutions and if you are f2p with any 75mm or lower tank you effectively have 0 solution for killing those tanks.
this problem will be mostly solved with BR update, but even then you can expect occasional bad matchup. to perfectly fix this maps need to be redesigned so tanks cant be effective in gray zone and/or add second vehicle slot for f2p players.
