Being an Ex Tanker myself I find the HE rounds to be a bit of a joke. There where intended to take out Infantry and lite vehicle’s and at the moment there are useless. you have trouble killing one person let alone a squad, trying to kill any infantry you are stuck with the machine gun only cause HE is useless.
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I agree. If you fire a 45mm or higher tank shell into a window it should kill everyone in that room
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Agree. Most of my HE kills end up been direct hits. I just use HE to save AP for tanks.
Agree hard with this.
Stuart 37mm HE: Supposed to be bad, it’s a high velocity tiny round, the explosive mass is kinda useless. However, I’d expect it to at least be able to do SOME splash damage. It feels like it needs a direct hit on troops to ever do anything… At that point, the tank might as well ONLY carry AP ammo, which also needs a direct hit to kill troops… and it sucks to have half your ammo be taken up by an HE round that is both useless against tanks, and not much more useful against infantry than AP ammo. I think this gun actually had some canister shot IRL, why not have that instead of HE?
Puma 50mm HE: This can kill 2 or 3 players IF YOURE LUCKY and they bunch up bad, but is usually getting lone kills or injury from splash damage, if you’re a good shot. I guess that’s about what I expect from a high velocity 50mm HE shell.
What really is obnoxious though is how terrible the 75mm howitzer HE on the PZ-III N is against infantry. I got that tank expecting it to be weak sauce against other tanks, but at least have an insane amount of HE splash radius and damage against troops. What I got instead however was a gun that barely feels like it has any more explosive potential than the 50mm. It feels like it’s artificially nerfed compared to how it would be IRL. It makes a bigger explosion visually, but just like the 50mm, you need to land rounds REALLY close to infantry, and might only kill 1-3 troops at best, depending on how bunched up they are. Like, you need to land a round right in the middle of troops standing practically on top of each other to get multikills with it. I’ve seen troops run right past a detonation off a wall that I would’ve expected to kill them IRL, and they don’t even take a hit from it. Like, the HE ammo on this tank is almost insultingly bad, it should perform noticeably better than the 50mm high velocity gun for obvious reasons. Instead, it feels almost identical… For a higher reload time, on a tank that is a lot less mobile than a puma. I straight up might go back to my puma.
What tank are you using?
It has a 50mm Howitzer not a 75. Idk why the description is wrong.
It has the 7.5 cm KwK 37, a 75mm low velocity howitzer similar to the American 75mm howitzer. Not a 50mm howitzer… Pretty sure no such 50mm howitzer existed for Germany in WW2, as the whole point of a howitzer is a high explosive mass.
The description for the gun is even more wrong than you seem to think. The tank in the game is not supposed to have a 50mm howitzer.
Agreed. Something is very wrong with certain HE shells. The Soviet 45mm HE shell should contain more than double the explosive filler of the F1 grenade, however in-game it does virtually nothing whatsoever. Direct hits are required on each and every single infantryman, and there appears to be no splash damage whatsoever.
Yes, 37mm rounds were historically bad with regards to HE filler, but I’m not seeing any damage whatsoever. If I have to hit each soldier with the shell dead on, then I may as well use AP, as it’s an oversized rifle at that point! 
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Scroll down to PZ III Ausf N
“Panzer III Ausf. N - Infantry support tank, armed with a short-barrelled 7.5 cm KwK 37 L/24 gun. 700 were produced or re-equipped from 1942 and 1943”
Also, yeah, the description in game is VERY wrong, and I wish they’d fix it.
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Hmm. It used to be on the campaign screen it listed it as a 50mm. I figured the reason for bad HE was because of that.
Nope, it’s just inexplicably bad, lol. I think they probably nerfed it into the ground or something.
But yeah, I would expect even a low velocity 50mm to have not great HE. Even that should at least be an improvement over a high velocity 50mm on the puma though. Lower velocity means you can make HE shells with thinner walls, and pack more explosive mass into the same size shell. It’s one of the reasons why not every Sherman tanker in WW2 liked the 76mm M1A1/A2 gun, as the stock 75mm gun had better HE shells for infantry support, and it was good enough to deal with armor up to the PZ III, IV, stug, etc, the most common armor they ran into. It wasn’t until tankers ran into smaller numbers of Tigers and Panthers that they started taking an interest in higher velocity guns.
Funny thing is the 76 had the same shrapnel radius as the 75. The tankers just thought that that extra CM vs the velocity wouldn’t do it so they didn’t try. Plus they were familiar with the 75 and knew guys in Italy were killing Tigers.
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Yeah, I mean, you don’t really need the 76 to kill a tiger anyway. Tankers were given 1 or 2 APCR shells for the 75mm if it really came to a frontal fight… But most fights aren’t frontal 1 on 1 duels. You can even see that in Enlisted funnily enough, I had 1 game where I had to fight a Jumbo multiple times in my PZ III N. Shockingly a won I few of those fights. One of them, I got the drop on him and just took my time driving around to his rear while he didn’t notice me. Meanwhile, I died multiple times in my PZ III that game from 1 or 2 shots, and didn’t know where they came from. I assume it was from him, as that was the most dangerous thing in that game. I probably engaged that guy maybe 5 or 6 times that game, and only 2 of them turned into frontal duels. Most engagements are one tank gets the drop on the other, and that’s all that mattered.
I tend to laugh when people start making comparisons about armor and guns between the Tiger and Sherman, or any other tank comparison really. The US produced 50,000 shermans during WW2, while the Germans produced 1300 tiger 1s, and 600 king tigers. The idea that it was common for Tigers to be engaged by lone Shermans from the front in perfect duels is ridiuclous, while… Well… Tigers broke down often enough that they often were engaged in small numbers or alone, and it often wasn’t an even fight. What mattered more was who shot first, and who had the tactical advantage.
A good example, people like to point to Michael Wittmann lone wolfing it through Viller’s Bocage as an example of the prowess of the Tiger 1, and while that is a perfect example of what that tank is capable of in the best of circumstances… Reading up on the context leading up to the engagement, I remember reading about something like 2 dozen Tigers in that unit responding to the Normandy break out, having to trek pretty far to get to the same area, and only a handful of them made it there without some form of breakdown. He was in a lone tank because that tank was the most serviceable one in his command at the time.
The realities of war are really interesting to me, it seems like WW2 was won more on logistics than anything else, and any one engagement came down to luck just as much as skill.
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A game is a game though, and has to be fair. Currently it is not, and that’s a problem.
Except it is. Tanks aren’t that unbalanced, players just suck at dealing with them, and then go piss and moan on the forums expecting them to be hit with the nerf bat, instead of learning how to take them down better. I posted on another post that was complaining about tank balance if you want to see my opinions on the subject.
I think if anything is truly unfair in this game, it is the invasion game mode, especially Normandy. That map is basically designed around spawn killing… Even then, it’s like… Well… That’s basically how Normandy was, so 10/10, authentic normandy invasion experience. And when I consider how many games I’ve won or lost on normandy as axis, I think it’s about tied.
Furthermore, balancing a tank so it’s “fair” or not, what about the lack of tank balance where the Puma is essentially a better tank than the PZ III N, because you’ve hit the PZ III with the nerf bat so hard that the tank that comes before it is actually overall, a better vehicle? The PZ III is supposed to have a massive HE round and good spaced armor, but be weaker to shermans and anti tank guns. It fails to deliver on this because the HE rounds on that thing are now kind of insultingly bad. I spent a ton of time grinding to level 10 just to get a proper tank in the Normandy campaign, just to find out the Puma will probably serve me better.
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It all depends what tank are you using.
If you currently use the M5a1 / Panzer II / T-60 the of course, their HE power is less than of a hand grenade.
Once you get to higher calibers the issue will be kind of gone. I play the M8 and in the D-Day I can take out the entire bunker with one shot.
Right, but what kind of multikills and splash damage on troops are you getting? Because I’m up to the PZ IIIN, with a similar 75mm howitzer gun to the M8, and it is, as far as I can tell, not a higher splash damage or splash radius than the 50mm high velocity gun on the Puma… And even that is lackluster (as it should be, it’s a 50mm high velocity gun).
So if the objectively far slower and far larger round with the far higher explosive mass is no more lethal than the Puma’s anti tank gun… Then what is the actual point of driving a mobile howitzer around. The HE underperforms to such an extent that what should be a way worse HE shell on a different gun effectively matches it, to an unrealistic degreee… Not only unrealistic, un fathomable. There is no rhyme or reason in the real world why the 7,5cm KWK73 should have an HE shell that performs no better than that of a smaller caliber higher velocity gun.
As far as it stands now, it seems like Gaijin can buff and nerf armor and figherpower depending on what the player is targetting. Perhaps they modelled the destructive capacity of the scott against bunkers correctly, but not the way it should be against troops
I thought it was just me being bad with the HE rounds, but yes, they need way better splash damage (at least as good as infantry’s grenades)
except the stuart’s HE was historically worse than a frag