Aiming. How do yooooou do it?

Canis Lupus

So was looking around at a couple of vids and whether for aesthetics or not I see a lot of people don't zoom in. The last vid was one by Jingles demonstrating the T29 and he didn't zoom in a single shot. Perhaps it was because he was top tier and didn't need to worry much about weak spots but his firing was rapid fire point and shoot (not really even bothering to let the reticle shrink much) and I'd say 95% of his shots landed and frankly he pwned his way through the fight. Others line up via zoom, then zoom out then shoot.

So then I did a little more reading and 'some' people say if you shoot in 3rd person the RNG gives you better odds of a pen shot. Anyone any more sneaky info on this or is it simply myth? I personally now tend to zoom, shoot zoom straight out and I haven't tried the 3rd person shooting style to see if it improves anything or not but wondered what others think.

Spear

The RNG thing is a pure myth.

As for aiming, it'll depend on the target tank and the distance, and the gun I'm firing at the time. The 105mm gun on the T29 has pretty good penetration at 198mm making weak spots less important.

Nody

As Spear said that's pure myth; he was also likely to use either gold ammo or shooting a tank he knew he could penetrate easily. I've not bothered to zoom in if I know any hit will do (side/back basically) or if the tank is close to die. Having said that I'm I usually do wait for the sight to come back to a reasonble size before shooting unless it's a "I need to kill that tank with this shell or I'll die" or "Oh hai 5 enemy tanks all about to blow me out of the water" kind of moment.

B0rG

few tricks that I know:

there's a rule of 3 calibres: if your caliber (read gun penetration) is 3 times more than the armour value, there will be no bounce. So in theory you can shoot as soon as your aim circle covers whole enemy.

More so if you're shooting gold only.

T29 got greatest pen for it's tier (198) so you can do the same if you're top dog And if you are on gold it's 320 pen, so you can skip the aiming part completely.

It is important what type of ammo he was using. HE got 420/53 (dmg/pen), and you can pretty much oneshot lower tiers if you get a side hit.

Another thing is the fear factor of a large tank: weak opposition is usually afraid of T29 cause it hits hard and they can't pen it really, so they start panicking and making more mistakes, and here you just roll Like the battle just started, they got 600 odd hp, they see a slow fat HT, they try to hit it (bing and nothing), it hits back for 350 odd, and suddenly they are oneshot material. scary.

And sometimes you just have a lucky day, like yesterday I got T34 and played two battles: first battle was set on fire twice (!!! ffs omg ffs!!! two times on fire?), but the team won. Second battle platooned with a friend on isu 152 (bl-10 muhaha), we were top dogs on prohorovka with only 1 m7 arty (buggered me all game hitting for 70 hp or so). Needless to say I finished with a master with 3k own damage, 3k spot damage and 3k potential damage received. Those kind of games usually end up on UTube with a voiceover bs like I'm always making right decisions that always lead to victory bla-bla-bla

It all works better on short distance.

And most importantly in the middle of short range dog fight against 2+ tanks you need to take risky shots to quickly shorten the opposition numbers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. And we don't see many videos on UTube where it did not.

But (as usual there are a lot of buts):

Russian tanks are notorious for "eating" the shells. (once got 4 non pen shoots off back and sides of kv1 from gold m4 with 150 pen, go figure). Same with "skirts" on is-6.

Properly angled tracks can absorb the damage for full module damage. Something to watch out for.

Also T29 in particular got very long reload time around 10-12 seconds, so the price of mistake is really high. It also got long aim time too, so most of times you don't really want to wait.

To learn shooting without zoom, I'd recommend amx 12t with gold. Because you're always on the move, so you don't have time for sniper mode. One mistake and you're back to hangar. And expensive shells just an additional motivator 500 battles and you'll be pretty good with it Ah yes, and it takes 12 seconds for amx 12t target reticule to close up...

Gosh that's a load of text...


Another trick: you can hold right mouse button, and move your target reticule at much faster speed, release it on chosen target, press T for "requesting fire on X", go to sniper zoom and wait for the turret to catch up. Helps to choose your target out of many.

Canis Lupus

Yeah I guessed it was mostly because in the T29 example he was top tier but in the vid he makes a reasonable number of long distance shots without really aiming much.

I figured the RNG thing was rubbish. Shame :P

Spear

Canis Lupus wrote: »

Yeah I guessed it was mostly because in the T29 example he was top tier but in the vid he makes a reasonable number of long distance shots without really aiming much.

If you're confident of penetration, then you can just rely on the aiming circle to have shrunk enough to put the shot on target.