An Idea for Artillery

So I got back into the game after a few month hiatus. I came back to find that arty is still incredibly annoying and game breaking for me. I am a casual player, I am not bad but I am not great either. That being said, I know you can "hide" from arty if you are able to get certain spots with overhang etc, but more often than not I find myself just getting obliterated by 1-2 artys while I'm angling or side scraping against another tank. This isn't fun. it dosent matter how well I play when someone can click at me from across the map. As such I have some ideas on how to make artillery better.

Artillery in general is usually considered to be a "support". So why not make artillery a support role? Give artillery different shells that accomplish different purposes.

1) Spotting "paint" round. Artillery fires a "paint" round that has a 1.5 meter radius. Enemy tanks that are "painted" are spotted for a set amount of time, regardless if they are able to be spotted by friendly tanks.

2) Make artillery have to deploy in order to have better gun handling stats. Similar concept with the Swedish TDs, arty has to deploy in order to have better aim time, dispersion, reload, etc, but this limits their movement.

3) Smoke round. Similar to WoW, a area of affect smoke screen to cover an area an provide concealment. Make it a smaller area (5-7 meters) and last a reasonable amount of time (7-15 seconds) so it cant be abused.

4) Remove stun mechanics.

5) Give arty a limited amount of HE rounds that do restricted damage. If the round does not impact the enemy tank directly, the round does not do damage, however it can blow tracks off, knock out commanders hatch, damage gun, etc. Crew are not able to be injured by an indirect round. If the round directly impacts the tank, damage is capped per the caliber of the gun. Example a 250mm gun can do a maximum of 250hp. (Note this might require every single arty in the game to be looked at, to make sure certain arty aren't out-performing and are balanced for their tier. Another potential is to have artillery do more damage to the lighter the armor rating on a tank.)

6) Reduce artillery reload for "special" shells.

​

Obviously this makes arty limited on its ability to do damage, however it gives artillery the ability to be a support role and turns it from "sit in the back of the map click at stuff" to have to at least think and use different options. In addition, each nation can have their own specific type of "special" shell. Example USSR can fire a shell that does extra damage, France can fire a baguette, England can fire a "minefield" type shell that damages tracks, etc. Let me know what yall think. These are just ideas that will probably never be implemented because, well because but doesn't hurt to post.