Personal Experience: I’m conflicted, we’ve got a fast no-armor jack of all trades medium autoreloader with low DPM. That, from my point of view, should be performing much worse than it does, but consistently punches far above their weight because of three key factors: Autoreloader flexibility, gun depression and well-rounded albeit not perfect stats. We’ll struggle to compete against more specialized enemies but can generally fulfill most roles adequately.
These were the most memorable aspects of this adventure for me;
Autreloader Flexibility & Complexity: The autoreloader mechanics afford an incredible amount of flexibility with how we manage engagements and the option to do 1,080~ burst damage. This comes at the cost of significantly worse reloads per shell and additional mental labor of managing reload timers as firing a millisecond too early before the shell was loaded in a tense situation, sets the timer back to square one and cripples our DPM.
Good Mobility: The top speed of 65 km/h is fantastic with good enough hp/t ratio. Were easily able to get to and contest important positions early-game and easily flex around the map to where the damage opportunities are. Markers do need to be careful not to use the speed to get themselves into trouble, as we’ll generally outpace most other vehicles except for light tanks.
Weak Armor: Our armor profile is truly awful, the weak side armor means even glancing hits from SPGs can slice off almost 300 HP and direct hits are well over 600. Our frontal armor is so weak that 80 pen HE shells can go through and our sides are completely butter to most HE shells.
Personally, the Standard-B is roughly on the lower-end of truly good tier 9 mediums for combat power. Definitely worthwhile for the 3MOE, but highly suggested markers pursue it when they're close to a peak in their gameplay performance. As the second-guessing nature of “Did I make the right choice with this autoreloader shell? Should I have waited? Should I have emptied everything?” can make our gameplay choices less clear without a focused mind to sift through the self-blame and copium.
Main Build: We’re faced with two issues, 1) Platform fragility and 2) Relatively poor dispersion factors. We can only really mitigate one of them with equipment.
Because of our poor armor we’ll almost never be able to mitigate damage with it. Meaning whenever we trade we'll have to dip into our HP pool outside of using gun depression and clever use of terrain. We can mitigate this with hardening, raising our HP pool from 1,700 to 1,870.
Were now saddled with weak dispersion factors in the aftermath of which reworked Italian mediums. We can mitigate this with Pink IRM or Aiming, and is the better option for DPGs.
I chose the more passive benefit and safer option with hardening. Even with our true niche being a support tank off on the side, we still need to commit ourselves into the fight and share our HP pool in most types of battles.
Secondary Build: The setup I would pull for defense game modes or larger maps like Prokhorovka where the enemy has to make the approach on us and were able to shoot uncontested most of the time.
Ensk: Our exposure time is too long (3s in-between shell reload), there’s no terrain to work with and unless we take a large risk going field or operating along the rails, all the enemy HP is clumped up on the 1/2/3 making it difficult to access. Easily skipped.
Airfield: This one’s a personal choice; the Standard B should work reasonably well, getting to positions early and slow playing the rest of the game or until the enemy makes a push. This works wonderfully as our low relative DPM and autoreloader mechanics gives us flexibility in how we handle our engagements.
Standard: Useful when engaging targets at range or light tanks – The higher shell velocity of 1,450 makes leading targets much easier.
Premium: Due to autoreloader mechanics, we are quite inflexible with ammunition choice. We have to visualize a little bit into the future what kind of ammunition we will need for the job. For targets at over 200~ meters our standard shells work better due to shell velocity. Otherwise I default to HEAT shells most of the time, the 330 pen but 925 shell velocity is fine at closer ranges where the higher shell velocity is a waste.
HE: Theoretically decent with 105 pen and 440 damage, but for practical purposes the opportunities to use it are hard to come by. Only good towards the end of a battle when they’re are only soft targets left. Our ammunition capacity is quite large so it doesn't hurt to have <6 rounds on standby if we ever need the DPM buff.
Crew: The Standard-B is unfortunately overloaded with the need for crew skills. Realistically we’ll need around five crew skills to unlock their full potential, with the commander alone we’d like to have: Brothers In Arms, Six Sense, Sound Detection, Recon, Situational Awareness, Repairs and Concealment.
- Sixth Sense and sound detection are non-negotiable due to high fragility.
- Recon and situational awareness are suggested as dropping either results in just sufficient view range.
- Brothers in Arms is important for general utility.
- Repairs and Concealment are non-negotiable due to high fragility.
Every ounce of crew skills is accounted for; there are no luxuries with Italian medium autoreloaders making them almost as skill-intensive as light tanks at higher tiers.
- Light-Alloy Mounting Points – I’m a little uncomfortable with this field mod choice, we need the extra turret traverse speed, but the additional debuff for damaged ammo racks is hefty for a low DPM machine. The frontal ammo rack module is also enormous making this a somewhat risky pick. Use caution.
- Improved Sight – Easy pick, final accuracy is worth it.
- Anti-Reflective Headlights Coating – Our reverse speed is still reasonable at 21km/h, and our camo goes up. Easy pick.
- New Aiming Gears – I opted for better gun handling as it's the safer option, but Markers with high confidence in their gunnery skills, can opt for Breech Tweaking.
- Second Equipment Slot Specialization – Survivability
New Aiming Gears: Our reloads are now glacial (10s | 11.8s | 13.6s), but with significantly improved aiming time and after firing dispersions. Because of our reloads we become fairly inflexible with our niche being short and controlled fights; poke and shoot however many times we want, and maybe maneuver slightly to bait a shot, then withdraw. The better aim time and after firing dispersions really help with that.
Breech Tweaking: Our reloads become competitive (9.05s | 10.7s | 12.3s) but the price is longer aim time and significantly worse after firing dispersions. Our niche is still short and controlled fights, but with wilder reticle bloom during the engagement. With our downtime being significantly shorter and our fully loaded DPM being roughly 227 higher compared to New Aiming Gears.
The differences are not so clear-cut as genuine arguments can be made for both. My bias is the safer and more predictable approach with New Aiming Gears.
Final Tanks.gg Configuration: The main setup looks like this. Significantly depressed reload times and punishing dispersion factors during maneuvers, but with a decent HP pool we can use to trade and faster aim time.
Remember to love, live and create the things you want with the time we have left. Good luck, and good hunting fellow markers.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/t7lh9g/my_standardb_three_mark_experience/
