Shells to Make Artillery Supportive

No matter how many profanity laced memes or posts are made, arty is going to stay in the game. Low tier artillery is obnoxious, but because it's the only arty that can actually be useful due to high RoF and significant damage for the tier. Higher tier arty doesn't have much options to support their team and big calibre arty (such as the Conq GC or T92 HMC) will often spend much of their time aiming at a target, have the target disappear, search for another target, rinse and repeat.

Every 20 games they might get a lucky engine deck pen on a S Conq or a STB, but remain idle for most of the game due to the high stakes with limited ammo and inaccurate guns.

With the revision of intuition, making it a necessity on many high tier tanks and artillery, now would be an excellent time to introduce more support oriented artillery shells. My proposal is two new types for tier 8+: Incendiary and Smoke. This is intended for tiers 8+.

Starting with Incendiary because that sounds scary. Incendiary rounds would be rounds that have +20% splash radius but come with some new benefits.

1. Applies External Fire: Fire that cannot damage modules, but slowly reduces HP if directly splashed onto an enemy (see #5 for damage and duration). This also applies the concealment reduction of regular internal fire (fuel tank or engine), but does NOT apply any other internal debuffs.
2. In the event of penetration, concealment of the enemy tank is completely negated but does not apply the camo reduction to the surrounding area. Burn damage is still applied and crew receives the same debuffs as an internal fire, but crew members are not injured.
3. Removes the concealment bonus of any bushes/trees in the radius of the splash, granting the arty assistance if enemies are spotted due to the shell's effects.
4. Reduces the module HP of exposed crew by 50% and increases the chance of injury by 20% upon being hit.
5. Damage and duration of different guns

*Fire extinguishers (both types) reduce burn damage by 45% and duration by 60%, but cannot directly extinguish a fire except for penetrations. Upon extinguishing an internal fire, all debuffs are removed immediately.

**The above is just an idea, nothing final.

Moving on to Smoke rounds:

1. Do not do any damage under any circumstance
2. Add 125% to shell splash radius of the standard stun shell.
3. Reduce view range of enemy vehicles by 75% and allies by 50%.
4. Increase the camo value of affected vehicles by 25%.
5. Block outlining (including pen indicators) through smoke, both allies and enemies are affected by this.
6. Damage done by ally shells that pass through smoke grant the arty assist damage.
7. Allies that remain unspotted (and have not not been spotted before) due to a smokescreen grant assistance to the arty for their amount of HP, only applied once per vehicle. Arty cannot receive more than 1 application of the assistance in a platoon, limit to 1 vehicle.
8. Duration by calibre

This is by no means are conclusive request and various testing would need to be completed to ensure that the rounds are balanced. Their inclusion would help arty better counter hidden vehicles by reducing their camo or assist in concealing allies on their way to an important position. Letting artillery do the function of "preventing camping" by letting them reveal enemy positions while doing minimal damage or supporting their team with a smokescreen to flank or too keep enemy snipers from having potshots.

The assistance factor would likely need to be better incorporated (as either a combination with the current stun or as a new conglomerate "assistance" ) and included in some missions to promote their usage more.

I know this is long but I wanted to share something that was more indepth than the usual "solution" of just removing arty. If you've read this far, your constructive feedback is welcome.