I three marked this beauty today on about 264 battles, a lot if you ask me, the reason I wanted to mark it was because the buff it received and I had a winrate debt since the last top of the tree of T57 heavy line that I got it. I remembered this thing being nearly unplayable because the gun sucked so much and having no fun when trying to collect some damage and be decisive on teams.
Now this tank can bully a lot of meta mediums, Progettos think twice before hit it because its 4 round clip is powerful and it can chase them easily if they try to run away, Borats don't think twice to hit it but fail to run away because their traverse speed is bad and having intuition and loading HE is a death sentence to them, the only ones that can counter T69 like crazy are the other medium american tanks with spaced armor (super pershing and iron arnie) those things are frontally impenetrable with HEAT and normal AP ammo and it's hard to hit their cupolas because they are still mediums and can move a lot. The DPM buff made it a first line/2nd line good brawler, 21 second reload with Vents actually feels like a fast reload your teammates can still count on you and gun handling buff allow it to make successfully trades with normal cyclical tanks and eat alive low DPM tanks like 122TM or 56TP. Against Tier 9 and 10 the only thing that saves it from being bullied it's the 280mm HEAT pen.
Its already good gun depression (-9) allow it to allocate to almost any ridge line on the game, it can peek a boo a single hot and bounce a lot of shots in the upper turret if they come from snapshots, enemies could take a second or two aiming to weakspots on turret if the cheeks are not show and from snipers it can wiggle its hull and bounce from the sides so the armor is hella trollish. It's not strong or good sidescraping 1v1 because the cheeks are prominent.
It can snipe pretty comfy with HEAT and V. stabs equipped easily clip the four rounds once you get used to it and flat armor like nowadays popular TD's (Turtle, ferdinand) melt with HEAT rounds, I have caught so many Turtles off guard thinking they are invincible and take 1000HP or 750hp from them in 7 seconds.
The best maps for this tank are the ones that have medium range battles like Cliff, ghost town, live oaks, pearl river, redshire, murovanka, etc. It sucks on opens maps like Prokorovca/Malinovka, its camo values are not enough sometimes, and has no armor enough to brawl on the heavy lines of those maps.
The process of three marking it was pretty simple, when it was out of the oven buffed it only took me like 40 battles to pump it from 65% to 85%, 30 battles to have it at 90% and from there the MoE and Ace values sky rocket and 200 battles more just to get the three marks at 95%. On the beginning I was able to ace it with just 1100 base experience. Now it takes 1300 base experience. Combined damage to MoE pre buff was 1980, today is 2360, so it is 15% a better tank? I would say it's in a sweet spot, not overly buffed and versatile enough to have a niche gameplay and good to people who love autoreloader tanks. It is a expensive toy tho, it requires food and half of the ammo being premium that's a 50k loss every battle, maybe a good alternative is Astron Rex for credit making? although they are not so similar. At 386 battles in total my winrate is now 51.5% before buff was 41% so not bad eh.
This was my only equipment setup: Experimental turbo level 2, bounty Vents, bounty V. stabilizer. Crew with almost 5 perks. Field mod. 2, 2, 2. Ammo: 20 AP, 16 HEAT, 4 HE and food.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/16lg0zs/t69_review_first_tier_8_three_mark_ever/
