I was looking at my garage and noticed that I was close to 500 battles in my KV-5 and at two marks. It hadn't been taken out in a few years, and I decided that it be nice to hit that milestone of 500 battles. My experience in reaching it however, was not the joy experienced years ago.
The KV-5 was always a memey tank, a hilarious armor layout, and spicy dpm. However in wot's current state it is a frustrating experience. Everyone knows of it's numerous weakspots and that there is no way to hide them regardless of if you're hull down, sidescraping, or even reverse sidescraping. Anyone looking at you can easily pen you, as long as rng is in their favor. This problem could be potentially fixed by buffing the r2d2 turrets on the front, which I'm sure the radioman would be much obliged. Leaving the two large weakspots on top as is, as they are harder to hit.
Next we have the gun, while having great dpm, the penetration values of both it's standard, and gold rounds is abysmal, and only consistently effective at fighting tier 7 tanks. At tiers 8 and 9, fighting heavy tanks and armored td's usually ends disappointingly. (In regards to tier 8 I am mostly referring to newer tier 8 heavies and premiums). Combined with traditionally meh russian accuracy and low penentration, I find myself wanting to avoid any parts of the map where heavies typically go. Correcting this would involve buffing the standard ammo to 200mm and gold to 240mm, or just buffing the gold rounds to said amount. To compensate, a dpm nerf, could or could not be implemented. As the way I see it, dpm on a less than agile tank isn't too much good if you can't pen. Another alternative would be to greatly increase the accuracy despite being incredibly uncharacteristic of russian heavies. This alternative isn't as desirable due to the fact many more recent heavies and higher tier ones require more than 217mm to penetrate even their weakspots.
With these changes I don't believe it would be overtuned for a pref tier 8, as it would still be a pinata of weakspots, but I would like to hear your thoughts as to what you think the kv5 needs, or if it's fine as it is, and whether wargaming would actually buff it.
I didn't think too much of it when they sold it again the other day, but having played it after years, I feel sorry for anyone who bought it. It's kind of scummy selling something to an unsuspecting customer, a tank that looks frankly awesome, only to find out it's a struggle to play.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/lxymnz/the_kv5_is_in_a_sad_state/