4Game

Amazingly, it's not the 0.5 gun accuracy, it's not the 7 second aim time after moving your tank, and it's not the HE non-pens on green sides of tanks. It's not even the 59 second max reload if you're empty on shells. The (very subjective) true biggest downside of the Caliban isn't listed in the garage, or even on tanks.gg; it is having someone on your team rant about how you're playing the tank wrong, literally every other game.

I know a lot of players just turn off their chats, so they really don't care about this at all. Usually, it really isn't a big deal for me; but I have never played a tank that gets even a fifth the backseat gamers as this thing. And it's not just the usual 45% players who blame their stats on bad teams either, I've had multiple solid players start ranting about how I should be playing the tank different, despite never even touching it themselves. One even told me that he knows how the tank plays, because it plays the exact same as an AMX 50 100…

I think it just comes down to the tank being classed as "heavy", despite really being more of a TD. And I know that line will also undoubtedly get comments from people who have never played the tank.
Personally, the tank I put the Caliban closest to is the T30. Some solid armor, but not nearly reliable enough to brawl most of the time. Hard hitting gun that suffers from some derpy handling. Not slow, but not fast enough to really flank, especially with the low camo. And sometimes, the best move really is just to snipe; you have mediocre armor and a trash reload, if you're not safe on 2nd heavy line, you're often better off at a bit of distance.

You would think that players would understand you're in an objectively bad meme tank, so obviously you're not going to be carrying many rounds; but I swear people just see "heavy tank not in heavy flank" on their minimap, and their eyes just glaze over. It doesn't matter that it's a meme tank with HE as standard and a >20 second reload, it doesn't matter that it's bottom tier in this MM; if your heavy isn't brawling with the rest, then you're doing it wrong.

Sorry for the rant, but the caliban is one of the funnest tanks I've played in quite a while. It's really filled a lot of the void since my KV-2 got nerfed (I know it now does better in other aspects, but it lost a lot of what made it so fun IMO). It just gets annoying to see the 5th 45% player ranting about you in chat, after only 12 games.