Unfortunately not seeing enough of a fight being raised over this. The 3rd iteration of the common test has seen no further changes to the Leopard, despite a lot of forum criticism over the rebalance.
Under the veil of a buff, they have removed the 1100m/s, 330mm pen HEAT round for a 1600m/s, 323mm pen APCR. Even Quickybaby foolishly called this a buff. Just no.
Losing 7mm of pen ain't the end of the world, until you factor in falloff at range. However, this really ain't my gripe. My gripe here is that lots of tier 9 and 10 tanks recently have armour angles that exceed 70 degrees, enabling them to autobounce all AP or APCR rounds that don't have a 3x overmatch. The entire Swedish tier 9 and 10 lineup, on all three tech trees, can autobounce 105mm AP and APCR.
Knowing this, a good player will load HEAT when seeing them. This isn't brainless gold spam, this is understanding the shell mechanics and knowing that HEAT still fuzes at 85° allowing you to pen these tanks.
By removing the HEAT from the Leopard, it becomes the only tier X medium in the game that physically cannot engage tanks like the STRVs, the new UDES mediums, etc. It can neither overmatch them, nor change to an ammo type that doesn't automatically bounce at 70°. Literally every other medium tank at tier X can either load HEAT or has a gun big enough to overmatch some of these tanks without it. (430U can take either option vs the STRV vehicles for example. It both overmatches the tier 9 and has HEAT for the tier 10)
Someone at Wargaming needs to see that this is complete madness. They want the Leopard to be some ultimate sniper tank with no armour but the best gun, but have taken away a tool that it requires to stand a chance to pen several very commonly encountered tanks at its tier or lower. What is the point of a sniper if vs some opponents you may as well be firing cotton balls at them?
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/bw4w48/wargaming_stealthnerfing_the_leopard_1/
