WZ-114 Marathon by Commitment and Thoughts

Hello there, intheshadows0 here.
Over the span of 8 days I completed the entire WZ-114 marathon, stage 1 to 10, entirely by Missions for Commitment.
I thought it would be interesting to track my stats across the entire marathon event since I'm not nearly
good enough a player to do the missions for mastery (not consistently enough to make progress, anyways) and
to give my thoughts on how this tank would perform in the hands of average player.
TL;DR – It feels like a tier 9 T34 with much worse gun stats, if you like that then get it on discount.

About me: I'm your average solo queue pubbie, sub 50% winrate, window-licking scrub. Most definitely not a unicum.

https://www.tomato.gg/stats/NA/MrX4353=1001086843
tomato.gg for reference

On to the stats:
I played 534 random battles over the span of 1/28/2022 to 2/4/2022 (8 days), with an average of 705 base exp
per battle. No premium account except as a reward for marathon stage completion.
Winrate over the marathon increased to 51.34%, although my total winrate is still below 50%.

Most played tanks duing marathon; T34 B (black market), TS-5 (marathon grind), EMIL 1951 (frontline grind),
T-32-2G FT (tech tree), IS-2S (road to berlin event).

Session stats for marathon

In the WZ-114, I currently have a 54.84% winrate and average 936 exp, and 1825 damage.
Highest was 1935 exp, 4542 damage, and have achieved mastery class 1.
Equipment setup is Improved Hardening, Enhanced Gun Laying Drive, and Gun Rammer. No bond or bounty equipment, no directive, 2 skill crew (100% BiA, 85% 2nd skill).
Consumables: Large Repair Kit, Large First Aid Kit, Automatic Fire Extinguisher.

Thoughts on the tank:

Gun: Honestly feels like a tank destroyer gun. Takes a full solar cycle to aim in on a target
and the dispersion can troll sometimes. RNG saying no to fully aimed shots wouldn't be such a
problem if the WZ-114 aimed/reloaded faster.

For comparison:

I even went looking to see if I could find any other tanks in the game with a comparable aim time
at tier 9 or tier 10. While I didn't go through every single tank, the closest ones I could find were;
the 183mm on the FV4005 with a 3.7s aim time
the 122mm M62-T2 on the ST-I with a 3.4s aim time
and the B.L 5.5-in on the FV3805 with a 4.3s aim time

This tank has, by far, one of the worst aimtimes of any non-artillery tank at tier 9 and the gun needs a buff in my opinion. Maybe decrease the aimtime to be more in line with other tier 9s or increase the damage to 600 or higher.

Armor: Turret armor is decent. Strong frontal turret with clear weakspots that makes fighting a hulldown WZ-114 a skill matchup rather than a RNG 2-pixel snipe when fighting a Kravagn.
With that said, the cupola weakspot is rather large so playing around it can be somewhat frustrating when compared to playing something like a T34 instead (weakspot is centered in turret, so you can at least get your gun out and aiming before you take damage) or an AE Phase 1 (weakspot is off-set, but considerably harder to hit).

Hull armor, on the other hand, is rather bad. There's a few auto-pen spots on the front armor when angling against opponents. After 31 battles I've only had 7 or 8 shots bounced off the
upper hull armor, and that was mostly against tier 7s. Not to say that it's super weak, you do get the odd bounce off of a tier 9 or 10 TD, but it's not strong either. Side armor feels worse
than a T34. Might be because I'm over-angling, however, it seems like the side armor tends to eat shots for full damage except in extreme angling.

Mobility: It's like a T34. Not super slow, but also not really fast. Little bit faster than the Lowe. Honestly the speed isn't a huge letdown and the mobility is fine as is. This is more of a neutral
point, not in favor nor against the tank overall.

Overall thoughts on the tank: Don't regret grinding the tank. It's not some OP meta changing tank, plays "uniquely" enough that it's a nice change of pace from other tanks and it does "feel" comfortable to play. For some reason or another it does strongly remind me of the T34, which is a tank I like, so if you ever wanted a tier 9 T34 then I would say go for it (but definitely not at full price).
I would like to see WG buff this tank in someway, preferably the gun, but I'm not sure that will ever happen.

Two observations about the grind:
The T34 is probably one of the oldest premiums there is in the game, but man does it still hold up.
Gold ammo spam seems to have really spiked lately, especially when bottom-tiered (tier 9s shooting gold ammo at my Scorpion [the tier 7 with 1mm of armor everywhere], tier 10s shooting gold at my T34's hull, and the M-II-/M-III-Ys firing gold at everything).
I suspect this is because of the marathon and the spam will go back to "normal" levels once this is all over.