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First of all, I'd like to say that I know this tank isn't the worst medium at tier 8. On paper, if you take all the stats into account, this tank is more or less in the middle of the pack.
But it feels painful to play to me and I don't know why.
I've been lurking on every m26 thread that I could find and player opinion is super polarized and inconsistent. Some people love this tank and call it the best tier 8 medium, some people call it very mediocre. I don't really get why there's such a rift in opinion.
Let's start with the gun.
On paper, the dispersion values while moving are best-in-class. I can't complain; Bloom seems pretty manageable.
But the overall handling feels so bad.....
My game sample size is pretty small, but I've had so many battles where this gun will just slam shots into the dirt when fully aimed. Maybe this more of a complaint about RNG, but it's ridiculous.
This is where the other problems with this gun tend to come in.
190 penetration for a tier 8 medium is pretty poor. prammo is decent, but more on that later.
DPM is pretty poor when compared to other tier 8s with similar guns.
Loading time of 6.9 with rammer and vents for a gun with 240 alpha is pretty bad. 2.15s aim time with vents.
You can't really afford to miss shots anyway because you're going to be reloading for 7 seconds with a gun with 240 avg damage.
The Pershing is better at pure snapshots than other meds at tier 8, and it can use ridgelines well, but the Pershing can't afford to stick around even if hull down. Why? The turret is absolute garbage.
The turret side, tho rounded, will get penetrated consistently--it's pretty much on par with the hull when it comes to consistent armor. The margin of the mantlet will bounce consistently, but the mantlet itself has around 200-210mm of effective armor. Tier 8 mediums will penetrate it often, tier 8 heavies will penetrate it consistently.
Against tier 8, we're looking at maybe 25% of the front turret profile being able to bounce shots or cause nonpens consistently. Realistically, when you're peeking over a ridge with ~ -10d of depression, you're still exposing some of your hull, which will be penned consistently even if you're at max possible angle. So really we're talking about a 10-15% area of the realistic front profile that's not gonna get penetrated.
Here's the armor model for reference: https://tanks.gg/tank/pershing/model
This is my biggest problem with people with claim the Pershing is a great tank and say the turret is strong. Has anyone who says this actually played the tank recently? Almost every time that I pull off the best possible peek and get hit I get penetrated. This feels more like a ridgeline trader instead of a ridgeline fighter, and the bad DPM and bad pen makes this a bad trader.
The unreliable turret, poor standard pen, slow aiming time and low alpha mean that this tank has trouble actually making the most of its playstyle when fighting anything other than poorly armored tanks at close range where you can actually afford to try a fast snapshot.The poor frontal armor means you're gonna get punished if you take too long. With the poor pen and poor trade potential even if it penetrates I just can't see this tank being a competitive ridge fighter unless its in perfect circumstances.
For those players that would say "just fire gold", a tank shouldn't need to use gold if its actually good. I can see this tank being called good if it had better stats everywhere while keeping 190 pen. But for a gun to need gold to even be competitive? That makes the gun bad imo.
Everything else on this tank is pretty unremarkable and mediocre and it falls short where its supposed to shine. I wasn't the biggest fan of the t20, but at least that tank was faster and the alpha was pretty good at t7. I feel like the T20 just does everything better than the pershing adjusted tier-for-tier. Has the Pershing just been powercreeped? Has it always had these problems?
