Seriously. It's been over a year. This unit is way worse than useless. It is particularly jarring for two reasons; first, DAK has very early game vehicles where you would logically expect to build Bazooka Teams. Except they're useless and you better not. Second, tanks now have side and rear armor modeled, which suggests the obvious gameplay dynamic where you won't pen a tank in the front, but you could kill it in the side or the rear pretty capably from ambush. Correct tank tactics will not expose your tank's vulnerable armor faces, and as long as your front armor is facing the enemy they can't even damage you. A well executed ambush or flank will work, whereas plinking the front with even a huge number of them is completely ineffective.

This is a highly specialized anti-tank unit that literally has no other job or purpose to exist, except it literally struggles to even kill halftracks.

What I would propose is simply to increase Bazooka Team's damage and accuracy. As it now stands a Bazooka does 60 damage, compared with a Panzerschrek which deals 160 damage. This is clearly an oversight that has yet to be fixed. In fact it's even worse than that because literal AT rifles like the Boys and Panzerjagers deal 50 damage, with a massively higher rate of fire and effective accuracy and DPS. What should be happening is that the Bazooka is highly effective against vehicles and useless against infantry. Rather than being completely useless full stop against every target type.

Penetration vs Damage

The relationship between the Bazooka and the Panzerschrek should be that the Panzerschrek has higher penetration, but equal or perhaps even poorer damage than the Bazooka.

What this means is that against a target that you can penetrate the Bazooka will do a lot of damage. But against a target it can't penetrate, it will bounce. Against heavy armor the Bazooka's penetration should be such that it won't penetrate. You will have to get them from the side to penetrate, but doing so should deal much more damage, much more quickly, than it does now.

The Panzerschrek having higher penetration will make it able to frontally penetrate more types of things, but its actual damage should not really be any better after penetrating a vehicle.

Against a very low armor target the Bazooka should literally be much superior due to having twice as many compared to the Panzerschrek. But against a heavily armored tank the Bazooka will always bounce on the front and will be extremely difficult to use effectively compared to the high penetration value of the Panzerschrek.

Bazooka Team Poor Durability

On top of this there is clearly something screwy with the Bazooka Team's durability, which has clearly been massively overlooked for the simple reason that no one ever uses this unit and therefore it isn't necessarily apparent. There may be some kind of bug with its received accuracy or some other problem.

It is my opinion that this unit should be essentially a Riflemen squad that has been kitted out differently with its models and stats being essentially identical to Riflemen in terms of durability. It is carrying anti-tank equipment but the basic infantry configuration should be identical. Riflemen models are demonstrably tougher than the very fragile Bazooka Team models even though their models look similar.

I should also add this unit has a tendency to destroy the cover it is standing immediately behind and that should probably be looked at as well- they need to be smart enough not to shoot the cover one foot in front of their faces when trying to hit something out there.

Bazooka team is getting some love in Coral Viper.  :)

Honestly even post-patch the Bazooka Team is still dogshit. A direct damage increase from 60 to something in the neighborhood of 150 was needed, not a 40 fuel upgrade taking it to just 80.

John_RE wrote:

Bazooka team is getting some love in Coral Viper.  :)

Was this an attempt to gaslight us?  The bazooka squad got severely nerfed by removing the damage from the white phosphorous rounds.  It was always a niche unit.  It kept 8 Rads from diving a 75mm half track but had no other practical use.  The penetration was so poor that you would lose the unit before it could kill even a damaged, crippled tank.  It's only late game viability was if it did get to Vet 1, then it was useful against someone that just balled up a bunch of infantry and A-moved them as a group.  Somehow, the "balance team" needed to make the game safe for those people.