“Poor armor at the front (weakspots galore) and horrendous armor everywhere else. It’s so bad that roof and side armor can be overmatched and penetrated if you shoot it at 80 degrees. You have to point your tank exactly at your target and hope RNG won’t make his shells pen you. Not that it matters, because autoaim is pointed at a weakspot : the center of your gun shield. Any hit there will do damage AND break your gun.”

Now first off the gun shield is the most heavily armored spot on that tank and autoaim DOES NOT aim there, it aims at the lower spot on the hull where there is a weakspot but if you hit that small strip with autoaim you fucked the RNG gods favorite donkey in order to get their favor. The gun mantlet will not get penned reliably. The machine gun and range finder are weakspots, but only east to hit at close range. 100M Away and the tank becomes significantly harder to pierce unless you have an accurate gun. And even up close your maneuverability can confuse the their aim and have them miss, or hit the 150mm thick weakspots at a bad angle and ricochet in a manner similar to the e5s wart. Realistically the over matching 40 mm side armor is not an issue as most of the time you would’ve gotten pierced there anyway or its exposed for too little length of time to get targeted.

“The guns? Smaller than average at tiers7+, with worse gun handling than the ISU with the BL10. What the fuck is the point of having a TD when you have below average DPM and at best, average alpha, and on top of that having to aim longer than most derp guns ?”

What are you smoking? If anything the tier 7 has one of the most powerful guns of its tier along with the tier 8. The tier 9 has less alpha then its peers but compensates with much better accuracy and RoF then most of them. Again I seriously doubt whether or not you have played these tanks. The aim time is not too bad considering at close range its not much of an issue and at long range the camo is good enough to get a shot off with their great accuracy (.33 or .34 roughly for the majority of them).

“And while you seem to be ok with playing gimped tanks, I don’t want to play TDs that fail horribly at being TDs, and simply can’t do anything else.”

Your exactly right, im ok with playing gimped tanks. The Is-8 is one of my favorite tier 9s and I loved the Lorraine 40t. Are they bad tanks? no only bad players give them that reputation. But saying that the tds “fail horribly at being TDs” is just dumb. In don’t know why you chose those words as they are great at being TDs if sitting back and sniping with support fire is what you’re referring to. They have great camouflage values and fast firing and accurate guns so I don’t know how that makes a bad TD

The way French TDs are meant to be played , depending on the map, is either through furious aggression to confound and intimidate your opponents, or to provide supporting sniping fire and then jump into the fray at the critical moment and become a hammer using your firepower and mobility. This is due to their well armored fronts and although they do have large weaskpots this can be countered through maneuvering. It is also important to note that If you play aggressively and relentlessly you will panic most players and cause them to take worse shots. Only experienced players will stay calm and consistently take well aimed shots, but if that’s the case they’ll probably penn you no matter what tank your using. Your arguments seem to indicate classic pubbie mentality, but thats ok these TDs are not for everyone, it takes experienced players to learn how to use them effectively. The french TDs aren’t broken, even the tier 10, they’re balanced with powerful strengths and huge weakness which can lead to misconceptions of their ability, This is understandable but not excusable so please dont bad mouth any tank unless you have played the tank alot and have done good with it.

Just get fast to the corner where waits enemy, peek exposing only front of your tank, the rest hide behind the hill/building, quickly snapshot enemy (when you are close enough gun handling doesnt even matter, and 257 penetration will go through almost enything with ease) and quickly retreat, heavly angling your front, but not exposing your sides. And it works wonders. Most recent game, bounced from my front multiple times T-44, T28 Prototype, T30 with 155mm (lel) and some other tanks, while penning almost every my shot, racking around 3k dmg before enemy tracked and flanked me. This tank is just king of corner fights, doing those snapshots, enemy don’t have time to actually aim weakspot on the tank, and becouse you wiggle it constantly they don’t even have a chance to hit it.

The worst about it is just terrible amount of hitpoints, and you have to be extremly careful when enemy has artillery.

It’s ONLY redeeming qualities are agility and armour. This is not enough to put Foch anywhere near “decent” category.

I hope you know that this isn’t a bug. It’s just the fact that it’s a fixed visual model which doesn’t move according to the physics. They’re simple glued to the bottom of the tank because they haven’t developed physics for free moving tracks.

have also bounced a few shots off m5 stuarts myself, in things with 140+ pen…..

So in practice, when you have triple overmatch you’re not realistically going to bounce unless your gun has absurdly low penetration for it’s caliber.

There is no thing like “automatically penn”.Overmatch only means that ur normalization gets increased (which as a result reduces nominal armor) and ur shell will always TRY to penetrate (as in there’s no autobounce anymore (at least for tripple-overmatch)).

Cmon, how can ppl not know such basics and than cry about broken game mechanics.