We are dumbfounded. I admit, I was a bit worried about the IS-7 in 8.0. A nearly unstoppable sloped armor monster roamed in my vision. When we faced it on the test server, the results were shocking but in a different way. Now, either we are that dumb and we had screwed up the previous tests that much, or Wargaming messed with the armor parameters without any transparency, again. No problem, that’s why we have tests for.

One tiny step forward, one big step back

What did we expect? An impregnable glacis armor and a tougher than ever lower front plate, wider angling options. But unlike American heavies we had tested, this tank seemed to not get the memo about the sloped armor compensation nerf, because we found the upper hull armor of the IS-7 not much different from the previous incarnations. It’s tough all right. The head-on optimised pike nose can be still penetrated casually by Tier X tank destroyer guns. Yeah, but this hasn’t got any news value. We have spotted a difference though. Russian tank hulls lose effective armor for the facing side of the pike nose when angled. This is still true.

However, this loss was reduced a bit in 8.0, sub-240 average penetration guns have very little if any chance to pierce this armor at any range and angle.

So far so good. We had expected a bit more than that, but that’s an improvement nevertheless. However, the disappointments did not end here. For the sake of order, I started to do some re-checking shots at the lower front plate of the IS-7, and this was the point where my jaws dropped. About 10 percent of the former armor was gone. One should expect somehow improved efficiency for a nicely sloped armor plate from the compensation nerf but nothing like that.

In fact, the LFP performed even poorer than in 7.2, when we had made the original IS-7 tests of ours. No improvement, not the same level, it was downgraded.



Randomgoddess is a heartless bitch or…?

The results were so bad that we repeated the LFP tests three times, then we switched back to live servers to find out if we had been mistaken that much before. And it doesn’t seem like the case, the 7.5 version still behaved as it was supposed to be.

8.0 armor facing tactics