Commanders!
As you already know from the Shockwave announcement, we’ll be overhauling the mechanism of all PELE shells in the game.
The reason for that is that, currently, PELE shells internally use no fewer than three or four separate mechanisms and their variants. That is why there are PELE groups that behave consistently while other PELE shells seem to not work at all. In the Shockwave update, we’ll be unifying them all under one mechanism.
The core mechanism in question is that of the HESH shells. Some of the older players might remember that this is how the PELE shells first started before being changed several times. This represents a compromise between realism and usefulness which we tested several times (both internally and by selected groups of players). We developed several variants but in the end, this one had the best feedback and offered the most utility while being sufficiently different from armor-piercing shell mechanics.
The difference was important as PELE shells are inert in real life and a fully realistic introduction would just turn them into AP shells with potentially higher damage but considerably lower penetration and that just doesn’t work very well based on your feedback. Most PELE shells in the game belong to autocannons and pretty much each of those already has its own AP shells. We wanted to introduce something different that would be more usable than simple AP in certain situations. The mechanics are, of course, somewhat modified compared to the standard HESH rounds in order to accommodate higher rates of fire and other aspects.
There are two rather special cases when it comes to PELE shells – high-caliber PELE rounds of the Arjun (Penetration Cum Blast) and Wilk XC-8. Here’s how we dealt with them.
- Wilk’s PELE shells will become considerably more powerful, no way around it. Given how fragile the Wilk is, we don’t feel it’s that big of an overkill to return the powerful PELE rounds it was once known for
- Arjun already has HESH rounds and PELE (PCB) shells will serve simply as an upgrade to them
We hope you’ll enjoy the new PELE shells and, as always:
See you on the battlefield!