It was removed for a variety of reasons, but the biggest reason seemed to be that even when the recoiless rifle was deflected by tank armor, it would still do a small amount of damage. For example, if the recoiless rifle cannot penetrate a Tiger tank from the front, and 20 recoiless rifles were fired at the front of the Tiger, and none of them penetrated, the Tiger would still be destroyed because of the small amount of damage that is applied regardless of the round penetrating.
This severely handicaps the 101st. Now, a simple scout car can kill the entire squad. If the recoiless rifle hits the scout car, sometimes the scout car survives. If that happens, the 101st will die. However, even hitting the scout car is difficult for the 101st. Airborne units in general have some sort of hidden modifier that gives them drastically reduced anti-tank weapon accuracy. It is common to see 101st missing both of their recoiless rifle shots, 82nd missing both of their bazooka shots, and SAS doing the same. Adding the second recoiless rifle back to the 101st would at least give them a better chance against vehicles for a doc that is widely agreed to be the hardest one to play in the game.
There have been a few discussions on this already, and I've quoted them here.
Sukin-kot (SVT) wrote:@Mark
What's up with recoiless rifles? I think that one shall be added back to a package, this change was absolute nonsense and got pushed by tiger only because of crying about this in every single topic. Twice reduce the amount of AT weapon which was already the weakest in game being in a doctrine which has the worst antitank capabilities among all allies doctrines, wtf seriously? I see no reasons behind this, it have always been difficult to play AB, and now if you don't have 2 hellcats when axis heavy is coming it's GG. First of all because it will be still impossible to drop them behind front line because you can't purchase weapon on unfriendly territory, so a single scout car will come and smash your squad ( actually it did even when 101s had 2 rs, accuracy is terrible and every second shot hit the dirt anyway ),why would we remove this possibility when old style was better in all aspects.
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MarKr wrote:I asked Wolf about this along with the "deflection damage" of RLs - or more specifically if 101st should get RL upgrade option. The answer was something like "no upgrade for 101st, at least there is more use for the 82nd" So about that.
This problem has been expanded to a wide variety of solutions. Some people suggest that the second recoiless rifle should be an upgrade instead of coming for free in the package. Others just want to make the recoiless rifle better as a weapon.
So I made this topic to centralize discussions, and made a simple poll with two possible answers.
Here are the basic arguments behind each opinion:
YES
- One recoiless rifle is not enough to kill enemy vehicles
- The recoiless rifle is worse than a bazooka
- Airborne are very inaccurate with AT weapons
NO
- The recoiless rifle always does damage if it hits
- Keeping only one recoiless rifle in the 101st shifts the burden of anti tank duties to the 82nd
- Airborne got the M18 Hellcat in a recent patch; they can use that against tanks