Armor:
If we would go "historical", Tigers armor along with Panthers armor wouldnt be as powerfull. A Tiger has a 58% chance to bounce a point blank shot from a 76 gun and over 35% to even bounce HVAP at point blank. That wouldnt happen in reality.
The Panther is quite the same story considering how frequently it bounces even HVAP at point blank.
Thus, when the 76 mm base pen against panthers would go from 0.3 (even less vs G and D) to 0.4 i wouldnt have issues when pen vs Tiger goes from 0.4 to 0.5.
But when we look closely the front armor of those two wouldnt be as different. The Tiger had a much better chance to bounce shots off its turret. A 76 barely made it through. The Panther in return had a much higher chance to pen from its hull but had a much weaker turret armor.
However, from a gameplay perspective it would even make sense to have both closer together in terms of front armor. Why? Because we dont have side armor. Many times we see tanks shooting from the side against a Panther and still bouncing many times. That wouldnt happen realistically. A Tiger with its much bigger historical side armor had much better chances to bounce even shots coming from any side angle. Thus the front armor also has to account for the side armor of a tank as well to some degree. Idk how many times now ive seen Panthers getting flanked, yet RNG triggers front armor hit and bounces all shots which is super frustrating to see since its all but easy to flank Panthers.
Panther and Panzer IV:
Yes, Panther was basically the successor of the Panzer IV. The only reason panzer IV´s got still produced till the end of the war was the urgent need of tanks (any tank) and switching all production facilties was just not possible during this time.
So having the Panther as bit more expensive (yet vastly better) medium tank makes absolutely sense.
"The 10 % thing"
Bit confusing but increasing somewhat by 10% doesnt sound much. Basically a 10% increase from a 30% base pen would mean 33% pen. In fact we mean "percantage points". Hence from 30% to 40% which means an increase of rouhgly 34%. Such changes do have an impact.
The pen vs Panzer IV H got increased from 50 to 64% and it changed quite a lot. Esspecially when modifing these values with ambush and HVAP. Those amplify better with higher base values.
A 76 shooting in theory from point blank vs Panther with HVAP has a 46% (or less) chance to pen a panther currently. When we change the base pen from 0.3 to 0.4 the pen with HVAP would increase to 61%. already.
oddly enough, in vcoh Panther has actually the armor values we request here.
My opinion is that not only the 76 should become better in terms of pen, but also 17 pounder and 60 mm lose far too much pen from skirts. From 75% down to 60%? Just because of some skirts in combination of an unit specific received pen modifier? I mean i saw Super Pershings bouncing off from Panther G´s.
