Love my Hetzer, but the StuG is growing on me...

Stug is my all time favourite!

Crew is getting very experienced.

I'm been playing WoT on and off since the beta. I've got less than 700 battles under my belt but I'm finding I enjoy the Tank Destroyer style of gameplay the most.

Other than that the Pz1c is awesome fun to play.... I love screaming through the other team's lines and wreaking havoc among their artillery!

TDs seem to fit my style of play also. Been a fan of the Hellcat. While it's nerfed a bit 'for balance', I still have lots of fun with it... The Stug is fun too but I've been spoiled by turrets fer too long

I've not done anything with the American line yet, plan to at a later date.

The Hellcat is usually one that I am very wary of though. If I have one pointed at me I suddenly get a great sense of urgency!

The Hetzer is great fun, I've had some really good battles with it. To me it represents the epitome of a tank destroyer - fairly decent frontal armour, paper thin on the sides and rear, but a powerful gun and low profile make it hard to spot. I decked out my Hetzer with a camo net and binocular telescope sight, so I know as long as I'm stationary I'm going to see the other guy before he sees me. It's also fairly mobile as well. I know in a Hetzer I can kill pretty much anything that is the same tier or lower than me. Higher tier stuff I either have to go for a side or rear shot, of that's not possible I try and track them so the highter tier guys on my team can finish them off. I know lots of people swear by the Derp Gun in the Hetzer, but I prefer the PaK 39 L/48 for its greater accuracy and faster reload. As someone who likes to snipe from long distance in my TD the Derp Gun is frustratingly innacurate and slow to reload.

The StuG III is a bit like a Hetzer on steroids... plays very much the same but with a more powerful gun. With the PaK 42 L/70 I know I can be very accurate out to a long range and reload very quickly - especially with a medium calibre rammer equipped.

The E-25 is loads of fun. It's like a Hetzer on speed. Basically a StuK 42 L/70 on a chassis only slightly bigger than a Hetzer and a 700hp engine. Powerful accurate gun, hard to spot, very fast. This is the absolutely perfect TD for shoot n scoot. I know whenever I'm in my E-25 I can outrun and outmanoeuvre every other tank on the map. Traverse speed for a TD is awesome too and people get a nasty shock trying to circle an E-25. I can relocate nearly anywhere I need to be on the map very fast, and when I get there as long as I'm concealed in a good spot I know I'm unlikely to be seen unless I let somebody get really close.

The Jagdtiger 88cm is my biggest TD. It's taking me a while to get used to it, very different approach needed here. It's too slow to support an advance, so you really need to find a good spot fairly close to the starting point where youve got a good field of fire and can snipe in support of your team. The Jagdtiger is also a huge tank and really easy for the enemy to spot, so don't think you can go all stealth mode like you can with a Hetzer or E-25. Once you have been spotted you need to be wary of the other team's artillery because they *will* go for your huge, painfully slow TD. The 88cm gun is underpowered for tier 8. Any tier 8 or 9 targets I come across I either need to aim for weakspots, or if they don't present one I try and track them so the rest of the team can deal with them. Although the 88cm is underpowered for tier 8 it is very accurate and reloads very fast so this makes the Jagdtiber 88cm really good for tracking the big guys on the other team. The side and rear armour is pretty thin, but the frontal armour is awesome... with a caveat. The lower glacis is a glaring weakspot and you really need to hide it to stay alive once you've been spotted. I had an awesome game the other day where I managed to ambush an IS3, T28 and King Tiger all at close range. All three had just been in a rumble with some heavies on my team and were all below 50% HP. They killed the heavies on my team and thought they had broken our line and were just going to waltz in to our base. They moved across a bridge that I had set up an ambush at. They all presented me with their side armour and I just blasted away with the rapid fire 88cm while their return fire just bounced off the huge armour on the front of my Jagdtiger. Very satisfying!

You've convinced me I need to run up the German TD line a bit Pielstick.

Like Pielstick I too run mostly German TD's, though I'm not as far along the line as he is. I still get a lot of fun out of using my Marder as it's small with a cracking gun for it's tier. My Stug G is my favourite and I notice that there is now also a Stug B available to purchase. I've also had plenty of good matches in my Bus and Nashorn, despite their high silhouettes. I've also found the derp gun on the Hetzer to be troublesome to use though effective if you do get the hit.

I would recommend getting used to changing ammo types in battle depending on whether you want to track/blow up enemies or penetrate their armour. It took me quite awhile to realise how best to use the different ammo types. I also have camou/ Binos and gun rammer equipped. Armour is thin on TD's and if your hit your usually knackered, so I just want to pump out rounds ASAP. The Nashorn however seems to have a very quick firing gun so I went with the Spall Liner to protect against explosions.

The new patch has ruined my current gaming experience as I now spawn in late, have low fps and washed out muddy graphics. The game crashes to either desktop or shuts my computer down and just today it's stopped shutting down correctly. I've tried scaling my graphic options, so far without good result's.

Just keep in mind there are two German TD lines nowadays.

- the classic one with usually decent frontal armor and adequate to powerful weaponry. Hetzer, StuG, JgPz IV, Jagdpanther, etc..

- the rather new one with cardboard armor, but extra-powerful weaponry. Pz.Sfl IVc, Nashorn, Pz.Sfl. V, etc..

They split after the Marder II, which leads to the Hetzer and Marder 38T. If you go for the Marder 38T (a fun TD, btw.) you still can change to the other line via the new T4 StuG IIIB. The Hetzer leads straight to the StuG IIIG.

I jumped to the StugIIIG via the Hetzer from my PZKW38(t)
Convenient

Yeah I got kind of curious seeing those boxes carrying the 88mm gun

I went back and got myself a Marder 38(t) and I'm starting to work my way through that line as well. Some of the later TD's in that line look pretty ridiculous, but lots of fun.

On a related TD note, I decided to pick up the Su-100Y premium today. The armour is 60/60/60 which may as well be paper in tier 6 and 7 matches, but it's got 700HP which is fairly decent and it has a good turn of speed. The highlight though is the gun... sloooow reload - 15.3 seconds (might fit a shell rammer to reduce that by 10%), pretty slow aim time, pretty poor long range accuracy.... but the penetration and alpha is huge for a tier 6. I played 3 games with it today and I one-shotted at least one enemy tank in every one of those battles. I'm pretty sure in one battle I had some tier 5 mediums running away from me when they saw a Su-100Y pointing in their general direction.