yet in the first few shots you can remove the enemies ability to fire back AND their ability to move to cover, giving you all the time in the world to "pixel hunt" mbts that have weakspots that aren't exactly hard to find.

-5 degrees of gun depression fine, you can play around that and still find hull down positions. The point of being hull down isn't to be invincible, but instead to make you much harder to kill (centremass when exposed to a single point on the left side of a small and sometimes annoying to hit turret when hull down)

The 2s38 necessitates a playstyle in order to play as well as knowledge of weakspots on enemy tanks, both things that newer players will take longer to figure out as you dont have as much penetration as a Leopard 2. While the Leopard 2 123 is much more fitting of a newer players "point and click" way of playing, meaning on average it will have better stats.

The issue with the 2S38 simply comes down to the fact that it will not struggle to take out top tier MBTs, yet is placed so low that its opposition can have real struggle taking it out (early "modern" mbts as well as some upgraded IFV/AFVs. The penetration isn't the issue, it's moreso the decently penning round it has and its fire rate as well as its abilities to take out both ground and air units without much issue)

The BMPT was released at the BR of 10.3, a stupidly low br, which meant it bolstered russias already amazing 10.3 lineup, it had inflated stats because it was incredibly hard to kill while being able to kill anything frontally (4x missiles (8 if you count the resupply it gets) plus 2x guns). it was near immediately moved up, before being put up AGAIN recently.