I love it so maybe biased as I loved it before before the buffs when it was not great. But since the buffs, it has a great gun with good DPM and respectable alpha while also having pretty good armour. The turret face is still not amazing, but with wiggling it can deflect off the sides pretty consistently. Mobility is mediocre but not debilitating. Can work as a sniper in uptiers but can brawl at tier 8 MM and below

I decided to buy this tank after I got the 3D-skin for it and I immediately regretted skipping it when I was grinding the E-100 line. On tier 8, this tank is as good as a tech-tree tank can get.

It has a reliable gun with good DPM and respectable alpha-damage of 360. The speed is not exactly the best, but it can get into postions early enough to not take any damage while driving there. Considering it is a rather tall tank with 8 degrees of gun depression, the armor works like a charm. Even though the cheeks around the gun are somewhat a weakspot when the enemy is shooting gold, they are still hard to hit since they're so slim, so you can confidently peek, shoot, and fall back without taking any damage in return while hulldown or sidescraping.

Obviously the armor becomes obsolete when playing against tier 10s, but then you still have your gun to fall back on, since it has enough penetration to go through the armor of most tier 10 tanks and it is accurate enough to land those shots even from a longer distance.

Underrated tank. Although almost everything else about it is very meh, the gun is a dream to use and absolutely makes the tank. If you're not playing the tank for the gun, it's not worth playing.

Pros:
-All-round excellent gun stats: above average DPM, usable alpha, good gun handling, good accuracy
-225/285 pen is really high for the tier and lets you pen a lot of turrets

Things to watch out for:
-390 view range is quite strong for the tier, you can spot a lot of tanks back when they shoot at you
-Armour is borderline passable. You shouldn't ever be relying on it. The turret roof gets cheesed by HEAT, and even the turret and upper plate are 50/50 for 250+ pen guns, but at least it forces the enemies to aim. Usable armour combined with the gun makes this tank ideal for quick peeking, preaiming, or trading.
-Good armour profile for sidescraping, but has a small hull belly weakspot above the tracks. Or your enemies can just blow through your turret cheeks.
-8 degrees of gun depression is quite usable

Cons:
-Terrible engine power means you won't be hitting your top speed without a big run up
-Very sluggish, poor traverse speed