Some impressions after some post-patch play:

The tanks are definitely different. I saw LOTS more one-shot kills, with the edge being to the tanks with better penetration vs. tanks with weaker armor. A JS-2 has a pretty good chance of penetrating a Pz IV and that shot will often get the ammo box - no more Pz. IV. The Pz IV, though, IF it gets a good shot can take out a JS-2 with one shot as well. The JS-2 is going to win that battle much more often than not, but not EVERY time like would've happened pre-patch.

No more is it a sure thing to camp with a JS-2 until you've been hit 20 times causing enough damage to blow up. It's more survivable than most everything else if angled correctly, yes, but in a more believable manner. Sometimes you get penetrated a few times with engine damage or minor damage, sometimes you get several shells bouncing off, and sometimes you get killed first shot. It seemed to open up play a bit, with more movement and less finding the perfect spot and angle.

The Tiger's 88 seems a bit more powerful, and maybe it's a bit more survivable if angled right. It seems to fare a little better vs. T-34/85's and a bit worse vs. JS-2's now - probably about right.

Didn't play any of the early-war maps (Hedgehog, Bondarevo) so not sure how things played out with those, but Bondarevo got quite a few tweaks so should be interesting with the new armor fixes.

Mainly played Arad as everyone was wanting to check out the new look and the armor. It's not vastly better - the forest is still a textured lump and the water is kinda lame. The forest looks better now though, and the issue / exploit of being able to warp partway into the forest was fixed. There seems to be more foliage and trees to go with the grass that's been added, so the terrain looks much better and seems to have a few more spots of concealment. The buildings are better looking, and the walls are now stone. No, you still can't knock those down with a tank, but it's more believable than not knocking down the wooden ones.

It also seems autobalance was fixed - didn't see any of those 18 vs. 8 starts to rounds. Couldn't really tell a difference in load times, but I've got an A64 3500 w/ 2GB of RAM and was usually one of the first ones to load so I don't think the fixes were made with me in mind lol. I'd imagine the fixes would help systems with less RAM load faster.

Didn't try out the new weapons at all, can't see them being a big deal anyway. Overall though I was happy with the patch, it seems the armor bugfixes made that part more fun and more like what I remember in the beta, and if nothing else it really boosted player counts as people were checking it out. I think the biggie with this game though will be if they can tweak the server code - this patch didn't help the skyrocketing pings when a server gets overloaded, not that I was expecting it to.