Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Excellent slope on the front
- Spaced armor on the sides
- Most of the time the weak lower hull can be bouncy, bouncing other tier 10 rounds. Especially in close range
- High alpha
- Well-armored rounded turret
- Nearly invincible when face hugging
- High top speed
Cons:
- Slow turning (not much faster than E-100 in soft/mid terrain)
- Low rate of fire (can be improved with rammer, vents and BIA)
- Frontal armor is tough, but relies on slope rather than thickness. Pike nose shaped armor means also tank can't be angled
- Highest terrain resistance in game means it will never reach its top speed on anything but downhill
- Slow acceleration and relatively poor mobility (especially in soft terrain) due to the high terrain resistance
- Second lowest HP of the tier X heavies, barely above the AMX 50 B (by only 50)
- Long aim time
- Poor on the move accuracy
- Yes, IS-7 is a beast at face hugging. But some taller tank such as the Maus can hit its optics and deal dmg sometimes, even though it's very hard to hit
- Ammorack is very often hit
Performance
It's fast and delivers massive damage while being hard to kill due to its heavily sloped front armor. The IS-7 has some of the best sloped frontal armor in the game, however this is somewhat nullified at close range by the equally thick but much less sloped lower plate. All these strengths come with a weakness; the IS-7's main gun, while having the same listed accuracy as the E-100's 15cm, it seems in practice to be far worse at actually hitting the target, let alone hitting a weakspot, thus requiring the player to get fairly close to their target in order to hit accurately. This in turn makes you a much easier target to hit as well. The IS-7 uses the 130 mm S-70, which has better alpha damage than the 122mm M62-T2 mounted on IS-4, but slightly worse stats elsewhere. The main difference between the IS-7 and the IS-4 is that the IS-7 is much faster, with a top speed of 60 km/h (though this is difficult to reach under normal driving conditions, you can expect 30-35kmh in most cases), as well as having good turret traverse.
However, these sloping plates also add a disadvantage: You cannot angle the frontal armour of IS-7 as you expose the well-sloped-but-weak armour plate to the enemy, the effective armour when fighting angled drops a fair amount, allowing tier 8, 9, and 10 guns to punch through if they strike at a shallow enough angle to the plate. This in turn makes your lower plate incredibly easy to penetrate as it is just as thin as the upper plate but with far worse sloping. When fighting one at an angle, prefer its flatter front armour sections than is angled side armour, or shoot the sprocket, dealing damage and throwing off the track. If fighting in an urban environment with many street corners that force you to turn to shoot you opponent, it's advised that you bait them into shooting your thick and spaced side armor by sidescraping, then returning fire as they reload. Or if your weak lower hull exposes to enemy fires, try to wiggle or shake it so that it's harder to penetrate. This can even sometime bounces tier X TD's shots.