World of Tanks (WoT) is a game that I had dismissed a couple years back, based on hearing from other players and Tobold the blogger that it was a P2W (pay-to-win) game. As it turns out, it’s a shame I hadn’t tried WoT earlier – it’s a fantastic game.
As a new player, I was very curious to see whether a new player could be reasonably competitive without spending any money. Therefore, I did not subscribe with a Premium account ($15 USD per month) and I did not buy any in-game gold.
After playing 775 battles up through Tier 5, here’s my take:
- Gold ammo, which you buy with real money, definitely gives a huge advantage. Gold ammo will penetrate (i.e. punch through armor to deal damage) almost any target you’ll face. However…
- Individual player skill matters more than anything. No amount of gold ammo or having a Premium account will enable a player to aim effectively, understand how to counter opponents, and work effectively with other players. WoT is a very high “skill cap” game
There are a few things you should I should mention, to contextualize my experience as a WoT noob:
- Prior to playing the game, I had not read up on the game (e.g. I didn’t read the excellent Wiki, any guides, etc). The only thing I watched was a video by SideStrafe, which got me interested in the game in the first place
- I have not played a PC-based FPS (first person shooter) since Quake, back before 2000. So I’m not an experienced shooter
- Over 80% of my matches to date have been as a solo player, not as part of a platoon (premade group)
So I basically went into WoT cold, without any meaningful knowledge about how the game worked, without much experience with shooters, and playing on my own.
Gaining experience without Premium is a slow process, and this in turn impacts the rate at which one can research / upgrade / level up tanks and crews. So without Premium you extend your window of being “undergeared” relative to your opponents. Would this be gamebreaking?
The easiest and most objective way to evaluate performance in WoT is to look at the rich statistics that are publicly available and the ratings systems created by the community.
In general, a player’s statistics tend to improve :
- As they climb up the learning curve for the game, which includes understanding how to aim, where to aim, how to control their tank, how to use terrain, how the maps work, what the capabilities of tanks are, strategies and tactics, how to coordinate with their team mates
- Upwards as they research and buy upgrades (guns, turrets, engine, suspension) for a given tank
- Upwards as they mounted equipment for a given tank
- Upwards as they level up the training for their crew to 100% for a given tank
- Upwards as they level up skills / perks for the crew for a given tank, which are available for a crew member once their training level reaches 100%
Not surprisingly, new players tend to perform statistically poorly compared to more experienced players who have better tanks and crews, and I was no exception.
Here’s a screenshot from NoobMeter.com of my performance up through today:
You can see that there are 4 rating systems (NoobMeter’s Performance Rating, Efficiency Rating, WN6 Rating, and WN7 Rating). I won’t go into detail about the differences between the ratings systems, but what is clear from looking at my stats is that there has been significant improvement when you compare the Overall column with the Last ~7 days column:
- Performance Rating: from 1502 (Good) to 1801 (Great)
- Efficiency Rating: from 890 (Below Average) to 1050 (Average)
- WN7 Rating: from 762 (Bad) to 1097 (Average)
You can see in the Recent column that my ratings dipped a bit over the past day, and this was likely due to my unlocking the Churchill 1, the Tier 5 British heavy tank. I played a few dozen matches with that tank before I was able to unlock the engine, suspension, turret, and first decent gun, and it was brutal. Prior to fully researching the tank, even when I was winning games my contribution was low from a numerical standpoint. For the Churchill 1 crew, I did acquire a 100% training level tank commander for 200 gold, as all players who changed their password were given 300 gold. I figured this was acceptable to use on a commander as that free gold was available to all players.
The most simple stat to look at for performance is Win Rate. According to WOTLABS.net, the average Win Rate is 49%. That makes sense, when you consider that that means the average Lose Rate is 49%, and that leaves 2% for Draws. One in 50 battles ending in a draw sounds about right to me. I did not cross the 50% Win Rate until ~620 battles, because I lost a lot of my first 200 battles, and even when I got the basic mechanics down, I was dealing with leveling up tanks and untrained crews at each new tier. My recent Win Rate has been ~56% for the 3 tanks I’ve been playing the most
- Tier 4 M8A1 tank destroyer (215 battles, 51.2% Win Rate)
- Tier 4 Matilda medium tank (191 battles, 56% Win Rate)
- Tier 5 Churchill 1 heavy tank (67 battles, 56.7% Win Rate)
My guildees and I have been discussing what % of the player base has Premium and what % of the player base is using gold ammo. Opinions range all over the map. My guess is that fewer than 25% of players are using Gold ammo. I would assume that a significant % of the opponents I’m facing have fully-upgraded tanks and 100% training level crews, and I’m still winning at a rate ~7 percentage points higher than average.
I understand that at higher tiers, the extent of grinding to fully research and upgrade tanks increases, so that factors such as Premium do matter more. That said, I do believe based on my experience that while paying customers have an advantage, non-paying customers can still perform effectively. So it’s safe to say that this isn’t a P2W game.
If you’re just starting WoT and can afford to a Premium account, it’s worth it to speed up the leveling process. But if you don’t want to pay and just want to play, you’ll be fine without it.
P.S. here’s a screenshot of my 27 battles from last night. This was a particularly good series of games for me, grouped up with Sujitsu (WoT: L337Zeon) and Trajan (WoT: TrajanMVN) and running solo. My Churchill 1 crew’s training levels are 100/87/87/87/87, and I’m turning the corner with that tank. The crews for my Matilda and M8A1 are at 100% training level and just starting to work on their first set of skills.
- Performance Rating: 1890 (Great)
- Efficiency Rating: 1810 (Unicum)
- WN7 Rating: 1749 (Unicum)
P.P.S. I’ve answered for myself the question of whether non-paying customers can compete – they can. As I plan to continue playing WoT but want to reduce the grind, I went ahead on May 1st and purchased a Premium subscription.
Cheers,
Taugrim
Taugrim's MMO Blog 
Hi Taugrim, have been playing WoT since Beta and love the game. Just to clarify you state “Gold ammo, which you buy with real money” this is both correct and incorrect. In patch 0.8.1 they allowed you to buy gold ammo with credits in addition to using gold (real money), and in 0.8.5 (latest patch) you can now buy premium consumables as well with credits.
They do make a huge difference in the load out of a skilled player, angling your tank correctly and knowing the weak spots of tanks makes or breaks your game.
My advise to my friends is that at some stage you will buy gold and the most effective use of it will be for two uses.
1) Buy a premium tank based on the country and tank class you think you will specialize in. The reason is for example say your goal is to play heavy Russian tanks, go and buy the IS-6 or Churchill III premium (without crew) as you can put your IS tank crew in these tanks with no penalty and earn double crew XP every day (once in the IS and once in the IS-6/Churchill III). Premiums also generally earn more credits.
2) Spend gold to move your crew up to the next tank and keep their current skills (200 gold per crew member). This has the negative that you can’t put them back down in the old tank unless you spend gold to retrain them. But they will get new skills/perks quicker as you are not resetting them or starting in the next tank with a vanilla crew. The perks and skills at higher levels are really a game changer. Sixth Sense is amazing.
Anyway, looking forward to reading your WoT posts (miss you not playing ToR).
-Wastey
Understood. I considered trying to explain the distinction. The thing is, some players who have a lot of credits to now buy gold, acquired those credits in the first place because they were paying customers, e.g. they bought a high-tier Premium tank to farm.
One of my guildees is an example. He spends credits to buy gold ammo. But he earns those credits on a Tier 8 Premium tank. So at the end of the day, his gold ammo is still coming from money, just indirectly.
This is great advice.
I don’t plan on going past Tier 6 at the moment. I’m having a blast in Tier 4 and Tier 5, and I’m OK with playing in the middle tiers. I’ve heard that at the upper tiers, in a losing battle you lose credits, because the earnings from the battle doesn’t cover the cost of ammo/repairs.
You are right, up tier 8 without premium account is difficult to cover the costs of the battle….
But if u buy once a Tier 8 premium vehicle, lets say ur Tier 9 destroyed in battle, instead that you wait that you Tier 9 returns to your garage jump into the Tier 8 Prem, play one battle, and you can easily cover the cost of Tier 9 repairs….
15$ one time investement for Tier 8 Premium is not that bad in my opinion….
And for retraining crew with gold for new vehicle, never do that, until Tier 8 don’t get any crew perks when u crew training reached to %100, the experience you collect will be used directly to re-train ur crew…
So you can select, re-train for credit option and you will still have %100 trained crews in the new tank…. :)
And watch these 2 guys videos emu87 is top 3 player in EU server (http://www.youtube.com/user/aerophobic2) and IbeeSI is a guy from Russia (http://www.youtube.com/user/IBeeSI) he is also quite good
Indeed, and it’s an effective “hook” by WG to get players to spend real money, to use Premium tanks for farming.
Yes, it’s helpful to carry a well-trained crew for a vehicle type (e.g. heavy tank) as you progress through tiers. It does cost gold to retain their full training level though.
Again, another effective hook by WG to get players to pay.
I’m not doing that with my Tier 4 tanks and above – each tank has its own fresh crew, but it’s because I’m trying to see how I do without buying gold.
Hi taugrim,
Glad to see you playing WoT, it’s a fun game and the guys above have added some good points.
One additional thing I’d like to clarify is that there is a logic behind making top tier tanks lose money and that’s to force people to keep playing tiers 5-8 which is where the sweet spot is and people can make credits even on a loss. It keeps those tiers populated so newer players starting out and players grinding new lines will always have battles no matter which tier they are playing at and imo is a brilliant idea.
http://wotarmory.com/ whilst not updated in a year still has some really good advise on top tier tanks and weak spots and helped me a lot when I was just learning the game.
Understood.
As Dirk Pitt wrote above, WG also incentivizes players to buy a Premium tank for farming purposes.
Yes, one of the hooks in the game is getting players to invest time unlocking different tank lines, for different countries. It’s fun to play new tanks, see how they perform.
It has been rather time-consuming to tier up, at least for me as a non-paying customer. I only have two Tier 4’s and one Tier 5 to date.
It’s a very rich game despite how simple it looks and really how easy it is to get in an start playing. Despite the addition of some crew skills that help with this, there is so much to learn about detection and spotting. Can anyone see me right now? If I shoot from here, do I need to move? If you play TD or ARTY you need to know that sort of stuff.
One of the things I like the best about the game is that, as Ed has mentioned, the game has a very high skill cap, which I agree with, but unlike other competitive PVP games, it’s not really a twitch game. It’s not about being able to rapidly determine which key to hit and do it faster than the other guy, and that suits me well
it’s about angling, making every shot count, threat priority. I really love the game, but when my clan, who had been dominant in Clan Wars, disintegrated after losing most of our territory, I took a break and tried to come back a few weeks ago, but I had so much fun playing in platoons most of the time, that sitting around solo didn’t do it for me and Defiance had launched and I was giving that a go.
Thanks to you for posting that noobmeter link. I used an old Dossier site that was around when I played previously, but this is very good.
Stats:
http://noobmeter.com/player/na/Steelkat
Yes, I appreciate that it’s a “thinking man’s” game and not just a pure FPS. The game has tremendous depth and rich mechanics.
I totally understand now why WoT has done well. According to Xfire it’s the #5 overall game, right behind WoW. Well merited IMO.
How would you compare WoT and Defiance? I was going to try Defiance before WoT, but after the bad taste Age of Wushu left in my mouth, I wanted to see whether there was a quality F2P that I enjoyed, so I tried WoT.
Your ratings are superb :)
I enjoy Defiance. It’s a simple game. PVP is fairly simple and far more forgiving than FPS shooters. But it’s a little boring after a month in. Hopefully as new content rolls in on the heels of the weekly TV episodes, that will pick up. It’s a really enjoyable timewaster though to just roam the San Fran countryside and blow stuff up.
As for my stats, trust me, I was at the bottom end of the range in the competitive Clan Wars area, but I was a safe selection in the important battles because I followed orders and didn’t risk the battle to get a risky shot in.
But that brings up one stat that i don’t see in the noobmeter, and I hope it’s because people moved away from overvaluing it. That stat is hit ratio. When I played competitively, that was one of the big stats people looked at. I played with people that viewed anything less than 70% (in a given tank) as scrubsville, and I just never got it. I used to put so much pressure on myself to boost my hit ratio. I built a spreadsheet to track and predict when my hit ratio would get up there.
Overall I am/was just at 63% because Arty brings that down a tiny bit and so does alot of low tier (rapid firing guns) playing. So like I said, I hope it’s not on noobmeter because it’s either just a small part of the performance rating calc or it’s out of there altogether.
You want to see superb ratings, here’s a guy I platooned with alot:
http://noobmeter.com/player/na/Thybane
We used to require potential recruits to submit their link to this Dossier tool.
http://wot-dossier.appspot.com/dossier/4364002
It’s VERY detailed information on a tank by tank level.
Yes. It’s a great site.
I was using this before noobmeter. Noobmeter is my go-to site now for tracking trending of stats across tanks.
Dossier is the best for per-tank stats.
Thanks for the perspective. I’ll probably pass on the game, but I actually got interested in the game because I’m enjoying the SyFy series.
I agree, 70% seems like a good target.
I have 70% on my Matilda, and my Churchill 1 is at 66%. My M8A1 is way behind at 57%, but that’s because I try a lot of pot-shots from long range, especially on Light Tanks moving fast.
That’s a big part of it, as you climb the tiers, you start dealing with longer reload times on your guns so it’s imperative to take more care. Overall hit ratio for a player is a bad stat, individual hit ratios on tanks in the good stuff. With highly accurate guns on the slow reload tanks like the E-100 in T10, you should just flat out not miss. anything under 80% represents a problem. But last night I bought a Panzer 1.C and it’s hard to keep the last few shots of any burst on target if you are at any sort of range., so I suspect 60% in that tank is probably good.
I would guess that if you plotted hit ratios on tanks, it would be a pretty linear graph correlating with reload time.
I found with my Churchill 1 heavy tank with the 75mm Vickers HV that the 12.5 rpm rate of fire made me very tentative at firing.
A 4+ sec reload doesn’t allow you to take risks.
Oh you wait! The 150mm on my E-100 is a 20 second reload. Damn, I’m starting to get into the game again but I am horrid! Between new maps and all new crew skills and an almost complete erosion of skills, I am failing so badly.
http://noobmeter.com/player/na/Steelkat
You mean personal skill erosion, right? Crew skills don’t erode, do they? I sure hope not!
Hello Taugrim,
good to see you discovered and enjoy WoT and quite amazing to see how you grasp gamemechanics at Tier IV that most upper Tier players haven’t grasped yet :). Looking forward to your next steps…
You might want to bookmark this site, excellent source on game mechanics and backgrounds.
http://ftr-wot.blogspot.be/
Thanks for the tip, I hadn’t seen that site before. So far I’ve primarily been reading the official Wiki and a bit on wotguru.com for weak spots of select tanks (AMX40, AT2, etc).
I must admit Taug, I am quite shocked by what you have written here….Normally I hold your opinion in the highest regard….but on this occasion I have to strongly disagree!
To say WoT is a great game? Play a few thousand battles and say that again!
The mechanics don’t actually, consistently work for a start. There are glaring balance issues between tank tiers and in some cases between same tier tanks. The power hikes of some tanks vs their normal opponents…especially as you hit tier 8….
The 0 damage pens, the random bounce mechanics for example: I once shot a Hellcat in the rear with a BL10 gun, that has an average pen value of 286mm. the Hellcat has (I believe) 15mm of rear armour, I hit it at a FLAT angle..result was a bounce. 286mm of pen vs 15 mm of armour.
Then there is the klingon tank issue. A Tiger II for example, on the move and remember this tank is the size of a small family home can actually VANISH 50m in front of you without any cover. For example, I have one replay where an IS3 does this at 51m range, with a small bush covering one part of it”s TRACK. It vanished 8 times during the fight whilst firing it’s main gun at me, from 51m.
I would ask you to not to endorse nor encourage people to “try” this game until you have witnessed exactly these things. Take a cruise around the euro forum and read some of the topics that come up.
As for player skill mattering? That’s a very subjective issue in this game, for the aformentioned reasons. If you find yourself on a team consisting of 14 “red” players and you are not in the absolute best tank, you are pretty much ensured a loss.
You also maybe want to mention the disgraceful behaviour of the general playerbase, possibly the single worst I have ever seen in over a decade of mmo gaming.
Your positive comments towards this game have truly shocked me, considering the sheer quality of statements you write 99% of the time.
There are some MAJOR issues with this game (I’ve seen most of them over my 14k battles) and I would hope you report on those too, as you come across them.
Yes, Taugrim, please stick to only error-free games.
In all seriousness, there are occasional issues with hit detection and spotting. But I have almost 10000 battles and I hardly consider any of the issues to be so commonplace as to damage my enjoyment, but then I have not played much in the last 9 months, so I can defer to Mr. Woodthorpe on this.
Glad you are posting your difference of opinion – I want to hear what people honestly think, not just agreement with me :)
Well, 700+ battles is a pretty decent amount of time to have played a game.
I haven’t seen the mechanics not work.
When I die there’s usually a valid reason. Sometimes my shots bounce when they shouldn’t (happened against an M37 Priest last night), but I’m sure I’ve had lucky bounces for incoming shells too.
You are definitely correct in that mixing tank tiers (e.g. 3-5, 4-6, 5-7, etc) creates mismatches, and that within a tier some tanks are better than others.
Well, I haven’t seen the Klingon thing, or anything of note that made me thing the game is not working correctly.
One of my guildees has 2.5k battles and he believes that the game isn’t working correctly as you do, but I haven’t seen anything conspicuous to be honest.
I don’t recommend games unless I have played them and believe they’re worth the time.
I take forums with a heavy grain of salt. A substantial number of things that players have claimed I have disagreed with – honestly it is the #1 reason I started writing guides and blogging in the first place.
True, but the flipside can also happen. Over the course of hundreds and thousands of matches, there is reversion to the mean, meaning that you’ll get overall reasonably balanced matches over thousands of them.
In-game, this is one of the least trolly games I have ever played. I was surprised, as I was expecting a lot of whining and trolling.
My guildee Sujitsu believes that it’s because the game requires skill, and it’s pretty clear who is pulling their weight and who is not in a match. I can tell when people are going to get killed 15-30s before they do, simply by watching where they go on the map.
At any rate, we seem to have very different perspectives on the game, and some of the things you’ve mentioned I don’t believe have to do with the number of battles played. I do appreciate your sharing your perspective though.
Taugrim, in his defense, the game does get very trolly at the higher tiers. Even with a Premium account, you can easily lose money at Tier 9 and 10, so players tend to be very nasty up there when things don’t go their way.
OK that makes sense since the stakes are higher. Thanks for providing that perspective.
It is a sad fact mate. Sans premium you be losing 30-60k easy on a bad loss. And if that loss happens because of a few players, well….it does get you down. Tier 5 and below is where the game works the best in my opinion.
I played (and gave up on) my Churchill 1, and two nights ago I got my KV-1, which is an excellent all-around tank.
I’ll try some Tier 6 tanks eventually, but for now I’m having fun.
I wish the matchmaking was only two ranks wide instead of three. Having Tier 5’s face off against 7’s for example creates a huge advantage for the 7s, although with smart, conservative play a 5 can still meaningfully contribute.
That bad match making is almost exclusive to the NA server. On the RA server they have no many people playing that if you play a tier 5 you see almost nothing but tier 5’s.
I kind of like the tier spread to be honest. It can be a fun (or frustraiting) challenge to be a tier 7 medium in a tier 9 game.
The match making used to be much worst. Tier 6’s could see tier 10’s!
That’s very interesting to hear.
And that explains why there is separate stat tracking by the community for the different servers. It’s a different ball game if you largely face only even-tier matches, compared to facing +/- a tier.
It can be a challenge and (sometimes) enjoyable, but generally I’d prefer to win or lose facing opponents with “equal gear” or thereabouts. There have been some battles where I was in the bottom tier and ended up disproportionately contributing to a victory, and that’s satisfying. But thinking about the gameplay experience, consistency is very important.
Yikes.
That would be awful on either end: you’re either largely impotent or clubbing seals.
Nice to see you write about WoT. I value your MMORPG movies very high. So glad you play WoT I’m now mostly WoT not longer MMORPG player. After 16k battles in Wot still feel not fully expert, still learning a lot. This game is challenging and requires a lot of skill and tactical thinking. Patience is very important for good player.
You can play it for free, even to tier 10, but some things will be hard. “Stock” tanks are very unpleasant to drive. Skipping some modules with free exp make game a lot nicer. Non-premium grind on high tiers requires a lot of tier 5-6 battles to make credits. Using tier 9, 10 tanks and gold “credits” ammo costs tons of time spending on credits grind.
My advise after your video is enlarge minimap at last twice, its helps a lot to understand situation. Also installing some addons helps a lot: newest XVM got shadows on minimp after tank get unspotted, with tank type name.
If you want learn weakspots faster, using good skins will help:
http://forum.worldoftanks.com/index.php?/topic/177817-85v58-lemon96-hitzones-for-the-tanks/
if your tank guns reload more then 5 sec, it’s good to know correctly in seconds how much this is 6,4 left or more. This addon got it:
http://forum.worldoftanks.com/index.php?/topic/229952-085-j1mb0s-crosshair-mod-updated/
After battle extra statistic, nice to have, nice to easy see who make most battle dmg:
http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/index.php?/topic/177899-statistics-pack-for-085/#top
If you want “easy mode” buy premium, get one premium tier 8 tank ( I suggest USA T34 ) and get some gold for stock modules free exp skip. Never skip tanks, only bad modules. never buy credits, its too dam expensive. But I’m sure you don’t need and don’t want easy mode :) I ‘m not so hardcore and I buy gold because i got huge respect for all job for Wargaming. This game rocks!
GL in battlefield ! Sry for my poor english :P
Thanks :)
I’m still a die-hard fan of the MMORPG genre, but it’s nice to find a different game that I’m enjoying so much.
Yea I can see learning things in this game over a very long period of time. That’s partly what I enjoy so much about it.
Thanks, I may do that with the minimap.
I can see the tanks as I have them on my list with an built-in option enabled, with the tank type icon.
Your tips on skins/addons is appreciated.
This will sound weird but I want to experience the “base” experience, so I may continue to play without anything that doesn’t come with the game.
In some games, e.g. WoW, addons were essential for visibility (e.g. DPS meters) and quality of life, but WoT out-of-the-box provides a good UI, with the exception of the horrible click-based platoon experience.
Your English is excellent :)
Premium is $14.99/month unless you buy one of their specials. I’ve actually found that if you buy premium when it’s on sale (which happens frequently for 3 days at a time), it’s more than enough to keep you going. Your gold, IE real money, will stretch further. Buying a premium tank also helps in the same way.
Also, above Tier 5 you can lose credits when you lose battles. It’s really not that big of a deal though. One win makes up for several losses. My overall win rate is an embarrassing 46%, and I still make plenty of credits with a F2P account. Don’t let that stop you from moving up. The challenge from players in the top tiers will put your talents to good use.
Yeah, its $14.99 for 3000 gold. Which 2500 gold is used to get 30 day premium and 500 gold left over. If you do this over time you will eventually get a free month after 5 months if you do not use the gold for other things in game.
Ah, thanks for the correction. Article updated.
And for the tip re: specials.
I wonder statistically whether players at upper tiers are better than players playing middle tiers. From what I’ve read and heard, Tier 5 is the most popular.
Certainly players at upper tiers have committed much more time to the game, but I think by the time a player has fully researched a Tier 5 tank, they should have the core mechanics down.
Of course, getting an in-depth knowledge of the game, e.g. armor and weakspots of every tank, will take a lot of time to acquire.
Tier 5? If anything I would think it’d be tier 6 for the medium tank companies. I saved my Hellcat specifically for that.
Good point though on top tier players. Though all the time invested in a top tier tank, even with premium, will certainly weed out the least dedicated. Also, tier 9 and 10 tanks are brutal to go up against. Victory is going to be a triumph of skill in a t7 or t8.
P.S. I bounced a gold round off an arty at point blank range a few days ago. SO pissed. I’ve also noticed my own arty shots landing outside the reticle pretty consistently. Only a problem with my M41 though. Other arty have been fine.
Yea the sweet spot seems to be around Tier 5 or 6.
Yikes.
In my T5 Churchill 1 heavy tank, in a match with Tier 7’s, I have to play as a backline support / sniper, since the opposing tanks have almost double my HP and hit much harder.
This is pretty rare though, right? Arty probably got exceptionally lucky.
We’ll have to agree to disagree then Taug:) But trust me, you will see these things crop up:) The value of the input of your skill in certain tanks/match ups also varies. If you are in an E75 for example, and you are against tier 8s you are effectively invincible providing you are at least self aware:) To perform the same in say, a french tier 9 takes far more input of skill.
In fact, I’d love for you to go down the french line and see what you make of it-you seem to learn fast and I think you’d make a fine player of those tanks.
As for the forum comment, you really should have a look. Hundreds of people don’t keep making the same thread over and over and over for no reason. WG have been very evasive about certain issues of late….
Anyway, good hunting:)
Understood.
I can already see that at tiers that I’m playing in. My Churchill heavy tank seems inferior to the very popular KV-1. The 75mm Vickers HV hits hard but the gun depression is horribad. So many times I’ve been screwed by even slight rises in terrain.
Can you link me a couple of the threads on the EU forum that you’re referring to? I’m curious to read them.
The Churchill series of tanks are very powerful, they just require a bit more understanding of the game mechanics to really shine where as the KV’s (like most Russian tanks) are brutes and reward a more aggressive gameplay which comes more naturally to most people.
To get the most out of your Churchill take a look at this guide on side scraping https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOFgYt0was and re-read the wiki guide on Effective Armour Thickness.
I know from previous posts you’ve been reading up on weak spots on tanks you’ve been facing but don’t forget to take a look at the weak spots on your tank as well so you can learn how to protect yourself.
Well, there are things such as the poor gun depression of the 75mm Hickers HV and the severely exposed tracks that limit the capability of the Churchill 1.
I haven’t watched the video but I’ve read the wiki and understand what sidescraping is.
Understood. I try to face left to hide the hatch on the front-right of my tank. Etc.
Sure thing, is there a way I can do it without spamming on here?
I don’t want to be mr negative, I just want a balanced look at this. There are good points about WoT but there are many bad as well.
On a sidenote, if you get time in the future, please take a look at Warthunder-I’d love to see what you make of that.
Spamming what? Links to threads? Please feel free to post ’em.
Fair enough. Every game has it’s cons. If there was a game that didn’t, we’d all be playing it.
If I try another military game, the next one would probably be ARMA. A few of my guildees are really into it. The degree of realism is amazing.
All I can say to that is…wowP I await with baited breath! That looks awesome!
Tier V is very unbalanced because many ppl using derp guns + gold ammo. M4 Sherman is great example of overpowered tank, 150mm ( gold ) penetration + 350 dmg + good mobility and turret. On higher tiers such extremes are rare. In my opinion “real” WoT gameplay it’s tier VIII and IX. Tier X is another unbalanced extreme, but mostly by too much numbers of op artys and very strong alpha dmg td-s.
Also many ppl calls these staying in low tiers : “seal cub basher” or “pedo bear” because challenge level is much lower when you counter mostly new, inexperienced players.
FYI.
Since I’ve answered the question I posed at the beginning of this article, and I plan to continue playing the game but want to reduce the grind, on May 1st I purchased Premium.
I been following your post for the last 8 months I find them very informative. Thank you very much for what you are doing. I just started playing WoT because of you it is a fun game.
Thank you for taking the time for write, it’s an encouragement to me :)
I’m happy to share the good experiences I’m having.