World of Tanks (Vol 2)

World of Tanks (Vol 2)

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Discussion

Beati Dogu

8,891 posts

139 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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In the top right, once you have selected a vehicle. Next to the Research button.

Contrary to its public image, the Tiger in this game can not take a hit and the historical L/56 88mm gun is crap (So crap that they allow you to fit the longer L/71 88mm gun, that in reality only the Tiger II used). Consequently most people die fast and are disappointed with the tank when they get it.

That said, if you don't get too close to the enemy and snipe from range it's not a bad tank, with a good rate of fire. Just remember to play it like a tank destroyer and stay back. I fitted mine with binoculars & a camouflage net so I could out range the enemy. Same goes for the Tiger II really, to a lesser extent.

Take your time and don't make the mistake of rushing up the tech tree for the sake of it. It's not a game where the goal is to 'unlock' the next level. Stick around tier 5 or 6 and learn the game from there. The principles are the same and it'll help you when you feel confident to advance. Playing Russian heavies like the KV-1 and KV-1S (both tier 5) are a good way to learn how to play heavies and angle your armour.

Most light tanks get different matchmaking that other vehicles. You can see tanks that are 3 tiers higher than you instead of just 2. It used to be 4 tiers higher until fairly recently, which was even more ridiculous. They all have lousy guns that will struggle to penetrate anything unless you fire premium ammo. They're the hardest class to play well and are best avoided, or at least got through ASAP until you know what you're doing and have the 6th sense skill on your commander.

From easiest to hardest to play I'd say the vehicle types are like this:

Artillery -> Heavy Tanks -> Tank Destroyers -> Mediums -> lights

Mastodon2

13,826 posts

165 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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ash73 said:
Enjoying myself a bit more now I've got to tier 4, 5 and 6, just one step away from a Tiger. Odd thing is my tier 4 light tank, which I really like, is always matched against much higher tiers so my shells bounce off everything. I'm trying to do a bit of scouting but won't survive long. My tier 5 and 6 tanks are matched with anything from tier 4 to 8, but I can get a kill every two or three games which is an improvement on where I was.

One question; I have to wait for XP before I can upgrade stuff, where is this counter shown?
Don't be offended, but if your still at the point where a kill every 2 or 3 games is an improvement, you're not even close to being ready for a Tiger, you will just weigh your team down. It sounds like you've got a lot to learn about the game mechanics yet, so do yourself and your teams a favour and head here http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/World_of_Tanks and read at the very least everything under the "Options" and "Game Mechanics" headings. Then, get a Matilda (tier 4 British) or a KV-1 (tier 5 Russian) and spend some time understanding the game mechanics and improving your play. The higher the tier, the less forgiving the gameplay, those two tanks are very strong for their tier, and will help you survive your mistakes better while you learn to play.

Mastodon2

13,826 posts

165 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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ash73 said:
I couldn't care less about the team to be honest
You're the disease that drags the good players down.

Mastodon2

13,826 posts

165 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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ash73 said:
And you're a bloody show off. Get over it.
I'm far from the best player, a long way from it, but I'm still a top 5% player - I've still got a lot to learn and even more to practice but I do my best to be educated in how the game works and I play to win. I'd never dream of selfishly tossing my team in the st. If you only care about yourself, what are you doing playing a team game? There's a disconnect there - perhaps Call of Duty would be more suited?

If you do start to improve and reach the stage where you're regularly in the top 3 spots on your team, or even the top half in most games, you'll become frustrated at self-entitled "me, me, me!" players who you have to carry along. Learn the mechanics, practice them and become proficient and perhaps most importantly realise you're here to win and your team needs you.

Edit: A quick look at my stats shows I've been close to cracking the top 1% in terms of Win8 in the last month, and my win rate has been in the top 0.01%. When I started the game I didn't have a clue either, but I knew I wanted to win and I knew I needed to help my team. I couldn't estimate how much time I've spent reading and watching videos to learn about WOT.

Edited by Mastodon2 on Saturday 5th September 13:59

Mastodon2

13,826 posts

165 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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ash73 said:
If you want to post crap like that fine I'll just ignore you. If on the other hand you want to be helpful, answer the specific questions I posted above.
I already gave you the link you need, if you read my post properly you'd have seen it. I'll post it again.

http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/World_of_Tanks

Scroll halfway down the page, read everything under "Options" and "Game Mechanics", at the very least. There is no point in us typing out what is written in there waiting for you to read it. You need to know it all, but the answers to the specific queries you've already raised are in the "Gunnery and Armour Penetration" and "Matchmaker" articles.

Beati Dogu

8,891 posts

139 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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The warning (usually a light bulb, but can be modded to something else) is sixth sense going off when you are spotted. It wont work until the skill is at 100%, so it'll take a while to get there.

You can buy equipment either by clicking on the Store button in the top middle of the garage screen, or clicking on one of the 3 equipment slots I've highlighted here:




It'll come up with a list of available stuff and you can buy them here too. A camouflage net is 100,000 credits and binoculars are 500,000. You only need to buy one of each though, as they can be transferred between vehicles free of charge.

On this vehicle I've got a gun rammer, a camo net and binoculars. To demount anything I just need to left click on them and select "Demount", which will send them to the my depot. I can add them back to this or other tanks in the same way.

Normal equipment like the gun rammer cost 10 gold to demount, so it's always best to have some gold for that sort of thing. If you do the tutorial they'll give you 300 gold to start with.



All that jazz

7,632 posts

146 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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If you want to advance up the tech tree and improve your overall player rating then you should be focusing more on doing a lot of damage rather than most kills. XP is weighted more to doing damage rather than kills and you need to be making a lot of XP in order to progress up the tech tree as quickly as possible. Having 6 kills in a game may look good on the results screen but if they all only had 100 hp remaining in a tier 5 game then it's not particularly impressive.

For tank equipment I run with a small repair kit, small med kit and fire extinguisher on every tank and any decent player will do too. For ancillary tank items I usually equip a camo net, binoculars and gun rammer on my TDs. You can find all these options on your garage screen - the repair kits etc are in your ammo loadout screen, just click on the symbols in the lower half of your screen and it'll let you choose what you want. By default each item you choose in turn will get assigned to your number 4,5,6 keys on your keyboard. So if you get set on fire and need to extinguish it, press 6. If you get your tracks blown off then you press 4 and then another menu pops up and you press the number corresponding to whichever item is flashing orange (I think it's 5 for tracks). Note that the small kits you can only use once per game.

For crew training, well this is like a separate side game I find and I've never been completely au fait with it myself as it's unnecessarily complicated. The general idea is to train up crews for your various tanks and then move them into new tanks that you buy rather than starting with a fresh untrained crew. When you first buy a tank it will ask you if you want a crew with it and will give you the option of them being untrained, part trained or fully trained. If you don't buy them already trained then you need to play with them til you've got your skills up to 100% before it will let you unlock crew training for other perks. The boxes will be greyed out. Once you reach 100% training then you can click on the crew members and select a skill for them. I generally go with 6th sense for commander and then camo for all the others on the first round of training, then camo for commander and repairs for the others on second round, but bear in mind I do play "kemp bush" TDs mainly.

There's a little box above the crew members that allows you to select 'accelerate crew training' which does exactly that, but if you're not running a premium account your XP earnings will be tiny and it'll take forever to gain enough XP for the next tank. It's worth noting that at the low to mid tiers you could be looking at upwards of a 100 battles to train a crew to 100% to get the skill you want. What most players do is buy a mid to high tier premium tank and run a premium account. The premium account gives you more XP and credits than a non-premium account and premium tanks train crews at 2x speed (iirc) so stick your crew in a premium tank til you get the skills you want then move them back into your normal tank. For example, I trained my SU-85B Russian TD crew in the boxtenk (SU-100Y premium) which has 6 seats in it. The SU-85B only has 4 seats so you get you 2 extra crew trained to use in something else. I've used the same crew in all my Russian TDs as I grinded them, all the way to the tier 10 Object 263. If I wanted to play my SU-85B again then I just take them out of the Obj 263 and put them in that. Note that tank crews are tied to the nation you're playing and also the type of tank (although you can retrain them for a different tank type under the same nation).



Edited by All that jazz on Saturday 5th September 14:14

All that jazz

7,632 posts

146 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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Playing light tanks in the game as it is now is only enjoyable if you enjoy being tortured. On the World of Tank maps golf courses where all foliage has been removed in order to passively spot, you just can't do anything. You will regularly be bottom tier so your gun will do about as much damage to the enemy tanks as standing in front of it throwing stones at it and everyone will target you as a nice easy 1 shot kill.

The game is rigged for heavy tank brawling play these days (and mediums to a lesser extent). Lights, TDs and arty will just have you launching your PC out of the nearest window.

Dr Banjo

656 posts

149 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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I decided to try lights.. (stupid boy)

I free xp'd my way to an ELC AMX. I just wanted to try it out. Blimey playing it is tricky and demands enormous amounts of discipline. I agree with everything that BD & ATJ say. The maps appear to be more "skewed" to heavies/brawling approach.

Fecking corridors get on my tits.

I do spend time watching Quickybaby content as his commentary is really useful and he knows the maps inside out so there is a lot of info to be gleaned.

I wanted the Tiger and had no illusions. However I decided I don't have the skills to really play it effectively. So when not playing the ELC I stay at Tier5. Just don't see much point in going further.

With regards to lights... I see quite a few players getting results in the Luchs. I am temtped to try it.

Perhaps I have a masochistic fetish with lights smash


bstb3

4,073 posts

158 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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Lights can be a lot of fun, and the low tier ones (like the Luchs mentioned) are generally a little more forgiving than the higher tier ones as the matchmaking will still fairly often give you tier 5/6 games. The problem with them is that you need to be 100% switched on all the time - get caught out in any way and it's usually game over. There is little more satisfying that zooming around the map cleaning things up in the end game, but getting to that stage is damn tough.


Nothing I can add to the excellent advice from Beati, ATJ and Mastodon above, other than to say be careful about equipment as some of it once added to a tank will need gold to remove. It does tell you, but it's a bugger when you put it on by mistake.

edit - oh and also look out for equipment sales, they are not that rare and can be 50% off which can save a lot of credits.

Edited by bstb3 on Saturday 5th September 16:30

RobDickinson

31,343 posts

254 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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It's a game that punishes mistakes harder the higher tier you are, so don't rush.

Love my tiger, it's a competent brawler if you are top tier, use it's HP as armour. Unlike reality it's not an impenetrable killing machine. Angling and side scraping helps but accurate shooting helps more.

Oh got ace tanker in my isu-152 last night. Odd one, only pen'd 4 shots, bottom tier wrecked some t10s

Mastodon2

13,826 posts

165 months

Saturday 5th September 2015
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My final day of premium account is tomorrow, I think I'll take a bit of a break and focus on Arkham Knight and the new Metal Gear game for a little while before I re-buy another big block of premium time. I'll probably play a few games on the weekends just to keep me ticking over but I won't be grinding. My target 2 weeks back was to hit 15 million silver before my premium ran out, I'm now at 11 million, but saying as I've purchased a JT88, 112, Type 68 and Panzer IV Schmalturm in that time, and just tonight a VK30.02M, I've exceeded my target already - each tank is currently sitting with at least a million silver in equipment and ammo on board. This has been achieved mainly through playing tier 8 premiums, tier 6 light premiums and occasionally some tier 5 premiums for fun. Luchs and KV-2s have been employed to break up the higher tier play, but I'm lucky in that my tier 8 premiums cover a spread of brawler heavies, snipers and mediums so if I get frustrated with one playstyle I can switch to another. I've had a few odd games in the STA-1 also, it's nice to jump out of premiums, which by design can feel very limited and deliberately handicapped, into something which is very powerful for it's tier and use that to stomp the enemy for a while.

My main grind on returning will be the E50M line, inspired by PHer RobDickinson unlocking his - I've wanted one for a while and it clicked in my head that I need to get it done. I'd previously purchased a VK30.02M, played one game and then sold it for space in the garage, jumping back in tonight I had 3 Mastery class 2s in 4 games and 2 High Calibre medals. A strong double, a few strong matches and the magic of German module sharing meant I had it fully upgraded after just 4 games. And my word, this thing is pretty decent. Good DPM, reliable if not amazing accuracy and good enough pen for a tier 6 combined with a good engine and decent enough hull traverse mean it's able to get around and keep the gun working. A bit of a shame about the giant size and lack of gun depression, but I'll live. It will be nice to have a flexible tier 10, as my Maus, IS-7 and JPE-100 are all pretty much incapable of flexing, the Germans because they're so slow and the Russian because it's just st.

Beati Dogu

8,891 posts

139 months

Sunday 6th September 2015
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I liked the VK30.02M Panther prototype. It's a decent tier 6 and a good sniper tank.

I've played up the E50, but didn't buy the E50M. Not yet anyway. I've now got the Leopard prototype and am slowly using free XP to get some of the modules. There's no way I'm playing that stock. The E50 was bad enough.

The E50 can be quite fun to play and you can bully tier 8 heavy tanks sometimes too.

Mastodon2

13,826 posts

165 months

Sunday 6th September 2015
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Beati Dogu said:
I liked the VK30.02M Panther prototype. It's a decent tier 6 and a good sniper tank.

I've played up the E50, but didn't buy the E50M. Not yet anyway. I've now got the Leopard prototype and am slowly using free XP to get some of the modules. There's no way I'm playing that stock. The E50 was bad enough.

The E50 can be quite fun to play and you can bully tier 8 heavy tanks sometimes too.
Good to hear about the E50 - my reason for going for the E50M rather than the Leopard 1 was the bully factor - the Leopard can't even expose itself to tier 8s or even tier 7 lights without being in danger, whereas the E50M runs roughshod over lower tier tanks. It's a favoured tactic of mine to aggressively pressure lower tier tanks, particularly when I get the impression they're not good players - most players cack themselves when another tank charges them and their shots go all over the place, I've seen E50M drivers smash through tier 8 heavies by getting up in their face, angling and bumping them in between reloads to stop them aiming properly - even though the player on the receiving end is likely bricking it and going to pieces anyway. And then when you're not playing a really aggressive move you've got a .3 accuracy gun to get to work with!

BigMon

4,186 posts

129 months

Sunday 6th September 2015
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ash73 said:
I couldn't care less about the team to be honest, and I'm not going to waste time grinding for tanks I'm not interested in. I would like to understand the mechanics better, but can't find a suitable resource that answers my specific questions.
Don't take this the wrong way, but if you 'couldn't care less about the team' then WOT probably isn't for you.

It's not a solo game and, almost always, it's teamwork that wins the day.

Playing just for yourself will not make you popular or a better player.

BigMon

4,186 posts

129 months

Sunday 6th September 2015
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On another note I had a bit of free cash this weekend so bought myself a 105 leFH18B2.

I haven't got a mastery like BD, but what a fun bit of arty it is! Just need to get a gun laying drive to speed up the aiming time and it'll be even better.

A 6 second reload in an arty is great and, as a bonus, I can use it to train my BatChat crew too.

Beati Dogu

8,891 posts

139 months

Sunday 6th September 2015
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Is the 105 leFH18B2 on sale again? It's certainly a nasty little sod sometimes. I think the reload is just over 8 seconds, but you could get it below that with Brothers in Arms. I have a 100% crew, but they don't have any skills. Another thing it has you may not have noticed, is 390m view range. So nothing is going to sneak up on it across open ground.


Mastodon2 said:
Good to hear about the E50 - my reason for going for the E50M rather than the Leopard 1 was the bully factor - the Leopard can't even expose itself to tier 8s or even tier 7 lights without being in danger, whereas the E50M runs roughshod over lower tier tanks. It's a favoured tactic of mine to aggressively pressure lower tier tanks, particularly when I get the impression they're not good players - most players cack themselves when another tank charges them and their shots go all over the place, I've seen E50M drivers smash through tier 8 heavies by getting up in their face, angling and bumping them in between reloads to stop them aiming properly - even though the player on the receiving end is likely bricking it and going to pieces anyway. And then when you're not playing a really aggressive move you've got a .3 accuracy gun to get to work with!
I remember doing that to a Tiger II. Like the E50 you'll have to be careful what you pick on though and know how much they weigh. Don't go ramming any KV-4s or WTF E100s.

I had a unicum E50M player try to bully my ST-I heavy tank recently. He bounced me twice before switching to premium and trying to ram me in frustration. Not a good idea when there's so little weight difference (about 5 tonnes in his favour). I shot him in the flat turret front and hull side a few times to kill him. I think I lost about half my health in that little exchange, so totally worth it.

The E-50 has the same gun and identical rate of fire as the E-50. It just fires APCR (the E-50's premium) as standard and HEAT as premium instead. The E50M does get a more powerful engine though, so I would think it's much more responsive to play than the E-50.

Edited by Beati Dogu on Sunday 6th September 17:55

Beati Dogu

8,891 posts

139 months

Monday 7th September 2015
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It's certainly important to know stuff like that.

This website is pretty good too:

tanks.gg

You can look at tanks there and select "3D model" to see the armour layout.

http://tanks.gg/en/wot/t95#tab:model




JustinF

6,795 posts

203 months

Monday 7th September 2015
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ash73 said:
Quite impressed with this app, which lets you compare the armor thickness and experiment with shot angles. I didn't realise the weak spots varied so much from tank to tank.

armor inspector is even better

bstb3

4,073 posts

158 months

Monday 7th September 2015
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That's exactly it with Tanks. On the face of it it's pretty simple, especially in the lower tiers, but better performance becomes increasingly tied to how much knowledge you have about armour profiles, reload times and such. Of course you still need the awareness, tactical thinking and right environment to do well (good pc, lack of distractions etc), but that alone won't help in the high tiers if you just don't know how to hurt that T95.

Quickybaby last night for example gave a great tip on dealing with the new Tier 6 O-I frontally if you don't have a high pen gun - and it's knowledge like that that can make the difference between winning and getting stomped.

(Shoot them just inside the front track area, between the track and hull, the hull armour is only 40mm or so and vulnerable to HE splash or direct AP penetration. Just don't shoot through the track, as it acts as spaced).