Crew Skills and Perks According to a Unicum

Original article by @Intumesce

Crew skills are an important part of the game. They can do anything between extending your view range, to letting you know you're spotted. I'm gonna go through all the crew skills in the game and rank them from best to worst. I'll also tell you which tanks benefit most from which skills.

My ranking is based on their usefulness, and I'll be ranking them on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most useful.

Let's start off with the 4 crew skills available for every crew member.

Firefighting - usefulness: 3

Firefighting does two things: makes you take less damage from each burn tick and shortens the duration you're burning.

Sadly, firefighting doesn't have much use as a skill. Catching fire is rare, unless you're driving a German heavy. Reducing the damage you take from fire sounds neat, but you can just bring a manual or automatic fire extinguisher instead of wasting a skill slot.

Repairs - usefulness: 4 or 7

Repairs is still useful for most tank types. Tank destroyers need the repair time so they don't get flanked, mediums need it to pull into cover without getting shot again, etc.

Usually it's a priority skill on heavies as they have very long track repair times. For mediums, it's more of a second or third skill.

Camouflage - usefulness: 9 or 2

Camouflage is essential to mediums, lights, and tank destroyers. These tanks rely on not being seen as a fundamental part of their gameplay. While any tank class benefits from not being spotted, self-propelled guns will often not be in spotting range and heavy tanks will usually be brawling in obvious locations and thus practically be spotted all the time anyway. For a medium or light, however, their job is to be flexible and invisible. And for that, they need this skill.

Brothers in Arms - usefulness: 7

Brothers in Arms, or BiA, is a general skill that does the exact same thing as the Improved Ventilation equipment piece. However, it takes up multiple skillslots (1 for each crewmember, ALL have to have the perk at 100%) instead of an equipment slot.

It's a priority skill on heavies and self-propelled guns. The former needs to squeeze as much as possible out of their tank, the latter just needs to aim and reload faster.

So that was all the skills available for every crew member. Next up is the crew-specific skills.

Commander

Sixth Sense - usefulness: 10

One of the most crucial (and dare I say, gamebreaking) skills in the game. Sixth Sense lets you know, with a 3 second delay, when you are spotted.

Not only can you find out if you're spotted or not with this skill, you can kind of reverse-engineer it to find out if there is an enemy within spotting range of you or not.

This is a must have on every tank, regardless of class, and is a priority skill for all classes save for self-propelled guns.

Mentor - usefulness: 4

Personally, I consider this a waste of a skill. It increases the crew XP your crew (minus the commander himself) earns, but only by a slight bit; by up to 10%. While I see the practical application of it on a crew you're gonna train for a long time, you could just fill it up with an actual skill.

Recon - usefulness: 7

This skill increases your view range by 2%. Its other useful side is it helps your view range when your optics are destroyed, but that is relatively useless as they repair automatically after some time.

This skill has priority on tanks that rely on camouflage or are scouts. Any boost to the view range helps.

Though generally because the commander has so many useful skills, this isn't a skill you usually pick until your 3^rd or 4^th skill unless you're one of the aforementioned tank classes.

Jack of All Trades - usefulness: 5

This skill lets the commander jump in for a dead crewmember. So say if your loader dies, and your skill is trained at 100%, you will have the commander working as a 50% (stock crew) loader. But if your radioman dies, the commander will now split his efficiency between the 2 and act as a 25% radio operator and a 25% loader.

While it's better than having a 0% crewman when they die, it's also better to have a medkit when they die, to bring them back up to 100%.

This skill does have use on tanks where the crew dies a lot, though.

Eagle Eye - usefulness: 2

This skill sucks mainly because of conditions required for it to work. After 4 seconds, if the enemy tank was spotted by your own crew, you can see which models are damaged if you're aiming at them.

So yeah... not gonna be useful unless you know the enemy has a damaged ammo rack, which is a once in a blue moon event if they don't repair it. There are much better skills to use than this.

Gunner

Snap Shot - usefulness: 8

For each 1% of this skill, you benefit from 0.075% less dispersion bloom for a max bonus of 7.5%.

Any tank can benefit from gun bloom, no matter how small the bonus is or how good the base stat is.

This is a priority skills on self-propelled guns, heavies, and just about any tank with bad dispersion.

Armorer - usefunless: 3

Your gun getting damaged is a rare event, unless you're an American heavy. Rarely will you need something to fix your damaged gun if you have already used your repair kit on something.

Though after a while, you run out of useful gunner skills, and this should probably be your first pick over one of his perks.

Deadeye - usefulness: 4

Contrary to what you might think, this skill actually works better with high-caliber guns rather than smaller calibers.

Since 3% is a very small chance for an entire perk, this is not a very useful skill to have unless you have nothing better to put on and you have a 100% skill ready. This is a viable 4^th or 5^th skill, however.

Designated Target - usefulness: 6

This keeps a target you're aiming at lit for 2 seconds longer. Useful on tanks that fire a lot or a little.

This perk has some priority on light tanks and tank destroyers. Anything else won't benefit from it much.

Driver

Off-Road Driving - usefulness: 7

For every 1% of this skill, your terrain resistance decreases by 0.1% for a max bonus of 10% decreased terrain resistance.

This skill helps a lot on tanks with bad terrain resistance values such as the E-50M, IS-7, or 113. It will effectively make them accelerate faster and keep their top speed more easily.

Mostly a priority skill on heavies thanks to their poor terrain resitance values

Clutch Breaking - usefulness: 6

Increases your traverse speed by 0.05% for every 1% of the skill. Max bonus of 5%.

Best used on tanks with high traverse speeds, but also helps compensate on slow-turning tanks.

Priority skill on tank destroyers and self-propelled guns due to their limited gun arc and some priority on heavy tanks to make them more agile. Mediums and light tanks get the biggest bonus but paradoxically benefit the least from this skill.

Controlled Impact - usefulness: 2

One of the less useful driver skills, Controlled Impact relies on your opponent being stationary and your tank moving to have any effect. In other words, the most powerful rams where you and the enemy both hit each other head-on will be unaffected by this skill.

The 15% increase of damage to them and 15% decrease to you is neat to have, but there are a grand total of 4 tanks I can think of where this skill is relevant. And on none of my crews do I have this skill trained.

Smooth Ride - usefulness: 6

Decreases your dispersion while your tank is moving. Doesn't affect stationary turning, however, so tank destroyers and self-propelled guns get no benefit from this skill while moving in place.

Sort of a priority skill on high tier medium tanks, but also useful for heavy tanks.

Preventative Maintenance - usefulness: 4

Why this couldn't be a skill instead of a perk, I dunno, but it's not really that useful to begin with. It increases your fuel tanks' hitpoints by 25%, but it has no effect on transmission (engine) fires. So German tinderboxes can go choke on a flame.

Loader

Safe Stowage - usefulness: 7

Increases your ammo rack's hitpoints by 12.5%. Not a huge bonus, but it will make a noticable difference on tanks with exposed ammo racks, and will often prevent you from being one-shot-ammoracked by tanks with huge caliber rounds. While it's not a must, I do recommend using it on every tank you can spare a skill slot for.

Priority skill on specific tanks with poor ammo racks (Soviet mediums and heavies, for one.)

Intuition - usefulness: 3

This skill means every time you switch ammo there's a 17% chance it will instantly switch to the shell you're reloading to.

It's too much of a gamble. If you're switching ammo, you should do it in a safe location instead of betting on a 17% chance to work in your favor. It being a perk doesn't help its case any more.

Adrenaline Rush - usefulness: 4

When you're at less than 10% health, you reload 9% faster. This in theory sounds useful, but you have to be within a very specific amount of health for it to start mattering, and might lead to your death if you become overconfident in the skill.

It's a neat bonus to have when you're about to die, but I wouldn't use it as anything short of my 4^th or 5^th skill.

Radio Operator

Situational Awareness - usefulness: 7

Sadly the only useful radio operator skill, this increases your view range by 0.03% for every 1% of the skill for a max bonus of 3%.

Priority skill on light tanks and medium tanks.

Relaying / Signal Boosting / Call For Vengeance - usefulness: 1 or 6

Rather than making a subsection for each of these skills, I will describe them all at once.

2 of these become irrelevant at tier 6 when everyone gets so powerful radios that radio range is no longer a thing you actually have to keep in mind. As such this skill is only useful in tier 1-5 when tanks have weak radios and these skills are sort of useful.

Call For Vengeance has very little use since it relies on you dying to have any effect. And again, it's a perk rather than a skill.
Basically, if you have a tier 8 heavy tank and you're forced to pick between these skills or firefighting or camouflage, get one of the latter. Radio Operator skills, save for Situational Awareness, are completely and utterly useless.

That about does it describing the useful skills and perks for each crewmember. Now let's go over how an average crew skill loadout should look for each tank class.

Keep in mind these are not specialized, and what works for one tank might be radically different for another. This is just to get the general idea.

Lights

Commander: Sixth Sense, Camouflage, Recon
Gunner: Camouflage, Snap Shot, Repair
Driver: Camouflage, Off-Road Driving, Repair
Loader: Safe Stowage, Camouflage, Repair
Radio Operator: Camouflage, Situational Awareness, Repair

Mediums

Commander: Sixth Sense, Camouflage, Repair
Gunner: Camouflage, Snap Shot, Repair
Driver: Camouflage, Clutch Breaking, Off-Road Driving
Loader: Safe Stowage, Camouflage, Repair
Radio Operator: Camouflage, Situational Awareness, Repair

Heavies

Commander: Sixth Sense, Repair, Jack of All Trades
Gunner: Snap Shot, Repair, Armorer
Driver: Off-Road Driving, Repair, Clutch Breaking
Loader: Safe Stowage, Adrenaline Rush, Repair
Radio Operator: Repair, Situational Awareness, Firefighting

Tank Destroyers

Commander: Sixth Sense, Camouflage, Repair
Gunner: Camouflage, Designated Target, Repair
Driver: Camouflage, Clutch Breaking, Off-Road Driving
Loader: Safe Stowage, Camouflage, Repair
Radio Operator: Camouflage, Situational Awareness, Repair

Self-Propelled Guns

Commander: Brothers in Arms, Sixth Sense, Camouflage
Gunner: Brothers in Arms, Snap Shot, Camouflage
Driver: Brothers in Arms, Smooth Ride, Clutch Breaking
Loader: Brothers in Arms, Intuition, Camouflage
Radio Operator: Brothers in Arms, Camouflage, Situational Awareness

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