Leaderboard

Hello! Starting today, statistics will be able to be updated once every hour, down from once every 24 hours. This applies to everyone. Patrons will soon be able to update their statistics at any moment they wish. Database queries have been optimized, allowing for much faster performance when calculating periodic statistics. As part of this, an issue has also been fixed which prevented some periodic stats from being calculated correctly. Fixed an issue that prevented average tier from being calculated in the overall column if an account hasn't played a game since the last old records purge. Hope everyone is having a great 2021 so far. Cheers!

I want to clarify something on this subject. A core problem is that HE shells scale twice: once with the raw damage value, once with the size of the blast radius. I did a lot of math on this back in the day, and the larger the blast radius, the less damage you lose from seeking out the thinnest armor. Take a case of a Lowe and Pershing facing another hull down Lowe. Lowe loads HE, it's 420 damage and 1.91m blast radius (6.27 ft in freedom numbers). Typically even with a solid shot you're still going to be about 3 ft from the thin top armor and thus losing 50% of the damage from blast distance. Lowe's top armor is 40mm, so 420/2/2 - 40 = ~75. Too low, but still something. But the Pershing is way worse because the damage is not only lower at 320, but the blast radius is 1.46m (4.79 freedoms). So for the exact same shot, your calculation is now roughly 320/2/3 - 40 = ~ 13. Pointless. If the blast was the same size, it would be 320/2/2 - 40 = ~40. Much more consistent. Thus, HE damage effectively scales exponentially instead of linearly as the damage value would imply, because two values governing damage are simultaneously increasing. By the time you reach the KV-2's 910 damage 152mm gun, the radius is 3.66m. In the shot mentioned above, the Lowe loses 50% to blast radius, the Pershing loses about 65%, while the KV-2 is only going to lose a paltry 17%. A numerical representation of the damage output isn't 320, 420, 910, but more like 112, 210, 792. The proportion becomes even more grotesque when we add in the armor thickness reduction, and becomes 72, 160, and 752. It's a joke. I said "increase blast radius", but that was a poor choice of word. It needs to be rescaled. Currently the smallest HE rounds are like 0.33m and the largest (non artillery) is the shitbarn at 5.05m. It should start at more like 1.5m, quickly rise to 3.0m, and then slow after that to maybe 4.0m. At 4m+ aiming becomes quickly less and less important to the point you get the HURR DURR SHOOT effect of HE that a lot of players dislike. The radius is so high that even a bad shot will seek out weak armor halfway across the tank. Rescaling the blast size would fix a lot of the problem by making HE scale more like a line instead of exponentially. It would be stronger on a Pershing, but be slightly weaker on a nuclear-sized gun that doesn't aim. It would do so while maintaining the basic concept of the shell and still offer an alternative form of doing damage.

I did a summary of the changes (I'm lazy so the formatting is fucked). But really, it doesn't take a professor of anatomy to tell you that the changes are ass. Here's why: 1. Crews lose skills Your old crews that had 3-4 skills will only have ~40ish skill points in the new system, which will lose you - 2-3 skills/perks in practice 3-4 skills were basically enough for anything that wasn't a highly specialised LT build, but now, you have to grind much, much more to get those crews to perform at the level they perform now, i.e. >75 points in the new system which is the equivalent of what is now a 5 skill (non-0th skill) crew. for a more detailed take, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/lqriw0/this_average_crew_loses_24_skills_when_converted/ 2. Crews do not combine If you were in the habit of grinding several crews to 3-4 skills instead of having 1-2 crews which you maxed out (which most people will be), you're shafted because crews do not combine and you're stuck with multiple (un-competitive) crews this is unfair to the players because under the old system, there was very little incentive to go past the 3rd or 4th skills, whereas now you're massively penalised for it with no recompense whatsoever if you think this is just sandbox and they might change it later, community contributors have said on the forums that they do not plan on introducing merging crews as a feature. 3. 0th skill crews have exactly 0 worth If your crews are Christmas crews/0th skill BIA crews, the extra skill you have will not be counted in the new system - you lose 2-3 skills from that alone - not counting the fact you effectively lose 2-3 skills anyway for what are currently 3-4 skill crews this massively shafts people who bought/ground out 0th skill crews with zero compensation 4. RNG-gated instructors Speaking of 0th skill crews, special 0th skill crews will now become 'instructors' which give small bonuses to specific perks. you have a choice between 3 perks of one category for each instructor - and which 3 you get to choose from is pure RNG - no rerolls. this locks bonuses behind a pay to progress, RNG-based mechanic where previously you just had to grind crews to progress. which makes the game even more unfair as between the players that pay up and players that don't (or can't). 5. Massive endgame grind for even more inequality They nerfed the commander bonus and introduced a new 'expertise' grind where for each level of progression you grind past the 75th point, you get a 'small' bonus to your vehicle handling. vehicle handling is the same thing as what BIA does now, and the maximum ('small') bonus you can get from expertise is 20%........on top of the 5% you already get from the renamed BIA and all the other bonuses you have through skills/equipment. Previously, crews, once you were past 100% and had BIA, no matter how much you played with them, no matter where you got them, no matter how many crew books you bought and fed to them, were capped at the same level of performance - you won't get a faster reload, you won't get less aimtime. For the mechanics of these changes, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/lqlt46/crew_20_sandbox_general_feedback/goi4lif?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 Now as for their effects.... The new system introduces an all new grind that gives you the equivalent of stacking an extra ~ 2.5 more bond vents on your tank this not only adds a new grind, but increases the already gaping inequality between players a new player with a fresh crew will lack the renamed BIA, he might lack equipment, he is likely not to be be running food, he certainly won't have the expertise bonus on his tank - and he will be facing veterans with crews that perform 40-50 percent better than what he has. *this hypothetical player would have to grind the equivalent of 7 skills in the current system just to catch up. the only bandage on this fresh bullet wound is the free sixth sense - which players in the current system could have got pretty easily by crew books in the first place - and which could be added without all this hullabaloo with the new system. CW Implications: some of the perks would be very strong in a competitive setting, which I admit isn't a bad thing necessarily. for a decently competitive clan, crew 2.0 would mean basically mandating people to have the equivalent of 6-7 skill crews in order to perform on a 'level' playing field and that's not counting stacking with bond/bounty equipment and access to reward tanks There are also side issues with tanks with large crews seemingly being shortchanged but that's minor compared to the iceberg that we're headed towards. Don't look a gold sink in the mouth! one of the touted features of Crew 2.0 is that you can train 1 crew for up to 3 tanks, only that.. u/Kuratovsky has kindly pointed out to me that in Crew 2.0, training your crew for the 2nd and 3rd tanks, just like retraining crews under the current system, will result in a penalty. unlike in the current system, the retraining penalty for the 2nd and 3rd tanks is 10% of the crew's total experience. if your crew has, say, 13 million exp (~6 skill crew), you will lose 1.3 million crew exp from the F2P option - and this directly eats into your crew skills/expertise bonuses currently, the penalty for retraining a crew to another tank is 10% of the major qualification, i.e. 10% of 100k exp. this does not affect the crew skills/perks. if you want to avoid bleeding XP, the solution is simple: 750 gold, 750 gold for every tank other than the first tank, and for every new tank that you switch in. the effect is that what appears to be one of the most F2P friendly features of Crew 2.0 is simultaneously the least F2P friendly part of the changes. this is because people who don't have gold will be forced to lose 10% of their total crew XP every time they retrain a crew to a different tank. Concluding thoughts For those of you who say that there's nothing to worry about and WG will surely revise the sandbox changes and make them good, I present to you the examples of: what happened to WOWS (https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldOfWarships/comments/k44sbi/flamu_dissects_the_upcoming_commander_skill/) what happened to Console(https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/l12hd1/world_of_tanks_console_ruined_with_1_update_dont/gjx40yr/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) and what is happening with the HE changes despite the population being generally ambivalent towards them (http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/index.php?/topic/765180-sandbox-test-he-shells%E2%80%94feedback-and-reaction/) For those of you who still remember, Rubicon failed in 2015 because the playerbase was not okay with cosmetics having an effect on gameplay. That they made heard. These changes with Crew 2.0 are of a much greater magnitude, are much less accessible, and in their current guise, it is safe to say that they will impact the game much more negatively. The multitudinous changes to the system and the overhauls to the interface only serve to hide the fact that your crews will be worse, that as players we will suffer, that we will have to pay more, grind more, to get less in return. There is no reason that the playerbase should allow these changes to happen.

This is trash. The new perks suck ass for a multitude of reasons, especially proc based situational ones. They don't work in any game, I can't believe someone greenlit that idea. Creates a huge gap between 7+ skill crews and lower level crews. You don't have amazing crews? Fuck yourself. New players can look forward to literally never being on even footing with veterans. I'll end up with 50%+ more crew skill then the other players in the match after 3 kills and a burned medkit. That's fucking stupid. I'm not even playing the same game at that point. How much you benefit from the crew conversions depends entirely on whether you kept a small number of good crews or a lot of okay ones. You honestly might as well quit the game if you did the latter because of the above reason. Incredibly disappointing. Give everyone sixth sense and then literally never touch the system again, wargaming.

You know the drill, 5 replays per person max. You shouldn't cherrypick good games here if you actually want good feedback. Derp games the same, they are just derps and not much else to say about them. The best games are games similar to your skill level. I'm more than happy to offer advice to anyone. If you don't want the video public - I'll PM you the unlisted Youtube video. I know @Private_Miros has been struggling a bit lately, so the offer for him is 10 replays. Games where you feel mistakes were made are obviously the ones you should want reviewed. If they are carries that is also fine, there's room for improvement there too. I'd love to review a 5k tier 10 session from somebody else than myself. Tier 9 and 10 only. I would consider some stronger tier 8s as well (Borrasque, Prog, etc) but I won't be doing a TVP VTU review because that would be a two second review of me saying "pick something else" No SPGs. You can post LT games, but that's not where my analysis will be the strongest. (That's a nice bush and your team played around it isn't exactly much to say). If you want me in my element here, pick high impact tanks. No Berlin/Pearl River maps. I still have yet to get a good read on these maps yet since coming back so analysis on them would likely not result in great feedback. This time you don't need to post sessions like before, you are free to pick any replays you want. Analysis will be tailored towards skill level - lower end means a higher mechanical focus and initial reading while stronger players will be subject to understanding tempo better, and decision making. Upload your replays to wotreplays and post the links here. Remember that if you make them secret then you have to specifically post the secret link (not the browser URL) I will do this for as long as I can muster, and everyone who asks for a review will get it. I'll close the entries eventually as I can't do this forever but everyone who posts their games for review before that will get their games reviewed. Estimate is about two weeks.

If you kill a tank who is oneshot, sometimes you won't get spotted, if only tank which is within the range to spot you is the one you killed. Tested this in training room, and the result was that if the enemy dies within about 0,165 seconds of when you shoot, that tank will not spot you. It seems to not be exactly 0,165s with every tank/shell, but the results were consistently between 0,165 - 0,172 seconds. Camo value of shooter seemed to not have an effect. This implies that for every shell velocity, there's a certain distance within which you can kill an enemy without getting spotted by them. If your shell velocity is 1000 m/s, this distance is about 165 meters. It can be useful sometimes when you are passive spotting and see someone yoloing towards you, if you can kill them with one shot when they are 50-150m-ish away you wont get spotted. Of course you will still get spotted by other enemies if they are close enough. I haven't tested this with Call for Vengeance, but I suspect you would get spotted if enemy has that perk. Did anyone of you know this or is this common knowledge? I had no idea, I've sometimes wondered how I didn't get spotted when shooting somebody right outside the proxy range without double bushing.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a non-issue. If some tomato in an E3 chucks HE at center mass and does say 300 damage he's only cheating himself out of the 750 that should have been dealt by one of the other shell types. The only way that the HE tactic gets ahead is if the other shell types have very low odds of success. Otherwise, HE consistently loses in the long run. If HE really has become an actual threat to the high tier meta, that would mean something has gone terribly wrong with the conventional AP/APCR/HEAT performance against typical armor profiles. As of the odd detail that HE no longer causes splash damage (cue memes about non-exploding HE), this smells to me that they're trying to shoehorn arta back into relevance as the magic solution to the 'camping' problem. Good luck with that.

I'll happily answer all your questions you have about me. I am an ex-WGL Pro player for starters, look up FAME 7x7 and Knäckebröd and you will see me playing casted games. I stopped playing WGL because the League literally got shut down. I've traveled to events and competed and met friends from the two clans I spent most of my time in (FAME and S3AL). This game was a very large part of my life before I moved on. I come back every now and then, and it takes a few weeks but then I'm back to form again. I find the game laughably easy. I wish it translated into something more productive though. The yun9 account was a reroll I made to get number 1 on the server, which I did. My account before the reroll was Yung_xD. and there I was playing off meta tanks. Stuff like this: The account was then sold, and obviously the player wasn't my caliber and depadded the account down and renamed it. I know the ID but since I have a code I won't leak the nick as that isn't very nice to the one who bought it. 4K EUR is plenty of compensation. After this, I pretty much only boosted other accounts as I literally did not have an account of my own anymore. I made a living off of this game for over 3 years alone. The average tier is a bug. That account had zero games below tier 8 on it. You didn't find it strange that it has a 3700 average damage output with a 7.22 average tier? Since I rerolled my original account after three marking every tier 10 in the game (excluding rewards), I got to keep the prems - and rewards. It had 1200 907 games on it. The rest was a mixture of strong meta tanks. If you go through literally any of my threads, content and so on, you will very obviously see that I know what I'm talking about. I know this game better than reality. I'm also the top DPG holder on very many tier 10s I'm 25 years old. My life's actually pretty fucking bad. I have autism, ADHD and I'm very likely bipolar too. Drug addict on top of that too. Somehow I'm still able to run circles around literally millions of players despite all of that. Have you ever played WoT on LSD? I have. It was pretty much the only time in 5 years that I played what the average player would consider average. That sig is my mark of achievement. Of coiurse I'm posting it - I'm proud of it. Have you ever been number one in the world at any point ever at something? That feeling really is something. At the time, I was ahead of the russians too. I'm not anymore, and plenty of players are better than I am now, but my knowledge regarding the game is more refined than pretty much anyone you'll ever come across on this forum, or any other forum. You can question my integrity, but pretty much anyone who matters in this game, or on this forum for that matter, will corroborate what I'm saying.

You clearly have literally zero understanding of how any game that involves teamplay works whatsoever, when your teammates are literal garbage (which a minimum of 11 will be every game on your team in this game) you need to play around their weakness. There is no teamplay. It's making use of teammate fuck ups. Anything goes in combat. WoT is a knifefight, not a team game. It's PVE, despite the notion that it isn't. The only thing you can influence is your gameplay, and when (and it's always a matter of when, not if) your team goes full ape the best outcome is to stall it out to cut your losses. The only way to actually get to 70%WR is by doing this very thing you are arguing aganist, or triple platooning. I know, because I did. I'm probably further behind my teammates than your average unicum but my impact is pretty much double anyway. Know why? Committing means all or nothing, and keeping your options open is how you can continue to positively influence the game - even after it's decidedly lost. I consider many games lost right at countdown because of matchmaking, and I have never used XVM. Composition decides your best course of action and sometimes you are dealt a really shitty hand. SR is great at making use of a bad hand. I've reviewed his replays and while there are things to improve on - there are things he does better than players considerably better than him by many margins. The most notable one is probably never giving up like so, so many players do when all seems lost. It's probably still lost, but you can either go down swinging or get down on your knees because you're never going to improve. Playing for WN8 and playing for wins aren't as far apart as you make it out to be, winning game states lead to better games. Snowballing is a concept for a reason and when that snowball is running towards you - you fall back to stalling. This applies to prety much every game ever created and not understanding it is a very fatal flaw you have in your gameplay just by typing these words out.

I think it's trash. It doesn't even make sense, the shells don't explode anymore. If it does make it to live, cool, swipe that credit card and spam more gold. No one deserves what they get more than the WoT player base. Here's one way to fix HE. You drop the damage to match other shells because why the fuck are they different numbers anyway. You increase the blast radius so it can actually be used to target thin armor. Penetration drops to 0. Damage will be higher against thin armor anyway, damage spikes just make it hard to balance. And then option: Rework the damage calculation from (damage/2 - armor thickness) to more like (damage - armor thickness*2). Or you take the arty stun mechanic and scale it down to stuns that last 1-5 seconds or something. First option would increase overall damage, second option would instead add stun. Either way the shell would be more about aiming and knowing armor models than currently, and be more useful for smaller caliber guns. As it stands, there's not much reward for aiming. If you increased the blast radius, it would allow you to target, say, low on a turret and splash the top armor on purpose, or fire underneath a tank to hit the thin underarmor. Shots to thick armor would do less, while aimed shots to splash thin armor would be more consistent and do higher average damage. Right now the blast radius is so small it's a waste of time. The main problem with changing HE is that most of the ideas, like what WG is testing, make the shell pointless, more obnoxious, or both. No one's going to load a shell with 60 pen to try to pen tanks in the side with 80mm + 20mm tracks to do extra damage. The last thing the game needs is a shell for killing lower tier/light tanks more easily. These changes ultimately will just hurt light tanks and buff armored bricks... which is, of course, the original sandbox vision they've been pursuing for years now.

The first thing i'd recommend is to watch good players play. Twitch has more people streaming than ever before. As a rough list, you have: the top EU streamers, who are both popular and good. It's easy enough right now as they are all featured in Team clash, but they include Dakillzor (https://www.twitch.tv/dakillzor), Orzanel (https://www.twitch.tv/orzanel - although I rarely watch him) and Skill (https://www.twitch.tv/skill4ltu). The last two play a bit of everything, whereas Daki as lots of CW gameplay and meta tanks. He does f2p on his Russian account though, grinding up from lower tiers on good lines, which is useful to watch. other, recommended EU streamers. These include CarryBarry (https://www.twitch.tv/carrybarry_ - currently trying to mark 279(e), so not fun to watch right now), Niall (https://www.twitch.tv/aniallator) and Kajzoo (https://www.twitch.tv/kajzoo), who are all FAME players and are fun to watch + insanely good. They all have different playstyles too, which helps when learning. There is also iyouxin, who although toxic at times does a lot of QB-type Youtube videos, but he actually knows his shit as he has 5.6k WN8. His Twitch is less useful to watch as he often plays low tiers stock on his f2p Russian account, but i'll link his YT (https://www.youtube.com/c/iyouxins/videos). If he doesn't annoy you, he has a lot to teach. Russian streamers. They tend to be the best damage farmers, although you have to watch on mute. I tend to tune in if they are playing a particular tank I wanna improve on - the best (that I know of) in the world is Stanlock (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl5iWTMMdyh6ltVH1Dc4ewA - his YT is up to date but his Twitch says last player 10 months ago, IDK). US streamers - no idea here, so i'll let others on this forum chime in. Might be most useful for you meta wise, to the extent it is different. I'm not saying you'll be able to watch these guys and instantly be 3k WN8 - no, what i'm saying is just be watching and absorbing information, often without realising, the next time you play certain tanks, or positions on maps, you'll remember what a good player did, how they pkayed it, how they reacted when countered etc. This game is 85/90% knowledge, and 10/15% mechanics. Watching streamers improves knowledge. I'd also recommend a lot of topics on this site which have previously covered similar queries around this, including: https://forum.wotlabs.net/index.php?/topic/28286-high-level-gameplay-laying-a-solid-foundation-increasing-consistency/ - Kolni explaining how he achieves consistency in reaching insane DPG goals. https://forum.wotlabs.net/index.php?/topic/29196-free-replay-reviews-3-games-per-player/, https://forum.wotlabs.net/index.php?/topic/28955-full-no-new-entries-free-gameplay-reviews-yt-with-commentary-by-kolni/ - two topics where Kolni reviews 5 replays from a variety of players looking to improve, offering pointers on gameplay, awareness, mechanics and mindset. It is criminal that the 2nd offer for 5 replays didn't get fully subscribed to. https://forum.wotlabs.net/index.php?/topic/28910-tier-10-struggles-response-to-snoregasm/ - this is a little more advanced/meta specific, but it is Kolni responding to one of my queries on why tier 10 gameplays is so different to every other tier. TBH, go through @kolni's post history for tips as well, as he always has something to useful to say. As @echo9835 notes above, i've also commented on a lot of posts/statuses with advice where I can, so anything specific throw it my way. I'm not kolni, but i'm still decent-ish.

Went for a quick look at the RU forums to see what they are saying about it: They dont seem to like it for many of the same reasons as us, so far at least. Edit, link to that thread: http://forum.worldoftanks.ru/index.php?/topic/2127797-ваши-впечатления-от-экипажа-20/page__pid__54595832__st__20#entry54595832

Basically it looks like this is the plan: Right now it's brutal to start out (especially when we're talking 50% crews) but you gain ground rapidly. It peaks earlier, because a 2-3 skill crew is reasonably competitive for the most part. By the time you have 4 skills you hit diminishing returns because you probably have all you vitally need on most tanks. 2.0 flattens it all out into a more linear climb. You start out way better off (100% crew plus 6th sense) but gain much more gradually. And ultimately, while your crew is lamer in the middle zone than it used to be, it eventually becomes more powerful... but only with a metric ass-ton more grinding. It takes way longer to get to the end, but +20% to crew skills alone is redonk. So, the good is that new players won't get shafted as hard, and the scaling of crews is much more even. The bad news is that they want to basically obsolete a bunch of your crews and extend the grind. Extending the grind is what this is really all about. Veteran players all have solid crews in their tanks at this point, so there's weak incentive to furiously smash that lever like a conditioned muppet to get the next pellet. So they want to make the grind longer and ultimately more rewarding as reaching the end grants stupid bonuses to the entire crew. So cool, purple nazi dork (and other assorted no-lifers) now rules the world, the whales get milked harder as they dump resources to pump up crews, every one else is pissed. LOOKIN GOOD, GUYZ

I feel the effects of the new system as proposed would break the player base into 3 different groups: Rough guesses on the percentages, but: The really new/really casual players (guess 10% of the player base?): Those who currently grind crews without 6th sense, those who play with 50%/75% crews when they get a new tank. These players would see a buff in that they get 6th sense for free and there are no more crews less than 100% major qualification. The really dedicated players (maybe 5% of the player base, probably less?): Those who currently have 5-skill crews on many of their tanks (fully grinded, 'zero-skill' crews don't count!). These players would see a buff in that they would immediately get Level 75 crews allowing them to get all necessary skills plus 2 talents. Also any skills they have over and above 5 turns into more major qualification. The vast majority of players (the rest, 85% of the player base?): Those who currently have between 1- and 4- skill crews on most of their tanks. These players get the shaft. Where their crews are perfectly passable in the current system (particularly so for heavy tanks), they either feel a bit worse in the new system, or or at best the same. This group of players doesn't see the advantages gained by group 2 above as their crews convert to somewhere from Level 18 to 70. So WG has proposed a system that helps the 10% really need it (the new/casuals), the 5% who really don't need the help (the really dedicated) and shafts the other 85%. And on top of that, the conversion process is going to be a ridiculous exercise for just about everyone to get their crews set up. The only good things about the proposed crew changes, in my opinion, are 6th sense for everyone, and no more crews with less than 100% major qualification.

not just a crew with 5 full skills, but that crew can't be a 0th skill/female crew because the 0th skill doesn't count towards the XP pool now also level 75 is not enough: maxed expertise gives you an additional 20% of crew skill on top of the 5% you get from the nerfed BIA and that's basically the new bond equipment grind for crews lastly but prolly most importantly to casual players, a 2.5 skill crew (basically enough for most stuff in the current system) will only get you at most 3 of the old skills RNG instructors are stupid This shit isn't Crew 2.0 - it's Rubicon 2.0.

Playing 60TP this weekend I had a game on lakeville where me and my platoon mate encountered 2 other 60tps in the corridor. We spammed HE at each other for 10 minutes. It was a very boring experience and this ordeal will take even longer after the HE damage is getting reduced. An array of unpenetrateable tanks lobbing HE shells at each others pixels chewing down 2,4k HP with 50 damage a shot. Sounds like fun and engaging gaming experience. Even less people will play Heavy Tanks.

But why is it bad? (not trolling btw) Yes, it does always dmg, but an E4 shooting gold will penetrate ur E100 turret face from any angle and deal 750 dmg, with HE it does 300, so what? yes an Jp-E100 shooting HE will deaal 500-600, and, with HEAT he would do 1k (and penetrate unless RNG strikes again) Only people driving stuff like T95, 279, E3, 705a, are complaining about HE i bet, for the rest, it doesnt bother me, perhaps ebr and t49 HE, because of lame-ass penetrations, but thats a tank problem, not an HE problem. And on low tier, its fine, the HE guns are not OP or extremely powerfull, they are just different. This new change is gonna make heavy armoured tanks invincible against HE, while tanks which need HE to be usefull (jap heavys, tier 5 derp guns, Fv 4005) will get nerfed a lot and for what? This HE change is a change for the sake of changing.... What WG instead should do is nerf gold ammo dmg 20%, APCR and HEAT should deal 20% less dmg, and guns that have APCR as base dmg need to be rebalanced accordingly (or give them AP as normal ammo) Some tweaking left and fight (dpm, gun handling) and the overal quality of the game will greatly improve, but WG is pussy footing about that for years and years, while do they keep trying to fix a non-exsisting problem...

Well, at least the thread wasn't in Casual Purple this time... Moved. As a player, am I the only one that never had any issues with how HE works currently? Arty mechanics notwithstanding.

Don’t say stuff like this is you wanna get better is the first piece of advice Blaming anything other than yourself won’t lead to improvements, doesn’t matter if it’s the reality of the situation or not Phoning it in because the odds aren’t in your favour is just loser mentality, the games you aren’t putting effort in are the ones that leave the most room for improvement The entire reason I got to where I was because I always cared about the outcome, meaning I can’t let emotions dictate my thought process just because the odds aren’t in my favour. Making the most out of garbage MM is a big enough portion of games to reflect your performance by a lot. Feelings cloud your judgment. Improvement is a result of self criticism, and you don’t do that unless you take blame. Be your own worst critic. That’s how you improve. Some have different goals, for me it wasn’t winning. For most it is, so the most proactive play towards winning is the best, but I liked DPG better, so to play toward that goal to the best of my ability I had to let go of the notion that winning mattered. That isn’t easy but it is necessary as the game can’t revolve around two things that won’t always agree with eachother. You also have to tryhard EVERY game. I don’t care if I did double my entire teams output and didn’t win that game, doing so only leads to frustration which leads to poor decisions.

The difference will be even larger after the changes

Havent seen it properly myself. Friend did a long summary of it. From what he said it sounds horrible. Changing it fully from a mostly passive stat boost that it currently is to a full blown gimmick system. "You get this for 5 seconds after doing this" "if you get this many kills you get this boost" No no no no no no no. It sounds awful. I didnt actually want WG to change crew skills because aside from making 6th sense default, I didnt trust them to not fuck it up. And it looks like thats whats happening to me.

Neither of the tanks you have are good earners so the 122TM does sort of fill a role. But then again, it lacks the credit coefficients of some of the older prems, and you will be wanting to run food to try and fix that 1.6k DPM. Looking at it another way, the 122 isn't that much stronger - if at all - than the other two, and any difference in strength will be even slimmer after the 34-3 gets its buffs next patch. I'd get something with a different playstyle entirely, preferably from a different nation, too

If the inconsistency bothers you, why are you here? The entire game is built around a +/- 25% RNG roll.

Most of the HE hate in WoT stems from arty and certain tanks balanced around HE spam (183/4005/derps ect.) obviously these HE changes dont really fix these tanks and their issues, and are honestly just a half assed workaround that comes with its own downsides. but tbh half the time we can only expect a half hearted attempt from WG when it comes to balancing the game anyway. These HE changes punish the few who blatantly spam HE at everything, while rewarding those who use it intelligently against soft targets. but also gimp soft tanks as a whole against HE, while also gimping heavily HE reliant tanks (T49/sheridan/KV-2 ect.) while also lessening HE's affects against hulldown gods/armored bunkers and also securing low HP kills/resetting cap. its a 50/50 in my book, some of the effects are nice while others are shit. but in the end the real issue is arty, which as far as i understand it these changes dont affect arty at all. As for the 183/4005, they cant be balanced unless they have their guns completely changed as a whole.

@Hoenn HE spam is a symptom of far larger issues.

Apologies to @sr360 for mucking in his thread. But you know - maybe we should take this out on the WN8 developers. Force them to run only manual fire extinguishers? Or dismiss their crews? WN8 is clearly the illuminati - it literally is telling you how to play your tank! Oh I have a better idea- what is WG took WN8 (which is open source) and used it to develop their own rankings! That'd show those WN8 whores who is boss! And then...WG could add in spotting! And apply it over a time period where they actually tracked stat totals over time! Then we'd never have to hear from those WN8 purple scum ever again! Oh - and here's another idea - WG could make a Ranked mode to match those players against each other - or maybe some kind of war between the clans? Or team battles or maybe some kind of Skirmish? These are amazing ideas dude.

Wargaming has this weird obsession with making low caliber HE useful. It's the sort of thing a person who has never played world of tanks might obsess over. As for the rest of the changes: what the actually fuck are they smoking over there? Opium? Lead paint chips? Turning HE into shitty AP shells won't fix the HE spam problems, reworking armor models to have actual weak spots will. The reason why people shoot HE at heavily armored monstrosities like the 279 E isn't always because they are lazy or stupid, its often because they don't have any other way of doing damage without throwing away their tank. I truly hope they don't go through with this, it will kill half of my favorite tanks in a single patch.

I kind of prefer an imbalanced map with many options than a balanced map with funnels.

All of this is super depressing I am really upset about the shafting of zero skill crewmen, nearly all of my meaningful crews are made up from those. Shame on me, but I did specifically spend money on tanks that were sold with zero skill crews bundled - maybe if I am not alone in that, it might be sufficient leverage for the community to have the zero-skills counted somehow? one last thought: for those willing to burn some (quite some, actually) gold, it might make sense to split up and move the old-style crews into two-person tanks before the change: The shift from old to 2.0 should be done on a per-tank-basis (independent of crew size), so this way you could “duplicate” e.g. one 4-skill old crew into two 2.0 commanders or make five 2.0 commanders out of two five-man old crews, or make three 2.0 commanders out of two three-man old crews etc., you get the idea. there should be at least one two-person tank in every tree for this, I think

I'd try to give WG my opinion, but I know that is 100% waste of time. RU players will determine crew 2.0

And who is asking for a stupid HE rework? Who will be satisfied with this? Almost nobody. Ppl are asking for fixes in MatchMaker, premium ammo, SPGs, wheeled vehicles, map design, clan wars, marathons, reward tanks, premium tanks... You know: the real issues. If WG didn't start this HE topic, nobody would be talking about it. It's irrelevant in the grand scheme.

Wrong section, basically unreadable. Just gonna go and throw this in the poubelle.

Also - HA at high impact tanks! Sitting in a bush is the EPITOME of skill!

Good sir, never stop. You're not quite at Diriz0000000n's level but with your talents I am certain you will get there eventually. I wish you luck.

Processing should finish in a couple minutes I'll do Miros' tomorrow

His/yours arguments are silly. Explosive shell is a tool, just like spaced side armor is a tool for players to use. You need to have the skill to know when and how to use the tools you are given. Removing tools equals removing options, equals dumbing down the game. That Tortoise used his tools well, and IS-3 made a mistake in positioning. Wtf was that actually? Got perma tracked and died like a noob. Result would have been the same with AP. Tort would just track, move a bit to the left and crush that IS3 with DPM. Shooting HE just made the whole process longer...

No, I'm a PTA/Leo1/50B spammer now that I've given up on completing the E6 mark so I'll never get a game getting into that position. The obvious exception to this though is if they have big TDs or heavies that can blap you hard for doing it, but there weren't any. The trick is to just whittle them down like you tried with the 263, but against stuff that you can actually reliably pen. Shave HP off, increase your impact etc. Even if you are uncomfortable in doing it, the development falls much more naturally when you gain more ground to play around. That triangle there is the key to winning the city and there were opportunities to take it, but not seeing them results in games like this. This is still processing, but I highly recommend that other people watch it as there is A LOT of good stuff in here, both in improvement and in the gameplay there. @Snoregasm2 I'll do them all! Tomorrow though

I would rather see frontlines as steel hunter, normal tier 8, on big maps, with different game mode is nice. Imo having fronline all the time ``on``, but with different tiers would be perfect, 1 month tier 7, then 8, then 9 and then 7 again. This way it doesnt get boring, and big maps with just t7 (or t9) would be really refreshing (tier 7 tds would be suprising good i think, they are in general fast with ok guns, they suk dik for normal game mode, but t7 only on big maps?) ps: same for light tanks and some t9, it would imo add a lot, and wont cost much effort, and why not try it? (for tier 10 its shit, too much viewrange and accuracy, so even on a big map its lame and shit)

It's 2021 and WG still doesn't know how to balance the game. The biggest issue being the shit maps and dispersion rn. But god forbid HE doesn't work the way they want it to.

I can't wait for wargaming to make vast changes to the game so i can uninstall for good. Okay, so this means they do away with the whole splash mechanic, which means you cannot shoot under a tank to do damage or the track from under them to do damage. This basically dumbs down the game even more.

It's a fairly subjective judgement. I don't like how it works because it results in huge damage spikes one moment, useless 0 damage hits the next. It's absurdly random yet still statistically inferior to other shells. For most of the tanks in the game you'd be doing the average player a favor by just removing it because they expect it to do something useful yet it doesn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jEfEkcOc40&ab_channel=warp103 well here my thoughts As a CC

If you want to find some teaching materials @sr360 has a huge page full of recorded replays to watch. There's no commentary, but you can watch a unicum and learn quite a bit from observation. Anything that @kolni, @Snoregasm2, or @Rexxie has written is probably sound advice and all four of them are active on the forum. PM me for discord details. I can run some games with you and give some pointers on the more general stuff. I am no unicum, but I can at least share what I learned when I went from where are to where I am now.

I liked Swamp because you had so many options, I don't really play that much heavies, so castle wasn't really ever relevant early-mid game for me. I played it mostly from mid, where you could abuse camo and vision to rek enemy team, and it worked from both sides, you also had good arty cover if you pushed over mid. There was also useful arty cover if you approached from water on both sides. It was just a really fun map to play.

This'll probably be the last thread I make regarding improvement, the game is about as milked out in content it can be. I decided to do it now because EU tier 10 is 3 arties every game so I don't really feel like I'm missing out by writing this up instead of playing. I'll also start off by saying that any question you might have (to me specifically) about anything game related when it comes to improvement, preventing tilt, getting out of a rut and so on all the way to tank/map specific things (opening positions, counters, timings, you name it) are things I will do my best to answer in this thread, if it isn't then ask it here and I'll answer to the best of my ability. It's also very little concrete advice here as the meta game gets trickier the higher you go, if you have any concrete questions to give the bones some meat then please do so. I play this game with absolutely no regard for the outside economy as the account I'm using has 450million credits with almost as much in consumables and there is nothing to grind on the account, it's simply missing some premiums and rewards. I also have acceptable crews for almost everything, and if I don't I switch them out. I don't take outside factors into consideration in the game. I won't keep firing AP instead of APCR for some extra credits at the cost of performance. I give myself the best chance of having as good of a game possible before loading into battle, and if you care about performance then you should too. I am not in the normal position of a WoT player here, as these things really matter early on. A playstyle like this is sustained either through spending money on the game, or a heavy amount of skrims before hitting random battles to keep your economy positive throughout. This has very little to do with direct game performance but the economy in WoT is a foundation you should build solid as it'll help prevent the most basic problems for a tryhard mentality. Running out of credits has happened to many, many players before strongholds were a thing. Stronghold skirmishes also solves some of the issues for a good service record, if you want a good overall service record on a tank the crew needs to be good, all modules researched and the best ones mounted before loading into randoms altogether. Radios are debatable but to me it's a matter of principle, if it's better I will run it even if the cost/benefit of researching is incredibly low. Making purchases on sale, stocking up on rations and big kits and so on to the point where it will last you until the next opportunity to do the same is where you'll want to be at or further in your economy. If you can sustain buying all your consumables up front for the entire period when it's on sale and holding off on tanks if they'll be discounted in the foreseeable future, your monetary problems in the game go down by so much. It is a long road to set your economy up that way, as it requires a lot of grinding. You're going from being a customer of consumables and equipment to owning your own depot. If it didn't require a lot of work then everyone would be doing this in the real world too, but it really is the most sensible way of not running into monetary problems as it is one of the biggest issues regarding performance. Not in the performance today, but in your ability to perform in the future. I'm lucky enough to not have to play skirmishes or spend money on the game now. Premium time, clan boosts and personal reserves make for break even or better with discounted consumables in even the most credit hungry tanks (50B, SConq, E 50 etc) with acceptable performance on them. This is probably where the real thread starts but I felt like making note of how much your outside economy matters and how setting it up to supplement you in the future really makes a difference. I am at the end with no problems at all, all tanks bought, equipped and credits are in overflow to the point where I have my next 15k games already paid in advance. Not having problem with credits ever again is a really big thing. For most players seeking to improve however this'd translate to playing a lot of skirmishes, or buying it with real money. Regardless of what you choose, taking steps towards a more sound economic structure along the way is something I really recommend. Eliminating one of the core problems of having an outside economy (unsustainable costs) while still being able to reap the benefits (other people also have unsustainable costs, and as a result they will ultimately perform worse because of it). I think about my game in two ways. The battle I just loaded in to play on its own, and then all the battles I played and will play for the session. For the first, economy doesn't matter. For the second one it does. I'll go more into separating your gameplay into these two later, but it's important to remember through out. Time to start the topic for real: I'll be answering the most commonly asked questions I get regarding improvement, consistency and on keeping an emotional distance and a professional mindset towards the game. I cannot stress this enough: Having a worker-attitude towards the game fixes a lot of anger management issues the game presents you with, but in doing so you'll start sucking out the fun as well. I enjoy the game enough (although in periods) that I still get enjoyment out of playing with a pro-active mindset to improve. This is where a lot of people fall short and it's totally understandable. An improving mindset is a really boring one. You are playing with an improving purpose, and not an enjoyment purpose. I'd say that I enjoy myself the most in a game where I just play and zone out until the game is over. Back in reality, basically a small escape from the real world for a while until you're forced to do whatever the real world requires of you. Thinking of your game in a similar way takes a lot of fun out of it, as being emotionally invested is an obstacle to overcome to reliable results. Luckily I am a competitive person, so I get my enjoyment out of good results, and many people are similar. This means that you treat the game as you would an assignment from a school, employer or whatever. It already sounds a lot less fun. You are playing to improve. This means that every rambo-like feeling you get out of casually playing goes out the window just as fast as the aggressive emotions that many people already struggle with fighting off. You can't be emotionally invested either way, as your emotions will influence your decision making that you want to be as pure in logic and reason as they can. Because of this, you'll want to distance yourself emotionally from the game just like a bad habit in real life. The boss forcing you on overtime means you suck it up even though you're pissed. You are mad because things aren't going the way you wanted and there's no easy fix for that. A worker mindset of adapting to it to the best of your ability and getting better at accepting whatever comes your way to get over it as soon as possible is the best way of dealing with it. This means that everything in the game that is out of your control is something not worth investing into emotionally. This includes everything from being XVM-yoloed, arty-whored or RNG putting a consecutive 4 shots at the edge of reticle. What exactly does an emotional investment get you here? Only fuel to a fire you already want to put out, your emotions are counterproductive right from the get go. This means that you have to let things like these go. They do nothing for improving your current game and only raise the tension for the games to come. Bad experiences from your current game should be left there, with anything positive to take from it should be at least considered. When sporting a working mindset you'll simply structure your gameplay in a way that you keep refining and re-evaluating your decisions and replace your bad tendencies with good ones. This is how I do it: Step 1. This is almost always initial deployment. Make up and decide where to go on the map on the spot after you've read the line-up and estimated the general deployment. Step 1 should at least have some benefits of going there, if it doesn't your step 1 is not good enough. This is everything from favourable terrain, free crossing shots, vision, tank advantage on flank and so on. How much damage is there going to be at step 1? - Try to answer. If you were right, focus on step 2. If you were wrong, think about why. Sometimes this is not taking slow mobility into account, or trading poorly too early etc. Personal misplay is an answer you are going to have to admit a lot of times here, Step 2. What to do after the initial deployment period and the damage it gave. Step 2 and onward is more difficult to give advice on, as they differ much more from step 1 which will remain fairly similar until you decide on a different opening position. Something to consider here however is how aggressive it should be. I base my aggression on urgency. If there is plenty of damage to farm, there's no need to throw your own HP into the mix until you will start losing out on better situations without it or a better position. I think about step 2 as I'm doing step 1. Unlike step 1 it will vary a lot more depending on what is happening on the map, information is scarce early on so step 2 changes often. Having step 2 in place however makes for a pretermined decision to fall back on without any time loss. If step 1 yielded much then step 2 doesn't have to be as aggressive as I'm ahead of pace in my target damage zone. If step 1 yielded little then it'll have to be more aggressive as I now have to compensate. Overcompensating is easy however, and when doing so you need to recognise it as just that, and not teammates being bad. You don't get anything to learn out of your mistake if you blame it on somebody else. Step 3. Step 2 becomes the new step 1, and you think about step 3 the same way you did step 2. The only real difference is that more time has passed in game between them, so the urgency gets higher to hit your target game the longer you go. As you go further into the game the gameplay either ramps up in tempo or massively slows down depending on how the engagements went. A close game slows down, and recognising it as so will let you put the brakes and conserve your HP for enemy mistakes until the game is decided. A steamroll only ramps up in speed, so if you recognise it your need of staying ahead gets higher and higher with time so you adjust your aggression accordingly. Step 4. Use your remaining HP to get as good of a game as possible. I wait with step 4 until the game is noticeably won or lost. Good micromanagement skills net you better games during steamrolls against you with an extra shot or two. When the game is decided, you don't spare any expenses. Survival rate is arbitrary, and I can't recall the last time I saw a good player wish he had a 10% higher survival rate instead of a full shot extra in DPG. If you have a lot of HP to use at this stage then using it to outdamage your teammates is a good idea. When the game is decided, your own HP isn't more valuable than the damage anymore. If the game is won/lost in a seemingly decisive manner, the damage is all that you can get out of it. So squeeze the last drops of it instead of throwing a Hail Mary for the win that virtually never happens anyway. From personal experience I've found that the risky play to win the game is less beneficial to actually winning than playing for the damage. The amount of times you're able to farm your way back into an even HP pool safely are more frequent than winning a lost game off of a Rambo mission. A spot on the map generally takes 10-15 games for me to gauge if they're worthwhile or not, so this is quite a bit more of testing the waters than what people assume. The meta changes, so you can't have a fixed handbook for what to do on every map even if the initial deployment is similar. With it you find many solutions to the situation you're in right now, one you will be in later and eventually you come up with a solid enough answer to everything on that area of the map that you'll start consistently having good games throughout. The more the better honestly, but I generally play tanks with little to no armour, so my focus has is around having a good damage dealt/taken ratio. For people more seasoned in slower and armoured tanks this focus would be more on micromanagement and perfecting your initial deployment. Lower mobility means less ability to rotate, so getting better at prediction and foresight hold more value the lower mobility you have. I talked a bit about emotion and how it's an obstacle for improvement, but there's still more to it to add. Shifting blame. I do this myself and almost every streamer I watch do it too, because accepting blame is difficult. You won't get anything out of a mistake if you blame it on anyone but yourself. It really is a lot of excusing misplay with platitudes in WoT. Arty, XVM and so on screwed your game over for taking an aggressive position. A lot of people write these things off as arty just being arty when in reality they were overreaching. I had this problem a lot when translating from the 3k to 4k barrier. You need to take a breath, get some perspective and look at the situation again. Did you really die because of some BS or were you actually misplaying? If it's BS you can let go of it as those things really are out of your control sometimes, but you're doing yourself a disservice if you let a mistake to learn from go by unnoticed. It's important to hold yourself accountable for your gameplay and if you really do want to improve this is a barrier that is a must to get over or it'll hinder all learning past this point in a fairly cerebral game that requires an understanding of the game that is too complex to put into proper words. There's a fairly good reason most people plateau at some point, and while that plateau is lower in general I can say with certainty that close to every (already) unicum hit a wall because of this. You are fairly confident in considering yourself decent at the game at this point, and your ego is in your way of improvement more than anything else. Tilting's also very common and I envy the very few who seem to be totally unaffected by it. A good mindset really helps here, as you'll see some of the few people who can live off of WoT content that have to keep playing for their income learnt this too. Most people do have the ability to quit whenever their anger gets the better of them, but when you are literally doing your job while playing you don't. Tilting ruins the rest of the session unless you untilt which is easier said than done, so you do whatever you can from preventing tilt from happening from the start. As I said earlier you really have to give up your emotional investment in both performance and outcome. It just doesn't yield anything positive from a performance perspective. Finding a way to un-tilt is good though if you insist on keeping the session going. For me the session ends whenever I notice myself being emotionally invested, both good and bad. If I load up, have a killer game and felt like I really enjoyed that game then that game is it. I had fun, although for a very short time, and then this session won't be a pro-active one forward if I decide to keep on playing anyway. It's important to separate the two, especially when they're so closely linked together for elitists (performance and fun go very hand in hand for me). If you want to learn then emotions can't get the better of you. If you are having fun while playing that's great, but you're also zoning in and going autopilot which is the biggest single detriment to improvement there is. Unlearning auto-pilot is something that would do every online PC gamer a favour in their gameplay by forcing them to re-learn actively (and onward) instead of only learning periodically and then sticking to what they know. You can obviously enjoy yourself while being a productive learner, but it's much, much harder than it looks. If you want to become better at the game you have to learn, and "having to do" something generally makes it a lot less fun even if it's with your goal in mind. My ways of keeping my head straight when I had a bad game, am dead and waiting for my tank that are pretty simple and easy to do. They do the trick for me most of the time, and when they don't I simply quit the session and come back at it with fresh eyes later. I generally only play 1 tank at a time, so this works well for me since I have a game to wait out before my next one. I generally try and watch all my games until they are completed because there's more to take from them after dying. Timestamping - Track rotations and how long they take for other players. If you know how long a rotation takes you can estimate how much will happen in that timespan and how a situation will look when you get there. Just look at the timer at the start and then again when you have what you're looking for. If a rotation is 40-ish seconds, it is for example a perfect rotation for a BC25t after a clip. It matters more on autoloaders since you have a longer string of dead time without being able to deal damage. Knowing this in autoloaders make for much better predictability and an increase in effeciency. If your BC just went on reload and you see a rotation to make that could be good, you have the information on hand that you will be reloaded when getting there. You can deal damage right away. The time spent reloading was spent being useful because you rotated in a situation where you wouldn't deal any damage anyway. Track trading patterns too if you can. Some tanks are tricky to trade against because of their reload timers are off-sync compared to yours. Russian mediums for example can shoot 3 times at a Type 5 on reload before he's reloaded again. If you know this you know how hard you can pressure without risking taking HP back. If you are against a 5A in a russian medium however the reload is off-sync, as you'll be halfway through your third shell when he reloads his second. If he fires and pulls back there, you end up losing the trade at 980 to 640. This means that you don't really have a way to use your RoF as a means of engaging that 5A when there's cover involved. Find a different way or take the bad trade if there's no other way. This is where playing a single tank at a time starts benefitting as these things are much easier to keep track of comparing against the 1 gun (yours) than all tanks. You can do this for pretty much everything, but when playing tanks with higher alpha it matters as single shot trades get more beneficial. A JGPZ wins almost every 1 for 1 trade, so for it to take them makes more sense than a russian medium that will get outtraded. Backseat gaming. I do this to both streamers I watch and to team mates when I'm post mortem. It probably goes without saying that I don't actually tell them what I think, I just try to backseat them in my head to keep my thought process going to learn. You start noticing how big the gap is and how much skill expression there is in the game by doing this, as methodical decision making is so much easier to spot than someone auto-piloting. It's tricky because things don't play out like you want them to to check if you were right, but you can easily mess with ideas and try to emulate a reasonable outcome out of it. I've gotten everything from good openings (mostly from streamers though), to good counters and responses from random pubbies this way that I didn't think of. They probably didn't think of it either, but I saw it work out so I can make use of it. The biggest use of it is probably that I've identified a lot of bad choices and having been attentive during it you will end up avoiding a lot of mistakes you haven't made yet. WoT is a PvP game but I found that treating it as PvE makes more sense. One player and 14 bots against 15 bots make for a more sensible way of looking at performance which shifts the focus from a team effort to win, to a player effort in a numbers game. You are alone and your teammates are no good, now do your best anyway. Consistency needs a solid foundation to build on. and for me this is the general thought process of how I did it. It takes long, but eventually it adds up to being important. The step from 4k to 5k and above was the biggest leap in gameplay for me, and easily the most difficult to approach. The difference between it and the previous level of gameplay was mostly consistency. I'd say that an easy way to put it was that now my median and average game are similar. This wasn't true before, were my median game was almost always higher than my average because of a game here and there going pretty bad. What working through this did for me was raising my average game up to my median, simply having less bad games while the ratio of acceptable to great games stayed the same. This change isn't much more than 500 damage in tier 10s, but it still matters. For me it was the last bit to focus on in the game, and having experience with it - the improvement never ends. I see so many mistakes in my own play in hindsight that I'll keep working on to remove. To me the game isn't at its most competitive state right now, as a constant 3 arties make for much worse experiences in tier 10 where I generally reside so right now I can't say that my improvement has yielded very much recently, but it did lay the ground work for a better time to come. Consistency for example is the only reason I was able to 3mark the ISU-130. The tank on the EU server has 20 or so owners, with none of them playing actively. In attempting the mark over a year ago I just couldn't break past the 90 mark reliably. The damage requirement of a 3500 combined average was simply too high for me to keep with tank tank. I was the only one playing it until skill4ltu got his as well, so the EMA of the ISU-130 mark was set almost entirely by myself until then. We both wound up just waiting it out. The issue I had was with consistency yet again, as I was struggling with finding a way to get reliable damage out when your penetration is worst in tier. (It's a high DPM/alpha TD with okay gun handling and mobility, while having a non-existent gun arc and very low penetration for those of you who don't know of it). I eventually wound up getting it done, but after taking a very long break from it. Just like all of the challenging gun marks this game has to offer with their reward tanks the consistency is what breaks most players. Having to pressure the game for so much damage so reliably makes single mistakes ruin several hours of work, so you can't make mistakes at this level. A lot of players have been bashing their wall against the Chieftain mark lately, and it's because of the same thing. Consistency matters so much when you are basically forced to either have a good game or re-play your last 10 games getting back to where you were. That's what it did for me in the ISU at least, being more aware, having learned more and approaching the game from a PoV based in logic and reason rather than using your gut and autopilot made the push. There's plenty of small pointers here and there to improve your game, but IMO this is the big one that sets you up well. If you have the work ethic to keep learning, you'll become more consistent. Eventually more consistent starts meaning better.

Its because they are sitting on millions or hundreds of thousands of gold. What's 1500 gold per crew to someone who has 500.000 and has nothing to spend it on?

I really want to emphasize this part, as why I think HE in the current form is wrong and needs a rework. The problem when OP tanks take dominant positions and can't be flanked, is not a problem that should be solved with a game mechanics that removes skill from the game (i hope we agree that shooting HE in general area of the target for guaranteed 300 dmg does not require a lot of skill). Damage shouldn't come for free (and that is why everyone who is interested in skillful play has issue with arty in the game) This is the problem of poor map design (no opportunities to flank dominant positions when hull down tanks take them), and of course imbalanced tanks.

that problem you list though, willl happen your way. when tank get struck with that shelll, in the turret or front superstructure, and start engine fire on tanks. Jagpanzer, Chrysler, Maus, object 263- you name it. And that is horrid mechanic I agree with HE doing 0 penetrative ability, but than those unique tank like Leo1, Badger, EBR75, M41GF, excalibur lose out with higher penetrate ammo. Definite, all arta need 0 penetrate HE. (Rework the damage calculation from (damage/2 - armor thickness) to more like (damage - armor thickness*2) I think it should be more [(damage/3)-armorthicknes*2] with minimum 5-10% damage maintained arbitrary This means HE does ultimately less damage, to negatively impact HE spammer like T49 or tier 10 TD, FV - while still allow for HE purpose, like reset cap or dealing damage to hull down tank like IS7, or to reliably eliminite enemy with 2HP left Bobi_Kreeg Maybe they want to kill EBR with this.. Idk. But these new HE shells go through wheels. That's the only positive I can see. But then, why don't they just make EBR wheels part of the dmg model, so that shots to the wheels make damage? In general... What's the point of High Explosive shells if they don't actually Explode? Isn't that just another Heat? EBR75 will be buff and nerf. Buff will be its high penetrate HE, defeating obstacle and going through to hit beneath, like tracks, fences, vision block, wheels, scarecrow Etc. Buff again, will be it low base damage HE, now dealing more splash damage in non penetrate, because it small explosion radius now concentrate within tank, not out. nerfs will be tires can be hit through. But many times still, tires will be hit through but pass underneath and miss anyway, where now they explode and damage. Shot hits gun, pen because most guns 30-40mm, pass through and miss into the sky, but (now) they would hit gun and explode, splash target. There still is an explosion guys. The explosion after, is focused as spall path inside the tank. Rather than explosion detonating outside the tank as radius

windstorm you mean https://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Windstorm Yeah, dunno why they removed this, was ok map (not good, not bad)