Jesse_the_Scout

Good god this tank is trash. It's stupidly slow, inflexible, and the gun is a joke against anything with good armor. It's so easy to outplay, the gun handling isn't even good enough to swap targets without dunking shells into the ground. It's good at sitting and sniping, but because it can't relocate you're stuck wherever you deployed at the beginning of the match even if there's nothing happening. It can't push because eventually you'll run into a CYKLA BLAT heavy hull down which will just shoot gold through your cupolas while you can't push him without getting farmed in the side. It can clog a lane, but who cares? Either the arty will eventually kill it or the enemy team kills everything around you until you're alone and helpless. As long as you aren't stupid enough to just stand in front of it bouncing your shots while it dunks you with its derpy-ass gun it's not even a threat.

Uh... yeah guys, you got 10 X5 bonuses for completing the damage missions for the Halloween skin. It's the same X5s you can get for WoT premium account. I stockpile those for horror grinds. Today it makes more sense just to exploit the daily X5s on different tanks. There was some other mission that gave out an additional 10 of them too, I think... you might actually check this and input one of the codes if you haven't already to make sure you got all of them. https://worldoftanks.com/en/news/missions/spooky-challenge/

At the risk of sounding like a dick, I think the solution to this dilemma is to remember this is a haphazardly designed freemium game Skinner box where whatever you "earned" today isn't going to be "worth" anything tomorrow and act accordingly. Artificial exclusivity is just marketing bullshit.

Of the ones I'm familiar with, the M10 is a no-brainer if you don't have it. It's just a copy of one of the best tier 5s, and it's a better trainer than the Pak40 overall. 1500 bonds is also nothing. The T-34 Shielded is the kind of vehicle that works if you dedicate a strong crew in it, but given the plethora of good Russian medium trainers it hardly seems necessary. Still, 1500 bonds is basically nothing. The Hydro is a complete joke. The Pz V/IV outclasses it so massively in virtually every way and has the same sheltered MM. The V/IV shouldn't even be sheltered, but welcome to WoT where no one who makes decisions has any idea how the game works. And because it's garbage it of course costs twice as many bonds as the tanks that aren't. The Mutz is power creeped to death. The Progetto does everything the Mutz does only better, including a massively superior loading mechanism. The Mutz has one notable advantage of lightning fast shell velocities which arguably make it a better sniper. In the meantime the Prog has higher effective DPM, moves faster, and has a little better gun handling. In a tier which hates mediums it doesn't pay to be an unexceptional medium. I've mostly played the patriot in Frontline, and there it's almost perfect. Enough hull armor to bounce some shots, very good turret armor, great gun, enough mobility to not spend half the game crawling from point A to point B. It's probably one of the best Frontline vehicles, and holds up pretty well in random games too. On paper it doesn't look like anything special, but it's the subtle things: lighting fast shell velocity and pen on the non-gold round, a little more mobility and top speed than most heavies, a little more DPM than most heavies, and a more compact form that lets it exploit terrain easily. I'm probably going to spend my bond stock on it. Please don't get the FV215b unless you're a collector or just have everything else. It's completely terrible. Compared to the power creeped Super C it gets a bunch of little bonuses that don't add up to anything: better agility, better gun handling, 100 more HPs, 10 more view range. In return it gives up ALL of its ability to use terrain with that near-invincible turret, has to deal with a rear mounted turret, even gets shorted on ammo capacity to the point you can't carry any HESH, and guess what? even the armor is worse. You think you're going to side scrape with that rear mounted turret, but surprise, instead of 100mm of side armor like on the Super C it's actually 50mm. But hey, at least it has better front armor? Nope. Super C also gets an extra strip of spaced armor on the upper plate and turret which beef up the entire profile. Before they overbuffed the Super C the 215b was not good. Now it's just a joke in contrast.

So with the MM changes and merciless gold spam are missions like HT-12 even plausible these days? I can't remember the last time I saw a tier 6 in one of my tier 8s even though all I see is 8s with my 6s, and even my paper tanks get gold spammed occasionally, much less my armored stuff. I'm thinking the Mutant 6 might be the most plausible option because its armor is basically "fuck your gold" against tier 7-8, and it's rare enough that no one seems to know when shooting it is pointless. So many well armored tanks are useless for this mission because people know shooting at a T29 turret is just a waste of time.

HE guns are trash. They fuck everything up at mid tiers, where you have to make decisions like, "I can't risk going there because there's an M4 and shitters always have derp guns which will full pen me." Or, "I'd better not go anywhere risky because they have 2 Pz IVs and could literally get deleted in a single hit". Last night there was an E2 in the way and I'm playing the crappy tier 7 TD with 20mm of armor, so I can't go anywhere NEAR him or I'll get obliterated even though the E2 with the 105 is a joke. I had to just sit with my dick in my hand until some one else dealt with him even though he was one shot, because I can't take 410+ damage to plink a guy for 80. Same play session I literally got one shotted by a KV-2 snapshot at 500m+ on sand river, a few seconds after being lit. 800 damage. Guess what? We lost that game. One lucky roll made that game. The HE mechanics are complete garbage. This is the first run on sandbox, does any one really think their goal is to make the KV-2 do 150 damage and 3 damage on smaller calibers? They'll tweak it until it works passably.

HE badly needs to be changed and this is way over due. Years and and years ago back when didn't have shit to do I wrote up an article about HE shells and how they should be modified. This appears to be similar to how I approached it, at least in effect even if not exact execution. The idea is too add another dimension to engagements by having ways to pressure high armor opponents which are otherwise invincible, like a top tier T29 hull down. HE guns and rounds could be a really important third option to have in the game for breaking up tough tanks in strong positions, especially if gold ammo is finally reduced in power. Right now they're just useless on 90% of tanks and RNG slot machines on dedicated guns. I've shelved all of mine (Pz IV, KV-2, etc.) because the inconstancy, lack of coherent gold round options, and terrible gun characteristics just make them frustrating to play. I think you're all getting a little overly worked up. The calculations as to how HE works is complicated and opaque, to the point where we'll just have to see how it all actually works. At the same time, part of my plan involved minor buffs to dedicated HE guns like the Pz IV or KV-2. Most likely if the changes weaken them too much they'll do the same to compensate, either by improving bloom, accuracy, reload speed, or whatever. Keep something else in mind, which is that if HE worked reasonably well that would be a point in favor or removing artillery at last. As it stands, it exists in part because it's the only thing that counters a Defender in a tier 8 game. If HE shells allowed a tier 6 to harass and actually present even a minor problem for a Defender you no longer need the ham-fisted balancing of artillery to maintain the veneer of balance.

And a year of power creep later it's unplayable.

WG's recent nervous efforts to keep people playing has done the impossible: made the suffering of completing the Panther II grind bearable. Tank reward German fragments to drop the needed grind by about 30k XP. On track event to double crew training. Premium account for +50% XP. New WoT Premium feature grants an additional X3 XP bonus on your second game. New WoT Premium feature of 5 selectable X3 bonuses daily. A stack of X5 XP bonuses on wins thanks to Twitch Prime (or the 5 per month you get from WoT Premium). Boosters that grant +200% to XP, +100% to crew XP, and a +50% credit booster because why not. Weekend bonus granting X2 crew XP for every game after the first win. The final push took 12 crappy games with all of 5 mediocre wins yielding about 10k XP per win plus a lot of crew training. Final suffering talley of 53 games with a 51% win rate plus a few frontline games.

Tip for any one interested in this thing on NA... I got a mastery badge in a tank today and it gave me a 30% off coupon that works for the tank. I was using the Captured Tiger II at the time, but I wager that's not the only tank that triggers one. Brings it down to $28. Halfway tempted but I'm not eager to spend money on the game these days.

I'm actually into this thing, but I can get clicked by arty over and over every goddamn game for free.

How do you play 30k+ games of this shit and still never realize you should probably shoot the almost dead tank instead of the full health tank?

Minor necro, I just skimmed the old Sandbox thread because I have no life. Here's what I think is happening. The first sandbox was to test the ongoing armor creep approach which WG had already begun to see if it yielded the results they wanted. The question they were trying to answer was, "how do we balance the game better without removing gold ammo and arty while still being fun to play?" As most people on this forum know, the answer is, "you can't". Those mechanics inherently make balancing the game a shitshow. Their answer was, "you increase armor to the point where armor feels meaningful again even in the face of gold ammo." 6 months later I'm hull down in a T28 Prototype with a Defender 300m standing in the open and I realize I can't reliably pen him in any way other than shooting gold at his lower plate. The power creep which became the defining aspect of the game after sandbox was the chosen method of implementation, with results favoring armor. Even buffs which didn't increase armor directly had the effect of increasing armor in the game; buff the mobility and soft stats of tanks like the T59, Super P, and T54 Proto and you see more of these armor-centric tanks being played. It had many advantages over a dramatic, sweeping global change: subtle instead of overt, selling new tanks for more cash than ever, no stated goal so players don't have a mission statement to judge. Within a couple of years the number of players tanked. Checking the numbers they lost about 25% of their players in the two years after the sandbox, with heavier losses in the profitable NA market. Bottom line is players didn't like the changes. This is the year they're finally backtracking on things they would never do, because their revenue is finally hurting at this point. You can see it in the increasingly desperate pace of tank sales, the huge boosts to premium account, the exceptional drop in pricing this Christmas, and all the features that should have been in the game years ago like crew books and removing team damage. They tried it their way, and it failed. Some of the things people are complaining about now like the huge, open lanes of fire on maps like Glacier, Fisherman's Bay, Erlenberg, Ghost Town, Studzianski, Kharkov, this is all trying to make sniping more effective and roll back what they've already done which can't be easily undone. Yet again, these changes don't make the game more enjoyable, because the core mechanics are the real problem: arty, gold ammo, big tier spreads, etc. The question at this point is how far are they willing to go in walking back what they did and giving players what they want? Will the gold ammo reduction ever see the light of day? Is there really some huge rebalance in the works or are they so internally divided it never happens? Are they even finally considering removing artillery?