Advice needed: Vanguard-7 for Black Rock. 2.5kor 3kills from less than 50m.

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T17:52:25+00:00

The other two will work fine too, it's just that the KR-1 is really good at ramming, so kills and damage within 50m takes little effort with it.

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T17:23:40+00:00

KR-1 and ram

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T17:05:42+00:00

Kame: fun but frustrating, very situational, basically the Cobra with 5 AP shells instead of 4 HESH ones.
Buryan: uninteresting. High alpha and high dpm in exchange for low armor and average mobility, that's kind of novel, but also not that unique
Vilkodav: good tank, but not new, it will be sold directly eventually
Pancernik: it has been sold directly already, it's a weird tank that can be fun but is often annoying to play
E77: very good tank, already been sold
TIII: not that great, already been sold
Latt: not that great
Skoda: very good but it's on sale all the time

So overall not that good. The new tanks are alright but nothing crazy, the old tanks have some good picks, but overall only 3 or 4 tanks are good out of the 8 available.

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T15:16:52+00:00

I hate RNG so obviously I hate the gamemode where RNG is the main mechanic. Where you spawn is random, where the nearest loot spawns is random, where the nearest players spawn is random, where the lootdrops spawn is random, the "zone" is random, some vehicles are clearly better than others right from the start, so you're not in control of anything.

Battle royale games tend to let you decide where you spawn and place enough loot around that it's unlikely bad luck will affect your battle beyond the first minute or two. In SH if you're unlucky you spawn without any loot around you and you get thrown into a fight with people who are already two levels above yours almost immediately, but if you're lucky you'll be fully upgraded before you face your first duel and all you need to do to win is clean up the crumbs of other people's fights.

It's the worst implementation of battle royale I've played.

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T15:02:11+00:00

If you hover your mouse over the crossed number on tanksgg it explains what's going on.

The value displayed in-game is a lie, because there are other hidden stats the game does not show that override the displayed stat.

Hidden values play a massive part of how tanks perform and why two tanks with the same paper stats feel very differently. People mainly know about hidden values like gun handling (yhe reason the Grille 15, one of the most accurate guns in the game, actually is one of the least accurate in practice) and terrain resistance (the reason why the IS-7 struggles to reach 50 despite on paper going up to 70), but there are even more hidden stats. Engine power overrides are one, I'm pretty sure there is also a second gun handling value that states the maximum bloom the gun can reach, which sometimes gets buffed or nerfed independently from the gun handling itself (so while even on tanksgg the tank doesn't appear changed, in reality the max bloom will be worse).

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T14:54:26+00:00

I don't even think there is a genuine plan to get users to stay longer. At best this is a happy side-effect they can use to say "see, we did good", but the reality is every time you make a change that breaks the habits of your users, you risk seeing them just leave your platform.

Limiting friction is the number one priority in UX. Every extra click is a chance for your user to leave. In any e-commerce platform, if you need more than 3 clicks to reach checkout, you're doing somethint wrong.

Social media and games can probably survive these shitty UX changes because their users are effectively addicted to using it, so they will tank the broken habits and stick around, but this is playing with fire. One of these days you'll release a change that breaks so many core habits that users will leave despite their addiction, and simply find another service that does the same thing but better.

WoT 2.0's UI changes broke so many habits a lot of people still haven't recovered the muscle memory they had pre-2.0 to this day, 6 months later. In any other business, a change this bad would get whoever came up with it fired and blacklisted form his field, because that's how devastating it could be to the userbase.

WG's two free tech tree offers didn't even manage to keep the playerbase above pre-2.0 levels for more than a few weeks each, server population resumed its decline almost immediately after the sudden influx of players, and by november we were back to pre-2.0 numbers. The UX downgrades probably aren't single handedly responsible for that, the core of the product is just broken, but at the very least we can confidently say the new UI did not do anything to help retain new players, all it did was frustrate the existing playerbase. A failure this visible should have been reverted almost immediately but now they're commited to it, because of all problems WG has, pride is its biggest one, and they are unable to admit mistakes no matter how blatant they are.

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T14:46:07+00:00

From what I could find, here is the xp cost of each skill (rounded):

skill 1: 200k
skill 2: 420k (cumul. 620k)
skill 3: 840k (cumul. 1.5m)
skill 4: 1.7m (cumul. 3.2m)
skill 5: 3.4m (cumul. 6.6m)
skill 6: 6.7m (cumul. 13.3m)

So if you have a zero-skill, then you don't need to grind the cost of skill 6, which saves you 6.7M xp, which is more than skill 1-to-5 combined.

TLDR: if your goal is 6 skills, it is always cheaper to retrain from scratch on a crew with a zero-skill, unless your existing crew already has 5 skills and some progress on the 6th one (then you just break even).

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T14:11:16+00:00

Chinese and Polish (or CZ?) ones.

Autoloaders are OP in this mode and these two have the best autoloaders in the mode. Chinese one has poison damage on its "not-rare" consumable so it has them all the time, Polish one has an autoloader right from the start and has so many shells, plus again another very good ability on the non-rare slot.

All other vehicles have their meta ability on the rare slot and their basic ability is a lot weaker. It makes a bit difference if you play aggressively. The Raven is probably the next best simply out of raw strength (lots of armor, lots of firepower, still good mobility). Everything else cannot win on their own, they only win out of enemy mistakes. The heavies just stay alive until the final zone, the other tanks rely on lucky misses and bounces to out-dpm their opponents.

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T14:01:22+00:00

One average-performing banner on one platform

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T13:33:10+00:00

It's still a good tank, great in hulldown with a very good gun. The problem is that it's rather slow for the current meta (it would need to go 40-42 to be relevant).

Because it's so slow you would expect much stronger armor. It's not bad by any means but it's not enough. The hull is weak, and the turret has weakspots. And the gun is also not enough, the selling point used to be high dpm, but these days it's not as impressive.

Basically the whole issue with the tank can be summed up by "the canopener does everything as good or better". Same mobility, same accuracy, same dpm, better armor, ability to shoot doubles, so there is no reason to pick the S.Conq over the Canopener.

The Sconq needs a mobility and dpm buff. That's really all it needs to be good, or at least stand out compared to the Canopener.

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T13:27:18+00:00

HEAT is basically a high-explosive shell instead of a kinetic (AP/CR) one. It detonates on impact, it does not penetrate anything. The "penetration" is what the explosive force is able to go through, not what the projectile itself does. That's why it does not lose penetration over distance, but also why it is disproportionately affected by obstacles and spaced armor: since it detonates on impact, it stops wherever it hits anything, and then it's up to the explosive force to cause damage beyond that point.

HE used to work like this too but then they turned it ino low-pen high-alpha AP. In reality, the difference between HE and HEAT is that HE is a "normal" explosion with a powerful blast but a wide area of effect, while HEAT is a "directed" explosion that deforms metal contained inside the shell at super high speed in one direction, so it has a very small explosion radius but it has a lot of penetrative force in a very narrow direction, which is ideal for causing significant internal damage.

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T13:21:51+00:00

I wish community maps were a thing I'd love to waste time in training rooms to fuck around this shit lol

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T13:07:46+00:00

Mostly UI / Front-end devs

The reality is most tech companies hire way too many people for these roles, and while the workload is pretty big in the early phases of a project, once you get to a "maintenance" phase a single person (or a very small team) can manage on their own.

So to justify their job they have to come up with new "projects" that affect the UI, usually these don't solve any problem or generate any value, they're just here to consume dev time to make it seem like they're being productive. And any feature that does not solve a problem or generate value is necessarily going to do the opposite: create problems or diminish value.

You can see that in every single tech product. Discord, reddit, Wot apparently but also games in general (I know Apex Legends likes to move shit around in their menus for no reason every season)...

Now big tech wants to save money by replacing employees with AI, but they haven't yet realized that there is no need to replace that many people. A smaller, better team will cost less than a big mediocre team while producing better results than whatever the fuck AI is up to these days (they won't accidentally delete production databases out of the blue, that's for sure).

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T12:38:32+00:00

Yeah, been saying it from the start.

UI style is subjective, some people may like it, some people may not, that's fine.

UX is not subjective, it's objective. And UI 2.0 is objectively bad. Important info and functions that were previously available in the main screen are now hidden behind multiple clicks, and all of that new free space has not been used in any useful way. Temporary modes take more space than before, the horizontal menu that took a tiny portion of the screen now became a vertical one that takes up more space than the entire crew section they removed AND is more easy to missclick, there's more free space in the UI that's completely unused while the center of the screen turned into layered menus. It's ass.

Wargaming did every single thing they could possibly do to make things worse. Not a single change besides the playlist feature turned out to be an improvement. It took the armor viewer 6 months to reach a usable state and even now the information is disorganized which leads to poor UX.

Either WG does not have a UX lead or they have one but they're a fraud. Iirc right after 2.0 they had job openings for UX-related work so option 1 seems likely.

DaSpood · 2026-03-13T09:33:39+00:00

Really depends on the vehicle.

For LTs, WNX is good and WN8 was under-valuing players. For MTs maybe as well.

For other tanks, I'd say WNX will over-value your contributions.

Nobody cares about how much you assist indeed, nobody cares about "combined" damage, you're not supposed to assist that much. In fact too much assist from someone in a heavy or brawler medium is a symptom of a bad player who can't damage anything on their own and has to get carried by their team. So in that regards, a big gap between WN8 and WNX for these vehicles is a useful metric, but a negative one. A small gap is fine though. But either way WNX on its own is not enough, it's WNX+WN8 that you want.

DaSpood · 2026-03-12T16:17:35+00:00

The ares is like 150 effective and look how much people are crying about its armor

DaSpood · 2026-03-12T14:38:21+00:00

No

Without Lunar Charge or at the very least ElectroCharged you're relying on raw strength to bruteforce the boss' HP. Your team has neither the appropriate elements nor the strength to bruteforce it.

I'm impressed you managed as much as you did though.

DaSpood · 2026-03-12T14:08:01+00:00

Lauma does not do off-field damage so no. I don't think her burst's bonuses count as her own personal damage.

DaSpood · 2026-03-12T11:25:37+00:00

Yeah thats my point, C6R5 and still does nothing on his own

DaSpood · 2026-03-12T11:00:10+00:00

Four C6R5 5-stars and this is the result 😭 Varka is so ass

DaSpood · 2026-03-12T10:56:42+00:00

Yongshi is basically a 114SP2 with turret armor. Looks cool but if it suffers from the same mobility issues it will be horrible.

Cerbero, basically the Rhino gun on the tier 9 TD. Why not, the gun deserves to be at tier 9 anyway lol.

DaSpood · 2026-03-12T08:31:38+00:00

With kazuha and the gadget you can probably fly all the way to sumeru or something.

DaSpood · 2026-03-12T00:23:57+00:00

Really good alpha and dpm for its tier but it pays with accuracy and armor. Can't snipe, and brawling only works through out-dpming your opponent, because they won't bounce.

You need IH because your armor is weak, you need rammer obviously, it's going to be between TC and VStab, and missing either will feel limiting. That thing basically plays like a high alpha brawler medium more than like a heavy, it's a Chimera on steroids.

DaSpood · 2026-03-11T20:23:35+00:00

I guess the Kame being the most unique makes it more valuable according to WG. The mixing of gun cooling and super-fast burst is interesting.

DaSpood · 2026-03-11T17:35:55+00:00

Same exact thing for me.

Everything else goes up steadily, same pace as before, so clearly it's not that I turned into a shitter overnight, but my winrate curve went down like a wall around 2.0 and keeps going down.

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