WOTBB 12 – Gold

Original date of blog: February 6th, 2015

Sorry for the delay in this entry – personal issues took away my time and energy. This entry I will talk about gold, not to be confused with coins. Gold is what you spend real money on in WoTB. You can use it for a number of applications, and it can be a blessing or a curse.

The first thing I used gold for were extra garage slots. You only get very few of them when you start tanking, so it’s a good idea to watch the sales to get some (a lot) extra slots when they’re on sale. Having only a few slots left now, I’m hoping for one soon. Of course, you can always sell tanks you’ve completely developed or ended up not liking, but I’ve found that hard to do. Every tank has its merit, its pro’s and cons. And if you platoon, a certain tank can fit the tank your platoon mate is driving better than another tank. So I don’t sell any of my tanks, except for the low tier premium tanks that were gifts from Wargaming at one event or another.

You can also use gold to get coins. I’ve found this to be fairly useless, as with just a few battles, you can easily earn just as much as you could when using gold, and it’s a shame to waste your gold like that. You can also use it as a substitute for coins to buy a certain kind of ammunition for your tanks. This will make you go through your gold quite quickly if you use it like that, but this kind of ammo does have the ability to penetrate more armour. You could also just pay for it with coins, though, making it another waste of perfectly good gold.

The second thing I’ve used gold for is to get more free XP. With one gold and 25 XP from one of your tanks, you can get 25 free XP. This isn’t something you -must- do, but when you get to the higher tiers and you have too little free XP to research the parts of your tank that will make the tank bearable to drive, it can be a good investment. As I mentioned before, I have done so to get through the Ferdinand.

Gold can also be used to purchase a premium account for x amount of days. This will get you 1.5 times the XP you would usually get in a battle, and 1.5 times the coins. Grinding tanks with premium can be very nice, especially when you’re saving up for the more than 6 million coins you need to go from your tier IX tank to the tier X tank in that line. And it can keep you from losing money if your tank is still underdeveloped. Depending on your goal, it can be a very good investment.

And there are, of course, the premium tanks. You buy these with real money and/or gold (which you get by spending real money, so in effect you will always pay real money for them). The tanks are complete as you get them – there are no parts to develop and crew is instantly at 100%. So why get them, you ask? Well, because they usually have more armour than the standard tanks of their tier, and they earn you more money than a regular tank would.

I have (had) five premium tanks. Of those tanks, I have four left, and one I’ve never used. The one I sold and the one I’ve never used are both tier III tanks that everyone in the game that was registered at date X received at the time. The other three are much more interesting.

There is the tier IV Pz.B2 tank that was the tank I bought earlier but sold without having an Mastery Ace-tanker badge on it, making me regret selling it severely. When it was available again at the beginning of the new year, it cost about 3 times the amount of money that it used to, but at least this way I can get that Ace-tanker badge on it eventually. It’s a true seal clubbing tank, very powerful for its tier, and a lot of fun to drive around and shoot the noobs that have no clue how the game works yet.

And when the British mediums were introduced in WoTB in December, shortly after they had a British tank destroyer on sale; the AT-15A. Well, ‘on sale’ doesn’t quite fit. It was expensive. But it is a really fun tank. The armour on the thing is heck strong, and though the gun isn’t all that powerful, it reloads very quickly, so in effect you can do a lot of damage with it. Usually with tanks you need to angle them just so in order not to get shot. This tank is the only tank I know that you have to face the enemy with directly. The strongest armour is at the front.

It is a low tank though, so up close and personal you can die very easily. And of course, it’s a tank destroyer, so it’s very slow (it crawls) and can easily get killed when flanked. But most of the time, when I meet an enemy in it, they’ve no clue where to hit me, and the sound of their shots bouncing off me is music to my ears. It also helps that the tank’s gun can look left and right quite far – meaning I don’t have to turn the entire tank as much as I do in other tank destroyers. This makes it harder for the tank to get flanked.

It took some time, but by now people have learned that with premium ammunition, they can actually damage me, so they use that against the AT-15A instead. So I die more than I used to in it. But my winrate in the tank is still 86%, so I’m not complaining. And I can call them ‘gold noobs’ and laugh at them. And most often -still- kill them before they kill me.

But, having saved the best for last, it is now time for me to tell you about the Snowstorm Jagdtiger 8.8. It came to the game in November, and it looks just like a real Jagdtiger, but it has camouflage on it. Grey and white, it is a winter beauty, that I’ve taken to nicknaming my Ice Queen. The camouflage changes depending on the map you drive into – in the map Desert Sands (which, duh, is a desert map) the colouring goes from grey and white to beige and darker beige. In Rockfield (lots of rocks and greens), the armour turns more of variation of greenish grey.

It is a tier VIII tank with tier IX armour. The gun is quite light, but has a decent reload time, making it dangerous to meet. It is heck slow though, slower than the Ferdinand. I use chocolate on it as a consumable, and have ventilation equipped, to up my crew’s abilities and make it behave a lot better, and making it drive 10 km/h faster – so definitely worth it.

It costs quite some coins in the match, but this tank is a true money maker. Even if I shoot loads, and use my general consumable as well as the chocolate, it still earns me between 30k and 70k coins per match! But the most fun part of the tank is a glitch that only recently got fixed. When I first started driving the thing, shots bounced on me left and right. It was amazing, and it made the tank so much fun for pwning noobs.

Why? Because it was impossible to tell where to hit the thing. The Snowstorm Jagdtiger 8.8 didn’t have the red and grey colouring that showed you where to hit the tank. I have spend many a battle giggling evilly as my enemies tried to destroy me and I destroyed them instead, because they didn’t see where they could damage me and were not smart enough to go for the areas that would be weak spots on any tank. I only recently learned that the had never meant for the tank to have that, and with the last update, it’s gotten fixed. And that’s just sad, because it’s lost a big advantage that way.

Now it’s still a money maker, but everyone can see where they can hit me now, and the tank has always been next to useless against tiers IX and X, because the penetration values of the gun aren’t that high, and with them now being able to see where they can hit me, I can no longer take my time to just aim leisurely and eat away their health one little bit at a time. It’s not made me regret getting the tank though. It is still a lot of fun to drive.

Overall, gold/premium tanks have better armour and a better firing rate. But I drift back towards the regular tanks because they’re -more- fun, because there’s something to develop there, something to work forwards to. On the other hand, premium tanks are an excellent choice when you’re platooning with someone that wants to get to their next time. Because of the better armour and firing rate, you can provide proper back up for them, while you earn plenty of money yourself.

I’m not a fan of all of them, but the ones I do have (and drive) are excellent. It is a double edged blade. I still sigh when I see a premium tank in my team, because there’s just no telling how bad or good the driver will be – if it’s a normal level VIII tank, you know they will at least have the experience of the first 7 tiers. But any noob can buy a tank using real money, and it says nothing about their skills. And most of the time, I can shoot down premium tanks very easily – because the lack of skill of the driver.

But then, they probably think me a noob too when they see me driving into battle in my Ice Queen or the AT-15A. I love proving them wrong =)

Battles fought: 4,016
Winrate: 59.86%