Thursday, July 25, 2013

World of Tanks: Ammunition

So after some changes to how your ammo works in world of tanks and through playing about 6,000 more battles since I wrote the Gold rounds and You! post, I've decided to rewrite my post about ammo.

Please note that using gold rounds is not cheating or being cheap. They've been part of the game for a long while and since APCR and HEAT has recently been nerfed a bit. I can't see why people would complain about someone using gold, to me it's as silly as someone complaining about someone using a repair kit or a fire extinguisher.

Types of Rounds

  • AP is the standard ammo and has a normalization of 5 degrees. Normalization by the way means that angling is just that bit less effective.
  • APCR is generally a premium ammo that has a normalization of 3 degrees. It has a greater penetration value of AP however it loses more penetration the further it flies. You'll only really notice this with across the map shots or when that piece of armor you hit is really angled.
  • HE is a standard ammo that explodes when its penetration value hits zero causing splash damage. It is most useful for artillery, resetting a base when you need to not bounce (aim for tracks), and dealing that last 1% of a tanks health that is hard to penetrate. (hull down T34)
  • HEAT is a premium ammo that has greater penetration then AP but automatically bounces off 80 degree or greater and has no normalization. It also loses a lot of penetration when it hits spaced armor so in certain cases it is more advantageous to use AP shells due to armor layouts.

General Ammo Layout

Standard Tanks

For my standard tanks I generally go with 60~80% AP, 20~40% Gold, and 0~2% HE. Some times I'm very lazy or a tank has a low penetration value for its tier so I equip more gold shells to better support it vs +2 tiering or those tanks I can't penetrate otherwise if I can't get along side them. Depending on how many rounds my tank carries I'll have a handful of HE shells loaded for last second base resets or dealing that last 20/1500 health on a tank I can't easily pen without exposing myself to too much enemy fire. As an example I carry about 10% gold in my ISU-152 just for some awkward shots vs Tier 10's and 2 HE shells because I never run out of AP and I might need them for a side scraping E-100 that is capping.

Derps

For those tank guns that uses only HE and HEAT shells like the KV-2's short barrel the standard loadout is about 50/50 HE and HEAT. In most cases vs lower tier tanks HE is enough to deal respectable damage but it falls very short vs same or higher tier tanks. Lets say your potential damage is 300 HEAT and 400 HE. You'll probably do 600 damage in 2 shots with HEAT while you'll probably only do 200~350 damage with HE for those two shots. This is mostly why I never play derp tanks anymore, and for the fact that my ISU-152's tier 10 gun is much more satisfying with AP.

Artillery

  For artillery I generally load 70~90% HE and 30~10% Gold HE / HEAT and 0~3 shells of AP. For artillery AP and HEAT shells are rarely worth the chances of bounces / misses. Gold HE is great for when you have a lot of tanks clumped together so you are more likely to deal decent damage to all of them but your bread and butter is always HE.

Very small guns

And we can't forget them little tanks like a T-50 in a tier 9 match, pretty much you're not trying to shoot tanks unless they're other scouts but a good idea is enough AP / APCR to deal with other scouts and to harrass big tanks in the bum or some HE to peck at cappers / maybe dealing 0.1% of a big tanks health but generally I find myself equipping more HE then usual on these small tanks because what else can you do with them but tickle with those little guns.