Best and worst tanks by tier and type – best tier IV heavy tank

There are only two tier IV heavy tanks (by patch 9.9):

• B1
• D.W. 2 (or DURCHBRUCHSWAGEN 2)

Advanced crew training

When you buy a new tank, and put a crew in it, it performs rather bad. This is because the crew is not fully trained, and because the stock modules on the tank more often than not are rather bad. The gun, the engine, the turret, and so on, make the tank perform badly.

As I have said earlier, you can use free XP to grind a tank before you use it in your first battle. This solves one of the issues, but not the issue with low crew skills. I will now explain how I do this. But first, let’s talk about the commander. As you have seen, the base skill level of a commander reaches 100% before you can unlock a second skill (or perk). On the rest of the crew, however, they will have to reach 110% before you can unlock a second skill (or perk). This is because 10% of the commanders base skill automatically is put on top of the skills of the rest of the crew.

When the commander reaches 100%, the gunner (or any other crew member) get a “bonus” skill from the commander. So the base skill of the gunner is 100% of his own skill and 10% of the commander, giving him a total of 110%. 1/10th of the commanders skill will be assigned to the rest of the crew. If the commander only has 90% base skill, the gunner will get 9% bonus skill from the commander.

As you can see, the commander is clearly the most important crew member. As a consequence, I often pay gold when I move a commander from one tank to another. If you can afford it, I recommend you do it. For the other crew members I pay in game credits, 20.000 “silver” for a 90% skill level when I move them to a different tank of the same type.

If you buy a new tank, 20.000 silver will only give you 75% base skill level on the crew. This is also the situation when you move a crew from a tank of one type to another, for example from a medium tank to a heavy tank.

The method I use to train my 90% crew for a new tank is based on two assumptions:

1. You have another tank of the same type and nation
2. You have a premium tank of the same type and nation

If you take a look at the tech tree, you can see that for many nations there are often two different lines of tanks. Let’s look at the russian tier V tanks:

Russian tier V heavy tanks

If you plan to go along both these lines of tanks, leading to great tanks as the IS-3 tier VIII or the fun beast at the same tier, the KV-4, it is kind of time consuming to first go along one of the lines and then the second line. One way to do this is by putting your T-28 crew into the KV-1, spending gold on the commander and silver on the rest of the crew. When you get into the KV-1, you can choose to unlock all the modules on it with free XP or by playing it. As soon as you have unlocked all modules, you have the option to unlock three different tanks:

KV-1 and it’s succsessors

If choose to unlock the KV-1S first, as I would recommend, you have a heavy tank, but no crew. When you have unlocked the KV-1S by playing the KV-1, your KV-1 crew should all have reached at least 100% base skill. If you then buy the KV-1S with a brand new crew with 75% base skill, you will have these two crews:

KV-1:

• Commander (100% base skill)
• Gunner (110% base skill)
• Driver (110% base skill)
• Radio operator (110% base skill)
• Loader (110% base skill)

KV-1S:

• Commander (75% base skill)
• Gunner (83% base skill)
• Driver (83% base skill)
• Radio operator (83% base skill)
• Loader (83% base skill)

Needless to say, the KV-1S crew will perform very bad. Aim time, reload time, view range, traverse speed and so on will affect your matches in a very bad way.

Enter the premium vehicle! There are at the moment three different premium russian heavy tanks to buy for gold: The Churchill III, the IS-2 (only for a short period) ant the IS-6. (Remember: If you have only played low tier tanks, it may not be a good idea to buy a tier VIII heavy premium tank. You should really have played about 2.000 matches before you try a tier VIII heavy.)

So even if the Churchill III is not a very good tank, it will get the job done: To train a new crew. Let’s say you now have the above crews for the KV-1 and the KV-1S, and you have bought the Churchill III. What to do?

The answer is to be a bit patient. Put the first four crew members from the KV-1 (commander, gunner, driver and radio operator) in the Churchill III, and put the loader from the KV-1S in the last spot. Premium tanks can use any crew from any tank, as long as they are from the same nation and same type. And you can use crew members from different tanks. Check the box “Accelerate crew training“, and go into a battle. Since the KV-1S crew member has the lowest skill level, he will get a double amount of skill points from the battle. In addition to this, a premium tank crew get 50% extra crew XP for a single battle.

If you follow this method, your crew as a whole do not suffer to much from having to “drag around” the KV-1S crew member, and this crew member will quickly reach 110% base skill level. Once you are done with the KV-1S loader, you can start training the radio operator, and then the driver and so on, until your KV-1S crew have reached 100%/110% base skill level.

One way to do this even faster, is to play only the daily double with the Churchill III. This will take more days, but fewer battles.