How to improve your tank

This post will cover how to improve your tank. I will use the tier VIII German heavy tank Löwe as an example, since it seem to be a popular premium tank for newcomers. Remember: Tier VIII is very different than tier I to III!

The Löwe isn’t a very easy tank to play, due to it’s low rate of fire, it’s low speed and it’s obvious weak spots.

Löwe, German tier VIII premium heavy tank

Once your crew reaches 100% base skill, the Löwe will fire 5 rounds per minute, which will give an average damage per minute of 1.600. (As long as you both hit and damage your opponent.) This is a very low number, but here is how you can increase it:

• Getting Brothers in arms as a perk on all your crew members. This will give 5% improvement on all qualifications.
• Mounting ventilation. This will give 5% improvement on all qualifications.
• Mounting a Gun Rammer. This will give 10% improvement on reload time, by decreasing reload time.
• Using a consumable. For German vehicles you can use Chocolate. This will give 10% improvement on all qualifications. This is, however, not recommended on a vehicle like the Löwe, where your normal equipment should be a repair kit, a first aid kit and a fire extinguisher (since it has got a 20% chance of being set on fire).

Let’s see how this will affect your DPM. All these values are fetched from tanks.gg:

1. Base DPM: 1.668,57 (this really should be 1.600, but I don’t know how tanks.gg calculates this number)
2. Brothers in arms: 1.706,29 (2,2% improvement compared to line 1.)
3. Ventilation: 1.706,29 (2,2% improvement compared to line 1)
4. Gun rammer: 1.853,97 (10% improvement compared to line 1)
5. Chocolate: 1.744 (4,5% improvement compared to line 1)
6. Brothers in arms + Ventilation: 1.744 (4,5% improvement compared to line 1)
7. Brothers in arms + Ventilation +  Gun rammer: 1.937,78 (16,1% improvement compared to line 1)
8. Brothers in arms + Ventilation +  Gun rammer +  Chocolate: 2.021,59 (21,2% improvement compared to line 1)

These values are estimates, and not correctly calculated. Using Brothers in arms in combination with ventilation gives a cumulative effect, which should be 5% + 5% = 10%. Based on this, the total effect of using all these ways of improving the Löwe, the DPM number in line 8 should be 2.080 (5%+5%+10%+10% =30% improvement), since these values are cumulative. (If they had been additive, it would have been  2.134,44, since 1,05*1.05*1,1*1,1*1.600 = 2.134,44.)

The only one of these improvements that only affects DPM is the gun rammer. All the other elements also improve the Major Qualifications of the entire crew and in any of the common Skills (Repair, Firefighting, and/or Camouflage).

Anyway: The best way to improve the tank is to play according to it’s strengths and weaknesses. The Löwe has got decent turret armor, although there are weak spots. It has a very accurate gun and high penetration, and the side armor of the hull makes it a decent sidescraping tank. So you should hide your hull and you can use it for sniping, but in tier VIII battles you can’t camp in the base…