Is skipping tanks with free exp worth it?

Hi, I'm currently grindin the german E100 heavy line, while I take a break from the soviets, to have some variety, and I got the Tiger 131 from the refereal program because I play mainly heavies, and the T34-85M wasn't avaliable when I had to choose, I would have gotten it despite being a medium.

So my experience with the 131 has been… well, it's a medium with a heavy tag, sometimes it bounces some shots but only when it's an auto-ricochet or a tier 4-5 with low pen shoots you, anything can easily fuck you hard, because of it's god awful armor thickness AND angles.

For some reason tho, even if it's pretty much the same, I have a 53% win ratio with the VK36.01h and I just Ace Tanked it, I just play it like if it was a medium, but I can't, for my life, play well with the 131, and the Tiger 1, has literally the same armor as the 131, but is a tier higher, and I don't feel like playing with a 100/80/80 armor in tier 7, nope, there's medium tanks with better armor dude, the only thing Tiger 1 has is a better gun than it's tier 6 counterparts, but I don't know man.

Yeah I have fun with the VK30.01h but it does allow you to play it like a medium, with 50kmh max speed. Tiger 1 is significantly slower, I just want to get to the Tiger II, which has much better armor and looks like the 1st actual heavy tank of the line, but I'd need 105k free exp to just skip it, and that's A LOT.

So what would you advise me to do? I don't want to spend gold converting exp.

Go through the excruciating pain of playing a tank that should be tier 6 but it's tier 7 and can see 9s? or playing other stuff while slowly building up the free exp? I have several other lines I'm interested in, so it's not like I'd be stuck on the same tank grinding free exp forever, but it still looks like it's gonna be a long time. I play with premium time and I have the Löwe and 703II to farm credits / more exp, if that helps.

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EDIT: I'd also try to use as many blueprints as I can on the Tieger II to lower the ammount of exp required obviously.