The potatoes guide to doing better, part 3

Hello, and welcome to part three of the potatoes guide to doing better. You can find the first two parts here.

• Part 1
• Part 2

So in part one I talked about tactics in the game and tank setups, while in part two I talk about settings and tools, but there's something that has become painfully obvious during my last month of trying to do the missions for the T55a and Chimera, which I feel like I need to address.

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• Don't play bad tanks

My stats took a complete nosedive when I started a couple of the new lines I needed to complete these missions, and my win rate for the last week is in tomato territory. Not only did I have to play a bunch of shitty tanks, but I also had to play them without full modules, since I just wanted to get through the lines, spending as little free experience as possible.

Playing bad tanks can be both tanks that are objectively bad, or tanks that are really bad while stock. Optimally you should never play a stock tank, but I personally have neither the money or patience to free experience my way to every single module on a new tank, but many tanks can be made a LOT less painful by carefully spending free experience on the vital modules.

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• Don't lose because of dumb missions

When I finally arrived at the desired vehicles, I took another stat hit because many of the missions are downright idiotic, requiring you to not actually kill tanks, because you want them to bounce on you, not killing tanks because you need to stun them instead in your artillery (and playing artillery also tanks your stats), or shooting at a specific type of tank instead of the logical one, because you need damage on that specific type.

Now I fully recognize that there's a lot of advantages to be gained from the missions, and I'm by no means telling you not to do them, but your win rate and WN8 WILL suffer while you're at it. The only way to avoid this is to simply pick a mission, and then not think about it until you do it by accident, and then pick another.

Personally I really want the top tier reward tanks, so I'm going to swallow the bitter pill, and tank my stats into the ground trying to cap or bounce my way through the stupidity. Speaking of stupidity…

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• Don't play anything but your best self-sufficient tanks during EXP-multiplier events

Whenever there's a x4 or x5 multiplier for the first win of the day, or some other similar event going on, you will have absolutely terrible games. This is quite simply because everyone – you included – will be playing like utter morons trying to maximize the experience multiplier. Scouts will suicide like mad, artilleries will friendly fire you (*they can still stun you*), Tank Destroyers will move to idiotic locations if they're not seeing any action, heavies will drive to the wrong locations because they want to farm damage from the very beginning, and mediums will overextend in the attempt to grab as much experience as possible.

This means that during events you simply cannot reliably play any tank that relies on your team. You cannot play anything that relies upon your team doing what they're supposed to, anything that requires a certain pace in the game, or anything too slow to run away from bad situations. The problem is that like everyone else, you'll want to have that juicy experience multiplier on all your tanks, so like me you'll probably ignore this advice, which is fair as long as you know that you're willingly dragging your stats out behind the farmhouse and putting a bullet in it.