Balancing Premium vs. Progression Vehicles - What do you keep in rotation?

[Quantum_Ranger 14]

What's the best way to manage a large inventory of tanks?

In the beginning, when all I had was progression vehicles, it was easy - grind up the tech tree, and the finished vehicles pretty much go into reserve unless they have good retrofits and generate good income.

Then I got a few prems, and I would keep a high-tier prem to farm credits, so I could afford more progression vehicles.

Now I have a bit of a strategic problem - I have more nice tanks than I can play in 1 session, and some less-than-nice tanks which might get better through grinding... but grinding the progression tanks is starting to feel more like a chore when there are other more fun vehicles to play... unless I have a BP mission to incentivize the grind. At the moment, I have a few progession vehicles that I just haven't played in awhile, so their tech trees are just stagnating. I even have some prems (like the Sabra) that I haven't played for more than a couple missions.

Is there a good strategy for deciding what tank one should play over another?  And long-term, is there a real payoff to grinding up the progression trees aside from tank collecting?  And what do I do with all of this locked XP (considering my gold supply is rather limited)?

Thanks for advice,

DVC, QR

 

 

[knutliott 41]

This is a new problem, really.

Back in the day, you couldn't unlock the next tank in a progression line until you'd reached 100% on your current tank.  And back in those days, 100% actually meant 100% - the tank was fully unlocked and upgraded, all options purchased and installed.  The only thing that might remain was to fully upgrade your crew... especially at lower tiers your crew would often only be level 3 (or even level 2 at really low tiers) by the time you'd fully unlocked the tank.  Now vehicles have so much overprogression on them (and not all of it is tagged as such and obvious) that you're unlocking the next vehicle long before your current vehicle is really 100% done.

Then there's the further consideration of retrofits... is your vehicle "done" if it doesn't have a full set of level 2 retrofits?

Personally, I keep playing a vehicle until it is fully unlocked and has all of its non-overprogression upgrades installed.  (Or rather, all of the ones that aren't tagged as such in the UI.)  Below Tier 8, though, I don't bother to purchase retrofits for them as that's just way too expensive with the game's current economy.

I mark all of my not-yet-fully-upgraded vehicles as "favorites" and then typically keep those displayed.  I only use "reserve" for expired rentals.  Everything else just sits there in the garage with no tags so that I can find it if I want it.

There have been a couple of times in the past when I've had all owned vehicles fully upgraded and nothing new to buy.  When that happens, I use the "premium" filter and generally just have fun playing premiums.  Or maybe I'll use the filter to display all of my Tier 10s and run through those once.  Or whatever.  When everything's already fully upgraded, you just play what you feel like playing at any given time.  I rarely play lower than Tier 8 in those circumstances, though, just because it's generally easier finding matches at Tiers 8-10.

But as long as I have tanks to grind, that's what I do.  I bring up my favorites list and play each one once to use the daily x2 bonus, then play whichever one of them I feel like for a few matches.

Note that as you're still grinding through the tech trees, you're much better off to grind them all at once rather than trying to get a single tree all the way to Tier 10 as fast as possible.  This is due to the daily x2 bonus - the more of those you can use each day, the faster you progress overall.  So spread out, unlock as much as you can, and grind everything together.  This also helps with earnings - you should be able to keep up until Tier 7 or 8 even without using Premium time or boosters... what you earn while grinding a vehicle is normally sufficient to buy the next one.  That falls behind if you use retrofits, though, which is one of the reasons I didn't equip anything below Tier 8 with retrofits as I was grinding.

The only real benefit to unlocking everything is that you're then ready in case a new progression tank gets added.  It's not likely to happen anymore, but back in the day they'd occasionally add a new progression tank and if you didn't have everything unlocked up to that point you couldn't access it.

Note that Premium tanks aren't supposed to be better than Progression tanks - they're just supposed to be different.  AW isn't terribly good at balancing, though, so especially in PvE there are Premium tanks that are pretty seriously OP.  Of course there are also Progression tanks that are pretty seriously OP, too... I'm looking at you, T-15.  But the basic idea remains true - the game is not pay-to-win, so you really do not need to own any Premium tanks to be competitive.  They do pretty dramatically increase your credit earnings, though!

[TeyKey1 119]

Ran into this problem a couple years ago. Had my selection of prems/progression vehicles I liked to play and the grind just started to become increasingly annoying. Luckily we had the Balance 2.0 progression reset at that time which gave me a shitload of basically everything but most importantly Reputation. At this time I decided to only research the tanks I liked before to the level they were well playable or had all essential modules unlocked. The rest of the remaining XP I regrinded to save the reputation. So tldr I have a lot of Reputation lying around now.

Good thing about this is that if I have a line I want to grind now I can instantly unlock all the important modules on a tank for it to perform well enough to finish the grind. Also it gives me the freedom to skip the tanks I don't like. So at this point I'm hardly playing any vehicles I don't like because I either just ignore or skip them entirely. 

What I want to tell you with this is that there's no reason to waste your time with frustrating tanks you don't want to play or grind. I don't see much point of grinding tanks just for the sake of having them gather dust in the garage after you're finished and not even having fun doing it.

1 hour ago, Quantum_Ranger said:

Is there a good strategy for deciding what tank one should play over another?

Best I can tell you is to play whatever you like to play at that moment. In the end it's a game and we are playing games for the fun of it (I hope at least) 

[dfnce 28]

13 hours ago, Quantum_Ranger said:

Now I have a bit of a strategic problem - I have more nice tanks than I can play in 1 session, and some less-than-nice tanks which might get better through grinding... but grinding the progression tanks is starting to feel more like a chore when there are other more fun vehicles to play... unless I have a BP mission to incentivize the grind. At the moment, I have a few progession vehicles that I just haven't played in awhile, so their tech trees are just stagnating. I even have some prems (like the Sabra) that I haven't played for more than a couple missions.

Is there a good strategy for deciding what tank one should play over another?  And long-term, is there a real payoff to grinding up the progression trees aside from tank collecting?  And what do I do with all of this locked XP (considering my gold supply is rather limited)?

• play for fun
• progress many tanks simulteneously, play one tank one time a day for victorious x2
• reserve unneeded tanks
• favorite currently progressing tanks
• more tanks in garage (even hidden), better garage XP bonus, faster you get next tanks and progress your commanders, profit ?

 

 

[Haswell 294]

Best way to deal with having too many vehicles is to ignore them.

In all seriousness, it's not an problem for me since I stopped playing the game religiously and ran out of things to grind that interest me. I evaluate vehicles based on their performance capabilities rather than XP or credit earning potential, and there are still a lot of progression vehicles that perform better than premium ones, both in overall and situationally depending on the vehicle in question. You can say that I play for fun.

The fastest and least soul-crushing way to grind credits is to run heroics every week with the x10 multiplier, stacking all the bonuses you want. Even if you don't have a premium tier 9 or 10 for printing credits you should still be getting 20 million or more for a full run, not to mention the XP you may want for grinding whatever tier 9 or 10 you may have. This will largely remove the need to grind credits at lower tiers, freeing you to play or grind whatever you want.

There is zero reward for playing something you don't want to, zero downsides to not playing vehicles that you don't enjoy. I have accumulated a sizable fleet of tier 6-8 premium vehicles from the contract boxes and I have not played a single game for most of them, as well as progression vehicles that I have not touched since I ground them out because they aren't good performers. I am not losing out on anything by ignoring them.

 

17 hours ago, knutliott said:

I mark all of my not-yet-fully-upgraded vehicles as "favorites" and then typically keep those displayed.  I only use "reserve" for expired rentals.  Everything else just sits there in the garage with no tags so that I can find it if I want it.

I use a similar approach, except I don't actually mark anything for reserve or favorite (aside for 3 vehicles that I use for checking map rotations). It's rather pointless for me to mark vehicles since I barely play any of them and it's far too much of a hassle to mark all of them as reserve, and I don't play any of them often enough that require more convenience than simply sorting by tier and class.