Table of Content:
Gold | Extremely Limited Use | Very Limited Use | Limited Use | Other Use | What Not To Do | Conclusion
What About Gold?
So you’ve seen a couple places in our previous article(s) where we’ve referred to gold. As you probably know, this is the premium in-game currency. You can acquire it several ways. The simplest is just to buy a gold package from the World of Tanks store. You can also earn “free” gold by participating in the various tournaments each week. Finally, if you are in a clan which can take and hold land on one of the global maps, your clan earns gold for their treasury, which they may distribute to clan members from time to time.
There are lots of things you can do with gold. However, because it is more rare (and, generally, more difficult and/or costly to acquire than credits), it is worth evaluating the various things you can do with it, and reserving it only for those where it makes the most sense. This is especially true when you are a new player, as your opportunities for getting “free” gold either via tournaments or the Clan Wars Global Map will be limited.
Primary Uses of Gold
Which uses of gold make the most sense depend somewhat on your willingness to spend money on the game. In addition to using it to buy Premium time (which is usually a very slightly better deal, in terms of dollars per unit pPremium time, than buying Premium time outright from the Premium shop), there are at least a few other ways that even extremely frugal players should consider spending gold. In breaking down the best uses for gold, we will present and discuss them in roughly increasing order of willingness to spend real money on gold packages.
Extremely Limited
Equipment Demounting - Other than the three “free” pieces of equipment that can be mounted and demounted an infinite number of times (Camo Net, Binoculars, and Toolkit), all other pieces of tank equipment can either be “sold” with the tank (at a 50% discount), or can be demounted for a flat 10 fee. Since the minimum cost to re-buy those pieces of equipment is 50,000 credits, and often is 500,000 - 600,000 , you can save yourself a significant amount of credit grinding by keeping a small amount of gold available to demount the equipment. This means you don’t have to waste time grinding credits to buy equipment for your new tanks, and you spend less time playing unequipped tanks (which, at upper tiers, is seriously detrimental to your ability to contribute) since you can equip them with the previously demounted equipment.
Very Limited
Crew Retraining In New Tank - When moving crews from tank to tank, they must be re-trained in their primary qualification. This can be done for free for a 20-40% penalty to their primary qualification (which must then be improved to 100% before they continue any other skill progression), with credits for a 10-20% penalty, or for 200 for no experience penalty. As with equipment demounting, spending some credits here can save you a LOT of crew experience grinding (because experience is related to skill percentage in an exponential relationship, even losing 10% off the primary qualification translates to around 29k experience, while 20% translates to around 64k). If you are very patient, this does occasionally go on sale for 100 instead of 200 .
Limited
Crew Skill Retraining - Similar to the above, you can also re-set the skills and perks of an individual crew member for 200. This can be useful if you want to acquire perks, but don’t want to spend all the time while the perk reaches 100% without any benefits. For example, a common thing to do on your commander would be to start him off training Recon (for better view range) as his first skill (since Recon is a skill, it is effective immediately, with your current “percentage” in the skill giving you that proportion of the maximum benefit), and then, when it reaches 100% and you start on his second skill, re-training and choosing Sixth Sense as the first skill (since it is a perk, and does nothing until it is trained to 100%). As above, this does occasionally go on sale for 100 instead of 200 .
Free Experience Conversion - If you have accumulated combat experience on your premium tanks or fully-elited normal tanks (tanks for which you have researched all modules AND all immediate successor tech tree tanks), you can convert it to free experience at the cost of 1 per 25 converted. Obviously, this is limited only by your willingness and ability to acquire and spend gold this way. The frugal version is to save this only for researching essential modules on newly-acquired tanks to ease the pain of grinding them (for example, if you acquired the
VII
T29
, and didn’t have the 90mm gun, it would be perfectly reasonable and in fact highly recommended to use free experience to allow yourself to equip the 90mm gun instead of the 76mm potato launcher you would otherwise be armed with). This also occasionally goes on sale, which allows the conversion of 35 per 1 spent.
Further Uses of Gold
The above covers the best ways to use gold if you want to be very frugal about your use of it. If you are willing and/or able to be slightly more liberal about your gold use, some further sensible options open up.
Changing Crew Member Primary Qualifications - For 500 , you can swap the primary qualification (which also allows you to re-choose all skills at no experience penalty) of a crew member. This can be useful if you end up with an extra crew member (like a useless radio operator; Russian heavy line i’m looking at you) that isn’t useful in your new tank, but has a full first skill already trained. Instead of letting him sit around your barracks, you can change his primary qualification to be Commander of some other tank, and thus start the new tank with a commander who has Sixth Sense trained.
Permanent Camo On Keeper Tanks - At a cost varying per vehicle tier, you can buy permanent camouflage for summer, winter, and desert for each of your tanks. The first-pass version of this would be to buy them only for high-tier premium vehicles and end-tier (tier 10) tanks. The slightly less frugal version is to add tier 6 and tier 8 “meta” tanks that you know you’ll be keeping in your garage. As with some other uses of gold, this one also occasionally goes on sale and discounts the normal price by 50%.
What Not To Do
Do not ever convert gold into credits. Seriously. We’ll find you and taunt you mercilessly on stream if you do this. Unless you already have 100,000 or something from tournaments and Clan Wars. In which case, why are you reading this?
All That Said… What Do I Really Do?
Given the choice, your best “buy” at the early and mid stages of the game is premium time. Premium tanks are a great choice, and certainly excellent at grinding out credits. However, their real power cannot be recognized without the addition of Premium time. It is a powerful multiplier, and your account will be better off with the Premium time over a single Premium tank.
