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Tank Academy with Alexander_cheng

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Post by Alexander_cheng Sat Jan 23, 2016 3:07 pm

Tank Academy With Alexander_Cheng

Hello COD, my name is Alexander_Cheng. For the past few weeks, I have heard numerous complaints about bad teams from many of our players, and I had my share of experience with the terrible teams as well. My win rate, which is normally around 66-70%, (For the recent couple days, not my actual win rate displayed in the game.) dropped to 59% for one day. I became extremely frustrated with the game,wondering if I am the one to blame for my defeats, or is it just because of the bad teams. I have spoken to many players I know, some from III, DFNT, and a few others. Almost everyone agrees that teams are getting worse, and that their win rate is dropping because of it. (So to those who are frustrated with the game, know that you are not the only ones.) There are many theories on why that is, but my personal theory is that enemy teams are getting better. I been seeing a lot more players who are over 50% win rate, even at tiers 5,6,7 etc… Still, I have seen few whose win rate is above 60% with the exception of tier X. I refused to believe that I, a 60% + player, can be so easily outplayed by those with 50% win rates. So I believe that there needs to be a drastic change in my play style. No longer can I walk into the middle of a fight, kill all the enemy, and get out barely taken any damaged. After some trials and errors, I was able to get my in rate back a bit, (It’s going down again because I am playing tier X)but I still hear many complaints of bad teams. What people don’t realize is that a lot of their games are completely winnable, despite the fact how bad their teammates are. The smallest mistakes, weather you noticed or not, will cost you your game.  I personally think that since I am the only intelligent one on the team 99% of the time, it is my responsibility to carry the game. If I do not do that, then I failed my job, and all fault lies with me. Yes, sometimes I will rage and blame my team for doing the wrong thing, but it is not their fault that they are new to the game. Think about the 60, 70, and 80% win rate guys. I am sure they get bad teams as well, and yet they are still able to carry. So, yes teams are getting worse and worse, but that does not mean you should keep blaming the team, all that means is you have to get better.
Note: I am a medium/light tank driver, so many of the tactics I have here will apply best to those tanks. If you play heavies, TDs, some of the material here will not work, or work to a less extent. (Example: Side scraping in a TD? Or snapshot in a Russian heavy?) I also don’t claim to be the best player ever. I have my own share of struggles and difficulties with the game. The materials covered in this guide are skills which I acquired from many different sources and I hope to pass it on to others. Keep in mind that this is just the first part of the guide, and many more additions will be made on here. Feel free to leave any comments and criticisms below.

Taking cover
Anything can be used as cover, from boxes to logs to hulls to buildings. Here is my classification of different types of cover.

Perpendicular Cover- Cover where the sides of the object is perpendicular to the ground. For example, buildings. These covers are the best for side scraping. Do not peek a boom out of a perpendicular cover as you will expose your weaker side armor to the enemy as you pop out, and most certainly get shot.

Angled Cover- This cover meets the ground at an angle, forming a triangle like shape protruding out of the ground. These covers are great for peek a booming, as you will only expose your turret, and very little of your side as you pop out. However, you will need to peek a boom fast, as the enemy will have a chance to shoot the very very limited side armor you may or may not have showing.

Peek a Boom
Medium tanks are great for peek a booming, however, I see that many people are doing it wrong. To peek a boom effectively, you must have:

Speed- The only thing stopping the enemy from returning a shot at you
Timing- You do not have to pop out each time you are reloaded. Sometimes you will find that if you wait a few second for the enemy to fire a shot, you can make sure you don’t take a return shot when you pop out because the enemy is reloading.
Auto Aim- Your peek a boom will be a lot faster if you have auto aim on (Both arcade and sniper mode) because you will not have to waste time once you pop out to point your gun at the enemy. It will already be aiming at your target provided you have auto aim on.

Practice, practice and practice some more, and you will eventually be very good at it. Good players can pull out of cover, shoot, then pull back in less than a second.

Mistakes people make while peek a booming:
-Players zoom in after they pop out of cover, wasting time.
-Players aim in their shots while they are out of cover, again wasting time. (This applies to mediums the most. Heavy tanks may not have the accuracy to snapshot.)
-Players pop out until they can see the entire enemy tank, then shoot. This makes them more exposed and gives the enemy more time to shoot back. To correct this mistake, pop out so you can see a tiny bit of penetrable armor of the enemy, shoot, and pull back.
-Players pop out in front of a dangerous tank, i.e Fv 215b 182 or a E 100 while those tanks have a shell in their chamber. You must wait until those tanks fires, then go and put shots in them.




Side Scraping
Here is a link to a video explaining side scraping if you don’t already know.
http://forum.wotblitz.com/index.php?/topic/2310-beginners-guide-to-side-scraping/

It is possible to side scrape in pretty much any tank, I have done it successfully in a crusader before. (However, your side has to be at a steeper angle than the m103 in the picture in in the link. This is a very important skill to have, especially when your cover is a building, which makes it unfavorable for you to peek a boom. (If you peek a boom out of the sides of a building, you will expose your vulnerable side armor to the enemy. Despite that, I still see many players, including myself, pop out of the corner of the building, and take damage which can be avoided.

Side scraping is a little bit tricky in medium tanks as you will have to angle your side at the steepest angle possible. Any mistakes in your angling will result in penetrations by the enemy team. Hence you must wait until the enemy fires a shot first before un-angling your side and return shots.

Situational awareness

This is a skill I have been struggling for quite a long time, and even to this day I have yet to fully master it. I used to platoon with a guy from XPD, and I would often see him leave a favorable cover and move to a less favorable one. I kept wondering why is he doing that? Until I take a shell in the back and I realize that the enemy has flanked around me, and that xpd player just avoided a lot of damage by leaving. Having good situational awareness can not only save you some precious health, it will also aid in helping you decide where is the best place to go, which tanks you should assist, and it will help you get more kills in battle. (Not that you kills are super important, but getting more kills will increase your KD, and it will prevent the enemy from getting an extra shot off at your team.) Now you can see the importance of situational awareness, and although I still do not excel at it, that is not saying I have not made any improvements. so I will share with you everything I did to try to make myself situationally aware.

-Go on youtube and look up “ten second timer.” Basically it is a timer which rings every 10 seconds in order to remind you to look at the mini map. This did not work so well for me, as my tunnel vision was so severe, my mind blocked out the sound of the clock ringing even when I have my computer set to the highest volume possible. Perhaps one of you guys will find this helpful.

-Do not keep sniper mode on all the time, as sniper mode will greatly reduce your peripheral vision. Practice zooming out immediately after each shot.

-One thing I struggle with is not taking my camera off of the target right in front of me. This is a huge mistake and it will sometimes cost me more health lost. Obviously it is important to see what is going on in front of you, however, for the few seconds that you are reloading, the enemy in front of you are not going to go any where. Feel free to take a look around when you are in no danger. You might even be able to find better targets, or targets that is a one shot, and get the kill instead.

-The mini map is helpful... ish. I find that you will get way more information about the enemy if you just use your lookout bar (Blue bar which can be placed anywhere on the screen and it allows you to rotate your camera without moving your turret.) For example, by looking around, I can clearly see which general direction the enemy is facing, how many friendlies are trying to engage them, how much health everyone is on, etc… This information allows me to make much more informed decisions about what I should do. However, the mini map is not completely useless. It is helpful in certain situations, for example when you are in sniper mode and you do not want to zoom out for some reason, the mini map can be used to identify the general location of the enemy. Then if you see that the enemy is in a potentially dangerous place, you can use the lookout bar to look around.

-Last thing is to keep track of where the enemy was last spotted. This is a trick taught to me my poop of death, one which I still haven’t been able to effectively use. If you know where the enemy was last spotted, you can make more informed decisions on how to deal with them.

Out of cover? No problem
For the most part, the hull is the weakest part of almost every tank. Hence when you are out in the open, always wiggle your hull, even if you are in the lightest armored tank. The reason being that you will greatly increase the chance of the enemy hitting the front of your track and only do track damage. The other thing is the enemy might have trouble changing their aim, and they might instead shoot your well angled side when your front is totally exposed, and vice versa.

Hull Down
A huge mistake I see when players try to hull down is they stay still and believe that their strong turret will bounce everything. This is simply not true. Even the T-62A, or the IS-7’s turret can be splashed by HE from big guns. Hence it is important to move back and forth perpendicular to the enemy’s gun in order to make them miss their shots.

Even tanks with weak turret armor can hull down, but they will not be as effective. (Crusader) They simply have to rely on the fact that they are moving back and forth to try to get the enemy to miss. Although they will not bounce any shots, you are protecting your hull and only exposing your smaller turret, which is harder to hit.

Advanced Tactics
Perhaps now some of you went back and tried to peek a boom. At low tiers, if you peek a boom fast enough, the less skilled players will not be able to land many shots on you. However, as you climb up the tiers, you will notice that people will start to land more and more shots on you no matter how fast you peek a boom. There is a way to avoid taking damage each time you pop out. (This tactic isn’t really “advanced,” I just say that because i hardly see anyone do this.) I call this tactic drawing shots.
It is the act of pulling out of cover slightly, giving your enemy just that tiny tiny spot in which they can pen, and then quickly pull back. Most of the time the enemy, (Even good players) will not be able to resist taking a shot at that patch of armor. If you are able to pull back fast enough, you will often see that their shell either hits your super angled front plate, or hits your cover because auto aim drags their scope there. Once you baited a shot out of the enemy, you can now safely pop out and get a shot in.

Being patient
This mindset applies to tier x games the most. In your typical lower tier games, it is very easy to do damage as you will always find enemies who are not taking cover properly. However, as you go into tier x, everything changes. You will find that a lot more people take cover, especially the ones from XPD, Krieg, etc… Instead of trying to do damage to a hull down t62-a from XPD, I simply stay in my cover, sneak shots into less skilled opponents, and wait. I do not expect that xpd player to stay in that one spot the whole game. Eventually he has to leave cover, and that is when you strike. In this case, you will be in cover and he will not, and he will have a very hard time doing damage to you and you will have no trouble penetrating his weak hull. That is how you deal with good players on the enemy team.

Alright guys, that just about wraps it up. I probably forgot some stuff that I did not include, so I will add them in once I post the second part to the guide. I will be linking video examples of what I talked about later as well. Thanks for reading this far, I hope that this helped a bit. Stay safe, and good luck on the battlefield!

Alexander_cheng

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Post by Alexander_cheng Sat Jan 23, 2016 3:19 pm

There is another way of peek a booming. I do not know what it is called, but the player does not zoom in while doing it. Here is a link to a video:. skip to 5:54 to see it.

I am not sure if it makes you peek a boom faster, there is no way to tell, but I am pretty sure it does due to the fact that you will always get the first shot on the enemy, and then you can focus on pulling back. Takes a bit of practice to do though.

Alexander_cheng

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Post by PoD Sat Jan 23, 2016 8:13 pm

Fantastic guide! Lots of good general info for everyone and especially so for mediums! Bravo, Mr. Cheng - thanks for the hard work here.

-PoD
PoD
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Post by Harlan03111 Mon Jan 25, 2016 3:02 pm

Indeed! Great post! Extremely helpful in nursing my WR back and (even better) raising it above 54%!!

I think that any player out there who is proficient at taking cover is probably not that good at situational awareness. I see that in game and I see that in myself, for sure. For some odd reason, I have the hardest time giving up a flank or giving up some damage on one tank, even though I know the consequence is the destruction of my own tank.

I'd like to add a few things to your article:

For situational awareness, like you said, Alexander, take a shot while in sniper mode, once that shot is fired (before it even hits), zoom out. Make it almost like a game. I guarantee you'll start to see things you never noticed, like one flank crumbling or one lone medium destroying your entire team.

When shooting at a target, keep auto-aim on in "Arcade Mode" (which is essentially non-sniper mode) and keep the auto-aim locked onto your intended target. While reloading, use that lookout bar and keep looking around, even if it seems like you're safe. This way, you will constantly be on alert.

That being said, I think everyone should play with the Auto-Aim toggle button on the side of their screen and the lookout bar activated. Auto-aim can be kept on while you're trying to hit a fast-moving medium, and I would suggest turning it off when you see a lot of enemy tanks, so that you can effectively hit weak spots.

Don't....go out of your way to kill a tank. Now, that is not to say "don't knock out tanks". But use logic. Too often, I see noobs rush out of cover just to get that one kill, and have their full-health tank be reduced to half or less in a matter of seconds. Don't go out of your way and risk lots of HP for a 60 damage kill.

The next two are really important: making sure only one gun can hit you and using your teammates as cannon fodder.

At all times in a battle, try to make sure that, at maximum, only one gun can hit you--the gun of the tank which you are shooting at. The biggest mistake is exposing yourself (either while peek-a-booming or while out of cover) to more than one gun, whether it be two, three, sometimes four. Try to pay attention to this during battle--it will decrease the amount of damage you take. For sure.

This one is dark and controversial, but, by far, has helped me the most....
Using your teammates as cannon fodder.
Honestly, I just directly assume I'm the only person on my team with any grey matter in my brain whatsoever. Unless I'm platooned. Either way, I have started letting my team rush ahead first. Rather than spotting for them, I let them spot for me, and then I make my tactical decisions. Yes, that means you'll lose out on a bit a damage at the beginning of the match, but it sure as hell is better than keeping your gun in the fight for a full 2 minutes.
Always remember: The longer you keep YOUR gun in the fight, the chances of you winning become greater. Keep your gun in the fight.
I've noticed something about human instinct--people will aim and shoot at the first thing they see, even if a better target presents itself. So, that being said, DON'T BE THE FIRST ONE SPOTTED. If you are, then you've done something horribly wrong, because that means you are either the first tank in your column, or you are the only person on your flank. Let the enemy hit your teammates. Better them than you.

Hopefully what I've added here helps. Yes, the last one is dark, but I think it helps.
Hopefully it is relevant to the topic.

Oh, and btw, peek-a-booming in a heavy certainly works, but you have to be so much closer. Done it in the IS-6, IS-3, and T29, and it works to some degree. I still prefer to side-scrape in heavies tbh.
Harlan03111
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Post by Alexander_cheng Tue Jan 26, 2016 5:54 pm

Thank you for you addition to the guide Harlan! Really appreciate it! If anyone else have any other suggestions or tips you would like to share, please post them below so that others may learn from it.

I have found a better example of the no-scope peek a boom technique used by yellow cab, and here it is below. In this video, you can see his hands, and you can see when he presses the fire button, and when he pulls back to get a sense of the timing.




This style of peek a boom not only looks cool, but it also makes you peek a boom just a little bit faster, and it allows you to maintain better situational awareness. I have been trying this style of play, and it's been working okay for me. Just takes a bit of practice to get used to. Oh, does anyone else find the music annoying at the end of the video? The girl singing it is basically screaming.... I just don't understand these kind of music... Seriously are you in pain or are you trying to sing.

Alexander_cheng

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Post by Harlan03111 Tue Jan 26, 2016 8:16 pm

Hahaha the song is Weatherman by Dead Sara.
I recognize the song from Need for Speed...I guess you could say she's dying...?
Will have a new post up soon about switching languages in game and how to have a German commander for your German tanks Smile
Thanks for the vid Wink
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