AutoLoader: Battle Pass, Tour of Duty, and Top of the Tree

Today let's talk just for a moment about Battle Pass, Tour of Duty, and the upcoming Top of the Tree event in World of Tanks.

Battle Pass

The new Battle Pass season is well underway. As usual there's a very useful $10 package you can buy that gives you some easy missions that will get you 20 or 30 chapters of Battle Pass very quickly. I tend to buy it early, but maybe it's better to wait until later in the event and buy it for the sprint to the finish.

It also gives you crew books and some other rewards, so I think it's a pretty good deal.

Harvesting bonuses

As you probably know you can only get so many BP points on a particular tank and once it's maxxed out you can't get anymore...but at that point you DO get a bonus batch of points. Max out a Tier 6 tank, for example, and you get a 15 point bonus.

It only takes 100 Battle Pass points to max out a Tier 6 tank and you can probably do that in 20-25 battles.

This season they added tier 4 and 5 tanks to the list too - my understanding is that you get a 15 point bonus for each of those too, and the value to max them is only 70 points for tier 4 and 85(?) points for Tier 5.

The reason I bring this up is that in recent seasons Wargaming has liked to spring a surprise chapter - like a marathon - on us late in the Battle Pass season and if you finish all the stages of that you get a tank or some other reward. Inevitably everybody ends up scrambling to complete that marathon or just buying the extra stages for gold. I'm taking the opportunity now to load up my Tier 4, 5, & 6 tanks with battle pass points so that when the time comes (a surprise chapter or a sprint to the finish) I'll have a couple of dozen tanks that are within a battle or two of collecting the bonuses.

Important: If you're going to do that pay close attention to the Battle Pass count for each tank. You don't want to accidentally max the tank out and collect the bonus prematurely. Get them to within a battle or two of the max, then put that tank away until you're ready to finish it.

Tour of Duty

Wargaming has announced a pretty big change to Tour of Duty. I don't fully understand the change yet, but it seems clear there's at least one good thing and one (sort of) bad thing.

The good thing

The new reward - the Contracarro 45T, a Tier X Italian MT which I've heard good things about.

The bad thing

To get the Contracarro you're going to have to play some games, pretty often, in a platoon with your clanmates. For players like me who tend to be lone wolves, that may be uncomfortable or even annoying. I tend to want to just play the tanks I play and not get caught up having to sync with a platoon-mate every battle.

I guess we'll see how it works out.

Top of the Tree

I'm pleased to see that we finally get a new tank line in the Top of the Tree. For months the Top of the Tree only featured tanks I already had the entire line for. I could grind Field Mods (and that got harder when they took away the x5 bonuses) but not much more.

This time we get the BZ-75, the Chinese Heavy. I have the Tier 9 unlocked but never bought it. So now it'll be on sale, and I can buy it cheap, grind it with the modest Top of the Tree bonuses and get the BZ-75 on sale too.

Along the way I'll probably grind the lower-tier Chinese heavies for field mods, as long as I'm at it. Nice!

That's it for this one.

GLHF!