AutoLoader: Black Market, Frontline, and more!

This week on AutoLoader....

The Black Market wraps up

For the last week World of Tanks has had the Black Market event going on. I like the idea of the Black Market - it's a chance to get some interesting tanks for gold or credits. I found THIS edition of the Black Market a bit underwhelming because:

1. Didn't seem like there were a lot of good unique tanks. Maybe the Type 59G? I guess the BT SV is unique, but I'm just not interested in playing tier 3.
2. The auction style for some of the tanks was different, but made it harder to know if you were going to get a tank, and far more likely you'd overpay.
3. The hours were tough. The morning release was at 8AM Pacific, which was right in the middle of my commute to work. I ended up trying to remote into my home computer from the bus.

Of course the fourth reason I found it underwhelming was specific to me: I already have almost all the tanks they offered. The EBR, the Lansen, the Caernervon AX, the AMX 13 57, etc. For people who didn't have them, it's cool they could get them. 

Frontline is coming

I'm a bit over Frontline, as you may recall, but I may have to give it another go in part to farm credits, and in part because I'm intrigued by these reward tanks they're offering this year. Apparently you can earn tokens in Frontline or Steel Hunter and apply those towards 2 of 3 reward tanks.

To be honest I didn't care much for Steel Hunter so not sure I'll play much of that...which means I may have to grind a lot of Frontline.

Well....we'll see. 

Positivity

The positivity effort has been going well. I can't tell if it's reducing toxicity but I have noticed that I get more positive post-game messages now. In fact, I'd say at least 50% of the post-game messages I get are "gg" or "You did good" and not only from my own team. Maybe my blog post had something to do with that. Probably not. Keep it up tankers!

Pantera

Thanks to last week's #ShowdownSaturday I got to play my Pantera a bunch and I have to say...it's really really good.  I was consistently doing 2K+ in direct damage, as much as another 1K in spotting and tracking, and almost always had at least 2 kills. After 73 battles I have a 56.2% win rate in it.

It may be the best Tier VIII Tech Tree medium in the game, and that's saying something because I think the Cent I and T-44 are quite good. The UDES 14, T69, and Indien Panzer are pretty decent.

Here's what Taugrim had to say about the Pantera:

 

Grinding obscure lines

I've been grinding the last few lines that I hadn't already worked lately. The AT line of Brit TDs and the Japanese Mediums. So far I've been pleasantly surprised. Not because they're especially great...but they're not as bad as I feared.

The Brit TDs have excellent frontal armor and a fast firing gun. I'm only up to the AT 8 so far, but 203mm of frontal armor at Tier 6 is remarkable (as long as they don't aim for the cupola). DPM, dispersion and pen are pretty good.

The Japanese mediums have pretty good guns so far. I'm on the Type 4 Chi-To. In most respects it's unremarkable. But the DPM is competitive at its tier, the pen is quite good and  shell velocity is good/

I'm casually continuing to grind them, but so far...it's been ok.

T-55A missions

Continuing to make progress on the T-55A missions. I finally finished the SPG mission I was stuck on (SPG-5?) and with that out of the way I proceeded to knock off the next 3 missions in one session! Between the recovered certificates from previous campaigns and the three more certificates I bought in the Black Market, I only really need to finish 3 (maybe 2 if I can recover one more set of certificates) of the classes in order to get the T-55A. 

GLHF tankers!