Holiday Ops 2021: Tricks and Tips

 A few ideas to help you get the most out of Holiday Ops 2021...it seems to be a lot harder to max out your bonuses this year, even if you buy a lot of large boxes. 

Festive Atmosphere is everything

The higher your level of Festive Atmosphere, the more rewards you get. 

In the square, once you've placed a decoration in a slot, if you notice the little "orange badge" on that slot don't ignore it. That means there are new decorations available for that slot. When you first put a decoration in that slot you get 3 Festive Atmosphere points. BUT...if you get another decoration for that slot and change to that new decoration you get +1 Festive Atmosphere points. 

So don't think that once you've filled all the slots on the Christmas Tree, the Fair, and the Installation that you're done and don't need to look at them again. Until you get to Festive Atmosphere 10 keep taking advantage of those new decorations to make progress.

Large Decorations are important

Each large decoration raises your credit bonus by 2.5%, so getting all 4 gets you a permanent 10% bonus to credits (through the end of the event, at least). You have to make the large decorations by flipping the switch in the Decorider.

Collections are tough though...

Maxing out the collections of decorations contributes to your total bonus, and for many players this will be the hardest thing to do. Why? The main reason for this, I think, is that decorations are harder to come by so it's harder to fill the collections than it has been in past years.  Also new decorations in the Decorider are more expensive (in terms of shards) - it's a minimum of 1000 shards to craft a random decoration now. In past years some of the "low level" decorations were much less than that.

Adding to the frustration, using the Decorider, especially once you've got more than 50% or so of the decorations in the collection, seems to produce a discouraging number of duplicates.

Here we've spent 7500 shards and gotten 5 decorations...but only two different types. Even more frustrating there are half a dozen slots for that type of decoration, and I only had two of those going in. Want to guess which 2?

That makes Antiduplicator charges almost essential if you want any efficiency at all...but you only get 10 or so Antiduplicator charges initially. So you have to spend even more shards to avoid dupes.

Dez lays it out

Good video from Dez talking about this issue and offering some tips.

Free bunks from Arnie?

As you complete Arnie's daily missions you'll unlock discounts you can apply to tech tree tanks. You might be eyeing some of the Tier 7 or above discounts for lines you're grinding, but don't overlook the tier II, III, and IV ones. You get 100% discounts there (free tanks) and even if you don't care about playing at those tiers those tanks can be great for one thing...

...free barracks slots. If your barracks is full, you can pick up a free Tier II-IV tank, and fill it with random crew members from the barracks to free up bunks for free. If you don't care about playing the new tank you don't need to train them on the new tank, it doesn't even matter if they're crew of the right type. They're literally just sleeping in that tank to free up bunks in the barracks.

Also from Arnie...

You can pick up to 3 tech tree tanks to assign bonuses to. This can be a great way to get an extra 50% bonus for EVERY battle (win or lose) if you're grinding field mods, or grinding to the next tank in the tree.

Alternatively you can get an extra 100% bonus to crew for every battle, if you're just grinding crew skills.

P.S. If you're on NA and you bought boxes very early in the event...

We're getting "compensation" for an error in their blog post. As of Monday the 13th at 7:15AM Pacific time I haven't seen them arrive yet, but...

Holiday Ops Compensation (worldoftanks.com)

GLHF!