World of Tanks Buying and Using Gold Guide

World of Tanks Buying and Using Gold Guide by Jodo42

‘Ello folks, Jodo here. Today I give you my very first tutorial, a player’s guide to spending gold. I realize it’s been done before, but I wanted to get a bit more in-depth than some of the other threads I’ve seen about it. Enough chit chat, let’s get started.

Before the Buy

Firstly, a few basic facts. Gold can be bought in 5 increments:
Taken from the WoT Wiki:
No. Gold amount Price (USD)
1. 25000 $ 99.95
2. 12000 $ 49.95
3. 6500 $ 29.95
4. 3000 $ 14.95
5. 1250 $ 6.95

So, if you notice, each higher price is a slightly better buy than the last. To actually spend the gold, there’s a lot of things to consider:

What do you need most at the time of buying, EXP, money, tanks, etc?
What amount do you need at minimum to do the job you need? And do you want extra to play around with?
Will you be buying gold again in the close future, and if so, how much?

Those are the 3 biggest questions. Now for answers. Obviously, you need more gold for bigger jobs. But to buy gold smart, realize several things. If you’re going to be buying gold again soon, it’s probably cheaper to get the bigger package than two smaller ones. Some things are going to take more gold than others, so buy your increments wisely.

Also consider if it’s worth getting the one, big time package or a smaller one and a much smaller one. Say, for example, you need a Lowe. A Lowe costs 12,500 gold, just over the $50.00 package. You need to think, is it going to be worth it to buy the $100.00 package, or should you just buy the $50.00 and the $7.00 package? Do you have something to spend that extra 11,500 gold on, or are you going to waste it on stupid/things you don’t need? If you want a Lowe, and nothing else, it’s best to buy the 12K and the 1250 packages. If you’re going to be buying a Lowe AND a Type 59, however, you probably want to go the 25K package and have the 5K to play around with.

Things like crew training and EXP conversion don’t seem to cost too much up front, but can cost you a TON later on in WoT. Once you have that free XP or %100 crew, what’s going to happen next? Are you going to let it sit in your garage and have fun with it, or are you going to use it to help you grind up faster? In general, bigger future plans mean more gold upfront. Realize you’ll probably do better with a %100 crew and get more free XP than without. Once you have you spent your first “chunk” of gold, leave the rest of it to use for later. If it’s a one time thing, make sure it IS a one time thing first, and then make sure again, and then, and ONLY then, buy a small amount of gold for XP/crew work. If you’re not %100 sure, it’s probably a good idea to get the next highest package. If you know that, for example, you’re going to use 200 gold to convert XP to elite your KT, so you can make more XP for conversion, get a bigger amount than normal. You’ll need that gold later, and you’ll wind up saving some money.

Before buying gold, always have a plan. If you know exactly what you want to do with your gold before hand, you’ll be much more likely to think things through and get the right amount of gold. Having a plan also lets you really think about what you need to spend gold on, and what you want to spend gold on. This is really the most crucial step, and it’s also the least I can tell you about. It’s really up to your personal preferences to determine your plan, I can’t tell you how to spend your gold. Just no matter what, have a plan.

Tl;dr? Have a plan, look to the future, know what you’re spending it on. Got it?

Congratulations! You’re now ready to buy some gold. There’s a TON of things you can do with gold, let’s take a look at some of the best uses of it.

Spending your Gold
Now that you have your gold, you need to do something with it. As said before, there’s a lot you can do with gold:

Buy a Premium Account.
Buy a Premium Tank (or two!)
Buy Premium Ammunition.
Buy Premium Consumables.
Dismount Non-demount-able Equipment.
Buy Credits.
Convert Locked Experience from an Elite tank to Free Experience.
Buy a %100 crew.
Buy more garage slots.
Buy more Barrack slots.
Start a clan.

Premium Accounts and Premium Tanks

We’re going to go over the big, important ones here, you can look the other ones up on the wiki. Firstly, premium accounts. Premium accounts are perhaps the best spending of your gold, for it increases your silver and XP gain by %50 Another chart from the wiki, telling you Premium Account pricing:

Extending Premium
Cost Length Days
24,000 Gold 12 months 360 days
13,500 Gold 6 months 180 days
2,500 Gold 1 month 30 days
1,250 Gold 1 week 7 days
650 Gold 3 days 3 days
250 Gold 1 day 1 day

As you can see, it can get somewhat expensive. However, just like buying your gold, the deals get better with higher prices. You need to take a lot of what you did in buying your gold into consideration. What are you going to do in the future? Is it a one time thing? Are you close to a new tank and just need a short jolt, or are you needing to do a hard grind? In general, the more work you need done, the longer you need premium. Used in combination with Premium Tanks, you can literally be drowning in silver in a matter of days. Buy what you need, and no more.

Premium tanks are another, somewhat less expensive option for making money. Premium tanks have several advantages over Premium accounts: They are always around, and are a one time investment. They always make good money, with or without premium accounts. They are often fun to drive! $$$ With these benefits, you can also be making lots of money. There’s another big benefit of premium tanks, not well known: most of the time, when you transfer crew from one tank to another, they lose some of their skill. So long as it’s the same class and nation crew, however, in premium tanks, there is no loss! This means you can transfer the crew from one tank to another, get the bonus XP, and then transfer it back the premium for no loss in skill, but an actual GAIN! This is awesome for crew speed leveling, and I recommend it, as it works for all premium tanks. However, not all premium tanks are created equal. Some make notably more than others. Notable money printers are:
Lowe- Slow, heavily armored and accurate German tier 8 heavy, 12,500 gold.

Type 59- Fast, heavily armored and with a rapid fire gun, a Chinese tier 8 medium, 7,500 gold.

KV-5- Very heavily armored, fairly mobile and realistically weak gun, a Soviet tier 8 heavy, 7,500 gold.

All three of these tanks make good money, and are good for funding your higher tiers. Even a new player just out of his T1 Cunningham can make 20-30K a round with his Lowe. This makes these tanks highly desirable for new players, but be warned: do well or suffer the rage. If you don’t do amazingly well in your tank, you will most likely be called a horrible n00b by half your team. If you do do well, you will be called an OP wallet warrior who feeds off of his mom’s credit card. It’s a lose-lose, but don’t despair. So long as you pretty much ignore chat and play well, you’ll DO well. These tanks, just like their lower tier counterparts, are inferior to a fully upgraded earned tank of equal tier, and have multiple fairly easy to hit exploits on them. Also realize, as an added benefit, these tanks get much better matchmaking than others. All in all, most Premium Tanks are fun and profitable to drive, and you should really consider getting at least one, especially if you’re a high tier player.

A quick note on buying the high tier premium tanks: PLEASE, if you’re not at least tier 6, preferably 7 or 8, you should seriously consider NOT buying one of the three tier 8 premium tanks. Yes, you’ll make money, but you’ll get ranted at a lot because you don’t know what you’re doing, and you could really be a nuisance to your team. As always, buy responsibly, folks. Because I’ve seen n00bs drive Lowes before, and let me tell you something: they’re easy kills. In a PANZER 4. Thank you.

Tl;dr? Both Premium Accounts and Premium Tanks make you money, together, you’ll be drowning in silver!

Crew, XP, Demounting, Garage Slots

%100 crews are always a good idea. It’s cheap at only 200 gold a crew member, and %100 percent crews preform MUCH better than their %50 and %75 counterparts, which means more silver and XP for you! Spend your gold on the crews that need it most if you have a lot of tanks, which in general means your highest or most used tiers. You can also blow it on all of your crews if you don’t have too many tanks. Either way, it’ll making tanking more fun for you, and will hopefully help shorten any grinds you have.

Demount-ing equipment is also a good idea. It’s very cheap at a measly 10 gold, and means you don’t have to grind another 500K for another toolbox. There’s not too much to say on this one, if you like being efficient with your tanks or are just plain lazy, hey, it’s only 10 gold! Depending on the situation, it’s either a good or neutral decision, but 10 gold is so little it’s pretty much never bad to do it, unless it puts you just below the amount you need for something else. Going back to making a plan, make sure you don’t just waste gold.

XP Transfer is also a very good idea. Every time you get an Elite tank, you have the option to start accumulating Locked Experience or to Accelerate Crew Training. I won’t go into the latter, that’s another discussion. If you choose to accumulate experience, there’s a problem. Even though there’s nothing for you to spend that XP on, you’re still earning it. Sound like a waste? It’s not! For only 1 gold per 25 XP, you can convert that Locked XP into Free XP, which you can spend on any tank! This is a highly advisable idea, especially after you’ve elited your best, most played tanks, and will often significantly shorten grinds for XP. It’s fairly cheap in the long run; be aware large amounts of XP cost lots of gold, especially in the long run. Along with Premium Tanks and Premium Accounts, one of the most used features for Gold.

At only 300 gold a slot, buying Garage Slots is pretty cheap. More slots means more tanks, which means more fun! There’s also specials that put garage slots at half price that occur fairly often, so if you’re not in a hurry, you may want to wait until that time to buy them. Either way, it doesn’t cost much to get more tanking!

Tl;dr? Garage slots mean more fun, XP means a shorter grind, demounting equipment and %100 percent crews also help shorten grinds and make things easier. All of them are cheap and often worth the extra gold!

There’s a few things that you can do with gold that aren’t, well, in your best interests to do on a regular basis. I’ll go over those ones in this next section.

Clan Wars and Other Gold Uses

Credits and Barracks

Buying credits really isn’t a great idea. It’s quite expensive, while it might not sound like it, at 400 silver per 1 gold. Realize, then, that it takes 2,500 gold to get 1,000,000 silver. You could earn that in a couple runs in a Lowe or Type 59 fairly easily. Buying credits is pretty much a last resort, emergency thing, and there’s much more efficient ways to spend your gold. In general, don’t do it. It’s a waste.

Buying extra Barracks slots is even more useless. Instead of wasting gold, 300 for each slot to be precise, to let your crew sit around and do nothing, just transfer the crew right before you sell your old tank, and move it to your new one. People rarely even fill up their NORMAL barracks, let alone go over it. A total waste of gold, IMHO. I highly recommend not doing it, as you’ll likely never need it.

Premium Ammunition and Consumables

Premium Ammunition is often very expensive to use on a regular basis, and there’s lots of misconceptions about it. Premium ammo almost never offers a damage boost, but rather another boost in some other stat. There are 3 main types of premium ammunition (taken from the WoT wiki):

Armor Piercing Composite Rigid (APCR) Shell
This is the standard Premium ammunition for almost all tanks in the game. It has the highest penetration value, but the damage value is the same as its AP counterpart. It still has AP shell characteristics.

High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) Shell
This is the Premium ammunition for most SPG-class and tank howitzer guns. It carries a higher penetration value than HE, but works like AP shells: meaning you must hit the target directly to do damage. It produces less damage than penetrated regular HE shells.

Premium High Explosive (HE) Shell
Found in some SPG guns, it has no significant difference to its HE counterpart other than a larger splash-damage radius

As you notice, none of the shells offer higher damage than one of their counterparts. Gold Ammo is very nice for UC, as almost everyone uses it, and it means you can pen higher tier targets with more ease. A few personal notes:

APCR: I find this ammo most useful on TDs, even more so on middle and higher tier ones. Note that you lose penetration over long distances, so it’s quite useful for sniper vehicles.

HEAT: This type of ammo has a HUGE drawback, despite it’s AP-like pen and HE-like damage: You need a direct hit to do any damage. Even in my Grille, direct hits aren’t always very easy to do, and I imagine it’s basically useless on SPGs like the T92. However, I found one very potent use for these shells: self-defense. When your team abandons you, or you just want to put one final shell in the guy that will finish off your team, these shells are very nice to blast that guy into kingdom come.

Premium HE: This shell is most useful on high tier SPGs, as the added splash radius means your accuracy is less of an issue. Would recommend it for most high tier SPG players. Note there is no actual damage increase per shell, but more shells will do damage which means more total damage done. And of course, that means more credits and XP!

Premium consumables are also very useful for UC, but expensive to use on a regular basis. In general, premium consumables are faster, more efficient, or easier to use, or gives a higher benefit than their silver counterparts. Taken from the WoT Wiki, a list of premium consumables:

Premium Consumables
Purchased with Gold

Large Repair Kit Cost: 50 Gold Repairs all currently damaged modules through the end of the match when activated by the respective button. Repaired modules can still be damaged again after the repair.

Large First Aid Kit Cost: 50 Gold Heals all currently injured crew member through the end of the match when activated by the respective button. Healed crew members can still be re-injured or perish.

Automatic Fire Extinguishers Cost: 50 Gold Activates automatically 0.5 seconds after the tank catches fire and reduces the chance to catch fire by 10%.

105-Octane Gasoline Cost: 50 Gold Increases engine power (and therefore, vehicle acceleration) and turret traverse speed by 10% for a single match. There is no activation, this effect happens and the item is consumed if it is equipped.
Available only for German and American vehicles with gasoline engines. Note that there is no in-game difference between German and American oil.

Extra Combat Rations
Case of Coca-Cola
Chocolate
Cost: 50 Gold Increases all crew skills by 10% for one entire match. This bonus is added even to crews that have a 100% base skill. There is no activation, this effect happens and the item is consumed if it is equipped.
Case of Coca-Cola is only available for American vehicles.
Chocolate is only available for German vehicles.
Extra Combat Rations is only available for Soviet vehicles.

As you can see, each of these is a “step-up” from their silver counterpart. These stop problems as soon as they arise, and often help reduce the chance of them even happening. Either way, these are best for UC battles, but are actually fairly cheap if you have a lot of gold lying around. I wouldn’t recommend using these in random battles, simply because they aren’t needed. However, if you’re like me and are a bit slow on the numbers, you may want to try them out.

Finally, we have, potentially, one of the most lucrative ways to spend your gold: starting a clan. For 2,500 gold, you can submit a request to start a clan for the Ultimate Conquest map. If you’re accepted, you can start recruiting members and get ready to battle the world! If you take land on the map, or ally and morph into another clan with land, you’ll instantly start earning gold. You distribute that gold to your members, and voila! You’re now making gold! The more provinces you own, the faster you earn gold, and the quicker you pay off the starting fee. You can also use clans just for fun, to create an organized fighting team among your friends. You’re going to be facing tough opposition that plans professionally though, so make sure your team is organized, well equipped (see above) and they have some big tanks if you want to make some money! In any case, starting a clan CAN be a great payoff, if you really know what you’re doing. Go for it, who knows? Maybe you’re the next MLP… (we won’t go into clan talk now, you can look it up on your own.)

Tl;dr? Premium ammo and consumables are great for the “special occasion” or clan battles, but can get a bit expensive for regular use. Starting a clan can also make big bucks, but come prepared.

FINAL SUMMATION
All in all, gold can offer you lots of advantages here in WoT, but none of them are overly game changing but UC. No matter what it does, gold makes things easier, more fun, or a shorter grind. Don’t worry if you can’t get gold now, it’s nowhere near necessary for playing WoT. Just realize that you, the paying player, the wallet warrior, the guy living in his mom’s basement (jk! ), keep it free for the rest of us. Thank you, for supporting us and a game you love. We are, literally, in your debt.

For players considering buying gold, we hope, and I hope, that this helps you out. For those seasoned gold spenders, maybe you learned something, maybe this helped you. If it did, go ahead and click that green + sign. I’d appreciate it, and it lets me know I did this guide right. If I helped you, comment!

I end this guide the way I began it, telling you you need a plan to buy gold effectively. I hope it helped you out, and please feel free to tell me what I got right and wrong. User contributions are greatly appreciated and will be mentioned in the Thanks To section below. To all you buyers, thanks again. Au revoir!

THANKS TO
I would like to recognize those good folks over at the World of Tanks wiki, your work has helped me write this guide greatly. I would also like to thank the wonderful community here at the World of Tanks forums for your feedback. This guide took me about 2- 3 1/2 hours to write, and a lot of thought went into it, so let’s hope it helps. This is Jodo, signing out.

Players:

GnBlck: Corrected XP/Silver gain for premium account.
iHuntTanks: Corrected the amount of silver gained for 2,500 credits.
halo_117: Info about Premium HE shells.
brucefox: Info about crew retraining in premium tanks.
SeanPwnery: Guide to using the Lowe.
Asyranok: An awesome guide to buying gold. Check it out!