World of Warplanes Guide for WoT Players

World of Warplanes Guide for WoT Players by rocketbrainsurgeon

My background: I’m a purple in WoT. Started out with absolutely abysmal results in WoWP: 30% winrates and 0.5 kills/game. Since raised that up, and over the past 50 games I’m averaging 1.3 kills/game and rising fast. Winrate climbing out of the dungeon as well, but it was deep in the red due to me having my first ~70 games in Attack Aircraft and trying to turn-fight. What does that mean? I’ll tell you!

Note: this information isn’t entirely accurate, nor is it intended to be. It’s meant to be a guide for WoT players coming over during the promotion so we don’t have to see large scale lawn-darting.

Controls

It seems the thing that everyone agrees on is that the controls aren’t perfect yet. You’re going to need to modify them to suit you in some way.

My setup: I keep the default settings, except that I mapped roll left to “A” and roll right to “D”.

It’s fairly crucial that you map at least one of yaw/roll/pitch to the keyboard. You don’t have to go overboard with it, but you need another form of input as the game sometimes can’t tell what you’re trying to accomplish.

If you are going to play with a tail-gunner, you will want yaw (rudder left/right) somewhere on the keyboard to give your tail gunner an angle to fire.

Ways to Win

• Shooting down the enemy planes
• “Advantage”, which is WoWP’s form of capping. Don’t worry about it, because it almost never happens and when it does happen it’s because that team was going to lose by kills anyway. If you are getting “capped”, kill a ground target or a plane and the cap points reset. Basically if you lead in planes and ground targets killed, cap points start accumulating. Targets get killed so often, that the cap points reset all the time, making it mostly inconsequential. And while you streak towards enemy targets and rack up 8+ ground targets destroyed, your team is getting wrecked. Oh, and all this time you weren’t accumulating cap points because things were continuously dying. So yeah, “capfast” in WoWP is a bad idea, but shooting ground targets isn’t necessarily bad on its’ own (more on that later).

Types of planes

Fighter / Carrier Fighter (RECOMMENDED): Air superiority planes. Fast, maneuverable, and lightly armed. Carrier fighters can carry ordinance (rockets/bombs), but some suggest that you’re better off not equipping them as they weigh you down and ground targets are low value. Others argue that you can take out enemy planes with rockets/bombs. All agree that you shouldn’t be attacking ground targets in them.

Heavy Fighter: Bigger guns, ordinance, and often a tail gunner. Often terrible at turning, so don’t get into a turn-fight. Supposed to be a hybrid between GA and fighters. Feels like WoT TD’s: frontally devastating, but get behind one and they are wrecked.

Attack Aircraft: Often referred to as “GA” (Ground Attack) aircraft or “sky whales”, their main goal is taking out ground targets. The problem is that ground targets aren’t nearly as worthwhile as taking out enemy aircraft. Attack Aircraft are often slow, so they have a tail gunner to help out. They have good firepower, but the nickname “sky whale” gives you a hint about their maneuverability. Maximize use of your tail gunner by staying low to the ground (more below).

Using your tail gunner

The tail gunner needs an angle to work, to prevent this. Rolling or turning slightly (yaw turn, if you mapped it to your keyboard) helps create that angle. You want him firing as much as possible while still doing what you want to do. You want the enemy slightly above you, if possible.

If your plane has a tail gunner, just assume you can’t shake anyone on your tail unless you have a lot more energy than they do (more later).

What you should be doing

• Don’t go alone. Stay in a group. If you find yourself all alone, that’s a bad sign. Retreat to friendly AA or teammates.
• Concentrate on killing enemy planes rather than ground targets
• If you have bombs/rockets or are in a GA, take out enemy AA ground targets if it’s easy and you have teammates over them. Otherwise, stay on the airborne targets.

Types of maneuvers you need to know

“Lag Roll” and “High Yo-Yo”

When to use each:

• Lag roll: you’re coming in steep, fast, and at a stupid angle. Like, diving from 1000m above someone at the beginning. You need to adjust your angle and bleed some airspeed off, and the lag roll works for that.
• High Yo-Yo: when you want to turn-fight and stay on someones’ tail, or you want to do a 180. The High Yo-Yo is very effective because it keeps your energy up instead of just doing a horizontal turn.

Energy

Think of altitude (potential energy) and airspeed (kinetic energy) as resources. Diving converts potential energy into kinetic, and climbing converts kinetic energy into potential.

Want to gain speed: dive.
Want to bleed speed and/or turn sharp: climb rather than cutting the throttle. When you cut the throttle, the only way to get that energy back is to boost/dive, but if you climb you keep your energy PLUS you get an overhead angle on your target PLUS you can turn sharper PLUS the lower-energy enemy can’t shoot or follow you. There’s very little downside, which is why the High Yo-Yo works so well.

Most people will simply cut the throttle and continue to turn in a dogfight. Eventually, both the attacker and defender will wind their way to the deck and be moving very slowly as they spent all their energy (altitude and airspeed). You, keeping your energy, swoops in and scores an easy kill on someone who can’t do anything but fly slow and straight.

What to do when someone gets behind you and you can’t shake them

First, everyone who is good agrees: don’t let it happen. It’s so much harder to lose a tail than for them to stay on your tail.

The best post you will ever find on the subject.

Break turn (hard bank turns) your way to teammates and/or friendly AA guns while keeping your speed up. The guy attacking you will be flying at a straighter angle than you will be, thus he’ll be easy for your teammates to shoot at: they’ll naturally attack him.

Notice that I don’t mention anything about shaking him or doing circles: it’s a waste of time as it just takes both of you out of the fight. Pick another target and work your way towards him while evading fire as best you can.

General Battle Plan

• Gain Altitude
• Travel with teammates; just be around them
• Avoid getting into pitched battles where you’re grossly outnumbered, even if you leave a teammate to die (better to lose one than two)
• Try to fight over your AA guns if you are outnumbered/out-tiered

Turn-fighting in a bee’s nest is the surest way to die

Here’s what will happen every single time:

• You see a target and get behind him
• Use a high yo-yo / lag roll to stay behind him
• He squirms, turns, and brakes his way down to the deck
• Both of you lose airspeed and altitude
• Someone above you spots this, and comes down to kill you while you can’t hardly move because you have no airspeed or altitude

Boom and Zoom is better for group fights:

Boom and Zoom

• Dive into the fray
• Keep speed up. Don’t need to boost, but don’t cut throttle or do a 180 degree turn either.
• Fire the guns until they burn
• Boost out and away

BnZ limits your exposure time and keeps your energy. Lower energy planes can’t follow you for any meaningful amount of time. Once you figure out the best way and time to engage, there’s very little downside to it. Turn-fighting comes with a very big downside: you are prey to higher energy planes.

Yes they will ram you, every single time

Head-to-head confrontations will always end in a ram if YOU don’t turn, because your opponent never will.

Conclusion

Anyway, that’s my quick-start guide for anyone that wants more than Wargaming’s “tutorial” on “how to find the fire button”.