I pretty much ignored last month's Top of the Tree event in World of Tanks until the last week. Then I found out that I kind of liked the format, which gives you specific bonuses and advantages for playing through a specific tank line. Of course having started very late I never actually got to the top of the tree in the German Maus line in the March event. But then Wargaming announced another Top of the Tree event for the French heavy tank line for April, and so I have been doing that this week, and plan to continue until the end of the month.

Now I am playing World of Tanks like a "whale" or "wallet warrior" or however you want to call a paying player. I got used to playing that way back in 2011, when Wargaming gave me free gold every day for some time, which I think they still do for various influencers (which these days are YouTubers rather than bloggers). These days I have to buy that gold myself, but I don't mind, and its usually tens of dollars in a month, not hundreds or thousands. Yesterday, after having seen that I kind of like the French heavy tank line, I spent €20 on a special Top of the Tree event booster, which gives the 5x bonus for victory three times per day instead of once, plus some other extras. That is going to be a nice boost at the higher tiers!

But more importantly my whale play style means that whenever there is an period in which experience from tanks that don't need it any more can be converted into free experience at a better exchange rate, I do that for all the experience I have accumulated with my various elite status and premium tanks. I had up to half of million of free experience that way, and still have over 300,000. Which is a lot. And it turns out that especially for French heavy tanks this free experience is extremely useful. Several of the French heavy tanks suffer from their stock equipment, especially the gun, being absolutely awful. That makes them an awful grind until you got enough xp to get the good gun, which frequently requires you to first get the improved tracks and turret. Being forced to play a number of games with a gun that doesn't penetrate anything makes the French heavy tank line somewhat unpopular. But I never play stock tanks. I never use free experience to research tanks, but I exclusively use it to directly get a freshly researched tank from stock level to good equipment level. And it turns out that those mid-tier French heavies are actually quite good once they have their best gun.

One special case is the B1, the tier IV French heavy. Its best gun is a tier III gun, which is generally still bad for a tier IV tank, and especially awful if you get into a tier V match. But that particular gun has another property which is good for wallet warriors: Its premium ammo has 50% more penetration that the regular ammo. Which means that for the B1 I was loading only premium ammo, and was doing quite okay, at least against same or lower tier tanks. Damage per shot isn't great, but rate of fire is, and both dispersion and aiming time are good for a heavy tank gun.

In summary, I'm enjoying the April Top of the Tree event, presumably because it appears to be more Pay2Win than the previous event, and I end up having a lot of success.