Terms and Definitions

  • Penetration: How much armor a shell can penetrate 50% of the time. Pen listed in the game is for 100m distance. Subject to +/- 25% ‘RNG’ modifier.
  • Damage: Value given in-game is subject to +/- 25% ‘RNG’ modifier
  • Normalization: Shell hits armor at an angle more than dead-on (0 degrees), game normalizes the angle of the shell up to 2 (APCR) or 5 (AP) degrees to lessen the effective armor value. Does NOT change the shell’s path.
  • Ricochet: After normalization is taken into account, ricochet is calculated. Highly angled armor can thus compensate for not being thick/strong. Angles of ricochet are 70 degrees for AP/APCR, 80 degrees for HEAT, and none for HE/HESH.
    • Can still impact and dmg other tanks after bouncing, or damage the same tank if they impact a weak spot after bouncing (called a shot trap)
  • Two Caliber Rule: If shell caliber is more than two times the armor thickness (without taking impact angle into account), normalization will increase according to the following rule:
    • Resulting normalization = the shell normalization angle * 1.4 * shell caliber / 2 * armor thickness at point of impact
  • Triple Overmatch: When a shell’s caliber in mm is 3x+ the armor thickness it’s hitting, it will auto-pen regardless of the angle of impact (happens with AP and APCR only)
  • Spaced Armor: Gun mantlet and tracks are considered spaced armor, some tanks have additional plates on sides as well. Tracks count as spaced armor but are not affected by normalization and just have an armor value attached to them.
    • AP/APCR penetrate spaced armor, every layer gets normalized
    • HEAT penetrates with penalties (listed below)
    • HE/HESH will penetrate if it has enough pen, or explode without penning. Even if it pens it will detonate before penning a second layer, so low damage potential as the ‘rays’ of the explosion looking for weak point of armor to pen will occur on the spaced armor
  • Splash Radius: For arty shots, the larger the HE shell, the greater the splash radius. Uses ‘rays’ of the explosion to determine damage given
  • Module Damage: AP/APCR/HEAT all take single path into tank, so module/crew damage is likely to be singular. HE/HESH create internal spall damage for shots that detonate on armor / on impact. This means that multiple paths can be taken into the tank, and that can damage multiple modules/crew members
  • Ghost Shells:
    • Can be the player not recognizing the visual tracer effect (watch replay to see if it is there or not)
    • Can be caused by heavy lag in the client/server connection so what the client sees is not what’s happening on the server, which is all that matters
    • Can also be caused by a mistake in the collision model of the opponent’s vehicle. The collision model is a simplified version of the visual model of the target vehicle, but it is separated into various hitboxes. If two hitboxes are not perfectly aligned, they may create a void between them that a shell can pass through if it flies through at just the right angle. There are also parts of the visual model that are not a part of the collision model at all such as boxes and fuel tanks that are pure decoration that a shell will pass right through.
  • Leading moving targets: The game’s automatic range determination system, which sets the trajectory arc of the shell, is based on where the aim point of the reticle is. If you’re aiming at the ground in the distance and something comes in between (tree, bush, building, another tank), the arc of fire can get messed up – this is the main reason why people miss high or low when leading distant targets
  • Additional ways to get damage:
    • Little known fact, tracking a guy while he’s ‘drowning’ will give you the kill
    • When being shot by HE (T49 for instance), turn sideways as they shoot, 75%+ of the time, due to dispersion caused by RNG, the shot will be put into your track instead

Ammo Specifics

AP – Armor Piercing

  • General
    • Lose penetration at medium to long range, but compared to APCR they lose less
    • 5 degrees of normalization happen before ricochet calculation, so can potentially pen up to 74.9 degrees
  • When to use
    • Most normal gameplay situations
  • When not to use
    • When its penetration value isn’t high enough for any enemy tank weak spots
    • When enemy armor values are so low that HE/HESH can pen, and will do CONSIDERABLY more dmg
    • When its velocity (meters per second) is too low to reliably hit moving targets
      • Look at the map to determine how far away the target is, if you realize penetration will decay too much over that distance, consider using APCR instead

APCR – Armor Piercing Composite Rigid

  • General
    • Have more penetration than AP base, but lose penetration at distance in a linear fashion (unless APCR is the primary shell for the tank, then it does not).
    • From WG: Penetration is lost at a linear rate, but different per round and caliber
    • Only normalize 2 degrees
    • Cost considerably more than AP
    • Shell velocity is higher making hitting moving targets easier
  • When to use
    • Should only use when encountering an enemy that your AP or HE shells cannot handle
  • When not to use
    • At longer ranges when AP is available
    • Against tanks that are highly angled due to less normalization

HEAT – High Explosive Anti-Tank

  • General
    • Does not normalize, which is why they have higher penetration values
    • Ricochets at 80 degrees
    • Does not lose penetration at range
  • When to use
    • Only want to use against very strong armor that AP cannot handle, and whether you can hit that piece of armor without hitting spaced armor
  • When not to use
    • On spaced armor, loses 5% of pen value for every 10cm/100mm traveled after going through first layer
    • Don’t use against tracks (especially wide ones), mantlets, or spaced armor
    • When target is obstructed by fences, trees, destructible vehicles, hay bales, etc. Heat will not pass through these things.

HE – High Explosive

  • General
    • Does not normalize, does not overmatch, does not ricochet, does not lose penetration at distance
    • Upon penetration of armor, a 45 degree cone is created of rays, and these rays will damage modules/crew that they reach internally
    • Deals damage at the point of impact with the armor if the penetration values isn’t high enough
    • Able to penetrate screens, tracks and wheels of wheeled vehicles at the point of impact, when it does so, the penetration values decrease. If HE penetrates the screen and explodes on the armor (not penetrating the armor), spall mechanic takes effect (guaranteed to cause damage)
    • Able to penetrate insignificant/destructible objects such as fences, destructible buildings, etc.
    • Two different coefficients are used for penetration loss: x1.0 for destructible objects, x3.0 for screens/tracks/wheels/external modules
      • Ex. Penetrate a screen with 20mm of armor, HE shell will lose 60mm of penetration value
    • If HE doesn’t penetrate a screen and therefore doesn’t reach the armor, it will cause zero damage. You must consider thickness and slope of screens if you want to penetrate effectively through them
    • In Sniper Mode, you can use the armor penetration indicator to predict the outcome of the shot:
      • Red: No damage, will not penetrate, will not cause damage
      • Yellow: Damage will be caused but not in full (shell might penetrate screen and reach the armor, but will not pierce it)
      • Green: Full damage (shell will penetrate screen AND pierce the armor)
  • When to use
    • To reset base captures
    • To deal with lightly armored tanks
    • To damage an enemy you cannot damage with AP (higher tier, no weak spots showing)
  • When not to use
    • Against any heavily armored tanks
  • Example of the internal 45 degree arc of rays on HE penetration:
  • Example of the internal spall damage created by an HE shell exploding on the armor at the point of impact:

HESH – High Explosive Squash Head

  • General
    • Same basic function as HE in WoT, but have higher penetration values. They spread a ‘paste’ of explosives on the impact surface, which then detonates.
    • Useless against spaced armor/thick armor, expensive to use if it’s a premium round

Example Chart of Various Shell Data

This training material was derived from many and various sources including WG wikis, forum posts, various materials drawn together by community contributors (13Disciple and Guido1212, for instance), WG training videos, and other materials such as Overlord_Prime’s Google Doc (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1au-7iJuzjSBsjhB6pLiAzMZNPxOOdrx_AFEGa6TU89Q) and the World of Tanks Game Manual (https://worldoftanks.com/dcont/fb/wot_guide/world_of_tanks_game_manual_en_com_web_8_8.pdf). As such, I am not the copyright holder of the information contained herein, but I AM the copyright holder for the information in the format in which it exists as presented on mtltemplar.com, so I exercise the right to demand that reuse of the content as it appears on my site requires my explicit permission.