Crew Skills and Perks

POSTED BY mnamestnik January 5, 2022

DISCLAIMER: This is MY (mtl_templar’s) crew skills/perks training, your mileage and opinions may vary, there is a LOT of room for personal opinion and preference when it comes to tank crews. As such take it as it is, if you want to do something different yourself, you are WELCOME to do so, do what best fits YOUR play style – just use this as a primer.

Only 4 Skills, But Many Perks

  • This training is more about the concepts, and much less about each individual perk, which if you’re interested in that rundown, you can watch 7th_Cav_Trooper’s video he did awhile back, which is still relevant. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GBWkCIhxYQ)
  • That said, there’s a complete list from Wargaming that explains what each skill/perk does, and in what situations, which tanks, and in combination with which consumables and directives they recommend their use: https://worldoftanks.com/en/content/guide/crew/all-skills-perks/
  • The key difference between skills and perks is:
    • Skills’ effects are active immediately and their effectiveness increases with their trained value
    • Perks don’t become active until their value hits 100%

Crew Primary Qualifications

  • These are the qualifications like commander, gunner, driver, loader, radio operator
  • A fully trained (primary qualification) commander will give a 10% boost to all other crew members (value can appear higher than 10% when looking at crew members due to some consumables and BIA perk bonuses)
  • Playing with a crew not trained (or retrained) to 100% primary qualifications can SERIOUSLY negatively impact in-game performance
    • NOTE: This should NEVER be happening with a tank you are bringing to platoons or competitive matches, those should ALWAYS be 100%+ crews, with at LEAST BIA fully trained

Crew Skill/Perk Info

  • Camo, Repairs and Firefighting effectiveness are calculated by combining total value of all crew’s values for that skill and dividing by total number of crew
    • Ex. 4 crew, one trained to 100%, 3 not trained in it, effectiveness will be 25%
  • Brothers in Arms requires the entire crew to be trained in it to have effect, and all must be at 100% before it is actually in effect. It does, however, provide a boost to everyone’s major qualification and skills which can have a huge positive impact on gameplay
  • Sixth sense is absolutely VITAL to becoming a good player, but it doesn’t come into effect until it’s fully trained. Until then, consider using a sixth sense directive so that you still have the ability
    • In Crew 2.0, the rumor is that sixth sense will be built into every crew, and not require training a perk anymore
    • As an aside, there are other directives available as well, such as snap shot, which will give you the capability of the perk while it’s not fully trained for the given crewmember who might still be undergoing training. Some, like snap shot, can continue to be used after and will double the effect of the perk once it IS fully trained already

How to Increase Crew Experience for Crew Training

  • First and foremost – PLAY GAMES
  • You could get the Mentor perk for the commander, however this is of limited value, as the graphic below shows. Also, you’re giving up a first perk bonus (such as training all BIA first) to train this first, or if you train it later it is of lesser and lesser value

[picture credit of http://forum-console.worldoftanks.com/index.php?/topic/125693-the-mentor-skill-is-never-worth-it-as-long-as-you-have-it-equipped/]

  • You could also consider the Designated Target perk, as it might (depending on your fellow muppets) help keep enemies spotted longer, thus getting you more assist damage, which results in more base exp, which combined with multipliers (especially if being fed back into the crew training) can mean massive crew training speed. But…that will ONLY be the case if your teammates actually SHOOT at what you’ve spotted, and we all know how that goes…
  • Use Experience (combined with ‘accelerated crew training’, see below) and Crew Experience personal reserves to increase experience gained towards the next skill/perk each match
  • Accelerating crew training is only available for premium tanks and elite tanks (where all modules have been researched, and all tanks up the chain of the tech tree have been researched) – checking this box puts all gained experience from a match into the crew’s training rather than being available for module research or to convert to free XP
  • Use your premium tanks to train your crew faster:
    • Premium tanks provide a 50% boost to how quickly a crew is trained (+50% more crew experience earned per battle). You can utilize this by moving crews between tanks, and at no cost.
    • The way it works is that you train a crew to the tech tree tank you want, then move them over to a premium tank of the same type (heavy/medium/etc.) and nation (regardless of tier), and they will require no retraining to be able to play at the same primary qualification percentage they were trained to in the original tank. When you’re done, just move them back to the original tank (or use the ‘Return’ option) and they go back, no retraining required.
  • Purchasing crew books can be a good option, but they do cost 2 million silver each to purchase. If you have resources to burn, great, have at it. If not, use these other options to grind your way through.
  • A full list of experience required for each % and # of skill/perk: http://wio.ru/strat/wot-exp-eng.htm

That’s all fine and good, but what should I be training as a first perk…?

  • This is purely a personal choice, but given the fact that you can finish a first perk through 100% trained in <20 matches, usually 15 or less, I will ALWAYS recommend training BIA first
  • TEMPLAR’S PERSONAL OPINE: I personally train every crew on BIA first, best perk second, repairs or camo third (depending on tank type), and then other individual perks after that. ‘Best perks’ can depend on the tank type I’m playing, but generally can be defined as:
    • Commander – Sixth Sense
    • Gunner – Snap Shot / Deadeye
    • Driver – Smooth Ride
    • Loader – Intuition / Safe Stowage
    • Radio Operator – Situational Awareness
  • If you’re like Blac Youngsta sitting in millions of bills worth of cash…
  • …you can use the Repairs, Reset, Repeat method to train the crew. This is where you train the crew in a skill that has immediate effect (such as Repairs), and once it reaches 100% use gold to reset the crew to 100% in a different skill like BIA that did NOT have effect the entire time. You then start training [Repairs] again, and over and over you go. A major drawback here is the, say, 1k gold cost every time you do this for a 5 man crew, for example…
  • That said, if you’re like the rest of the great majority of the player base (the poor and huddled masses), you could just train BIA first, and when it goes active you get an immediate boost to all primary qualifications, which combined with vents, food, etc. can be a SIGNIFICANT difference with how your tank operates…
    • … which in turn makes the tank behave better, allowing you to do better in battle, get more exp as a result, and train your further skills/perks even faster as a ‘free to play’er…

General Crew Information That Didn’t Fit Elsewhere Better

  • Any crew sitting in your barracks is not building skills or perks, they’re just being wasted, put them in tanks and train them up or don’t keep them – CERTAINLY don’t expand your barracks to accommodate even MORE freeloaders
    • Exception: You want to have another crew to put into a tank as you unlock it later in the tree, and keep the current one in the current tank because you plan to keep the tank long term
    • NOTE: Don’t go rushing out and getting rid of all your crew in the barracks, rumor is that when Crew 2.0 comes out (if it does, eventually), crew in barracks will be converted to crew books based on their training level and # of perks, so keep that in mind
  • FUN FACT: As the crew continues to gain experience, skills and perks, the individual members also rank up. So you might start with a Warrant Officer, and eventually they’ll go through Lieutenant, Major and eventually the rank of General. Not that the enemy can see that to know, but still cool
  • TIP: If you have XVM you can use ‘Put Best Crew’ and it will fill with the best crew members available in barracks (primary preference given to crew already trained in the tank, otherwise highest # of skills/perks trained)

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.