The Garage Overfloweth

I breathed a sigh of relief and joy last night when I crossed yet another item off the list of goals for this year – and gave myself some fun to look forward to. It’s time to say goodbye to the ST-I and hello to the IS-4.

Yes, ST-I. Apparently not the ST-1, as I assumed when I first bought it. The tank has been at times a grindfest, and its taken me a lot longer than I thought to get through it. But then I kept getting distracted by new shinies. The truth is that this tank was everything it was advertised to be. Really tough armor that bounces a lot of shots, an excellent gun, and decent (at least among the heavies) mobility. I think I am going to sell the M103 instead and hang on to it, though the real problem there is that I’m already hurting for Russian heavy crews. But then, that’s why I have The Beast, to train new heavy crews.

The question is where to run from here. The general consensus among the players I know is that the optimal play is to have three tanks in rotation. And generally, for me, one of those is going to be a premium tank because I’m constantly after credits for this or that. One of the reasons this line too so long is that I went a little nuts and was back to, at one time, working on six lines. I’ve cut that down again. Right now the primary focus is on the new tier 10 medium Object 140. I hadn’t intended to, but its a nice twin to the awesome T-62A, which I happen to also love. And since it comes from the existing T-54, which I already had elited, it was just a matter of the final grind. So I’ve already been working on it a bit and am about %15 done. So I have room for one other line to do serious work on. I have three choices basically.

1) I can continue with the stated goals for the year and finish out the IS-7 line. I need about 171k to unlock it, and the IS-8 is already in its top configuration, so its fairly smooth sailing – outside of the fact that the IS-8 is fairly weak for its tier.

2) I can instead pay out some free XP for modules and begin the E-75 grind to the E-100. This has become a solid choice for Clan Wars and the E-75/German Heavy line is right up my alley anyway. The downside is burning free XP for the turret, which is pretty much a necessity. The good news is that with the 8.8 changes, the extra top engine is gone and the mobility increased at the same time, so this will be a fun grind. But it will be much longer – more than 300k when you take into account the top guns for the E-75 and the E-100.

3) It occurs to me that I’m stocking a lot of heavies in my garage – when my specialty, my bread and butter, my best tanks – are mediums. And my brother will soon begin his game again, where he is working on some mediums. So I could continue the trek in the Chinese or US medium line, with an eye towards finishing one or both. The bonus is that my rotation won’t have to involve a change in playstyle since my other main grind will also be a medium. Catching up to my brother’s tier 7 Russian medium shouldn’t be too hard (75k or so), or I can pop into the US line, knowing that I will need to drop some free XP and/or cash to make the M46 Patton grind bearable. The downside of this is pretty easy – the top tier Chinese and US medium tanks are not really CW tanks. So I’m not benefiting the clan any. On the other hand, getting the Object 140 squared away is a big clan asset. So it all evens out.

Any of these are good options really. Right now I’m leaning more towards three, but I’m sure I will bounce around a couple of days before settling on something.

And of course, I will need to take a match off every now and then to drive my shiny new IS-4…