How to Grind SL

SL Grinding #

My opinions on how not to have SL troubles.

I can spend at least a little cash. #

  1. Buy premium time.
    • Buy at least 90 days at one time, or better a full year, for the best value.
    • Wait for Victory Day (May), Anniversary (Halloween), and Christmas/New Years for 50% off.
    • If you do it right, premium works out to less than 3GJN per month.
  2. No, really, buy premium time.
  3. Buy into the Battle Pass season for even more SL drops and boosters.
    • Most season give an almost 2m raw SL plus 15 SL boosters if purchesed and getting to level 75.
    • 4 Premium vehicles (usually 2, plus 2 coupons)
    • Plus up to an extra 6500 war bonds for premiums from the war bond store (2-3 more premiums).
    • Coupons for vehicles can be worth raw GJN, but usually not all that much, however even the mediocre ones can often cover the cost of the BP itself..
  4. Buy a good air premium with a high SL modifier that you can enjoy playing.
  5. GE for SL is a bad deal. Avoid at all costs, buy premium time or vehicles instead.

I have no monies. #

  1. Work an extra shift/do extra chores/mow some lawns/sell bodily fluids. Profit. Buy premium time. A single 8 hour shift at a minimum wage job will pay for a full year of premium time.
  2. Grind events. Get the good vehicle coupons. Sell them on the marketplace for GJN. Buy premium time. A single top tier reward can often pay for 2 years of premium time.
  3. Grind the Battlepass to get vehicle coupons. The free reward is usually worth enough GJN for a year’s premium, or a year worth of paid Battlepasses. Once you have a paid pass, the top tier reward can be worth closer to 2 years of premium.
  4. Use warbonds from the Battle Pass to get premiums.

Earn more in Games #

  1. Login and do your dailies and special tasks every day for the free boosters and SL drops.
    • ARB tasks are usually the fastest and easiest, especially if you can groundpound.
    • Use rerolls liberally to get easier/faster tasks.
    • Avoid tasks that rely on wins unless you can reliably carry your team.
  2. Use your wagers.
    • Use multipliers, Kill 10 vehicles with realistic x2 multiplier is only 5 kills, easy in GRB.
    • Best squad with 3 friends on discord is a pretty trivial 250k in an evening.
    • Thunderer is surprisingly easy with a good attacker/frontline bomber in ARB.
  3. Use Orders, especially if you’ve got a booster running.
    • Some are easier in Air, some in Ground or Naval, pay attention to the details.
  4. Win. 50% bonus in an okay win can be better than 0% bonus on a great loss. Play the modes and BRs you’re best at.
  5. Bombers and attackers can earn lots, especially if you don’t just hit space then die.
  6. Don’t just win. Things other than raw kills give SL and RP.
    • Groundpound and kill bases in air.
    • Cap points, scout, repair allies in ground/naval.
  7. Chose the right mode
    • AirRB usually gives the most rewards per time spent and repair costs.
    • Coastal Naval is awful for rewards
    • But winning is most important, so choose one you do well in.
  8. Avoid naval, especially coastal.
    • Naval games frequently take the full time, so even if you earn a lot, reward per time is often low.
    • Mid to high rank fleet games can have very good rewards, especially with premium ships. (US 5.0 Destroyer lineup with Moffet and Porter for example)

Be Frugal #

  1. Turn off Auto-repair
    • Reserves repair for free, consider keeping one in your line up for a no-cost spawn
    • Low tiers (especially BR 2.0 or less) will auto-repair in only minutes or hours
    • Use multiple nations while letting others repair
    • Rotating among nations and slots with low rank AirRB could let you play with only ammo costs and no repair.
  2. Check for high SL mods relative to BR in your tech tree (e.g. Me-264).
  3. Avoid those mid tier vehicles (rank 3 and 4, mostly BR ~5.0-8.0) where repair costs are too high.
  4. Avoid mid to high tiers while grinding SL. Everything costs more; separate your SL and RP/Spade grinding.
  5. Wait for sales to purchase expensive vehicles.
    • Victory/VE Day (early May, only 30%)
    • Anniversary (Late October to early November, 50%)
    • Christmas (Late December to New Years, 50%)

Why Premium Time? #

Some people assert a good high tier premium is better, because eventually premium time runs out, while a premium vehicle is forever. So this is true, but only to an extent, since the RP and SL you earn while playing every vehicle on premium time remains forever too. Most people do not want to play the same vehicle endlessly. You have to be willing to play just that one premium vehicle, over and over and over; even just playing other vehicles in the lineup is a loss to the efficiency of earning with your premium.

For the cost of one higher tier premium, you can get a full year, or even 18 months, of premium time. Premium time makes every vehicle a premium, rather than having just one vehicle you have to keep using over and over. It works on every nation at once, at every BR, in every lineup, in every game mode. It keeps working after you die in your best spawn. It’s even cumulative with every premium vehicle, purchased with cash, GE or earned in events, for an extra boost if you run one.

With premium time, it takes dedicated effort to lose SL on matches. It also doubles RP gains, halving stock module grind time and halving researching the parts of trees you just want to get past.

If you buy it during one of the several times a year when it is 50% off, such as Christmas, Anniversary, or Victory Day sales, it costs the equivalent of around 40GJN for a full year. 14900 GE is reduced to 7450GE; which is 41.5GJN if you buy exactly 7500GE, or 50GJN with 2550GE left over for vehicles, talismans, etc. That’s less than most single AAA video games, and cheaper than almost all subscription games (< 3GJN per month). It’s cheaper than many store packs. It’s even cheaper than some GE premium vehicles if they’re not on sale.

Premium recommendations #

If you can tolerate AirRB, go with a premium plane. First, AirRB rewards in general are almost aways better than other modes, especially if you factor time. Second, plane reward multipiers are much higher than ground vehicles. Third, with single spawn games, you don’t have periods of the game where you’re not earning with premium.

The principle thing you want to have in a premium plane is a very high SL modifier, preferably combined with a fairly low repair cost. The second factor is to make sure it’s something you can stand to fly often and do well in. If you hate flying it, you won’t, and it earns no money.

  • US A6M2 or XP-50
  • Ju-288 or German La-5FN
  • I-153P or P-63A-5
  • Spitfire F Mk XIVc or Mustang Mk 1A
  • A6M5 Ko or Ki-61-I hei Tada
  • Italian Bf-109 G2
  • French Yak-3
  • Pyorremyrsky

Using and Abusing Auto repair #

This expands on something mentioned earlier.

Take advantage of the fact that lower BR vehicles have free repair times of under 1 day while sitting in the hangar. Sometimes under an hour, for rank 1 vehicles. So turn off auto repair. Switch nations when your lineup is dead/damaged. After you play Ground RB and you didn’t use your plane, play Air RB.

But just sticking with base lineups, there are 9 nations with ground lineups right now. That’s 9 Ground RB games to start with. Plus (possibly multiple) Air RB games for each plane in a lineup that didn’t die. Even if you only unlock the base 5 crew slots purchased for SL, that’s potentially 45 Air RB games, with no SL losses other than ammo costs every day.

If a match averages 15-20 minutes, by the time you have rotated through all 9 countries, every vehicle with a repair time under 3 hours will have repaired. That means almost every lineup at BR 2.7 or below. If you do this using every slot for AirRB, using 5 slots across 9 countries will take about 12 hours of nonstop playing. If playing 3 hours per day, that means even rank III planes will be repaired by time you come back to them, and possibly some rank IV planes.

Note that repair times go up quite a lot if the vehicle isn’t selected in a crew slot, so you can play multiple different vehicles per slot, but it will take much longer to repair for free.