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Introduction
The title to this guide is a long one, but I believe it to be the most important aspect of completing the missions necessary to get the Object 279. Many (most) of the missions are maddening in the least, and some approach rage-inducing levels due to their abysmal designs. Before starting down the 279 path, you must understand a few basic truths:
- You will get angry at the game… very angry. It’s almost as if the missions are designed for just that purpose.
- If you care about your stats, understand that they will take a hit—a big one in some instances.
- You will need to get certain tanks to effectively complete some missions. Depending on your situation, this might mean grinding entire new tank lines just to get a couple missions done.
- You will have to play some tanks in certain missions in a manner that is dramatically contrary to the way the game is meant to be played – there’s that abysmal mission design again.
- The Object 279 missions take a fair amount of time to complete. Don’t think you can binge for a few weeks and get them done.
- To minimize rage and frustration, you will need to use a lot of Orders collected during the Excalibur, Chimera, and potentially final missions of the Object 279 branches.
Basic Strategy – Orders
One thing that is helpful in completing entire trees of missions is the Order system Wargaming has instituted. Orders are obtained by completing the last (15th) and final mission in a branch with honors—including from the Excalibur and Chimera mission sets. Via orders you can use a single one to skip a single mission within a certain branch. This is very helpful with a few of the more horribly designed missions. The last mission in each branch, however, takes three Orders to complete. The nice thing here, though, is that you can skip every other mission in a branch by using three on the last one, meaning you can skip entire branches by spending three orders. Before I started, I had two Orders from the Excalibur branches and two from the Chimera branches. The Excalibur orders are fairly easy to get. The requirements to get Orders for a couple of the last missions in the Chimera mission set approach stupid levels. Count on getting all four of the Excalibur Orders and whichever Chimera Orders you can.
The “Skip Two Branches” Strategy
One Order strategy is to is to get the maximum number of orders possible and skip two full branches. There are a total of 10 available for this strategy, with four being available from the Excalibur final missions, four from the Chimera missions, and two from the branches you decide to play in the Object 279 missions. If you use six for skipping two of the branches entirely, you have potentially four left to skip individual missions in the branches you do play. As mentioned, though, while getting the four final missions done with honors in the Excalibur branch is pretty straight forward, getting them done in the Chimera branch is less so. Trying to get all those done with honors is every bit as frustrating as some of the worst Object 279 missions. I figured I’d need three orders to bypass particularly difficult missions in two of the branches, plus the six to skip two branches, for a total of nine, possibly eight. This would necessitate me completing the final Excalibur mission with honors (easy), BOTH of the final missions with honors in the branches I did play, plus completing one more of the Chimera final missions with honors. I felt this would be too rage inducing.
The “Skip One Branch” Strategy
I felt it would be slightly easier to only skip one branch, while selectively skipping difficult missions in the three branches I chose to play. I estimated it would take five orders to skip tough missions, plus the three for skipping one branch altogether. This would mean that I’d need one less Order - only two more from either the final missions in the Chimera tree or the three final Object 279 missions of the branches I played. This gives a lot more flexibility should one particular path prove too difficult for your style and/or capabilities, though it is longer because you have to complete more missions.
The “Skip No Branch” Strategy
You can probably get away with skipping two missions in the Union branch, one in the Alliance and either 1 or 2 in each the Bloc or Coalition, depending on how masochistic you are. This strategy will clearly take longer, as you have to complete more missions, but it also means you have to do less of the really hard missions by garnering only 7 total Orders (worst case) and 5(!!!) best case, at least by the way I play and which missions cause me the most rage.
Ranking the Missions
For the purposes of this guide, I have ranked the missions with three different criteria (range from 1: worst to 4: best):
- Skill Required: Pretty self explanatory. Can you be a potato and get this done, or do you have to have some modicum of skill?
- Tank Specificity: Are certain tanks required, or can you use almost any tank? 1 = any tank. 4 = only a couple can effectively do it.
- Reliance on Teammates: Do you have to rely on your teammates to get the mission done, or can you do it with a team of tomatoes? 1 = Who cares what your team does… 4= Your team has to be decent AND both contribute and not get in your way (e.g. other scouts stealing your spots).
- Map Specificity: Are certain maps required? 1 = Any will do. 4 = High level of map restriction (e.g. damage blocking doesn’t work well on Prok)
- Rage Inducement: Do I need to go into details here? 1 = Low Rage. 4 = High
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