World of Tanks glossary
The game and its community use a lot of shorthand. Here are the terms you will meet most often in battle chat, guides and videos, in plain English.
- Alpha damage
- The damage a single shot deals on average when it penetrates.
- AP / APCR / HE / HEAT
- The four ammunition types: armour-piercing, armour-piercing composite rigid, high-explosive and high-explosive anti-tank. See the guide.
- Artillery (arty)
- Common name for self-propelled guns (SPGs), which fire in an arc from the back of the map.
- Base capture
- Winning by keeping vehicles inside the enemy base circle until the capture bar is full.
- Bottom tier / top tier
- Being among the lowest-tier or highest-tier vehicles in a battle.
- Camouflage (camo)
- How hard a vehicle is to detect. Improved by bushes; reduced by moving and firing.
- Consumables
- Items such as repair kits, first-aid kits and fire extinguishers that you use during battle.
- Credits
- The main in-game currency, earned by playing and used to buy vehicles, modules and ammunition and to pay for repairs.
- Crew
- The members operating a vehicle. They gain experience and learn skills that improve performance.
- DPM
- Damage per minute: alpha damage multiplied by the number of shots a gun can fire per minute.
- Equipment
- Fitted items that improve characteristics such as reload speed, view range or concealment.
- Experience (XP)
- Earned by each vehicle in battle and used to research modules and new vehicles.
- Flanking
- Attacking the enemy from the side or rear, where armour is usually thinner.
- Free XP
- A share of experience that can be spent on any vehicle.
- Gold
- The premium currency, mostly bought with real money.
- Hull-down
- Positioning behind a ridge so that only the turret is exposed.
- Matchmaker (MM)
- The system that builds teams for a battle, mainly by vehicle tier and class.
- Modules
- Replaceable parts of a vehicle: gun, turret, engine, suspension and radio.
- Normalisation
- A game rule that turns armour-piercing shells slightly towards the plate on impact.
- Overmatch
- When a gun's calibre is much larger than the armour it hits (roughly three times or more), much of the armour's angle is ignored.
- Penetration
- How much armour, in millimetres, a shell can pierce.
- Platoon
- A group of up to three players who join battles together on the same team.
- A time-limited paid status that increases the XP and credits you earn.
- A vehicle bought with gold or real money rather than researched, usually designed to earn more credits.
- Ricochet
- When a shell hits at a very shallow angle and bounces off without penetrating.
- Side-scraping
- Angling the side of your vehicle steeply behind cover so that its armour is very hard to penetrate.
- Spaced armour
- Thin plates, screens or tracks in front of the main armour that absorb HE and HEAT hits.
- Spotting
- Detecting enemies so they appear for your whole team.
- Tech tree
- A nation's branching research path of vehicles from low to high tier.
- Tier
- A vehicle's level. Higher tiers are generally stronger and more expensive to play.
- Tracked / de-tracked
- When a vehicle's tracks are destroyed, leaving it unable to move until they are repaired.
- View range
- How far a vehicle's crew can detect enemies.
- Weak spot
- An area with thin or flat armour, such as a lower plate, hatch or cupola.
Definitions describe the game as we understand it at the time of writing; mechanics can change with updates, and Wargaming's official information prevails. toridon.online is not affiliated with Wargaming.