Critical Hits Can Be Your Friend (Sometimes)

Critical hits are a feature of the game you wish that would not happen for your tank but on the other hand happen to every tank you are shooting at!  Learning weak spots helps with doing damage to the HP of a tank, but going even further you can learn the basic areas for knocking out modules to improve your chance of survival in specific situations.  Knowing that shooting someone’s gun(aim for part closest to turret or shoot the hole that the gun comes out of) has a good chance of either damaging it effecting accuracy or even knocking it out for quite sometime can be the difference in living or being torn to shreds.  As a low tier tank facing a higher tier this is sometimes your only option to survive since it will buy you time to scurry away.

Learning to shoot the tracks is also very important. It might not always do HP damage but it does immobilize that enemy allowing your artillery and support to focus in on them to dispatch of them easily.  Knowing that for most tanks shooting the rear of the tank does engine/fuel damage that catches them on fire and also slows them down is very important. Instead of shooting the front half of their tank if you are on their side, aim for the rear section in the engine area.  For German tanks you can usually shoot through the frontal lower hull as well and do engine damage as the transmission is on the front of the tank on most German tanks. Smaller things like sights, turret ring, radio aren’t as reliable or easy to damage reliably but learning to use the gun, tracks, and engine/fuel tanks more often helps more than you would imagine. 

Doesn’t having your driver or loader die really suck? I thought so especially if you already used that med kit.  Learning the crew locations of the tanks you face the most is easier than you would think.  This website has models for essentially all World of Tanks tanks that show module and crew locations.

http://gamemodels3d.com/

Keep in mind that doing module damage can help you out but also hurt you if you need to do HP damage.  Knowing when to go for a module hit is important since it can come back to bite you.