Commanders!
As we announced in our article about the plans for 2019, we will be launching a new, American-themed Battle Path campaign in December. We’ve decided to call it the Last Patriot since you’ll be helping a former U.S. Army and ISD officer by the name of Austin Harper make contact with the Resistance movement following the disastrous events of the Moscow Calling season.
Mechanically, the Last Patriot Battle Path will have much in common with the previous campaigns. Once you acquire access to the campaign, you’ll be earning Battle Coins and spending them on Battle Path progress. Battle Coins will be earned either by just playing or by completing missions. Several mission sets will be available like the last time.
Like the last time, the campaign will feature several Premium vehicles available as a part of the campaign’s basic level progress. These will be:
- XM247 Sergeant York Tier 5 Premium AFV for achieving Level 10
- Griffin 120mm Tier 8 Premium LT for achieving Level 30
- CATTB Tier 10 Premium MBT for achieving Level 50 (along with an optional skin)
Unlike the last time, however, there will not be any “bonus” progression levels – the level progress will end with Level 50 and the acquisition of the CATTB. For those players who want to have it all, another special skin for the CATTB will be available for completing a certain number of Battle Path missions.
Apart from the abovementioned Premium vehicles, the Battle Path levels will contain other rewards such as Battle Coin boosters, camouflages, decals, avatars, Gold, boosters and much more.
There will also be four mission chains, each unlockable with a ticket (available at Level 1, 7 and 12) and each with a different focus and reward:
- Dealing damage with high-caliber weapons (130mm or more, excl. ATGMs) with the top reward being the Expeditionary Tank Tier 6 Premium LT and the Prime skin for it
- Various armor-related objectives with the top reward being the MBT-70 Tier 6 Premium MBT and the Prime skin for it
- Dealing damage with HEAT rounds (excl. ATGMs) with the top reward being the RDF/LT Tier 6 Premium LT and the Prime skin for it
Players who already have those Premium vehicles will receive Gold instead.
The final, fourth mission chain will, as usual, be unlocked upon completing the other three and will reward you with Commander Austin Harper. Austin Harper will focus on buffing allies around him and, like a true action hero, the less people will be on his team, the stronger will his vehicle become. You’ll learn more about him soon in a dedicated article.
But here’s where things get quite different. Like we mentioned before, you’ll have several ways of earning Battle Coins.
The first one is simply by playing. We’ve made some significant changes to the formula. There will no longer be a random factor to this type of reward –you’ll receive a fixed amount of Battle Coins (2 for PvE and GLOPS, 3 for PvP) for each minute of effective combat. Effective combat time is a new mechanic that counts only the time when you are active in battle (during or between the actions that contribute towards your team’s effort).
During the last Battle Path, we received a number of reports about players who enter some battles and go AFK and still receive some rewards. This mechanic solves the situation – unless you actively contribute to the battle, you will receive either nothing or very little. The exact length will be rounded up for the purposes of rewards (eg. 41 seconds will be treated as 1 minute, 1:01 minute as 2 minutes etc.) and will be available on the results screen.
Like before, winning will multiply your reward (by 1.25 for PvE and GLOPS and by 1.5 for PvP) but you’ll also receive extra Battle Coins for being amongst the best players on the battlefield (4 for Top 2 in PvE, 5 for Top 5 in PvP and 10 for Top 5 in GLOPS).
The second way is by completing the updated Repeatable Battle Coin Missions. This feature also appear during the last Battle Path and, like with the Battle Coin formula above, we have changed it for this one.
There will be three missions available:
- Deal a certain amount of damage (each point of damage against player vehicles will count as five for the purpose of this mission)
- Destroy a certain number of enemy vehicles (each player vehicle will count as five)
- Earn a certain amount of net Experience
The cooldown of these missions will be 72 hours. However, there’s a twist to them. Upon each cooldown, each of these three missions will also contain a randomly chosen set of conditions. For example, the Battle Path may ask you to deal damage while driving a Marat Shishkin Tank Destroyer, or a Sol Schreiber vehicle of any class.
Additionally, there will be a third, brand new, way called Challenges. Next to the mission chains and the Repeatable Battle Coin Missions, Challenges are a third type of tasks that you can complete for additional Battle Coins.
Challenges (there will be ten of them in total) will open on weekly basis as the event progresses. Each Challenge requires you to do something (for example, deal 15.000 damage in PvE/GLOPS or 3.000 damage in PvP) and consists of ten stages, each more difficult than the last. The abovementioned Challenge opening will be server-based, so joining the Battle Path two weeks into it will allow you to start with two Challenges already unlocked. This will help latecomers to catch up on progress faster than ever before.
And, last but not least, one new mechanic will be available – the Workshop. This new Battle Path tab will allow you to modify your Battle Path vehicles with additional performance-enhancing or modifying modules that will be available for completing a certain number of Battle Path Missions (chain or daily) or Challenges. These include for example a module for the XM247 that will trade more mobility for fewer hitpoints or new, advanced shells for the Griffin 120mm.
These modules will become available only when you obtain the vehicle itself, although the completed missions and challenges from this Battle Path will count retroactively. With some effort, all these upgrades will be obtainable during the Last Patriot Battle Path but it is worth noting that if you don’t manage to do that, future Battle Path missions and challenges will count towards them as well.
For those players with spare Battle Coins, there will also be a brand new Patriot Loot Crate with blueprint pieces of the fourth Battle Path Premium vehicle – the Bradley AAWS-H Tier 8 Premium TD, a LOSAT program predecessor to the already implemented M8 MGM-166. As the name suggests, it will be armed with kinetic missiles, albeit with lower performance corresponding to its Tier.
But, in addition to the blueprints, the Patriot Loot Crate will have three new traits compared to the last time:
- It will drop parts of Special Loot Crates
- Special Loot Crates will include a chance to drop Premium vehicles (including Tier 10s) that you don’t already have
- Special Loot Crates will include a small chance to drop Battle Path commanders (Alexander Cortez, Alisa Korhonen and Ofelia Kitescu)
- Every opening of a Special Loot Crate will count towards the Workshop module progression (as long as you own the Workshop vehicles)
And that’s the long and short of it. The Last Patriot Battle Path took plenty of your feedback into account as well as our experience with the last one. As you might have noticed, we’ve removed some elements of the older Battle Paths, such as:
- Randomization of Battle Coin income (which you criticized)
- Tying Battle Path progress to the Contract Missions (which was also criticized due to the randomness of the Contract Mission campaign itself)
- Elite Loot Crates (their mechanics were merged with the Patriot Loot Crates)
We hope that you will like the improvements we’ve made.
See you on the battlefield!
