Originally Posted by
Ranorack
HE shells are -really- meant to be used against tanks with little to no armour, usually SPGs or TDs. They're also handy when normal shells just keep bouncing, as they rely on explosive damage rather than penetrating enemy armour, even when it's at an angle! HE shells -can- do more damage but they need to penentrate to do it, which they usually don't. But if you were to hit an open top tank (Such as various low tier SPGs) with one it hits pretty hard.
As for grinding...well, they have to make their money from the F2P game somehow. If it's really that bad you can get yourself a premium account and a premium tank (Or a tank you get a lot of XP in with elite status)
What does this mean?
When a tank is in elite status, and you are not accelerating crew training, you can convert the excess XP gained into Free XP at the cost of gold!
Premium account increases the CE and XP earned by a fair margin.
And a premium tank has much lower repair costs and is automatically elite. Meaning in a premium tank you can gain both Credits and XP like a baws!
I got three free premium tanks, one from New Year's 2012, one from Xmas 2012 (Last month) and one from a give away. All three are excellent at earning me credits and XP to convert even at low levels. More so when the crew is maxed out and I'm against people playing in T1-3 tanks with crews usually around 50-60% skill as opposed to 100% with perks! The Xmas Tank for example can reload stupidly fast for me, whereas other users take a while to do so.