George In The Meta
What gives Driver XP in WARDOGS Season 02?
By George In The Meta ·
Short answer: in WARDOGS Season 02, Driver XP comes from delivering supplies, round trips back to base, repairing vehicles and deploying the spawn vehicle. Repairs pay 2 Driver XP a tick with the wrench and 3 with the drill, and round trip streaks climbed 150, 200, 250 in my games. Refuelling pays too, but that XP goes to Support. This is everything I found levelling Driver from zero on 16 and 17 October, on the Europe (West) servers.
Does repairing a vehicle give Driver XP in Season 02?
Yes, repairing a vehicle gives Driver XP in Season 02, it just doesn't look like it in the vendor. The wrench in the vendor still shows the Support class icon, which is what I went by at first. But when you actually do the repair, the XP feed shows the Driver steering wheel next to every tick: "Repaired vehicle, 2XP", plus $4 a tick. So the patch notes are right, and the vendor icon looks like a display error more than anything else.
Does WARDOGS give XP for repairing damage you caused yourself?
Yes, in my games WARDOGS gave Driver XP for repairing damage I'd caused myself, and the XP is the important part, not the money. I crashed my own truck on purpose to test it, then repaired it, and got the same 2XP per tick as any other repair, plus the cash. It's only two experience a tick, but I caused the damage and then got experience for fixing it: that's an easy exploit. The caveat is that there might be a threshold I just haven't hit. BULKHEAD has banned players for cash and XP exploits before, so I wouldn't farm it (what gets you banned in WARDOGS).
Do WARDOGS round trip streaks work in Season 02?
Yes, the WARDOGS round trip bonus is working in Season 02, and it goes up as you keep the run going. On 16 October my round trips back to the safe zone paid 150 Driver XP, then 200, then 250, and the cash went up with them: $400 on the 150 XP trip, $600 on the 250. That's 50 more XP every trip, and I didn't do any extra runs in between. The patch notes say a ground round trip is 50 XP plus 25 for every trip in a row, up to 10, so in my games the streak is climbing twice as fast as the notes say (what levels what in Season 02). The streak seems to belong to the vehicle, too: when I swapped the Kodiak for a Ural, my next round trip paid only 100 XP. BULKHEAD has since said a Driver XP exploit, rapid round trips to a nearby FOB, let players level far too fast, and it has adjusted the Driver track, per PCGamesN on 16 October, so the round trip numbers may already be different.
Does driving the spawn vehicle pay in WARDOGS Season 02?
Yes, driving the spawn vehicle out pays you in WARDOGS Season 02, in both Driver XP and cash. On 16 October I got a lift back to headquarters, took our team's spawn vehicle, an M113 APC SV, out and parked it up at the church. Deploying it paid $300 for the tactical deployment plus $50 for the spawn vehicle deployment, and every time someone spawned on it I got "Deployed player assist, 25XP" on the Driver wheel. I hit Driver 6 while I was out there.
It felt slower to get out on this map, though that might just be the way this computer performs. And again, the FOB was woeful: 57 ticks into the round, our one FOB still didn't have walls, so I'm not sure how long the spawn vehicle will last.
What's a cheap Driver rig in WARDOGS Season 02?
My cheap Driver rig in WARDOGS Season 02 is a fuel can and two wrenches, which levels Driver and Support together, $255 with the recruit discount. I bought two wrenches because I can't afford the drill yet. Repairing pays 2 Driver XP and $5 a tick, and I suspected refuelling my own vehicle would pay too, and it did: "Refuelled vehicle, +$15" in the feed, plus 14 or 15 XP a tick. That refuel XP goes to Support, though, not Driver: the feed shows the wrench icon next to it, where repairs show the Driver wheel. I got 15, 15, 14, 14 and 14, and I don't understand the one difference. That's so bizarre to me: repairing a vehicle counts as Driver and refuelling doesn't, but refuelling, you're only ever refuelling a vehicle, so I don't understand why that would still be Support. This is probably going to be my rig for a while. Next I'll upgrade to the drill, take fuel and the drill, and keep going up that way.
Later the same evening I unlocked the drill. The Light Drill is $600, and drill repairs on my Ural also go to Driver, at 3 XP a tick instead of the wrench's 2. My loadout of the drill, a wrench and a fuel can came to $750, now that I'm past level 9 and the recruit discount has gone.
Before that, I unlocked the Ural for $35,000, which took me from $37,316 to $2,316 and made me poor as heck. Owning the unlock isn't the same as having one to drive, so I'll swap to the Ural when I have enough cash to actually buy one.
Getting there was the hard part. Enemy helicopters killed me twice on the way to the play area, just outside our headquarters, and I ended up parking under a wall-less barn so there was a roof over me while they flew over taking out our supply vehicles. They wrecked our spawn vehicle too. That's within what you're meant to do in the game, but their team was getting rolled, so stopping our supplies wasn't changing the result. I don't know why you'd keep doing it except to farm your own score.
It happened again the next day: a helicopter hit my Ural and took it down to half health, so I parked under the same barn and repaired it with the drill.
Can you drive a vehicle you haven't unlocked in WARDOGS?
Yes, in WARDOGS you can drive a vehicle you haven't unlocked yet, if you find one. On 16 October we found someone's Ural that was pretty beaten up. Because I take the wrench out with me, I repaired it, got Driver XP for every repair tick, and now I've got a Ural I can drive without paying the $35,000 to unlock it.
It still does 79 km/h, the same as before, but it feels a lot slower. That might just be the laptop I'm playing on in the UK, which runs WARDOGS a lot worse than my PC.
Swapping into the Ural did cost me the round trip streak, but what I got for delivering my first pallets in it made it worth doing. The Ural's streak started again at 100 XP, then 150. That round we won, first place with 100 points to 39 and 10, and the end screen put my profit at $20,356, with $19,785 earned against $1,857 spent. It took me to Driver 5.
FAQ
Does repairing a vehicle give Driver XP in WARDOGS Season 02? Yes. Each repair tick pays 2 Driver XP with the wrench and 3 with the Light Drill, even though the vendor still shows the wrench as Support.
Does refuelling give Driver XP in WARDOGS? No. Refuelling paid 14 or 15 XP a tick in my games, but to Support, plus $15 cash.
Do round trip streaks work in WARDOGS Season 02? Yes. My round trips paid 150, then 200, then 250 Driver XP, and the streak restarted when I changed vehicle.
