Light tanks are not hard to play well. You simply have to play them differently. They're scouts and should be played as such. Sneak around and spot enemy movements and do your damnedest not to be seen.
Then you watch your map like a hawk and look for an opening that you can exploit to flank them or get at their inner tasty artillery and camping TD's looking the other direction. And then you feast on their entrails and bask in the lamentations of their women.
Lights are very tough, and what's even worse is that you need camo, sixth sense, and optics (at least 2/3 of these) to do well. A new player is going to flounder
hard in a light tank. I'd even argue that most new players do practically nothing ever in the vast majority of their light tank matches.
I would argue about HE. While it usually does scratch damage at most it also ignores angled armor so a heavily angled wedged in HT with a sliver of HP left can be reliably taken out by HE.
of course the gun must have a reasonable caliber for that but i'd always carry several of those.
Most of the tanks with that kind of armor are high tier ones, and even then you can't be sure that the HE will actually do damage. Unless you've got a 128mm+ cannon, I wouldn't be firing at, say, an E-75's front plate and hope to do more than double-digit damage.
Still, yes, there's situations where HE can be sort of useful, but 1. you can be wildly successful never using an HE round in your life and 2. a new player trying to decide when to swap to HE and when not to is going to perform worse than if he just went ahead and forgot the ammo even existed. Only when you've mastered basic game mechanics would I suggest dynamically swapping to HE.
Stay away from Japanese tanks, there are no good ones until tier 8.
WHAT!?!?!?
I'lll agree with you on the tier 5-7 tanks but the low tiers are rather excellent, The Chi-ha is one of the funnest tier 3s in the game in my opinion. (In tier 3-4 matches the hull down ability of it allows it to just dominate, hell its gun even is capable enough to work in tier 5 matches) and the Ke-Ho, thanks to not getting Scout MM is pretty much the only tier 4 light in the game that can be considered enjoyable. (And man did I have fun with it)
Wasn't aware of that, don't really play anything below T5. All I know is that the 5-7 are bad/mediocre and 8-10 don't really have any tanks worth going through the 5-7. Since that's going to account for 90% of your playtime I'd suggest ignoring the lines exist, but if the 1-4 are neat then I guess nabbing one he's interested in wouldn't hurt. Just don't invest too much into going up the tree.