conductiv

personally I feel that HE is all but useless in WoT, save very special "HE guns" (SPGs and derps) as soon as I entered this game I hoped that would be different..and while it was not..now it is, to a degree it still needs tweaks (as in HE needs another tap..not full on hit..with the nerfbat) to make AP a better candidate for common targets. (thinking about high tier armored DD's with the 8" and lower tier DD's with the 6" allowing the higher DPM ammo to be used effectively) but they are pretty close already.. about the 1 shot scenario: well I did play a few IJN cruiser games again and I am a BB shell magnet (no really..if there is 1 BB on the opposing team..I will sail towards that guys position by accident)..I did not get 1 shot...I did get badly mangled..and killed over the course of the fight a few times by the class that is supposed to counter me but that is how its supposed to be in my eyes. now this doesn't mean it is impossible for them to 1 shot me..if they aim well and I fail to dodge I deserve the pain sandwich...as much as they deserve the torp surprise if I get close (something that is pretty much a 1 shot with IJN torps). ah well that is just how I see it. I actually like the "no saves" in WoWs (for citadel hits that is) relative to WoTs save system, the save system is a bit like the brain jumping out of the bullets path upon a headshot in FPS metafores. so I'd like it if they kept that, adjusting target size for balance is okay with me. maybe, WG has the data on a larger scale, and as a CA player mainly my opinion is rather subjective. but for now I see few problems with the BB's boomsticks (as in I agree with WG's decision to increase penetration depth)..before you where both immune to citadel hits and has a smaller profile if you just sailed "ramming course" to a battleship, now the BB can badly hurt you from all angles, forcing you and me to avoid their shells..auch...but it also makes them a true counter.

if that is their goal, do you agree with it..and how close do you think they are to that goal?

a few comments. -the problem with torps is hitting them, its not like it takes almost a minute for the dahm things to get to the target..its a reason the average torp hit rates seem to fluctuate between 8 and 10% -so you had your instant repair and heal on cooldown without taking a single shot before that torp hit you?!...what was the reason you used them on your full health BB. if that single torp finished you off as a damaged BB...well that's what torps are for. -flooding has a limited duration, around 45 seconds and is applied in about 60% of all torp strikes..it isn't guaranteed -when facing DD's its wise to load HE, as the AP shells over-penetrate destroyers. -secondaries are currently being reworked to be a more worthwhile investment, however, they will never become strong enough to deter all close range threats -airplanes with stealth technology...no really you can see them from about 10KM off. -you would be surprised how effective actual smoke is..it can be dense enough that you won't be able to see 3M in front of your nose, potent enough to use as a screening maneuver in urban combat..instead you get a 1 or 2KM auto-detect zone while sailing into a DD's killzone..ehh about that...stay away from smoke, you can see that from 10+ KM away as well.

that must have been prior to the closed beta then, because when the closed beta started, armor and overpenetration mechanics where both absent, allowing AP to be extremely effective against all targets. on top of that, the fire mechanics was bugged so the listed fire chances did not apply on any ship save the aircraft carrier, causing fires..even with 25%+ chances only when 40+ hits where landing on the target HE did less damage to any target, be it a citadel hit or not and HE only knocked out irrelevant modules (AA guns and secondaries) on all ships larger then a destroyer. needless to say, AP was used everywhere as HE was severely under-performing, there was no reason to use HE on any target. Saying that it was wise to use it on a DD was moot as you could kill it quicker with AP, the only so-so option of use was on the 2 max per game carrier because it would knock out their ability to launch planes..and even that one would die quicker if engaged with AP. it is fair to say that up to the HE patch...there was no "liberal use" of HE.... -at the moment BB AP is worse then before, with armor and overpen active..it has problems against angled peers and poorly armored ships. but it maintains its high DPM effect. WG is steadily making it more effective by increasing penetration depth and reducing ricochet angles. as long as they don't touch the overpen..it should be okay -HE has largely recovered, with the fire bugfix its actually effective on most ships (module damage is still largely ineffective)...problem is that it came with the increased impact damage launching it right past balanced into OP land. on top of that the recent "release" of the fire chance calculation shows that defensive and offensive odds arn't exactly calculated in a fair way....that is if the source is to be trusted. currently with the new reduced impact damage fix, there is a steady decline in HE=OP threads as they start moving towards torps and carriers. I hope that any future tweaks to this ammo don't break it.

that's where we feel very different then..fire is a sort of primary damage when engaging heavily armored targets with HE, its a bonus effect tagged on especially to allow HE to compete against AP on targets where AP isn't effective. the blast is effective on low HP targets with puny armor, its fire effect allows for some damage against heavily armored targets. if fire was insanely rare...there would be no reason to ever use HE, so in a way...you rely on fires. AP bounces, blast damage is greatly absorbed and only torps deal decent damage. Using torps as a main ammo source generally means a lot of misses as well as taking frequent deadly risks, so you have the option of hitting it often enough so you get a fire and wait for that to slowly wither the target away...its not as good as blasting it with 5 torps and takes a lot longer to kill the target..but it will get there in time. if fire took 40+ hits like it did before...it would always be insta clicked away, and be completely useless. actually...on average I expect cruisers to need 10 HE hits to start a fire, on average 1se every 2 vollies if they hit most of the shots fired. this makes a few cruisers very effective in starting fires. but overall it takes a cruiser about 30 seconds to start a lvl 1 fire on a battleship outside of BB optimal range (this means beyond the 10-11KM killzone where BB's are expected and when decently played will demolish cruisers so..12-16KM) so its far from instant a battleship comes with 2 counters, its self repair outpaces and outrepairs a level 1 fire and HE shell damage, and its repair party instantly douses any level of fire. this should be enough for a battleship to easily stall 90 seconds worth of time taking only minimal fire damage (unless he takes fire from a multitude of ships, but then you should be losing health fast) . after that the ship needs at least a minute of time to recoup...so if you can't kill the enemy cruiser in 4 salvo's or aint sure..it might be better to just sail away..he can follow..but then your allies should be able to get him unless the BB was daft enough to go out alone. now this doesn't sound like a nuke if you need 50 of them and it still takes in excess of 2 minutes to do its lethal work...and even then a well played target can just sail off

as a tier 6 DD in a tier 9 battle with 40K damage apparently gives you these scores...you did have a decent enough game, the rest of your team didn't do as well. scores from a battle won by cap is a bit of a weird way to claim the effectiveness of fire, as we have idea how exactly the XP buildup works, we know damage is a major factor..but that's where it pretty much stops... now it is possible he was engaged by others soon after, and the lack of repairs is definitely relevant...but the 9K fire damage itself...would that really be something a tier 6BB would be so extremely afraid of?...especially since you had to fire for almost 2 minutes straight to get those fires going

wouldn't this just lead to "lets all lemming to the back of the map and camp there"? because getting a whole team to move in unison...won't happen, you always get the "I'll support from the back" players around. and moving out will just get you killed, and that would give the opponent points meaning they would win. this means that the most effective way to win the suggested battle mode is to simply stay as far away from combat as possible and kill off any bored stragglers..because if they don't go..its a draw, and if they do get bored..they lose

2 fires in 51 HE shots.....roughly on par with a 5% fire chance. now if you are complaining about the amount of damage inflicted by the fires...that is roughly 15% of one of the BBs engaged, all light damage..so he most likely auto-repaired that right off the bat. even though the DoT was most likely completely ineffective..it would still come up in your after battle report

DoT damage can be quite devastating when allowed to run rampant, especially flooding, but that doesn't make it OP. flooding is the one DoT that you can see a minute before it happens. torpedo's are slow, and the units that can drop them very close (planes) can be spotted 10 KM out. most cases of "killed by flooding" are cases that involve premature use of the instant repair ability. For now the torpedo is the only ammunition type that can cause flooding, and does so very frequently...roughly 60% of all torpedo hits cause flooding. The flooding damage is a % of max HP DoT, at roughly 1% per second for 45 seconds on top of that it cuts the ships maximum speed in half. this is VERY powerful, but currently not a real concern because the torpedo hit rate is quite low (at about 10%) and most causes of flooding are instantly repaired...or moot because the target died immediately after by other torpedo's from the spread

term-meaning-minimap display BB=battleship=(bullet shape with 2 lines through it) CA=cruiser=(bullet shape with 1 line through it) DD=destroyer=(triangle shape) CV=aircraft carrier=(bullet shape with a sideways T in it) ones you probably already got AP=armor penetrating ammo HE=High explosive ammo torps=torpedos I have no idea if you can change the UI like that, didn't try to change it myself

I fully agree with the suggestion, using the reduced numbers in later posts on the "minor" fire rather then the opening posts 0.5-1 and 1-3% as these numbers would be too severe. I was the 0.5% per second claimer...mostly based on personal experience (originally 0.5% per tick and a tick every 2 seconds, I changed this to 0.5%/s when people started complaining they lost 1K+ HP/s with level 3 fires on mid tier battleships) (something that is impossible with sharana's 0.3% per stack..as no ship has 100K+ HP (3*0.3=0.9= less then 1% so no 1K HP per second lost even on the toughest battleships) keep in mind people where claiming the 1K HP/s lost by lvl 3 fires on mid tier BB's like the new mexico) however, I had no access to a controlled environment nor did I use recording tools to measure the numbers exactly...hence.... take sharana's numbers for true. 0.3-0.4%/s HP lost per second seems like a decent enough number for a "normal" fire, and 1-1.2% (3%/s would be too high, it would outright kill the burning ship even with my guessed duration numbers) will do just fine for a serious fire upon penetration of a (minor) ammo or fuel stockpile (a citadel penetration would likely yield engine damage and max HE damage already..so there is no need to make anything like that more severe) I could swear the base fire duration was 45 seconds and not 60 though. I would expect CA and DD to be unable to start a serious fire on a BB, but the BB would still be threatened by the fire damage magnitude..even though it won't stack anymore. well aimed 203mm AP fire on the less armored BB's should yield better results then standard HE spam, but constant HE spam could kill a BB over a long period of time (2-3 minutes of constant spamming) this prevents the immunity bypass I would also prefer if they would change the fire chance formula, making both the defensive and offensive fire bonuses additive rather then the offensive one additive and the defensive one multiplicative. (this currently makes -% fire chance bonuses rather useless..if the russian source is correct) the secondary/AA suggestions...clarity would indeed be a step in the right direction...but I think this would need a bit more work.

RESULT: -superman repair team popped up and extinguished all fires, insta repaired all guns planes where shot down, DD sunk....Target is still raw deu to insufficient cooking. no I just had to make that comment. I see this suggestion a lot "lets just make it so it damages secondaries", but lets be honest here guys, there is hardly anyone that cares about those guns in a ship vs ship battle. you lose them all the time in the current spam HE meta..and nobody abuses a knocked out secondary or AA. -for AA because you have so many of them..losing 1 or 2 just doesn't make a dent in the overall AA power, on top of that only the limited in number CV can exploit damage to these guns. (and any ship that only has 1 or 2 has no AA power to start with) -for secondaries because most ships don't rely on them atoll, (cruisers DDs and CVs) and the one that does rely on them somewhat has a arsenal of them, on top of massive range on the main guns they try to exploit. its like damaging a guys pistol if he's shooting at you with a heavy machine gun. now if fire/HE sacrificed damage to jam up or severely hamper the main guns and torpedo tubes it would be a suitable annoyance to sacrifice damage for...even if it can be instantly clicky-removed like it is now, but for AA and secondaries.....

I'm surprised this is a thread regarding low HE damage rolls, basically claiming the nerf was somewhat more then 10%. I'm very used to the typical claim of "HE is OP". so this is a change. now, while it is true that you are supposed to engage targets with HE if you cannot penetrate in the citadel with AP, the impact damage of the HE shells should still be low (otherwise it would be straight up armor bypass), instead you rely on fires for the damage and on the module damages to limit the enemies effective return fire. at least that is how I see HE should work on armored targets

unless the BB is an idiot...(facehug the jap, get a spread of torps as a present) same like anything else, HE should light them on fire when hit plenty of times and deal pathetic impact damage per shell, if the BB sits there not dealing with the cruiser he will burn down. no weird immunities. yes...and no..if HE is just there to blow off secondaries make it a worthwhile trade...I have seen 0 threads about people complaining that their secondaries or AA got hit on top of that secondaries repair extremely fast. and at the moment they are being broken left and right by the HE spam..its just that nobody cares about these guns. yay 1 of my 20 AA's got broken, woot 1 of my 16 secondairies got shot....nobody gives a dahm...you have dozens on the ship and the'll be back in 15 seconds. The ones that have less (cruisers and destroyers) don't rely on them atoll or even disable them for stealth advantages. FIRE NOOOOO, somebody gives a dahm about that...0.5% damage per second for 45 seconds that can be instantly clicked away OMG NERF NAO my battleship is burning down.

fire the bane of WoT....it has never been too relevant in that game. single fires are instantly clicked away and double fires are soo rare that people trying to do that mission complain all day on the forums. even in beta when there was no extinguisher killing someone with fire was extremely rare. on average it takes 2 hits on the feul tank or 5 in the engine to cause a fire and you have 45% chance of hitting the darn thing if you aim properly. this means you can expect a fire once every 5 or 12 shots depending on your target. and most tanks die when damaged 5 times by a moderate caliber gun. in this game it happens at a high frequency (~1:10 for most cruiser caliber shells)...but the fire damage is low and you get the clicky for free...the fire damage only really becomes relevant once it hits a level 3 fire and the target used its clicky before that point, forcing him to take almost half its HP worth in fire damage.

BB's lit on fire: primary solution: remove the source, AKA blow up whatever ship is trying to light you on fire...then fix the fires. secondary solution: create a barrier that makes it hard for him to light you on fire..create distance and sail towards allies then fix the fire. tertiary solution: tank it on your self repair ability to lessen the impact, repairing it only when the severity is extreme and fighting till the end. notes: -the repair crew ability basically calls superman to the ship that flies to the affected module and bends metal to fix leaks, unjam guns and rutters, magically revives engines and uses its super lungs to instantly extinguish any fire. -the "normal crew" needs somewhat more time to fix issues on the ship...and even then repairing a jammed turret, or patching a torpedo hole in 90 seconds is very impressive. and while doing that, the ship maintains full combat effectiveness...no manpower is drained from loading, steering or fire control positions about some of the proposed fixes: -limited fire immunity. between 10-30 seconds its fine...but keep in mind that making it too long or even making it so long that it overlaps the repair cooldown will make the whole ship immune to fire. and its a bit of a lame fix. -different hit categories of fire, 2 ways to interpret, either give the ship hit-zones where the ship is immune or susceptible to fires or change the severity of the fire based on whats burning. and even then there are like a billion ways in how this can turn out. on its own the suggestion ain't that bad. -no HP damage, just debuffs...depends on the debuff..fires are not scary if all they do is knock out a few AA batteries and secondairies, lowering turret traverses, reload times, main gun and torpedo armament range and/or accuracy are far more severe and will actually be felt. fire has to remain a danger to the ship, if one can just shrug if off with *pff..just another one of my 40+ AA batteries down* it has no impact and the effect is moot. -lower fire damage, increase module damage on secondaries and AA...nobody gives a hoot about their secondaries and cares very little about AA if attacked by a ship (see above). and lower fire damage by a lot makes it a moot status effect, if it focuses on module damage, the attacked modules have to be relevant..like almost guaranteed rutter jams when aimed there, the ability to jam main batteries with great reliability when aiming at them. people care about their HP, torps, main guns, engine and rutter..having 1 of 20+ secondaries or a AA knocked out is at the moment completely irrelevant. there are often too many of them on the target ship..and their impact relative to the main is very small. -repair toggle, how long would the repair times be..I take it they won't be instant.

does this conform with what you notice in game? how reliable is the source... because lets be honest...multiplicative they make little sense (unless the listed numbers where like 25-30% on the perk and equipment...but instead they are 5 and 7...). certainly because the formula does +% fire chance as a flat addition and then applies -% fire chance multiplicative (bit of a double standard...). it is just weird. give it some time, 1st day observations are prone to bias.

try to say that in WoT with regards to arty and you would be publicly quartered, while they are not similar...they are both capped and both expected to live for the majority of the game, the WoT arty is definitely NOT supposed to have the highest average damage per game and is repeatedly beaten by the nerf bat because of it...(the current arty is still being demonized and its a shadow of its former super-OP self) be very careful when you say "I'm capped so I'm expected to be better then X", or "I survive longer due to my mechanics so I should be better then X" while damage isn't as much a winning factor in this game then it is in WoT (as the number of games won by capping is higher in WoWs), it is the major reward factor at the moment and still a large contributor to the win. ......okay.... the other side of unintentionals coin, instead of being in favor of CVs thinking about the systems implemented to "counter" aircraft. why would anyone focus on AA as the one class that actually uses offensive aircraft gets a AA counter? its something like "BB secondaries should be great at blasting torps out of the water".

I still get citadel hits on cruisers near the waterline underneath the torpedo section, center hull for the cleveland and new orleans and front hull under the steering cabin for pensecola and des-moins. level shot 203mm AP shells from my ibuki and baltimore. I have no idea what you did wrong...what I do know is that testing would be a whole lot easier if we had a training room

yeah the ammo problems are making it hard to gauge CA effectiveness. at the moment HE impact damage is roughly on par with AP penetrations without the addition of fire damage, and since AP only pens ships on flat surfaces on reasonable range due to its invisible penetration, ricochet, bounce and apparently over-penetration mechanics. it makes HE just a whole lot easier to use...if you are not going for citadel hits. now I still use AP a lot on cruisers when fighting cruisers, and usually out-perform HE by a margin because I get a number of citadel hits...but looking back...would I perform a lot worse when simply spamming HE? I don't know...its going to be darn close in any case. as with HE I don't have to worry too much about the target..DD's are practically impossible to citadel and are 60%+ non critical hitzone, so HE was already the primary ammo..cruisers, don't have to worry about pen and get a fire chance to mitigate the loss of citadel hits..BB had to spam HE already to do any damage with guns due to the very low penetration chance with cruiser AP ammo on them, on top of that as fire deals % of max HP damage it stacks on large amounts of absolute damage and attacking carriers was a luxury in any game as they usually hog the back line. The only real damage loss I would have would be on cruisers, but I would not lose any time switching ammo and I would be more effective if the cruiser proved hard to penetrate. about cruisers in general...well I like options..and cruisers still have a lot of options. cruisers have decent enough guns and good RoF rates on moderately stealthy ships with either good AA or "poor AA" and torps. -You can move around the map without getting spotted from the moon and can generally engage any battleship from stealth (Pensacola being a exception here)..or any cruiser that might have opened fire on any ally before spotting you for that matter. -cruiser guns cannot be ignored by any ship and you have plenty of them regardless of nation, this means you always have a ready option to shoot..the range might not be battleship level..but its decent, accuracy is solid..and the damage..well is currently bodged by the ammo isseus. -the AA and associated skill allow for some torp protection from air based threats...nor can your camo be negated by DB or fighter stalking like can happen with DDs as even the IJN will shoot them down if they try that. -access to a scout plane to look past mountains or DD's in ambush that have yet to use their smoke...or DDs that forget to disable their AA in smoke. minor tool but very useful on some occasions. -IJN has access to torps, something I like a lot as this opens up another surprise for oblivious enemy ships, at the cost of some toughness and AA power.

not to my knowledge...they where destroyed and repaired back to damaged condition in time, they never got all the way back up as the repair kit consumable wasn't around yet...but never permanently destroyed.

while I have seen the AP bounce off pretty much anything I can't say I've seen over-penetrations on anything other then DD cannons...when playing the DD. (and that's like "over penetration" followed by the message that a turret was destroyed) this doesn't mean I haven't seen a fair share of low damage penetrations, buts that's usually when you hit the bow, stern or superstructure with a AP round and these shots already did poor damage before the ammo changes. and back then, over-penetration wasn't even possible (as I read later on that the over-penetration system was defunct) It is also the main reason why I asked if destroyers even had a citadel (as I didn't get the citadel hit ribbons with AP or HE ammo when playing any class and fighting them) even though damage on them was relatively okay..damage on target was never close to the levels of citadel hits on cruisers, but closer to typical non-critical-penetrations. is there some way to see if the AP shell you fired in the game is a over-penetration? bounces can be heard by the dinging sound and if I get over-penetrated I get a message telling me so (or maybe that is only the case with cannons/turrets getting over-penetrated)...but I have no recollection of any significant visual or audio cues that might indicate a over-penetration by my cannon.

that's not what the post is about, the post is about absolute immunity for all damage form the class. basically there should be no case where a class deals 0 damage to its counter class with all its attack options. to clarify...this is not specific to fire. I take it your "not the case" is based on the assumption that I meant "immunity to fire". immunity to small caliber HE fires is not a problem if the commander invests everything in fire chance reductions...and even then the immunity can be bypassed if the other invests into pyromania. HE damage will still do some impact damage even if AP dings off the chances of fire in the situation you describe (module with fire chance reduction +tier 5 captain skill that reduces fire chance) is 0 for half the cruisers in the game...with the 203mm guns having a paltry 4% chance to cause fire. and 203mm guns aren't exactly known for their great rate of fire on all but 1 cruiser..the des moins. however, I have seen a constant pattern when people complain about cruiser HE fire chances. on top of constant insisting that their BB can't hit the cruiser,and their BB always gets double or triple fires on every single salvo. might have something to do with this one, and the fact that many captains don't have or want to take the tier 5 fire prevention skill, making the cleveland and the 155mm mogami very effective "flamethrower ships"..as even with the 7% chance per shot..they can expect a single fire every 2 salvo's on average, assuming most shots connect as they have a great rate of fire and lots of guns (12 and 15 respectively) downside of these ships is that their AP is relatively weak compared to the 203mm guns available at those tiers, and the HE impact damage is at the moment too high. Meaning that these ships lend themselves for HE spam in the current meta (as they hardly work in any other way) fire itself deals marginal damage (0.3% per second per level according to a supertester, so no more the 0.9% at a level 3 fire. my own assumptions are higher at 0.5% every second per level and is more in line with people claims...but even then it can never reach the stellar damage heights of some) but this does lead me to believe most of the damage people complain about is HE impact damage, and not fire.

while the amount of fires is most likely not going to change, the impact damage of HE shells is going to change in one of the next few patches. so that 8K would be more like 4 or 5K. mostly to make penetrating AP more effective then a HE shell somewhere on the superstructure on top of that AP ammo is going to get a minor buff, as in the angle to riccochet will have to be more severe..allowing AP ammo to penetrate angled surfaces more reliably. apparently...fire chance and damage will be up for balance after the impact of the second AP/HE patch can be seen in the stats.

I agree with him, however...I have no idea how to fix the mentioned problem, its not like you can give BB's a super accurate doomcannon that hits citadels cross map with terrifying reliability (because he is basically saying that they are too inaccurate), because that would instantly end the fun of...everyone else. no suggestions from me on how to fix carriers either, but he's right that damage-focus is not what it should be. only thing I think he is wrong about is the claim that pre-set flight decks limit personalization, because lets be honest...when you have a community where you can pick and choose..people are going to hog 1 or 2 "best" setups and that's it.