conductiv

as a cruiser player I can tell you, going broadside to a battleship at 10KM = your dead. going face first to a battleship at appox 6 = lose 20K HP. exceptions exist when the enemy BB is drunk..or for some unexplainable reason blabs his shells into the water in front of me. if you can get closer then 6KM away from a BB, use torps if you have them (and you better do otherwise why the hell are you so close to a battleship) and hope he can't aim low enough to hit the citadel...as now you actually have a chance he just overpens..you are still going to take like 10K damage in total..but at least you don't instantly cease to exist. at long range (14KM+) when angled you'll frequently be able to take only 3K damage per BB shell that connects, barring the odd "hit the sweetspot" citadel hits through the deck armor that take a third/quarter of your HP away. if he hits a broadside however, almost guaranteed "heavy damage" I havn't really seen this change in the time I've been playing WoWs...now in my experience with battleships, they do tend to spread a lot so getting devastating strikes off isn't that easy, but relative to cruisers...its a lot easier to land kills, carry games and do tons of damage as the AP is actually potent enough to plow through the front of a lot of ships, unlike cruiser AP that just becomes ricochet central the second the enemy is even slightly angled.

I personally think using AP as your primary ammo would have given you more total damage and possibly killed off targets quicker, as a cruiser player I know that AP can paddle a cruiser from almost any distance and angle and a single lucky hit can cut my health in half...showing broadside to a battleship inside of 10KM should be an instant death sentence for a cruiser when facing a solid BB player. target selection, you want to remove firepower ASAP, as such it is generally better to go for DD's and CA's first, as torps and rapid fire guns can chew through HP fast, while these ships can usually be killed in a few salvo's themselves. you ignored DD's a few times while having HE loaded, while these torpedoboats can inflict devastating damage to you or your team. Damage on these targets also tends to "stick" as only tier 8-10's have access to healing skills (there may be a few exceptions by now, but in general T7 and below cruisers and DD's won't heal), making the damage more valuable. battleships have big guns, heavy armor and the ability to heal their considerable HP pool of most minor damage, it is important to get these assets into play as soon as possible. Your current playstyle seems too defensive, now there is a balance to be struck here, battleships are also slow and generally need time to recover, so you need an point of engagement where you can attack and take heat but not too much at once. and the "taking heat" is only useful if you have allies nearby that can use you as a distraction, or you are sure that you will get out of the exchange with the ability to heal most of the damage done to you..if going for a 1 v 1 slugging match. just to be clear...being more agressive does not mean you yolo in and eat a bow full of torps in the first 5 minutes. battleships tend to get "stuck" on a flank because they are so slow, but do keep eyes on the minimap to see opportunities to avoid getting flanked or getting flanks in yourself, armor becomes a lot less powerful when a full broadside is shown..this goes for enemy ships but for you as well. this is however a lot harder for battleships to do compared to destroyers or cruisers, and even then relocating takes a very large chunk of time. this is more in relation to the second game where your other flank was pretty much abandoned and you pushed into the 3 enemy battleships in front of you. you seemed to both miss the impending flank as you would get shot from your base and the front at the same time, and failed to realize that the enemy that was showing pretty much full broadside could be badly hurt for that mistake.

having more time to avoid while being torped is a major advantage, but while my mid tier cruisers don't have access to radar to find the DD..many of them do have acces to hydro, (I play USN, IJN and KM cruisers) hydro is great when you do charge a destroyer because it will spot torps from a large distance and it has a very long duration for a consumable, but it doesn't actually help me find the destroyer unless I'm already extremely close, as such it still requires an isolated enemy...and its not the tool to engage the enemy destroyer from any form of safety. the tier 3 skill is also highly contested, cruisers tend to rely on their consumables and their high explosives, as such the tier 3 skills "superintendent" and "demolitions expert" become very desirable. I never picked "vigilance", as such I can't say if the 25% detection boost it grants is trivial, or if it is enough to basically become a "passive hydro" for torps only.

OP's post aside, I was under the impression that it was a cruisers main job to..in absence of an enemy CV...to hunt and kill off enemy DD's. but in my experience playing cruisers in the 4-7 region, they have a hard time doing so. my observations: -you have the guns, but not the tools. the 152mm is a solid gun to engage enemy destroyers with..it has a high HE DPM and enough penetration that shots that hit tend to do a nice chunk of damage you also tend to have a good number of them. problem is getting those guns to hit the target...as in those tiers you don't actually have any tools to spot the DD unless you are at point blank range. (in general you rely on allied DD/CV to find the enemy destroyer) -have to move in late, early in the match you can generally find DD's in or near the cap...problem at that point is the heavy battleship support and the fact that cruisers can basically get deleted when exposed to their guns. so you can't push in as long as the enemy DD has support. -even if you catch a lone DD its not a done deal, cruisers are also remarkably fragile to DD HE spam. and almost all destroyers have smoke + high speed, giving them the option to disengage if needed...or worse, stall till they have support again, allowing them to use their smoke offensively. while cruisers do tend to have more guns and can deal more damage, they are also much bigger targets and easier to hit..destroyers can make themselves really hard to kill if they manage to shoot from the edge of their range.

next time before doing a whole new reinstall try and use the launcher to repair the game files, might save a bit of time.

did you accidentally hit the P key and disable the secondaries? I know its probably already checked...but you never know

plunging fire..based on the popularity of the strategy I'm not sure this is actually modeled sufficiently to actually be effective. the majority of shots I see being fired by enemies in battles and streams of various content creators are aimed for direct hits, never once have I seen a CC or an enemy use "plunging fire" Otherwise one would say that max range AP shooting with relatively slow shells against big targets like battleships would be relatively popular, as even 152mm shells maintain a 100mm+ penetration at max range, and most BB's have a 50mm or so armored deck. and unlike bow tanking, you cannot angle your deck against shots from above. AP tends to have a lot of negatives compared to its HE brother and could use a small buff, notably the smaller calibers. battleship AP however is the odd exception..since battleships have calibers so high that they benefit from overmatch against various targets, and have very high base penetration. this ends up removing the ricochet/bounce problems from a number of targets, a benefit smaller standard AP shells from CA/CL/DD do not share. HE damage is lower because the shell is much more reliable then its equivalent..because it does not care about angle or range, cannot overpen, can add DoT effects on top of dealing damage and every target you can shoot at has at least 1 area that the shell will inflict penetration level damage to that is always available to shoot at (initially at least, until this area is saturated). this is the reason "HE spam" is so prevalent.

aiming the main guns on a BB, secondaries on a nearby DD, using the downtime to drop torps while dodging incoming planes and torps... I'm okay with having access to manually aim any of the guns...but if I'm controlling the main I want a somewhat decent bot to man the other "secondary" armaments.

as far as I know, AP gets 0 dmg hits on module penetrations as well. so why would you be guaranteed ~3K worth of overpen damage if you had fired AP and hit the same modules? if you get overpen damage on everything if you hit with BB AP, but get pen or no damage with HE it becomes a bit wonkey....especially as BB's generally load AP and take a long time to switch ammo.

it is important to deal damage, a major part of the fun in this game is shooting ships. however, as the CV is a relatively reliable damage dealer, you cannot give it a huge damage output...as it will then simply dominate the board. and if you make damage potent but very hard to land, you choke the influx of new players as you will get a very steep learning curve, on top of unicum lopsided games. so for now a major part of the class "scoreboard position" seems to be determined by DoT kills, and the ships ability to deal damage over a long period of time. this low overall damage per strike also means it won't be able to just nuke whatever attacks/spots it. as any power it can project in its defense..it can also project across the map..needless to say that if it can nuke a DD that chases it...it would also nuke the DD's during the opening stages of the game. and that would be fun for the CV...but also extremely detrimental to the game as a whole. it is a bit of a special class, I don't know what kind of player this class intends to attract, it may be the support player type.... in every case...its current iteration won't attract the power player.

you got little XP because all you did was cap their base...while it was the winning move, this does not automatically grant you top XP. This is because the game expects one to have to fight for it...not the enemy handing it to you and running off to god knows where and duking it out with your team. the game only really uses the caps as a means to force conflict should one side deliberately attempt to stall by hiding or running away.

fresh potatoes starting the line is good, CV population is low compared to other classes, so it needs new blood influx. and the experience you see from the CV perspective is what I see from the receiving end...CV attacks are hard to dodge, luckily don't lead to instant death but they do eventually pile on the damage. And as a victim of the CV, there isn't really much you can do. I do see a clear difference in the skill of CV's though, newer CV players can outright miss a strike, and the more average ones miss the weaker pionts on ships dealing minimal damage. while experienced ones will land reasonable potent hits and will trigger the DoT effects on a regular basis. more experienced ones also lose less/no planes by avoiding the flak burst. 30K average for T4 isn't bad...yes you can do better in a cruiser or BB...probably a magnitude better..however, there is also a magnitude increase in chances you would be dead so I think the averages would be fairly similar. 50K+ average at tier 6 is more then solid, it tends to beat my cruisers and seems comparable to my battleship numbers. I do however have a feeling that the CV is intended more as a damage support then as a full on damage monster (aka intended more to damage targets that are already engaged with the team, increasing the takedown speed and allowing for wins with lower total damage) and utility tool box (scouting, defending and flushing enemies out, basically actions that if ships where to do them would require them to move extremely fast, be in extremely dangerous positions or be in very forward positions) as the planes can attack from angles not easily accessible by combat boats, and move across certain area's much faster/safer.

I can't think of any single ship of any ship type that has enough stopping power to take on all enemy bots in a operation.....its just too much raw HP to burn through.

flags, signals, camo, premium time and solid games... you can get the free exp part well over 1000% with this, and you can boost the pre-conversion EXP intake 2-3X as well. but it will still take a considerable amount of games (I dare say well over 100 games) so you will pay in a considerable amount of spend items, and grind time. however, there is nothing wrong with spending said free exp....its not going to do anything for you just sitting at your port.

once I find the way to reliably win games, I will be an unicum...for now I have regular meetings with excessive amounts of enemies while completely isolated from my team because I decided to sail up the wrong flank...attemps a cap when the team is running the other way or engaged a (what I thought was) a lone enemy. cruisers also have an occasional meeting with a 300mm + shell fired from a different postcode that happens to plunge through the middle of the ship causing half HP damage, tend to eat torpedo soup when trying to decap a torpedoboat that really likes his smoke using state of the art hydroacoutstics labeled "detects enemy ships bigger then a literal barn when you are right on top of him" anyway...plenty of ways to get a meeting with the ocean floor while having good intentions.

the grass sure does look greener from the other side of the fence, I was grinding my T6 BB and I did meet a significant amount of CV's of both tier 6 and 8...so I can't say my BB "never entered a T8 game" (I wish you where right) cruisers getting hit by air attacks...happens all the time...at least with tier 6 and 8 CV's, against tier 6 & 7 cruisers. unless you have a dedicated AA cruiser/DD along with a souped up commander specced for AA, you are not going to stop a strike plane. I have seen cruisers get hit by rockets over and over, and plenty of them got hit by divebombers...the only thing that doesn't seem to hit cruisers reliably is the torpedobomber. you might think every cruiser is a AA specced worcester, however not all of them have a good AA suite from my perspective as a cruiser/DD/BB player, CV's seem to be reliable...they prove hard to dodge and stop but lucky for the combat boats...don't have the ability to instantly delete any ships...but they will pile up a lot of damage over frequent strikes, and the AA casualties a cruiser inflicts don't feel as they have a huge amount of impact on the CV (keep in mind this is how it feels from the cruisers point of view, I can't see if the CV player is slamming his head on his desk because he lost 5 planes). For DDs that are not AA specced...aircraft prove to be a massive PITA..its not just the rocket planes, its the fact that you have to smoke every time one of those gnats strays too close...lest you get plastered by whatever ships you where currently stalking. from a BB perspective..well you will have that CV player on your backend for a big portion of the game, now my BB isn't geared for AA...so I'm not exactly suprised it can only knock off like 6 planes over an entire match (this while using the sector system) I'm often basically forced to eat torp because turning to avoid would give a broadside to an enemy BB, and even if there is room to maneuver the mid tier BB's in every case can't really dodge a decent drop. the MM however, isn't drowning in CV players waiting to enter a game...every match will have a good amount of cruisers, generally 4-5 BB's and 2-4 DD's however CV's are the one class that doesn't seem to pop up every single game. and there is a big skill gap between the new CV players and the ones that have experience...much more noticable compared to the difference between a decent and bad BB or cruiser player. personally I think we do need a healthy amount of CV players, so this means that the number actually has to go *gasp* up (at least in the mid-tiers (6&8) no matter how annoying they can be) as I do feel the air game adds another dimension to the game.

tier 3, 4 and 5 you are slow as hell and generally unable to dodge much of anything, your AA and your accuracy sucks...you are however tough as nails and can delete most ships with a single well placed broadside. a lot of the torpedoboats you see also lack the ability to stealth torp you, have few guns, relatively poor captains and the HE that does hit has a relatively low chance to cause fires...so you don't get anywhere near as much stacking fires. in the combat effectiveness corner, I'd say that low tier BB's are still the better pick...the guns can be used against any target and are always effective, you have thick armor, high health and a heal meaning that unless any enemy apart from a BB manages to land torps you can shrug off an amazing amount of damage. cruisers on the other hand...well the only way they can deal with a BB in any decent amount of time is to yolo rush them with torps. the only real downside of low tier BB's is their pathetic movement speed, once you realize you are about to move up crap creek without a paddle...you have no real way out.

I think cruiser AP is to blame. the 203mm of all nations tends to have a lower DPM then its 150-range counterpart, and when spamming HE...DPM is really what matters most. the improved ballistics of the 203 only really matter when firing AP, and AP is extremely situational on cruisers. destroyer and cruiser caliber AP can use a buff in my opinion.

it is actually in the lower tiers that I tend to spot a lot of CV's, and its not cleuless new players playing them either. if the mission allowed me to complete it in the battleship I'm grinding I would have finished it ages ago.

a server drop at 1AM central European time on the first of march...I have a sneaky suspicion it's a server reset. it being midnight and the first of the month and all

to my knowledge almost all targets are best engaged with HE, unless you get a clean broadside at medium range or you have 300mm + caliber. pro's for HE. -IFHE allows for large improvement of penetration on spam-cruisers and DD's allowing them to wither down practically any ship, negating the downsides of having a small caliber weapon. -triggers on all ship classes, as all ships have weak superstructures but not all ships have enough armor to trigger an AP fuse...cannot score an overpenetration for reduced damage -ignores angles, it cannot ricochet or fail to penetrate due to angles. -ignores shell velocity/drag coefficients, the penetration is the same at all ranges -has an added chance to apply a DoT that deals % max hp damage/sec, this can make it very effective against high HP targets, this chance is rolled regardless if the shot bounced or not. -has a frag-box that can destroy or disable modules around the point of impact. cons for HE -deals less damage then its AP brother. -rarely scores citadels for full damage, this may happen on carriers and the odd flimsy cruiser...but it will rarely hit for its full damage. -cannot punch through torpedo bulges into the hull, hitting and penetrating a bulge would cause 0-damage penetrations this makes HE-DPM builds fairly reliable, as the shell ignores almost every aspect that would frustrate AP use, it can be used on a destroyer as well as on a battleship and the orientation of the target doesn't matter, you also get to aim at a relatively large visible area for optimal effect (superstructure) it also makes the german line or 203mm guns rather meh, these guns usually have a lower DPM to balance its better AP ballistics...but the best counter against 203mm AP is to simply turn stern/bow, have no armor...or have a huge amount at a slight angle or long range. and in order to get the best out of AP you have to hit and penetrate a covered target that is partially or entirely obstructed by the waterline through 2-3 layers of armor, and destroyers don't even have that target to shoot at to begin with. this makes me believe that DD and cruiser AP could use some love like That_Other_Nid suggested.

This does seem to be a "wait for the storm to blow over" situation. as there are a lot of carriers in the matchmaker at this moment. resulting in the vision saturation, the low AA rating of destroyers and the addition of the easier to aim with rockets also made destroyers a prime target for multiple passes, resulting in a particulary bad couple of days for players of this class. but I am worried, especially by the apparent immense gap between "good" CV players and the new/average/bad ones...if you can dodge flak, you pretty much hamstring the AA of any ship, allowing you to take on any that are not sailing in extremely close proximity to their allies. if you can't dodge flak, you lose planes like nobodies business. this directly translates to the fact that a good CV player can dominate the fight, with the losses that they do take restored during the flight time of another squad, while the "bad one" will be crippled 5 or so minutes and waiting for the onboard factory to rebuild the lost planes. this in my book would mean that one of the initial goals of this rework..narrowing the skill gap between good and bad CV players...didn't exactly pan out like it was intended to. it also proves hard to counterplay a CV, you can only control the reinforced sector, but the majority of the AA damage is still in the flak busts...if they get avoided, well...nothing you can do to counteract that (if they can't avoid this, well even moderate AA flak will badly damage planes). as what remains will simply be too anemic to stop a drop, and if its first pass to even reduce the numbers of munitions used on you. with rockets, torps and bombs in tandem, there is also no ship agile or small enough to avoid a whooping...provided the CV player is a capable enough shot. the only remaining "counter" is sailing in a blob.

fighting DD's without radar is usually a invisible thing that can spot you with impunity and cause his team to open up on you. if you do happen to get close enough to catch a glimpse they usually smoke up and force evasive maneuvers through torp vollies, only if one manages to survive to get within ~4KM you can use hydroacoustics to find them in the smoke, and avoiding anything at that range is nigh on impossible. in effect a well played DD is practically invulnerable provided an enemy DD doesn't light them up, or an enemy CV doesn't park planes overhead. if the DD gets spotted by the above counters (hydro, other DD or plane) they are not dead yet, you actually still have to hit the target that is the smallest, most agile platform in the game...and most of these can almost make a U-turn in the time it takes for a BB shell fired from 10-12KM to land. and even if you do hit, these ships do not have a citadel so arn't as prone to being instantly deleted like cruisers are. This does not mean they take damage well, DD's have fragile modules, have relatively low HP and they cannot repair damage...however it does give them a margin or error should they get spotted in open water Radar allows for a few charges each lasting less then a minute of long range spotting, bypassing invisiblity shield of the DD...should the DD be hiding behind an island he will be informed he has been spotted...and can just wait out the timer in safety (as of the moment of this post, no mole-shells/torpedoes are present in the game), should he be in open water the DD has enough agility to bob-and-weave his way out of the detection zone of the radar...with less risk then a cruiser would experience should he be spotted by a destroyer.

you would think that would be the case, but it is in my experience actually relatively rare for the DD to win easily. he will win unless he goofs up somewhere, but generally after a protracted fight lasting 4-5 minutes or even longer..as the best counter against being torped by a DD is simply sailing the other way.. barring any method to force the BB to engage, or having the advantage of a totally oblivious BB he is going to try and maintain distance, meaning the DD is down to using its artillery for the dreadfully slow BBQ death, or repeat torp spam for 1 hit every minute or so. the easy wins happen if the BB is completely unaware of the DD's presence (and gets ambushed/stealth torped), or when the BB is forced to engage (trapped in a map corner/forced to attempt a decap..generally endgame stuff in the extremely rare 1v1 scenarios)

torp walls..nasty long range torp..walls... using shotgun tactics works if you have enough on a DD, but even then it was a high tier exception to the rule. much like the zao is now with cruisers