callumwaw

It is not true the answer is in google. When you google it, you find TWO CONTRADICTORY ANSWERS and that's why I started this thread. Seriously, how hard is it to read the original post and comprehend it? The only reason I asked the question is that I had googled it and I had found divergent answers. This is called "secondary illiteracy". You can read & write but you don't really comprehend what you're reading. I never said "getting IFHE for Bismarck is the right thing to do". All I said was I was experimenting with different set-ups and that I wanted to know what penetration the 105's have. One simple question but here you are, imagining things and living in your little world of fantasy, where people say things they never said in real life. LOL dude, you're really funny. You butt in here, you have absolutely no meaningful contribution to give, you haven't said a single useful thing, but you go on with ad hominem arguments. FYI, I'm 41 years old, so you're off the mark by at least two generations, hahahah. Just read the original post please, and pay attention to the question I asked. It's at the bottom of the post in bold type. It's easy to see and even to understand. If you have anything to add to what has been already explained, please do. If you don't, just go away and stop wasting our time. Yeah, I wanted to be able to see exactly where the 105 mm shells were hitting :-D

Finally someone said this! Thank you! But there are people who think there is only one valid build-up for a given ship, which is nonsense. If this were true, they wouldn't give us any choice, the captain perks would be distributed automatically. I agree there are different ways of building your captain. At the moment I'm experimenting with enhancing the efficiency of the secondaries as there seem to be fewer CV's so statistically, it seems, speccing for AA is not useful in as many games as in the past.

@tank276 clearly, you're no linguist, so as a linguist myself let me explain: words of the same origin often have different meanings in different languages. Like the word "consequent" and its counterparts, which in many languages mean "consistent" but obviously not in English. It has developed differently in English since it was borrowed. As centuries pass, borrowed words often change their meaning in target languages. So it is of absolutely ZERO relevance what "dilemma" means in Greek for Modern British English. It could even mean "don't start off-topics in internet forums" in Ancient Greek, but it would still mean what Oxford English Dictionary says it means as far as English is concerned. And I doubt the original Greek word meant "not answering the question" or "preaching to other people what you think is right." Ahhh, here is the source of the problem. You didn't even bother reading the original post, you only read the title of the thread and jumped to conclusions. How's that for "not being very bright"? I even made out the bleeding question in bold to make sure everybody knew what it was, but you didn't even read that far. Please, stop adding more posts that have no relevance to the problem at hand. I will ignore any further comments that are irrelevant, it's a waste of time.

That's a good point, thanks! I parked my bismarck 5 km away from the target (bismarck and Roon) so perhaps I should repeat it from, say, 10 km.

@Sigimundus thanks so much, mate! Finally the answer I've been looking for. It's kind of weird, because the table in the Wiki says the opposite. Also, only the tier 10 BB has 128 mm secondaries. Did the Bismarck use to have them in the past? With the 105's only having calibre/6, they cannot even penetrate high-tier DESTROYERS, which means they are absolutely useless for anything else than an occasional fire. If you get IFHE, you can pen 19 mm, which means you can finally pen destroyers and theoretically battleship superstructure, although my tests in the testing room showed that even with IFHE the 105's are not penning superstructure! So in fact the 105's seem to be even worse. It's all very strange.

@tank276 clearly, you don't understand the word "dilemma". It doesn't mean: "please teach me how to spec my captain". It means "a situation where a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives" (as per OED definition, and I don't think you'll find a better one). The two alternatives are: is it calibre/4 or calibre/6. The choice is difficult because there are sources that back up either of these claims. This is an outright lie, mate. You're lying. I never said I needed advice on that. I didn't even say I was considering IFHE for my captain. I specifically asked: 'My question is: is this true? Do the German 105 mm HE shells have "regular" instead of "German" penetration?' This is a quotation from my original post. How hard is it for you to answer a simple question without coming up with a whole illusionary story of me supposedly asking you to teach me things, and you answering questions that were never asked by anybody in this thread? How hard is it NOT to go off-topic? Of course I could if I wanted to, or if I was conducting an experiment...

@Sigimundus thanks very much, finally a factual answer! Do you have a source of this information (that the 105 mm's have caliber/6 penetration)? Because the table in the Wiki clearly shows that German 105 mm secondaries have the caliber/4 penetration rule (http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Armor_thresholds). It's a bit surprising. Is it just a mistake in the Wiki? I've done some testing in the training room and the results are baffling. With IFHE, my 105 mm's don't even seem to pen the superstructure on the enemy Bismarck and Roon, (which they should easily do even if they are caliber/6). Are the 105 mm there just to look nice if they don't do anything?

@Aotearas you're 100% right. And if the 105 mm's have the German penetration (1/4 caliber) then giving them IFHE would mean they could even pen bow armour on tier 10 battleships (32 mm) That's a huge difference. Again, it's well worth looking at this table: http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Armor_thresholds As for the 50 mm plating, unfortunately the German secondaries can't help there, even the 150 mm. 150/4 = 37,5, plus 30% for IFHE = 49 mm penetration :( You would need 156 mm caliber to go through 50 mm with IFHE. But another valid point you're making is IF the 105 mm's have regular pen, and you don't have IFHE, then they can't even pen most of the destroyers you come across in high-tier battles :(

Ah, I forgot about it completely! :D :D Thanks for pointing this out. I'm heading straight to a training room :)

@tank276 Why are you trying to teach my how to spend my captain perk points? Am I telling you how to play the game or spec your captain? I'm conducting an experiment here, testing a hypothesis. But even if it were for real, still, yes, I can take Vigilance for my CV, or I can take the torpedo reload perk for my North Carolina that doesn't have torpedoes! If I want to waste my perk points on something that doesn't work or makes no sense, it's my choice, my game and my captains, and I can waste however many skill points I want. Firstly, if those 105 mm guns have the regular HE penetration then giving them IFHE doesn't do crap. So then, yes, they totally make no sense at all (except as fire starters) and buying IFHE is a waste of points. But if they have the "German" HE penetration then IFHE makes all the difference in the world: the 105's go from not doing anything to being able to pen a bow-tanking tier 10 Battleship. That's quite a difference, isn't it? You would have 8 guns doing a total of up to 3200 dmg every 3 seconds. (naturally this is the top value, IRL they won't all hit, but even if only 1/3 of them hit, it's still 8500 damage you get for free in the time it takes your main guns to reload. Plus a chance of fire). It's eight guns on each side, so I don't think it's, like you said, "a few guns". Basically it's like having a destroyer glued to each side of your ship :) Thirdly, I'm checking a hypothesis here, it has nothing to do with being "rational" or "irrational". Now, to finish this off-topic and get back to the actual question: @Flavio1997 that's a very good idea, I also thought about it, but the problem is what @BeauNidl3 said earlier: you will also start fires, and fires will change the damage count completely :( All I'm looking for, basically, is for someone to actually look at the table in the Wiki: http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Armor_thresholds and say if it's true what it says.

Guys, thanks for all the replies but you're answering questions that nobody asked. I'm not asking if IFHE is worth 4 points. I'm not asking if 4 points can be spent better otherwise. I'm not asking if it's situational or not. I'm not asking what captain build is the best for you. I'm asking a very simple question: do the German 105 mm secondaries on the Bismarck have the German HE penetration (caliber/4) or standard HE penetration (caliber/6), and can you give a reliable source of this information, rather than hearsay?

@Riselotte What do you mean by 'they don't pen anything and have regular pen'? Do you have a reliable source of information, or is it just your impression from playing the ship? If you do, can you link the source of this information please? The link I gave is to a table in the Wargaming wiki, where it says that 105 mm German secondaries have the caliber/4 rule, not caliber/6. It even says so in the table. Your statement that "they don't pen anything" is only right if you do NOT have IFHE. With it, they can pen much more: Even if they have the regular (caliber/6) pen, it's worth taking IFHE because it enables them to pen high-tier battleship superstructure and high-tier destroyer plating. If, however, they have the caliber/4 pen rule, as it seems from the table, then taking IFHE gives them ability to pen bow-tanking tier 10 BBs.

as opposed to destroyers, which are NOT fragile and NOT caught with their pants down when they get perma-radared trying to cap ;) ;) i didn't say "meaah", I said that was a valid point, but the reason it doesn't impact gameplay that much is that it's very short range. If radar had a 6 km range, nobody would mind. And it doesn't seem to bother many people - I don't think there are too many forum threads about the viles of proximity spotting. Which means it happens so rarely that people don't care. I said this several times already but I don't assume everybody reads all the posts in the thread (I know I wouldn't) so let me say this again: LoS is already implemented in the game for regular spotting. In any modern object-oriented programming language re-using an already implemented routine is a piece of cake. It was already true when I was involved in software development years ago (C++), let alone in 2018. And this, really, is what the whole problem boils down to. Like I said, it bothers me that radar apparently works on neutrinos in this game because I see a tonne of difference between stretching or simplifying and being totally, utterly absurd. Ships "disappearing" from sight is a simplified representation of existing phenomena: fog, wind, clouds, gunpowder smoke, waves etc. But radar that works through islands is just impossible, like having ships that fly, or gravity that works up so shell arcs bend upwards, not downwards. But leaving all this to one side (because we can argue forever what's more unrealistic, X or Y or Z), radar as it is now makes the game stalemate quickly. B O R I N G .

@evp66 Yeah, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Some forum users will immediately say "you have no skill" or "coordinate with the team". Well, the only difference is that if the team coordinates, they will use radar one after another, instead of all of them at the same time, which means they will not run out of radar charges until the end of the battle. Your skill has no bearing on this if there are 4 radar ships in the game. The game is becoming increasingly passive. Radar promotes camping. In theory it shouldn't (if all players were as skilled as some of the forum users here ;) ) but it does. The extremely simple solution of making it work on a line-of-sight basis would make the game much more active (no more camping behind islands and radaring caps), and this would require real skill on the part of the cruisers (maybe that's what some forum users here are afraid of...) while at the same time preserving radar as an extremely useful tool. As for what somebody else suggested, I am personally against removing radar completely, it's a good tool against perma-smoked DDs spamming HE. Radar is useful and needed, but not in the current form. Make it line-of-sight.

and since they've changed game mechanics very significantly (a number of times) both in WoWS and in WoT, they can change it again. If people don't say anything, they won't change anything. If people complain about things they don't like, they might listen. Proximity spotting - that's a good point, I forgot about it. But it works at such close ranges that it doesn't really have a very significant impact on gameplay. I mean, it does, in select, very limited situations, unlike radar. I have no idea what software development systems they're using, things have moved on, but even 20 years ago if you used an object-oriented programming language, this would be really easy.

@Episparh Dude, you have no idea about artillery but you're trying to be clever. For your information, artillery almost always fires at targets beyond visual range. Do you know how? Because they get coordinates from other sources (FO/FAC/drones/GPS coordinates). In WoWs, the reason you "see" targets in smoke or behind islands is that you are getting their coordinates from other ships. Real ships have hundreds of people, some of them are in the plotting room, others are in the radio room, or the radar room, etc. They work together to triangulate and plot the coordinates. That's how ships can "see" the enemies at night, in fog etc. So the fact you can see them in game is just the result of the work that your ship's "crew" is doing. It is perfectly normal that you can fire at ships you can't see yourself, ships and artillery do that all the time. But where I learned physics, it's not normal for a rubber ball to magically go through a brick wall. It's funny how people who have no idea about the subject are trying to be sarcastic, LOL.

@Xevious_Red There is a huge difference between taking something that exists and simplifying it/making it more playable, and inventing something that violates basic laws of physics. That's a long list of Wargaming making simplifications for playability's sake, and taking something that exists and stretching it further. It's only natural, it's not a simulator of real life (and, as such, it would be horribly boring): It's too difficult to model everything that impacted visibility IRL (fog, waves, wind, spray, clouds, how tired the crew were etc.) so they simplified it by giving each ship a detectability range. When you fire your guns, there's a bright flash and a cloud of smoke that lingers around for some time, giving away your location - they simplified it by giving it a duration of 20 seconds. Torpedoes, as you rightly pointed out, would be useless if you only had one or two loads, so again they took something that existed and stretched it further to make it more playable. Radar that instantly makes enemies visible to all your allies is also a simplification - IRL the friendly ships would communicate on the radio, take radar readouts from several ships, triangulate the enemy pings and thus arrive at the (more or less) exact location. The game simplifies this by giving you the exact location, but to keep it balanced, it only works for 20 or 30 seconds. Ship crews can have different levels of training, skill and motivation. A fresh crew won't perform as well as an experienced one (cf. the problems HMS Prince of Wales had in the Battle of Denmark Strait). This is simplified in the game by "captain skills" - of course it's not the captain who's running around the deck rotating the turrets or spotting the enemy torpedoes :-) but it's a simpler way of modelling captain and crew experience. Physics is generally something that Wargaming boast about - ships have inertia, they float as they should, shell trajectory is meticulously modelled, as is penetration and armour models (again, with some simplifications). So why do they suddenly come up with one thing that just does not exist in real life at all? Radar that goes through solid mass is not a simplification of complex phenomena (bouncing off solid mass is a very simple phenomenon, a rubber ball can do it, let alone radar rays), it's just ludicrous to anybody who went to primary school and at least took Science 101. The Russians have always had a strong mathematics and physics curricula at school, so I'm surprised that the guys at Wargaming aren't able to grasp it. (also, radar is used for navigation because it bounces off rocks and islands so you can see them in the dark and avoid running into them! Apparently, the Wargaming radar uses neutrios that go right thru matter, not radar rays. But if this is the case, it would go through ships as well without detecting them :) ) Would radar be too complex if it didn't work thru islands? No, it wouldn't because regular spotting works like that and nobody has a problem understanding it. Would radar be underpowered if it didn't work thru islands? No, because you could still detect ships in smoke, or when you're sitting in smoke, etc., and that is the main aim of radar: to counter smokescreens. Would it be difficult to implement it in-game? No, they've been known to make much bigger changes, they were able to totally rework the physics engine in WoT a couple of years ago, so modifying Radar to work on a LoS basis would be a piece of cake, especially that the game already has a routine to determine line of sight. So, in addition to being an insult to everybody's intelligence, radar that works through islands is just unnecessary, it would still be a useful (but more balanced) tool if it didn't require us to believe that a rubber ball goes through a solid wall instead of bouncing off it.

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Sure, radar that works through land masses is not overpowered in your opinion. Look at this sentence again: RADAR THAT WORKS THROUGH LAND MASSES. Can't you see how utterly ludicrous this is? Why not introduce laser guns, or teleportation? Why not introduce gravity that works sideways instead of downwards? Or 16" guns that fire 600 rounds per minute like a machine gun? None of them exist, but neither does radar that works through solid rock. As for your point about there being lots of new radar ships, well, yes, this is a good point and we're probably seeing a bit more radar ships than when things settle down. But even later, if you have twice as many radar ships as before, you will be getting statistically twice as many of them in the battles. Now you're probably getting 4x as many because they're new and people are grinding. I'm not sure this is the best idea, after all this would again mean we'd be getting spammed by invisible DDs hiding in smokescreens. Every tool in this game should have something to counter it, and radar counters smoke (hydro too, to a lesser extent, but its range is too short to be practical - and it has to be short because it detects torpedoes). The only problem with radar is that it promotes passive gameplay because it can keep everybody in check by working from the safety of being hidden behind islands. If not for that, you'd see that we wouldn't have too many problems with it.

You're misrepresenting what I said. I never said "radar cruisers are no skill". I play all types of ships myself (except for CVs) and I know for a fact there is a different set of skills for every type. What I meant was that there is a certain group of cruiser players who, thanks to radar, don't need any skill, they just park behind an island and turn on radar when it's ready. This was the case in that Bismarck battle I mentioned before: even on the enemy team the cruisers were just popping radar as it came off cooldown, but nobody moved - not friendly cruisers, not enemy cruisers. They denied access to the caps to everybody (anybody trying died instantly) so we just sat there for a long time doing nothing. If radar worked on a LoS basis, this wouldn't be possible. Now you've nailed it. Of course, if there was ONE radar cruiser per side, it wouldn't be a problem. But do you know why there are 5 or 6 per side these days? Because radar is so clearly overpowered that every man jack wants to play a radar cruiser. And this is how it becomes a problem. "a bit"??? You're being very diplomatic... As for everything else you said, I don't disagree but making radar LoS wouldn't really hurt anybody or make it unplayable. As for light cruisers being deleted by BBs -- well as you said I've got the Minotaur, where get consistently citadelled irrespective of angling by 203 mm guns, let alone BB guns, so I would know. Leaving radar with just CLs is not a bad idea but it will not solve the problem - basically everybody who plays radar ships to camp behind an island will switch from CAs to CLs. You will end up with the same number of radar ships anyway. Making it LoS solves all those issues, prevents people from abusing the system, and rewards skill more.

I'm amazed how much effort some people put into writing answers that have absolutely no relevance to the topic of this thread. It's also fascinating that some people love to be patronising to others so much that they don't realise they come across as dickheads. But back to the main topic: clearly, there is a problem with radar. Its excessive presence on the battlefield basically turns DDs (functionally) into small, fragile light cruisers with a tiny healthpool. In other words, they cannot perform their true function of spotting and capping, so (as some people here suggested) they need to park behind islands and fire at the enemies spotted by CAs. Instead, CAs take over the function of spotting. It's totally topsy-turvy. Like I said, if the developers tried to adjust the range of the radar consumable, there would be no end to debate, with some people wanting radar nerfed more, others - less. Another person suggested the spotting ship should become visible itself. This is very reasonable due to how radar works in real life. It's like turning on a torch in a dark room - you can see things but others can see you. But if this was implemented, there would be no end to moaning as people would actually have to learn more than just to park behind an island. But if radar is changed to work on a Line-Of-Sight basis (and this mechanism is already implemented for other things, such as secondaries or regular spotting, so it definitely is doable) then nobody can have reasonable grounds to complain, as you can't complain about moving from science fiction to something slightly more realistic.

As far as I've been able to glean from people's comments in this thread, there are several conclusions: - first option is that radar uses a modified version of the regular spotting mechanics - if this is the case, just introduce the line-of-sight mechanics, which should not be a problem in any modern, object-oriented programming system. - alternatively, radar uses a modified version of the proximity spotting mechanics - in this case, just reduce its range, it's a matter of modifying a single variable in your software code. - contrary to what WG are saying officially (that radar is OK), it seems they are aware of the problem, as evidenced by them nerfing Radar mod 2. So clearly radar mechanics can be modified, and are being modified, so it is not insurmountable from the software development point of view. In other words: they are bullshitting us when they say "radar is works as it should". If it did, they wouldn't be tampering with it. Naturally sloppy software development in the past may make modifications harder, but definitely not impossible. Alternatively. wrong requirements were provided and nobody wants to take the blame. But technically speaking, this is software, not the real world; anything can be coded. Ships can be made to fly if the developers want to, so modifying radar is just a matter of good will.

@159Hunter Clearly, you consider yourself a very good player. But this game is not for very good players, or for unicum players. It's for average players, who are the largest group and who contribute most to Wargaming's coffers. So it does not matter that you, a very good player, don't have a problem. What matters is that average players, like myself, find the game increasingly frustrating, as evidenced by the many threads on this forum. Especially that we can clearly see that we are doing pretty well in mid-tier DDs and then suddenly the gameplay style changes completely even though it's still a DD, not a BB. If all very good players disappeared overnight, Wargaming would suffer slightly finance-wise. If all medium players disappeared, Wargaming would go bankrupt. So saying "git gud" is nonsense. Many of us actually have a life outside of computer games, we have jobs, wives and children etc. So we only play occasionally and it is not our ambition to "git gud". Our aim is to have fun. 'gitting gud' is important for simulator game players, not arcade players. Arcade games are to entertain. Just my last game in the Bismarck on the Hotspot map. 5 radar ships on the enemy team, 4 on ours. Result? Everybody at cap D sat behind islands, two cruisers radaring when their radar was off cooldown, but the enemy was also sitting behind islands radaring when possible. I tried to push carefully, got radared, lost half health to torpedoes and HE spam coming at me from behind an island. Two minutes later an enemy DD tried to do his job, that is cap, he got radared and shredded by my primary battery and secondaries. Did he have fun? I don't think so. Result? Everybody kept sitting behind islands and nobody dared move. Static, boring gameplay is what radar promotes. And you can't expect everybody to 'gid gud'. According to your definition, at least half of both teams were not 'gud'. Can you change that? Again, your comment is neither here nor there. The fact that playing high-tier CVs is frustrating has no relevance whatsoever to this thread. Frustrating CV gameplay does not make DD play any less frustrating.

@Krikkio82 you're 100% spot on! The KEY word there is: BORING. That's the problem with this mechanics.

huymog, this is a good point if they had to create the line-of-sight mechanic from scratch. But they already have it for sighting enemy ships. In any modern object-oriented programming language re-using line-of-sight shouldn't be a problem if it's already implemented elsewhere in the game. loppantorkel, thumbs up, I couldn't recap the problem better myself. Implement it, test it, roll it out if it works. As simple as that. That's how all IT projects are done.