ollonborre

Well kind of. From tier 5 they are fast if you use your speed boost correctly otherwise they are sometimes sluggish or nothing special. For gunpower they are somewhere in between the IJN and US cruisers with pretty comfortable gunnery overall. Decent torps are a nice complement, and the gimmicky reload booster starting from tier 8 can really push out some nice damage. But as domen says the Japanese or US line is often a better starting point as they rely purely on good old fashion gun-armor-stealth combo without any gimmicks (apart from radar).

EM means you can keep your guns on target even when manuvering. And it is a great quality of life change, so definetely recommended. As for DE, remember the IJN cruisers are alpha strike predators. Fire 1 volley, dodge, set fire, target repairs, fire another, set more fires. So again DE helps in that a lot (and on the Atlanta, basic firing training actually gets you more fires per minute than DE).

Expert loader is a great skill on the Zao. Railguns with great accuracy and 12 shells with good AP damage and penetration coupled with great stealth means you can often shave off large chunks of HP or straight up delete most cruisers you will face. Not to mention the AP will outdamage HE if you have broadside BB's at around 12 km away from you.

A bold claim. I would say that this supposed DD problem only really exist on tier 4. If a DD rushes you down on tier 6+ then either you have positioned really poorly or the rest of the team is pretty much dead.

So far in my Jutland the CV experience have been: - CV spots me. - If the CV is out for me then I'm pretty much going to loose a bunch of HP unless I smoke up. And if no allies are around he will camp my smoke. - If the CV is not out for me (which to be fair seems be 90% of the time) it will briefly spot me, hover over me and then strike something else. - The squadron around me dies extremely quickly due to allied ships. I can fully accept I'm in the minority here, and this is most likely a player problem, but I don't seem to be hunted as actively as before by enemy CV's which skews my view. On paper the rework is hell however, and when a CV is out for you well you are pretty much screwed or need to run for friendly AA.

Depending on the directive criteria it can be anything from 1 gaming session to 1-2 days. Also dependent on how much time I can put into the game ofcourse.

Will most likely get the tier 6 before the event ends, but probably not the tier 8 (I assume you need to buy crates to get the tier 8, so screw that). 100% zero interest in the CV's. but the flags and bonuses you get are pretty nice since you have nothing else to really spend these gimmicky currencies on.

Sadly no navy or ship background here, not that much of a water person so an armys life is what suited me. Still a great topic and best of luck to other who has served or will do in the future

Just because people do it does not make it any less wrong. You can't fix stupid.

I stand corrected then. Having only played the Buffalo and Dank Memes on the test server and the Pepsi on live I was under the impression Pepsi-Baltimore normal arcs, Buffalo-DM floaty.

Which is why I said floaty arcs the higher you go. Up to tier 8 the arcs are basically the same as on the IJN, but on the Buffalo and Des Moines you do get the lazy arcs (I could be very mistaken about the Buffalo though). And maybe this is just me but I found the HIV arcs to be pretty good close-medium range, but it feels like they loose a ton of velocity over longer ranges.

For heavy cruisers I would go for IJN, as they are more "standard" with flatter arcs, great HE, still good AP, pretty well armored (apart from Mogami and Ibuki), sneaky and pack devestating torpedo volleys. But the US are not a bad starting point either, just that they don't get any real survivability until tier 8 and tend to have more floaty gun arcs the higher you go. Still the AP hits like a truck and they got good AA across the board. I would argue the IJN heavy cruisers are easier to play but the US are not that far behind in terms of difficulty. The other US branch however is where it gets interesting (or cheesy, opinions vary). The light cruisers give you high DPM and comes with just about every cruiser consumable so adapting to almost any match up is pretty easy. As another bonus point they learn you about position and map knowledge, as their high firing arcs make firing over islands very easy. And while you can't use every island in other cruisers, you can still use most of them with a bit of positioning. The clear downsides though is that they are more captain skill dependent (IFHE is mandatory pretty much) and very flimsy. Hug islands or explode violently is usually the norm if you try to pick a fight with something in open waters.

If you are forced to fight a bowcamping force, you either just roll with the Yamato who straight up counters bowcamping, or just fire HE. I know I know, you are not "supposed" to spam HE in a BB but if a target is bow camping then that target is 9/10 times sacrificing 33-50% of its firepower while you can utilise 100% of yours most of the time. Alternatively, call it out to your cruiser buddies. Nothing is more enticing to a cruiser than a big, slow target that will catch most of the shells you throw at it. Bow camping only really works if A) that ship is in a strong position and can cover most approaches. Solution to this is to HE spam-torp it to death because it can't effectively disengage. Or B) your team throws themselves at the bow camping target providing easy damage. In this case ignore it and try to gain map control instead.

Getting a stealth build is good. Promoting max range sniping is not. There are few things more useless than a BB that sits at max range all game only pushing when all is lost. Use the range while you advance or kite away by all means, but do not use the range as a main point of engagement. As for the fires, all ships have a set fire coefficent: So if 2 ships of the same tier burn differently, then that is just confirmation bias or purely down to RNG. You are just as likely to set a Vanguard on fire as you are a Bismarck. Only thing that hurts the Vanguard more is that it is weaker to HE so it attracts HE spam more which usually results in more fires thanks to sheer volume of fire. Not that it burns any differently to other BB's.

But that was sort of the same before (besides the 2 tier 10 CV's obviously). Still painful I admit. Having played DD's mainly at tier 9 and currently grinding up another DD line starting from tier 6, I have not been having that many issues with CV's lately. Offcourse I do get planespotted more often and the RNG nature of dive bombs can sod off frankly, but apart from that it feels sort of same as before. Ironically the thing that messes up my day more often is because of the CV rework everyone is playing AA heavy ships, which also happens to be most radar cruisers. So if anything I have had more issues with radars than CV's.

I don't get it, you are 1 duplicate away from completing the entire collection? OH the horror?

The FDG was recently buffed and with the hydro and 80 mm deck I see no reason why it should not be passable now for random battle grinding. Zao is very good, Mogami with the 155, IFHE and rudder shift build is also fun. Ibuki is a bit of a hard sell. Not terrible or very good, just uninteresting and squishy.

Yeah I'm just going to quote what Tyrendian said: The game holds no responsibility or cares about individual player skill. If you don't adapt you either need to start doing so or play lower tiers to get a better grasp on the game. Buying a premium and not even knowing what tier it is should give you a hint what you should be doing.

First question: If you loose to much money on higher tiers, you either need premium to compensate or play better is the simple answer. Only good players tend to make money without premium on higher tiers. Get more lower tier moneymakers or improve in your Vanguard (or improve your own game before jumping into tier 8, preferably). Second question: The blue ammo is just cosmetics. It is a special captain that has blue tracers, nothing more. If you got nuked that hard any other BB could have done the same thing. The rest seems like a lack of understanding game mechanics. Nothing is purely "invisible". If radar can't see it, it is outside of radar range (alternatively the change in radar could sort of explain confusion. Radared ships are visible first to the one who radars, then seconds after to the rest). Florins are a new temporary currency for the arsenal.

True. However since you fire HE so rarely you notice it more often, especially when you place your hope in that the HE volley will get rid of the DD that ambushed your fat [edited]around an island. So basically for me it is a mix of confirmation bias and a small issue.

I agree. The BB AP vs DD change was really needed, but like you say for some reason any BB HE that is not British seems to be strangely unreliable when it comes to dealing raw damage. My personal experience is still that if you want some reliable damage AP (suprise) is still the ammo to go for. Now I do not want this to be changed to "let us make BB HE nuclear against DD" but more of a consistent ammo type so we get away from this whole spam AP at everything which was the point of the DD pen change.

This one is easy to explain. Not that high overall damage and low amount of % damage on multiple high HP ships. If almost all of that damage was done to the Alaska alone for example you would have earned more credits.

I just use my Wooster captain and it works just as fine now as it did prior to the whole CV rework. Sure AFT might not be the most optimal skill nowadays but on the Atlanta it gives you that sweet sweet range that combined with CE opens up so many options.

I did the mission very quickly in the Pepsicola. It still has murderous AA and is arguably the strongest AA ship at tier 6. And at tier 6-7 is where most carriers hide so you should have have no problems. 29 planes in the first game and then 1 coop game where I shot down one spotterplane and that's it. With that being said, I really dislike plane killing missions and killing ships from specific nations. They are simply too random, and unless you play at a common tier or a busy evening you are almost always stuffed out of luck.