ollonborre

Sometimes you don't have a choice however, and since the AP pen angles on german AP is horrible getting that extra firechance to your overall damage output feels valuable to me. This is my current Hindenburg build. I find that this build offer me enough flexibility in each game, and since I tend to switch between Hydro and Def AA depending on what I face. Lately DD's have been spammed a lot so I have gone for Hydro, most other times Def AA since I do tend to face CV's often enough for it to be worth it.

Have not played the Ishizuchi in ages, thought "what the hell, stick a Zao captain in it and let's see what she can do". First game was underwelming with ~50k damage, but I tried once more and well... First time I have seen a Witherer below tier 6.

Personally I find DE on the Hindenburg a nice addition to my overall damage output. With DE and the reload mod it is a great firestarter, so you can easily force people into either going bow on and suffer from fires and HE damage or turn away thus exposing them to the great AP DPM.

I sort of agree. French and British cruisers especially are ships that can benefit greatly from Last Stand, so picking that when you have most of the other "core" skills is not a terrible idea even for higher tiers. And in ranked or clan games going LS on certain cruisers is also a viable option.

Apart from heals, great manuverability, generally the best stealth among cruisers and great torpedoes. Smoke is most certainly needed for the higher tier British Cl's to perform well (even though radar Neptune and Minoutaur can be very scary and effective) but they do pack a punch and flexibility without smoke. So they are certainly not useless without their smokes. Then again when all this praise is given to the British cruisers it is from tier 6+. Below that they are pretty terrible even with smoke.

If you don't know how to position yourself or know which areas of a ship that have the least amount of armor, then yeah it is a mistake. If you do know however you will struggle to find better XP farmers and suprisingly effective carry machines. All you have to do is to persist until tier 6, and after that it is a wonderful line of ships with the great Leander, extremely strong Fiji and with the buffed heal really fun Edinburgh.

The problem with the suggested builds on the wiki is that they are not always reliable. For example on a lot of battleships people have suggested survivability expert as somewhat useful, where as in reality it is completely useless on a BB. Most of the suggestions are indeed alright, but they should be taken with a pinch of salt (as do the pros and cons for that matter).

I too play over aggressive and like I said, I was in 1 ramming engagement over the last 1k games. Maybe not go in so close so you allow a ramming to be viable?

My biggest question is one that has already been asked: How do you get into ramming engagements so often? During my last ~1000 games I have rammed something once and never been rammed in return. Ramming is such a low priority "problem" and a rare occassion that I would consider ramming damage fine.

Sort of what I'm going after. Pick a coefficent and then tweak values so some ships don't spin out of control and yet certain ships retain their national flavour (IJN nuclear HE is mainly what I think of) but not to the extreme.

In that case I misread, thought the OP meant normalised fire chance. EDIT: Highlighted the part I wanted ro talk about since I did some thinking. If normalised fire protection is the main thing here, something occured to me. Right now a Zao burns tier 8-9 ships more easily than tier 10. If the fire protection is normalised it will have just as high of a chance to burn a tier 8 as a tier 10. See no real problem there. All that does is extend the life of a tier 8 BB for a few salvoes more. On the opposite end of the spectrum tier 8 ships will just as easily burn tier 10 as they will each other. Now this could encourage more HE spam, but in the current state of the game where you have to fling so much HE anyways and not get a single fire HE spam will just remain as it is since it will be more rewarding for tier 8.

But if the normalisation is implemented well the fire spam will be the same. Right now tier 10 ships are flamethrowers, and lower tier ships either cause no fires at all or very rarely when fighting against certian tiers. So a normalisation akin to that at tier 6-7 will make the fires about as common as it is now, the biggest difference is that lower tier ships will be able to actually start fires on higher tiers. Basically it will mostly benefit tier 8 cruisers that mostly get shafted in terms of MM and overall usefulness and for everyone else it pretty much stays the same.

The other 7 kill game I got was in the Mikasa ages ago.

Huh? Apart from average XP it sits at a reasonable ~50% winrate and has the second lowest average damage. So server wise it is balanced. And I don't exactly feel like it is overperforming ingame either. Well the radar duration is a bit silly but other than that I'm lost on why you would say it is overperforming. Feel free to enlighten me, I'm actually curios to see what I have missed.

Not sure if this is sarcasm or not since I have been playing crappy last week or so, somewhat hard to tell in text. Followed your advice and played more passively, and things started to click more. A lot of the annoyances I had sort of went away when I started to use torps more and less guns, only using the guns while in smoke, to finsih off low HP targets or when the target is 100% distracted. Will soldier on and see if things improve more.

Like El2aZeR said, try to branch out more. More variety in your port means you won't get bored quickly in a session and if you can't win in one specific ship having a bunch of ships means you can jsut play something else. Also I tend to not play a specific ship if I get a streak of 3-4 bad games in a row. By that point I try to switch ships or simply log off and do something else and maybe get back later.

You hit the nail on the head perfectly I think. The Maas and Z-23 rewarded cap rushing, and since I'm not a very good DD player overall I think this is my biggest flaw: simply adapting. Will try a bit more defensive play and see if I find any improvement.

Most have been said but I will add this: the spotter planer is very useful. No it gives you no bonuses for the guns, but the sheer duration alone is well worth it providing you with plenty of spotting. And The Roon shines in close ish fights with enemy ships. The Nice DPM with the reload mod and turtleback means it will often come out ahead of most enemy vessels and thus it can easily secure caps and gain map control.

Not entirely true. I enjoy RTS games a lot, the problem is that the CV interface is buggy and unresponsive and you have a different set of rules to anyone else. Not to mention the AA powercreep at tier 6-8 that makes any progress for me grind to a screeching halt.

Well i'm a total random scrub so that is why I highlighted this part. My experience is completely based off random games, I have not even touched clan wars yet. For randoms the build I use work wonders, but as you say in clan or teambattles the build may change drastically depending on the composition or general tactics.

I'm curious aswell. Apart from the normalisation change that happend god knows when (atleast I think it did, could very well be wrong though) the only change the German high tier line has had is the AA buff on the Hindenburg and the 1/4 HE penetration instead of 1/6.

The thing is, while the range mod is up to personal preference it is not a very good option. The Hindenburgs design favours mid-close range engagements, where it is suprisingly annoying to burst down quickly and in my experince it does not eat random citadels every other shell like certain other cruisers (Ibuki). The AA mod 2 is not that usefull all around since CV's are still somewhat rare, and the AA range module combined with defensive AA solves the AA problem pretty well. So that leaves the reload mod, by far the best option if you want the most out of the Hindenburg. Get within 12-15 km, use HE with demolition expert on angled targets and when you do get enough broadside you have 8.8 second reload with 12 guns and great AP damage. At this range you are still tricky to burst down quick and your DPM is crazy good. You can play it as a long range HE spammer sure, but I do wonder why though? Long range HE spam in the Hindenburg is something I do early on to put pressure on BB's or when kiting away, but not for the whole game since then you waste the raw DPM potential at closer ranges. If you want a truly excellent HE cruiser the Zao has not gone anywhere, and long range HE spam is what it does. Using the Hindeburg in the same manner works, sure. But I just feel it's wasted potential.

To counter that I find that switching to AP does wonders if they still give you broadside (which they usually do). 10 second reload and suprisingly good AP can really suprise BB players when you start to chunk 5-6k HP with each salvo at fairly long range.

I honestly don't like the Oktober. For me the König is much better with more reliable and fast firing guns. On topic the Kongo sisters or the König would be my bet. König thanks to DPM, number of guns and actually not bad AA when specialised for it, Kongo due to big guns, range and speed.

So Ugandan navy next then?