SethAbercromby

The problem unfortunately also stems from Myogi not being a good BB in the first place. Its main guns are balanced towards having so many secondary cannons, but the secondary cannons are absolutely terrible. So you end up with horrible long range artillery and horribly short range secondaries with terrible accuraracy. It's the only ship I was really glad to never ever have to play again prior to the hard-wipe. It'll get better once you've got the Kongo, but with the high ignition chances they will still be pretty dangerous to BBs if allowed close enough. Cleavelands with HE spam are interstingly good against everything that isn't their own class. They are great aginst DDs because of their high RoF and good against BBs because of their high ignition chances, but with an Aoba, I'll take them on any day of the week. Being reasonaly fast, having a very narrow profile and a decently thick armor belt, the Aoba can tank most shots that come at it frontally with minimal damage and will see a lot of shots missing wide. And once in torpedo range, you'll usually send the Cleaveland into Dreamland. Terrible puns aside, the ship lives and dies by its cannons. Get in close and the thing usually rolls over pretty fast. The getting close part is where it gets tricky though.

Hotspot is a map that creates a lot of circular movement between the individual fleets. If you don't follow, you'll end up being swept up if the enemy fleet drawa a circle your direction. This map is particlarly intersting for CAs and DDs because of its fragemented island strutures, but these islands also provide a lot of cover to CVs if used currectly, death traps if not. Due to the fact that cruisers and DDs can get really close to BBs beroe either can engage, the latter is also encuraged to use more agressive styles of play, dominating points to catch a CA when they are most vulnerable or use CA escorts to cover their flanks. Basically, this map is completely designed to punish the coward's approach to combat while being extremely rewarding for any that are willing to play more agressively.

Well summed up and this last tidbit I was aware of, but didn't know the full range of which ships it applies to. Thanks for clearing that up to me.

You're right, I forgot about thr 20sec rudder shift time. In that case your turning circle can be as tight as a button, it's pretty easy to predict your path once you're commited to a direction...

WG did have rough Armor ratings for the ships as in "min value to max value" for Hull, Citadel and Deck, but made them hidden not too long ago. Wikipedia lists Myoko's main belt armor at 100mm, with the bow having a bit more thickness where the two sides of the belt meet, I'd guess about 110-120mm, which combined with the angle gives you quite a bit of effective armor. Going head-first should also cover most of your weakest spots -if not all- while reduing the area people can hit to actually damage you. This initial reduction of incoming damage is much more important than doing a lot of initial damage with your shelling, since torpedoes will be your main source of damage with this approach regardless. I've yet to see results against Izumo, Yamato, Des Moines and Montana (I had the pleasue of tanking a few shots of a Zao, which was actually pretty managable in damage, I even tanked a torpedo to the rear by some overenthusiasic friendly DD before are realiatory torpedo of the Zao gave my ship its well-deserved end, though not without sinking to my torpedos herself), but I'd guess using a same-tier CA will yeild roughly similar results, due to the more heavily reinforced bow armor.

I forced an Amagi into a brawl by driving into her head-on. The captain also made the mistake of turning right into my drection, reducing the amount of turrets he could actually shoot at me, all the while I'm shelling his ship with HEs to get him burning and maybe score a few citadel hits. Did exactly as I explained abode, passed him so close, we barely avoided collision, but whiffed my topredos, hitting only 3 of the spread, but the fire damge, plus flooding, and me giving him a few more shots broadside before going down in glory myself did him in not too soon after. Outside of taking a High-angle AP from a BB to the deck, the IJN CAs can actually take quite the beating with their frontal armor.

Torpedos haben schon so viele counter, dass ein abprallwinkel vieleicht doch ein wenig sehr viel wäre. Zum Thema counter-Methoden quote ich einfach mal von der ersten seite: Sich parralel zum Fächer auzurichten is die effectivste Methode schaden zu begrenzen, wenn man denn nicht komplett auuweichen kann. Wenn du Nebel aufgehen siehst oder ein DD sich hart zur seite reißt, kannst do deinen Kahn darauf verwetten dass Aale zu wasser gelassen wurden. Der Trick mit den T7+ Torpedos der IJN Kreuzern ist das Schiff wie einen Brawler zu spielen, im besten falle Bug-zu-Bug um die Ttrefferfläche zu minimieren und die gegnerischen Geschütze auf die Buggeschütze zu begrenzen. Wenn sie sich dann versuchen neu auszurichten, hast du die Inititaive für Schüsse auf die Zitadelle und dergleichen and in dem Moment wo du sie passierst, wirfst du die Torpedos auf eine Distanz und Winkel, wo der andere nur zuschauen kann wie der komplette Fächer seinen Bug aufreisst. Bei 2 Lauchern pro Seite (ab T8+) können da nur die widerstandsfähigsten BBs darauf setzen nicht sofort versenkt zu werden. Obacht nur wenn man das gegen andere IJN Kreuzer verwendet, weil die die gleichen Spielchen machen können, was dann schon mal daneben gehen kann.

You may see the USN guns to be owerwhelmingly superior, but a good spread fom an IJN Cruiser can sink just about any ship. If you wanna talk roles, the USN cruisers are good for shelling-focused roles where they can score advanatges with range, RoF and being reasonably difficult to sink from a distance. With the IJN Cruisers, you want to go into a head-on brawl, use the frontal armor to get close while reducing the total amount of turrets to your direction and launch torpedoes from ranges and angles they can't possibly be avoided from. It's not about how good you are at fighting, it's about how well you can unfairly skew the fight to your advantage.

Anything you do won't help if you wait for his torpedos to pop up before you do. Torpedos can only be evaded if you take preemtimve counter-measures, because if they do catch you unaware, that hit's mostly on you. As others have siad, planes are spotted from 10km and have very defined visual cues when prparing to drop their torpedos.

Fighting an insanely strong opponent jut mesns I have to be more insane in my fighting style ;P Seriously though, that ship is scary. Really looking forward to my first few duels when I reach T8 on my IJN CAs.

Oh yeah, I skimmed through the RoF rating od the USN cruisers and noticed they were pretty much aligned with the IJN ones. Didn't notice the Des Moines to suddenly pick up double of that... The worst part is, that RoF is historically accurate. Now I am very afraid

The problem with that is that BBs are already extremly strong even against medium-caliber AP ammunition -which they should be- delagating the primary source of damage against them to extremely unreliable fire feels somewhat unfair to me. HE impact damage and ignition chances need tweaked, but I'm not sure either how to go about it... And I get what you mean with the Cleaveland and Atlanta. I didn't consider just scaling ignition chances down for all related guns would mean Destroyers get the short end of the stick, punishing only those two ships specifically would make people very disstasified. Again, very difficult to find the right approach to blance them out.

Starting with Tier 6, both IJN and USN cruisers prefer to mount a smaller number of large-caliber cannons with slower RoF with roughly the same performance for both nations. Cleaveland and Antlanta are kinda their own thing, being stuffed to the brim with small-caliber main cannons with insane RoF, which makes them great for HE-spamming. Otherwise, IJN Cruisers have as their most defining chracteristic the torpedo-launchers, which get delegated to the rear starting with Tier 6. This unorthodox launch arc makes them more difficult to use than the ones being mounted on a destroyer, but they can still use them to great effect on short distances. What I like to do is moving directly towards another CA or BB to minimze my hit-zone and the amount of turrets they can aim at me at the same time, pass them at grazing distance and drop my torpedos right into their line of movement. This way it's possible to reliably kill ships well above my tier, provided I get close enough to make use of this tactic. USN Cruisers make up for their lack of torpedos with better AAs, having thicker armor on average and a bigger HP pool, so they tend to survive longer in a "fair" firefight.

The name Seth stuck with me from an early age. It was one of the suggested names in the Pokemon Colloseum game for GCN and I really liked the sound of the name. It has always been part of my usernames since then. Unfortunately, Seth by itself teds to not be avialable for some reason, so I ended up sticking numbers or very early on the super mature "Xx" to it to get it through registration. The Abercromby came a good deal later, when a friend and I got hooked on the movie "Reign of Fire" and I borrowed (read: blantatly stole) Quinn Abercromby's name as the last name of my alias. Being a proper name and all, my alias does have a fictional persona added to it, which I sometimes fall back on when posting things on the internet.

Alternatively, people tend to use the worst offender of a class as the reson for a blanket nerf. I don't see the Cleaveland or Atlanta as a reason to blanket nerf Cruisers, but to argue for a rework the HE sysstem, maybe with differing calibers in mind, for example small caliber HE having less module crits and ignition chance, but make up in RoF, while larger-caliber HEs have better chance to knock out turrets or start fires to make up for their decreased RoF. Back to the other stuff, I'm sorry for jumping on you like that. It was just that it was the most recent discussion in the thread and I kinda jumped to conclusions myself on who you were adressing with that. And again, I was more for a case-by-case basis on which ships need what secondary range. The fact is that main cannons are designed with the secondary cannons in mind (turn-rate, RoF, etc.), but whith the current secondaries, we just end up with 2 sets of terrible weapons on the worst case ships.

I'm aware of counter methods, but I've also been on the recieving end of a cross-spread that I just barely survived with proper precautions. I should get my butt into one of the CVs and see how difficult more complicated drops are to execute, how the effects of panic spread feel and what the most effective drop distances are. Before that I can only say that from the recieving end, CV planes feel fairly balanced in relation to the available counters. The bigger question to me personally is whether those counters make CVs feel unfairly difficult or on the contrary still very easy to use despite. Again, can't tell because I haven't played them yet.

That's kind of the thing with manual drops. If you have a really good CV captain that can trap you with a cross spread from 2 squads... You're gonna get hit no question. AAs and the visibility of planes is supposed to be a balancing factor, since you can tell when and how the planes drop their torpedoes, and they get worse spread when they get too close and recieve AA fire. Mimimizing your hit-zone by moving right towards the planes and hoping for a favorable spread is often most you can do. Whether or not planes themselves feel balanced well with these factors I can't tell yet, because of my lack of experience of using CVs myself.

Just... please read my arguments without jumping to concusions. Any change to range should be accompanied with terrible accuraracy at those ranges. Give the guns terrible spread and hook them up wit a pre-schooler-agility version of the PvE ship fire control. Bad aim+bad spread = very unlikely hits at range. At close range that bad aim would become less of an issue and the shots don't deviate as far any more. Those effective ranges should optimally start at about half range against BBs, about 1/3 of the max range against CAs and probably never against DDs, assuming the ship prensents you its broadside, making itself a bigger target. At 8k max range, those effective ranges would be 4km, 2.6km and "goddamnit" respectively.

Because it's the implication of getting hit that matters. At 6k, you might only rarely get hit, but close into 5 or 4k and suddenly those stray shots get much closer to your hull and will wind up with a few hits here and there. 3k and closer, secondaries should already be well ranged in onto a target as big as a CA since that's the range where even the mediocre USN torpedoes become incredibly dangerous to BBs. If the terribleness of their aim starts at 3k, you might as well replace them with confetti cannons. Gives them about the same degree of effectiveness then what we have now.

This is also why i'm in favor of more natural dispersion. The randomizer does such a hard job at making sure misses actually miss that it looks like your crew's flinging rocks at the other ship. With a natural spread we'd see a lot of the same things we already see when similar guns are used by players. CAs you can get reliable hits on at close range, DDs are a pain in the [edited]to actually hit, even at close ranges and when the gunnery AI isn't the brightest fish in the pond (undercompensating for ship movement at longer distances and overcompensating at short ranges), performance at short range wouldn't be too different (with CAs usually being hit more often though, which would make secondaries actually relevant) and long range would mostly be there simply to give the players some warning shots. Even if nothing practically ever hits at 6k, the mere fact of shots flying your direction would change the way players respond to BBs.

I kinda gott off the track where I was going with it, but the basic point was that secondaries are a linked element in gun-balancing, which includes ammunition types. I may get that point back together in my head, but it was something I blurted out in the spur of the moment. Anyways, as far as secondaries go, I'm all for worse accuraracy, the point is that they show actual presence outside of ranges where they become largely irrelevant because you'll be such an easy target for the main cannons anyway. In fact, even pre-3.1, I'd just dive my IJN CA right into knife range, tank whatever pathetic damage the secondaries throw my way and shotgun the BB with torpedoes. The turret traverse and reload is so bad on BBs that when they miss their one shot or don't make me the priority target, they die about 4 times out of 5 attempts. If secondaries were to give me some actual pressure (CAs being much easier to hit than DDs, which would extremely benefit from more natural randomization in shot dispersion than bullets that have a 1/10 chance to suddenly turn into a homing missile), I'd have to be more careful with my dives.

This has as much to do with how to do with how the game seems to use secondary armament as much as it has to do with HE balancing. I feel that WG uses a randomizer not for the spread for the shell but whether it will hit the ship or not (or a lest whether it will be fired with extremely high accuraracy or somewhere into outer space), so range increase through skills/modules does not nessecarily translate to an accuraracy drop at those ranges. If the cannons were to just fire roughly in the general direction of the ship, you'd see a considerable amount of misses at current dispersion rates with very few shots every getting close to the target, but with accuraracy improving when the ship get closer into the optimal range of those cannons (say, for example, the max range we have now). And It's not even a "Buff my BB" post but "make BBs not so pahetically easy to shoot at from my CA".

The point is, when secondary armament gets a proper balancing, main guns can see adjustment as well. This all-or nothing mentality is what made AP terrible in the first place. And remember that secondary guns have terrible accuraracy already at knife range, so expect them to miss a lot at double that range. The point is that they are to get actual pressure on small ships, because the main guns are inadequate to deal with a fast moving target due to their extremely low rate of fire and how vulnerable you are if you miss a shot. Secondary araments would create some suppressive fire blanket to ships that suffer a lot from having these large cumbersome weapons and fill their historical purpose that way. Also i did not call for a blanket-buff if you read my statement correctly, but for gradual adjustment that would provide adequate balance between Main Arament and Secondary Armament for their respective tier.

The reall issue BBs in particular suffer has been here for a while now HE performace just made it more obvious. It's called secondary armament range and is legendarily below actual historical ranges. Or did you think the secondary armament on the IJN BBs was just for show? BBs that reliend hevily on seconary armament to deal with smaller targets need very specific buffs that allows them to deal with such ships without breaking the game (so no shortened reload times, as much as I'd like to be able to shoot more than once a minute). My best guess would be to shift up secondary range little by little for each patch until they start becoming too powerful and then carfully shift the flagpole downwards until you've got all ships that balances the secondary range against the overall effectiveness of the primary armament. If we keep the guns at similar rates of dispersion, the increased range wouldn't even translate to that much more damage. I'd like to see being experimented upon.

Mein persönliches gefühl ist dass AP penetrationswertung viel zu extrem runtergeschraubt wurde, was auch erkären würde warum man ständig an gleich gepanzerten Schiffen abprallt oder auf einem full-damage auf einen DD macht. Für die meisten Shiffe is nach eigener erfahrung her HE zur Pflicht geworden, weil AP einfach zum größten teil nicht dort effectiv ist wo es sinn machen sollte.