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DD, CA, BB, CV Though I tend to do better in CAs, DD gameplay - especially the US DD one - is extremely enjoyable if I can make these ships work.

This thing actually plays a lot like an ELC: Use your decent camo and excellent mobility to a) ambush enemies and b) stick your oversized boomstick into people's butts. I know, I know. It's basically a Mahan with a slightly different flavor and almost all DDs can do this. This thing has the style down, though.

Gun upgrades were rolled into hull upgrades for ALL battleships. Instead, you have engine upgrades to grind, because Wargaming couldn't help but not reduce the grind on them. Fully upgraded OBT Kongo is still just as good as fully upgraded CBT Kongo.

Sims suffers a lot from its premium opposition at its tier. The Atlanta performs really well against it and there's very little you can do about that. It'll work much, much better once a lot of people play regular ships at tier 7. The Gremlin is still fun and will catch BB drivers off guard with its relatively long range torps, while equally wrecking CLs with their shite armor and liberal use of AP. I was a fan of the Yubari when I had just entered CBT. Nowadays I'm not that fond of it anymore. It lacks the necessary equipment for its role as an AA escort.

Tried it and didn't deem it useful enough. A CA without Sonar is still a decent enough DD hunter. A CA without the AA cooldown will not save anyone from an IJN CV zerg. By virtue of only one skill being vitally important, the other one has to be cast aside.

There's also an upgrade that does the opposite.

It doesn't change that you're at the mercy of the CV f***ing up. No semi-decent CV player is going to let you drive straight towards or away from his TBs. DBs are less of an issue and also way less dangerous - especially while sailing with a teammate. I have had situations where I accidentally ended up driving with another Pensacola against a Ranger. Even our combined AA was not enough to a) deter him from attacking us and b) shoot down even half a squadron outside of the AA cooldown. Now consider a 1v1 situation: Your AA DPS in high tier CA, a so-called "counter", is only high enough to effectively reduce the probability of damage while your AA ability is up. If the CV sniffs that out, he can move all of his squadrons towards you, staggering their approach in a 2DB-followed-by-1DB/3TB pattern. The CA HAS to use the ability as soon as the 2DB group enters range. Only then will he have enough time to actually shut down a significant amount of them. Once that has happened, CV can pull back the 1DB/3TB group and wait for the ability to run out. In that time he can even relaunch the two DB squads he lost. Once the CA is left with the ability on cooldown, there's exactly 0 chance of him fighting off the inevitable zerg. He may get damaged, he may get sunk, he will get set on fire, he will experience flooding. All of that for a measly 11 to 20% of an equally tiered CV's reserves. This is bad design, considering that the CV is at virtually no risk from the CA during that maneuver. Also, 180s cooldown is kind of a lot when shot down squadrons replenish very quickly. If I was to humbly suggest a change that, in my opinion, encourages teamwork, I'd suggest changing the way a CA's AA DPS is distributed. CAs, if they're supposed to fill the role of an escort, require most of their AA DPS to be long range, similar to what the DM has to offer, for example. That change in AA DPS distribution can be met with a reduction in overall AA DPS for CAs. Short range/high dps AA is what BBs and CVs themselves need.

Highest base exp I've ever scored was this match: The Hiryu was left on 5k health while I was sitting at 500, dodging his planes. One more salvo would've given me the chance to kill him. Alas, teammates decided to cap and deny me that satisfaction.

Yeah, well, that's all nice in theory. My experience with the Hyriu in my full-AA (in terms of skill distribution and equipment) Pensacola is that you literally cannot touch them in a 1v1 and will succumb eventually to one of his squads hitting, be it dive bombers or torpedo bombers. Sailing with another teammate is all nice and dandy until you realize that most of these ship's AA DPS is in close range. In fact, that range is so close that in order to cover your teammate both of you would have to give up all semblance of maneuverability, meaning that, while there won't be as many DBs or TBs, you cannot really hope to dodge them as well, increasing their accuracy. This should only change once you get the DM with its 5.7km base range on 70ish % of its AA DPS. Also, with increased AA for other ships comes a significant increase in both alpha and reserve capacity. I wouldn't go that far. There's a significant difference in the amount of skill needed to perform decently in both classes of vehicles. If the captain is good, you really cannot do much against CV due to the low amount of RNG involved in that class. Meanwhile, potato players can deal upwards of 1k damage per shot in their herp-a-derp GWT. That stuff doesn't really happen with CVs.

...when the impatient enhusiast crowd has bought enough doubloons to convert their free exp. They'll unify gold once that happens.

I'd be shocked if we didn't get accelerated crew training at some point as part of an account level unlock.

As others have already confirmed it, the skill does work on your main battery. The issue is that, as Pawndemonium pointed out, it increases your range to where your shell travel time becomes prohibitive. Even BBs can dodge shells that fly 15+ seconds.

Also, intercepting and destroying planes doesn't pay jack s**t.

Just had a game against Aerroon in his stock Taiho. It was him and a Cleveland against me in a Cleveland with full AA loadout, an Atlanta and two Warspites. It was a massacre. We managed to shoot down a grand total of 35ish planes, if I recall correctly. Dat matchmaking.

There's exactly nothing stopping people from comparing core principles of the economy of both WoT and WoWs, just like they could compare them to similar games in the same genre. Hell, people are comparing DotA's, LoL's and Hero's economy all the time, for example, and with good reason. Wargaming's explicitly stated goal to align the economies of all their products implies that the fundamental principles should be the same across all of them. One of them is "A player's progress is mostly limited by experience gain.". In WoWs, people are currently limited by credit gain, marking that a paradigm shift. It thus fundamentally doesn't conform with Wargaming's policy. This is a logical fallacy: Since people are limited by their credit income instead of experience gain, converting free exp to research more stuff they cannot afford makes no sense. I do think the economy is slightly borked in the sense that ships and modules cost a bit too much. Equipment cost can stay as is for all I care.

The RNG element really reminds me of WoT artillery. Edit: Screw the Izumo. That thing is bloody horrendous.

As I said: CVs are a CV's counter. That's how high tier matches in CBT ended up in my experience: Carriers would try to torp/bomb/harass the everliving crap out of each other while the CAs try to help them out, leaving the BBs to fend off DDs. At the same time, DDs got frustrated by having their torps spotted by all the planes whizzing around. It wasn't pretty but it worked. Sort of.

It is capped at 76.9 fps, by the way. I'm at a loss as to what that number is the result of.

I've played BBs up to tier 9 and frankly, if a CV wanted me dead, no amount of friendly support would save me in the long run without basically giving up map control. I've seen even DDs get bearmauled by four torpedo bomber squadrons, launching torps at them from every direction. Carriers also seem to have only one relatively reliable counter: Carriers. Normal gameplay seems to revolve around 'BB > CA > DD > BB'. Carriers are separate from that in that they, more or less reliably, beat the other types of ships. In the same turn, I've tried low tier CVs - the Langley (both in CBT and in this pre-OBT phase) and the booger (CBT only) - and I found them to be extremely boring to play with their default squad loadouts. You tend to rely on your team a lot more than with IJN CVs thanks to their anti-ship loadouts being more heavily focused on the vastly more useful torpedo bombers. Also, playing with only two squads when half the time one of them is going to be useless is quite, as I said, boring. They're annoying to play against in high tiers and they seem to be annoying to play as - at least in low tiers. The latter is probably a quirk of mine, the former may be an issue worth looking into if others are agreeing.

IJN cruisers seem to be very similar to US DDs in the sense that you're forced to abuse terrain for concealment in order to get close to your target, enabling you to torp them to bits. Feel free to correct me as I've only tried the latter, not the former.

Which is precisely why I'm not going to argue about whether this specific game is pay-to-win or not: The argument OP was making is highly subjective.

He does have a point: If something can be bought through ingame means it's not strictly not pay-to-win. If it is prohibitively expensive without the usage of one's wallet, it might aswell be considered inaccessible and, as a result, pay-to-win. However, I'm not going to argue whether this logic is applicable in our case.

Let's be honest here: This was a pretty dumb move. It goes against that whole "Premiums are supposed to have less potential than regular vehicles of the same tier." logic they've tried to employ whenever possible. Given that the Arkansas is VERY similar to the Wyoming, this shouldn't have been terribly difficult either.

...which can be extremely powerful in the right situation. Got a hard time seeing the usefulness of premium repair party, for example, because, given enough time, the premium version gives exactly as much health as the standard version. Time is the one thing you tend to have quite a lot of with the way BBs work. Premium damage control party has the potential to save your bacon from that salvo that would've citpenned you for ungodly amounts of damage. This alone makes it mandatory in my opinion.

Yeah, the credit economy does seem off. Can't really say too much about experience yet.