Khul

Which is why I was rather quick & explicit in jumping on him. There's enough bad feeling in this game--alpha/beta players narking on new players 'cos they don't know what they're doing, new players narking on alpha/beta players seal-clubbing them, battleship players narking on consensus reality for not making their toys invulnerable, unbeatable floating insta-kill death machines, everyone narking on carrier players--at the moment without letting things like this (from a minority of very strange reality-denying people) cause even more grief.

Somebody else has already pointed this out, but I felt the need to reiterate you simply do not know what you are talking about, because torpedoes do not do maximum damage every single shot--it depends what you hit & where. You are simply, blatantly, hideously misinformed on this point.

Seriously: no. Since the loop-hole was closed that allowed the use of a target lead prediction indicator for gunnery back in closed beta (& that wasn't a hack, it was in an alpha version of the game & got edited out & someone found a way to re-establish it) there's been no hacks, no game-breaking mods, nothing. Not one single replay, not one single actual verifiable instance of anything like it at all. There has been a huge amount of unsubstantiated butt-hurt whining, a shedload of people who apparently don't really understand the game mechanics & some quite beautiful examples of the Dunning Kruger effect, however.

S'not a special, unfortunately: http://worldofwarships.eu/en/news/common/armada-yamato/ ...But someone's obviously a bit of a Bowie fan. "She began to waaa-aaaiil, jealousy's scream, waiting for the reload if you know what I me-aaaan..." Ahem. I prefer "Modern Love" from that era, myself, but there's no accounting for taste, eh?

People who know battleships have told me that it's best to fire HE in it, 'cos the IJN 12" guns have terribad AP (something about shell dynamics I didn't quite catch). Someone else who knows IJN BBs reaaaally well told me to grind out loads of free XP & skip straight to the Myogi. Today, I took the latter's advice.

^ FWIW, I find that it's better in the Arkansas to do what CV players do with their staggered divebomb-then-torp approach: hit them with half the turrets to try to get them to burn their repair off, then once they're moving again hit them with the other half & finish them or cripple them. Of course, I am teribad & get torpedoed. But it seems to work in principle (if only I could get it to work in practice!)...

This is a massively understated point imo. When I'm in a DD & the enemy cruisers stick close to the enemy BBs, screen for them, the DD job is massively difficult. I'm not sure if other players understand this. A Cleveland player the other day did, there was an enemy carrier & we had none, & he stuck with the BBs, I scouted ahead in my Gremy, & a Phoenix joined us. I found a couple of cruisers, ran from them & called on the BBs to exploderise them for me (& they did!), whilst the Cleveland played air defence. The BBs all listened to his suggestions (no divisions on our side, IIRC), they stuck together, survived the air pummelling & our makeshift flotilla rolled slowly across the map & mopped up basically the entire enemy team. It was terrific. Did I have a massively high scoring game? No, not at all (I think two torp hits & a bit of gun damage). But it was massively satisfying to see the game mechanics working. But, the number of games where, in a Japanese DD, I've been forced to play anti-destroyer screen (or even more hilariously do AA duties in my Gremy!!!) are becoming more & more common. I'm hoping for a playerbase attitude readjustment, but don't expect it any time soon; & in the meantime, I am afraid WG will respond to the mass hysteria you see on the forums, the one-sided howls of approbation (BUFF BBs!!! NERF EVERYTHING ELSE!!!) with a blanket hamfisted approach that will cripple many things at once, & that will send the game into a weird spiral.

Sincere apologies then. & CVs? Nah. No problem. They die just the same when you HE them. Though I kinda enjoyed the Langley, circa April. But not enough to actively play them like mental, & never got further than the (then-tier 5) Independence. FWIW, I think the Arkansas is a really nice ship, from my few battles in it, has indicated that I'd probably like the US tree more than the IJN battleship one, 'cos they all seem to play a little more like the Nagato, from the videos I've seen & the way the Arkansas is, than the Fuso, in which I was... terribad. Just... Unbelievably awful. & anyway, to all those drowning in rose-tinted nostalgia about battleships: surely a battlecruiser is leagues more exciting & amazeballs than a boring old battleship? I could genuinely understand the hooplah about one of those. But you never see forty threads going "BUFF THE BATTLECRUISERS111!!!", or hordes of fantasy threads demanding the return of such ships to the world's modern navies. I am intrigued as to why that is... BTW: I would concur that the biggest problem with this game, from an enjoyment standpoint, is the HE model. It does genuinely weird things to modules on all ships, the fire chance is completely mental, & I dislike WG's blanket "more guns are better than bigger guns" approach (I think it should be modelled on a bit more of a sliding scale: the uber-light cruisers with loads of six-inch guns were incredibly powerful ships, but it's very strange how they rule surface engagements atm. But you very rarely hear people saying this).

I do not think BBs are overpowered at all, thank you very much. & I had about three hundred BB battles during closed beta. In answer to your question, I am lazy & cannot be bothered to get into the grindset that WG games require. One day, far off (Nagato again would be nice, as would a Mogami). But I can wait. Do you ever see me post anything saying BBs are overpowered? Do I in fact engage on a range of topics? & does the person I asked do anything other than harp on & on & on about one particular subject?

& I think this illustrates the biggest challenge this game faces: unpicking the fantasy many people have in their head of the dominant, all-conquering battleship that only has to sneeze at any opposing ship for it to vapourise & is virtually unsinkable. Not that ANY OF THAT matters, of course, because this is an arcade game, not real life, but you can see the psychological mindset of many of these people in this thread: present real-life accounts of 14" & larger shells passing clean through destroyer escorts without doing much more than making two fourteen-inch holes in them & battleship guns being unable to depress sufficiently to hit small targets at close range, & these things are ignored or shouted down whilst the fantasy crowd still continue to bleat about how invulnerable & all-powerful their toys were in "real life". & then people posting unsubstantiated "B-b-b-but BIG GUNZ! BOOM! CRUSH!!" stuff that supports their weird fantasy results in pos-rep heaven. Battleships are very strange, & so are the people that love them. Just look at the multiplicity of threads you get in the "naval warfare" section, where people will argue--despite, y'know, reality--that battleships are still somehow relevant to modern naval surface combat (or have been for, like, 60 years). You will always find someone shrieking about how they just know it's viable, normally at the top of their lungs. It's a very strange phenomenon, & one that you see on these very forums almost daily & I think dominates most people's preconceptions that they bring to the game. I think this gives us immense psychological insight into the Big Gun Lobby, circa 1935. If people are this convinced of the ships' theoretical superiority now, post-WW2, just imagine how intense must this fantasy have been before a single ship had been sunk by an aircraft?

D'you ever post anything apart from "WAAAAAAAAAAAH MY PRECIOUS BB!!!!!!!!!"? Genuinely curious.

The rudders & prop shafts of My Tenryu & Yubari would suggest it's a wide-ranging problem; I can only assume Japanese stuff has a higher module crit chance or something.

Sharana seems to think it's a feature:- But as you've said, it didn't seem to happen before, or at least, not every bloody game; I don't know if they've massively upped the chance of crit damage from HE splash or whether it's subjective & just feels that way 'cos we no longer take HP damage from near-misses, just the crits; no real way to find out unless WG tells us. EDIT: Ninja'd by the man himself.

I would like an answer from someone at WG please as to whether or not some sort of "module damage from HE near-misses" now applies to light-cruisers & destroyers, & if so, why, & also why wasn't it in the patch-notes at all please? EDIT: NVM, Sharana provides an answer on the "Damage mechanics" thread in the Newcomers' Section.

A bigger nerf than the changes to the smoke mechanics--& this has also hit traditional light cruisers even harder than destroyers imo, another effect of WG's hamfisted splat-everything approach to introducing balance changes--is the way HE near-misses now cause module damage (an undocumented change introduced in patch 0.4, as far as I can tell) to light ships, meaning shots you dodge but land behind you now blow out your rudder/steering. It's bad enough in a destroyer when you dodge the shot & it does this, but in a light cruiser it's invariably fatal as you cannot drop smoke & you're normally slower than an equivalent DD so you have less of a chance to get away. Obviously, the devs don't want us running directly away from fights, as this now over-exposes one to shots that'll destroy the manoeuvering gear. (One wonders how exactly you're supposed to compensate for this, possibly by sailing diagonally.) Or, perhaps, the message is: "Now you're meant to play by not getting spotted at all" (which, btw, I'm sure will reassure new players: of course, it's going to be much less problematic to be torped to oblivion by a load of things you cannot see, isn't it? That's definitely "fair"). The implementation of this new mechanic has been introduced, imo, by WG feeling the need to curb the power of destroyers before the hordes of new players arrived in open beta. That, instead of tweaking torps to make them slightly less devastating or whatever, they chose to implement a mechanic that means if you get shot near (let alone in) the arse, you're dead, is... Well. I think "stucking fupid" just about covers it.

I have run out of plus-ones, but that is the best fecking suggestion I have ever seen regarding this game. Literally. The single best one. The boost to the overall standard of gameplay would be immeasurable, imo.

Great stuff, this is the sort of thing that WG might want to put on a scrolling banner whilst downloading the game, imo. The interaction (or rather, the interrelation) of the classes is something that is proving very difficult for a lot of newcomers to grasp, imo, & leads to a lot of squalling rage topics on the forum & much butthurt in chat.

Dunno about your feelings about the AA--I'm not qualified enough to judge--but the rest of that is a fantastic post mate.

The problem that people do not want to acknowledge is that a battleship is hideously team-dependent, rather than being hideously underpowered. Of course, people will always complain that their ship is underpowered no matter what, but that stems from a refusal to engage with the reality of a battleship's situation, which WG have simply faithfully implemented into the game design: Without an escort of cruisers or US DDs, you're immediately vulnerable to fast-moving smaller ships. Stripped of your consorts, you're liable to wallow into a space where you get trapped easily & then you're a sitting duck. This is not the game's fault. This is the battleship's fault by design. That's why they were escorted almost everywhere they went, & when they were alone were picked off with hideous ease. The exact same thing happens in the game. My worst games in battleships are the ones where people refuse to co-operate no matter how nicely you ask ("You can't win by capping noob" a DD player told me in my last game in my Arkansas, in domination): as you watch the cruisers evaporate or YOLO off to random parts of the map at full speed, the destroyers torping each other a minute into the game & then getting blown to smithereens five seconds after they contact the enemy, your desperate pleas for sanity or at least a nominal plan laughed off or sworn at, you get that sinking feeling... & five minutes later you actually are sinking. I would suggest that WG could mollify a lot of the perceived "weakness" of battleships if they stuck a big flashing "ARE YOU SURE YOU HAVEN'T GOT ANY FRIENDS WHO WANT TO ESCORT YOU IN A DIVISION, BECAUSE CONTRARY TO YOUR FANTASIES EXPECTATIONS THE SHIP YOU HAVE SELECTED IS DEPENDENT ON TEAMWORK" banner across your port the moment you select a battleship. It would solve a huuuuuuuuge amount of problems. Convincing people that this is the case & that their particular wank-object big powerful stronk ship isn't an invulnerable floating castle of death, however, is going to be harder, & I am beginning to suspect (just from the constant "feedback" from aggrieved battleship enthusiasts we get on here & that I see elsewhere) that this might be the major flaw in the game: trying to convince people they're playing a combined-arms naval game, rather than an individualistic ego-shooter.

I do concur about the extra game content; with the nautical theme there's just soooooooooo many opportunities to add modes, whether they be escort, anti-convoy, bombardment or a mixture of all three.

Awesome stuff mate, can we sticky this please?

From here: http://forum.worldofwarships.eu/index.php?/topic/17907-torpedo-spotting-range/ In other words, Sharana suspects it's not actually based on torp range at all & will shortly be to the rescue to find out whatever the hell is influencing it & put it in his "mechanics" thread, mate.

Human nature is therefore broken & needs adjustment, something rather outside WG's purview.

@ OP: It's a good job the game you're playing is "World of Warships" then, isn't it? Rather than the mythical "World of Battleships", say. That gives you, what, another three ship classes you might enjoy. Try them, see if you like them. Carry on. PS:

Thank you.