Procrastes

I hope they will be able to work on the build diversity; at least with the new system divided into ship classes the potential is there. But I agree that a number of the new skills can just be crossed off the board as they are in no way viable alternatives to the prime picks. As for the supposed "death of secondary builds", I have not given up. I still go full secondary build on my Georgia and Massachusetts, as well as on all the German battleships (and of course on the Mikasa). On the rest of the USN battleships, as well as on the French and Italian ones, I go for a classic tank build. The only battleships in my Navy that currently carry a Deadeye commander are the British ones. I'll give it some time and see how it works out.

The "WC" designation for our beloved fun police - and your motivation for it - is unfortunately more astute than I would like to admit. And I say this not because I have a soft spot for CV:s - I don't - but because it bugs me to see a bad design choice ruin what would otherwise have the potential to be a balanced and valuable ship class in the game. There is no need whatsoever to make CV:s user-friendly to the exclusion of all other concerns, to laden them with a number of uncalled-for invulnerabilities to artificially bolster their performance, and to burden every CV player in the game with the stigma of driving a despised ship class. I'd make a fair bet that most dedicated CV players would choose to have a level playing field rather than this over-coddled ship class that current carriers have become.

Good points, all of them! Not all things were better in the olden days. I have done extensive research, and it has shown conclusively that most things - such as health, public safety and personal freedom - were all generally much worse in the olden days; the worse the older those days were. World of Warships is no exception to this. Even with such things as the reworked carriers, and tier X ships with legendary modules now being available for money, it is still a better game than it was way back when. Let's hope it stays that way, right?

Back in my day, submarines were never going to be in the game.

Back in my day, sinking animations were completely crap.

Back in my day, carriers were actually supposed to, and equipped to, fight other carriers.

Post-Mortem Plane Squadrons Need a Zombie Fix! I recently squared off against a Lexington in a ranked battle where I was driving in my Orkan destroyer. It ended quite scandalously, I'll have you know. First, the Lexington attacked me with a bunch of rocket planes which I dodged while shooting down one of his planes. Then the battle went on fairly civilly with each of us minding our own business in separate parts of the map. But towards the endgame, where I had sunk the enemy Missouri and gone hunting for their Benham, I happened on the carrier as well. This triggered a furious naval ballet of rocket strikes and heroic dodges and pot shots against the carrier, where I had considerably more trouble dodging his rockets since I had to also simultaneously dodge the incessant torpedoes from the Benham. On the other hand, being in the Orkan I could heal back a lot of the damage I took, and the carrier was subjected to incoming fire as well. In short, the carrier was sunk before he managed to put me under. This was bad enough, of course, and strictly against the rules of reworked CV/destroyer engagement, but the carrier was rightly and properly compensated by retaining a full squad of rocket planes - i.e., his post-mortem plane squadron - even after having been sunk. But now I come to the scandalous part: The carrier player, after having been sunk, didn't manage to sink me with his post-mortem plane squadron. Oh, he came close enough to make me hesitate to engage the enemy Benham with what was left of my hit points, and he did take out my engine (again), but he didn't actually sink me. This is a proper outrage, I tell you. A carrier player did not manage, after having been sunk, to take out the destroyer he had been fighting while his ship was still in the game. I am sure most of us would agree that this is not supposed to happen. Clearly the rework has failed. On behalf of reworked carrier adherents worldwide, I propose the following changes to carrier rules: 1. If a carrier is sunk by any other ship than another carrier, his post-mortem plane squadron will be immune to damage until he has sunk one other ship of his choice that is not a carrier. 2. The post-mortem plane squadron will have endlessly regenerating loadouts of bombs/rockets/torpedoes, which will however only be able to do damage to non-carrier ships. 3. If an enemy destroyer happens to be the closest enemy ship to the carrier when it sinks, the enemy destroyer will automatically sink as well. I thought about making carriers immune to other torpedoes than those dropped from torpedo bombers, but that might be going a bit too far. We wouldn't want carriers to be seen as having an unfair advantage over other ship classes, after all. Disclaimer: This is a spoof post. No vehemence towards carrier players or WG staff is intended; I am just letting off some steam. I will now go and get myself another cup of coffee. Have an altogether pleasant weekend, fellow forumites!

I really can't believe that Wargaming would pull off this kind of maneuver simply in order to sell a bunch of extra doubloons. They have opened up a lot of venues for that already, not least with now having 10-point commanders for sale in conjunction with the new option to trade in commanders for elite xp; both of which require doubloon expenditure. Creating an occasion for for further skill respecs just to make some extra money would generate a huge and totally unnecessary amount of player badwill. Call me naive if you wish, but I honestly don't think that Wargaming is either greedy profit-conscious enough, or dumb enough, to do that.

If one would go for a positive rather than a negative approach to this information, one could perhaps say the following: - Deadeye has been the single most contentious part of the whole commander skill rework. Wargaming is now considering to change the skill. This suggests that a) they are listening to the player base, and b) they might even be prepared to act on it. So this is good, right? - If Deadeye is changed, another period of free skill respecs would be a nice and welcome gesture. If that is not going to be the case, I would hope that we at least get a satchel of doubloons to cover the expense of half a dozen full respecs or so. What I'm not going to do at this stage is to assume the worst and start feeling bad already about something that may never happen. - Expecting a refund for a ship because of a change to the Deadeye skill is not reasonable. No ship in the game is Deadeye-dependent.

OR... they could put all Tones and CV:s in a special game mode, with only Carriers and Tones in it? If they do this and also give Tone the same magic fire fighters and other invulnerabilities that normal carriers have, the latter would finally be getting a much-needed dose of reality check. Just think of it: Whenever a carrier drops a bomb or a rocket that sets a Tone on fire, the fire will immediately go out, and there will be a voice-over - heard by everyone - where Commander Jingles says, "How do you like them apples?" It could be beautiful...! I know, I know... but a man can dream, right?

No kidding? Not even County Durham has that much coal to spare... I guess my Regia Marina ships will have to settle with keeping Captain Blackadder* as their commander-in-chief. To be fair he's done a good job of it so far, although Luigi does have a snappier uniform. * He calls himself Vincenzo Palladini in the game, but I swear he's just Captain Blackadder in Italian uniform. The moustache is a dead giveaway.

Is it enough to buy one container from the shop (6000 coal) to start the Italian collection, and then you can collect them in daily containers as usual?

Ok, straight off the bat: I think having separate skill trees for separate ship classes is basically a good idea. It makes the skill system a lot more more flexible, which means that it will be much more easy to fix balance issues and adjust for new ships and ship classes in the future. (Whether we would actually want those new ship classes or not, is of course a whole other cookie to argue about.) I have at this time no way to judge what effect the Deadeye skill has, or will have, on overall gameplay. I suspect that not even Wargaming has any clear idea of this at such an early juncture. But my personal belief is that the main effect of the Deadeye skill will not be of a mechanical nature, but rather that it will have a bad influence on player behaviour. Even by its very existence, it can be interpreted as a legitimization of border camping and long range sniping as a viable tactic for battleships. This is not a thing that should be encouraged, in my opinion. The skill itself, however, doesn't have to be all bad - just as long as it is not used as an excuse for passive gameplay. I have it on my main British battleship captain, but that doesn't mean that I won't support my allies or make a push when the time seems right - it just means that I will (hopefully) be at bit more effective at long range gunnery during the opening phase of the battle. In short, I believe that battleship captains who continue to play to the objectives, and who keep close enough to the action to be able to push in and make a difference when the time is right, will continue to do better than their border-camping brethren - irrespective of whether any of them have taken the Deadeye skill or not.

I find ranked battles to be a generally pleasant experience, and one reason for this is that teams seem to be overall more able to cooperate and play for the objectives. But there is a catch. I'm a destroyer main, and I tend to favour destroyers in ranked battles as well. And since I often find myself as the only destroyer on the team in those battles, there can be a bit more pressure than usual (in my own head anyway) to do a good job and not mess up. This makes ranked battles more stressful for me, rather than - as it seems to be for many others in this thread - more relaxing. I guess I just need to be a bit more "chill" about the whole experience...? Me: You:

Respect, senpai. I had all summer of 2020 to complete that campaign, but I still couldn't make it. Not because it was too hard a grind - far from it - but simply due to other engagements. Burning through it in 24 days shows dedication and willpower of epic levels.

Hello, Captain @EnacheV, and welcome to the game! I was about to mention that bot AI in co-op and random battles has already been toned down in order to avoid a Cyberdyne scenario where the bots wipe out humanity, but Captain Excavatus has already gone into that in post #29 above. So I'll go straight to the crunch: Focus on PvP gameplay and you will get the hang of the game much more quickly. Bot behaviour is depressingly predictable and its only strength is its consistency of purpose. The sheer mindless steamrolling tactic can, and will, win the occasional battle against unfocused human players, but the less said about this the better. Personally I use co-op games mainly to familiarise myself with a new ship before taking it into PvP combat, or to complete the odd mission where I need to focus on things other than proper gameplay (such as collecting flooding markers, for instance). PvP is the heart of the game, and once you start getting to tier IV and above the number of bots in random battles will drop and eventually disappear altogether. But if you still prefer the co-op mode - and there are many who do - rest assured that bots will not remain an obstacle for long. Best of luck!

The problem with mission parameters that promote bad team play is an old one, and to be fair to Wargaming things are generally much better now than they were three or four years ago. Back then there used to be a lot of those stupid "kill" missions, that would only give you points for destroying ships but none whatsoever for dealing damage. The result was that players would hoard their salvoes, waiting until an enemy was on such low hit points that they were practically assured of a kill before opening fire. There was also a lot of predictable salt as accusations of "kill stealing" flew back and forth across the chat. The only sane response was to just play the game to the best of one's ability without giving a fig for the missions. That is what I did then, and that is what I do now. If I absolutely definitely need to set a given number of fires within a set time limit, I'll play a few co-op games and then go back to randoms. The best kind of missions are those whose completion criteria synergize with good team play, so that all you have to do to complete them is to just play the game as usual. Again to be fair to Wargaming, most missions nowadays are of this kind - except when they have to be completed within a set time limit.

I would be tempted to say that you lost me at Σ... but I'm afraid I dropped off the beaten track long before that. A most informative post nonetheless, Sir!

This is an neat point to make. You can't set fire to something that is already burning in the location where you hit. Or at least, I think you can't. One might speculate that an ongoing fire that was about to burn out could have its duration lengthened - or "restarted", rather - if you dropped another HE shell on it... but I don't think that is the case?

I'm sorry to hear that. Following the lists - and hoping to see my name on them, which I would in no way have considered to be shameful - was one of the main highlights of this thread.

Working as intended, from what I've heard. Having planes become invulnerable to AA while flying through AA makes perfect sense, really. Because making them invulnerable to AA while not flying through AA would just be pointless, right? ...what do you mean, "not making planes invulnerable to AA at all"? Why, man, that's just crazy talk...!

Sunday Morning Lemmingtrain I just played a ranked battle in my Orkan. At the start of the match, someone suggested that we go for b+c. I said ok and let everyone know that I, being closest, would go to b. When I entered I immediately got radared but managed to dodge back out of range. Then I waited out the radar and went back and capped b, while the enemy Yûgumo (as I later concluded) capped a. So far so good. Then I took a look at the minimap - belatedly, I'll admit - and found that everyone else on my team had taken the long route around c and were miles away from providing any support towards the center. I called out for assistance in chat but was met with diligent radio silence. Seeing that I was about to die alone and without friends I started heading away, but was then challenged by the enemy Yûgumo. Having realized that friendship can be overrated anyway, I thought "the hell with it", and charged the bugger. Unfortunately for me, he was backed up by his team mates whereas I was backed up by Jack and squat (and Jack had left town). So I was sunk while he survived with just enough hit points to secure a well-earned win for his team. My team on the other hand suffered an equally well-earned defeat. In a typical situation such as this, when the whole team lemmingtrains except for one player who goes off to face superior forces alone, the one player has no one but himself to blame for his inevitable early demise. But in this case, I was responding to a call from another team mate to split forces between b and c. I can't help but to feel that at least that one player could have found the wherewithal to come and back me up - although thinking about it now, I suppose that he might have been too far away for that to be practical, having most likely been one of the first to head for c as I made it known that I was going for b. It goes without saying that this sort of experience is probably a lot more historically accurate than most other aspects of the game...

Immersion is good! So, yay for more creative damage visuals! Introducing actual gameplay effects - such as increased dispersion after having had the range finders knocked out, for instance - would probably be more at home in a true simulation than in this arcade game, though. I think it would bring with it too great an element of chance, as it would add another insta-loss mechanic on top of the already present and much-loved Detonation chance ("fun and engaging!"). At least if you are Detonated, you can chew on that pill for ten seconds and then go on to play another battle. Now imagine if you were instead to receive the first salvo of the game straight into your range finders, having your accuracy halved for the remainder of the game and leaving you to basically either go for a suicide ram or drive around in circles and letting the opposition shoot you full of holes - how fun would that be? This bleak scenario could of course be mitigated by allowing for such module damage to be repaired over time, just like is the case with damage to engine or gun turrets today. But I still doubt that such effects would be worth the programming effort and potential bug issues that would inevitably follow, not to mention that such a change would also play merry hell with the overall game balance. So for my part, I think I would prefer if we stick to mere visuals at this time!

The Curling Generation is real, and it's coming for us. Raising children is of course a challenge all of its own. But how do you think your son will learn to face life's real challenges, if you won't even let him join an online arcade game without trying to level the opposition for him? As for the subject matter, introducing skill point caps for given ship tiers would be a Very Bad Idea. Not as bad as trying to apply the skill level of the individual player as a matchmaking factor - which has also been suggested, by the way - but close. It would drastically reduce the appeal for players to level up captains and move their commanders around among the tiers. Not to mention that such a change would go in the very opposite direction to the recent rework of the skill system, it would make the overall gameplay a lot less dynamic - and also, for anyone interested in staying on as a long-term player - a lot less fun and rewarding. I would have responded in a less acerbic tone if the opening post hadn't contained a number of remarks to suggest that players who join in low-tier games with 21-point commanders are "cheaters" or "losers", or that they should "Grow balls". Besides being factually wrong - playing with a 21-point commander in any ship of choice is not cheating, by any definition - such statements convey a passive-aggressive element that we can just as well do without in an open and friendly debate.

Captain @Lordcrafty, Sir, Your challenge is accepted. Come at me at your leisure - I defy you to sink me! (And when you have sunk me, I shall take comfort from the fact that by my death I have hastened your return to the honourable society of non-carrier surface ships.)