Viridem

Enterprise looked at me funny, and I took exception to that. It's these rare games that make AA builds worth the investment.

What are you talking about? The new line, starting tier 7, has one of the best AA for cruisers. It's one of the salient aspects of the ships...

It depends on the ship. When I planned for an eventual 21-points captain for Furutaka (which will probably never happen), I didn't really know what to pick. Some aspects are too weak to buff, the ship has little utility, and the strong aspects don't need a buff (plus it's tier 5, who needs 21 points at this tier!?!)... The latest CL line however... You can pick AA skills with the AA upgrade in slot 6, you can pick both torpedo upgrades and the three torpedo skills. You can of course build for guns with the usual cookie cutter cruiser build, with or without IFHE, you can pick heavy HE with a lighthouse build or keep your concealment decent with both CE and the concealment upgrade (at the cost of rudder shift). Outnumbered is a good pick if you have the playstyle for it, some people run Survivability Expert too (which I find questionable at high tier, but still not a bad pick). There are many ways to build your captain with significant consequences on the ship's performances and your playstyle. I remember making a lighthouse build for Mogami last time we had free captain retraining. It was a challenge to work with 13.45km concealment, but with Top Grade Gunner and AR kicking in at low HP, I could reach 350k HE dpm... I didn't revert back to my usual build because lighthouse was ineffective -it was- but because it was too stressful. Commander skills for cruisers are far from useless...

I love the work they did on the triple 150mm guns of the latest CL line. Germany being the only nation that produced 150mm naval guns, we can truly see the exchange of technology that could have happened between the two countries. Truly a masterpiece by the art department. Sarcasm aside... I really like the Northern Lights map. It feels like I rarely get it from the map rotation though. The sight from around F7, where's there's that lighthouse, is really nice. It's a bit dark however. Generally I like looking at the little towns they put on islands. They remind me of train model towns, which I alwyas found charming. I'm quite partial to the ARP camos too. I like Maya's camo. It's a solid plain dark-blue gray, but not only is it historical, it looks like the Sasebo blue -my favorite-. Otherwise for camos... I use a historical camo mod, so apart from a couple fantasy ones I left, it's mostly solid grey ships. The work on some camos is of pretty questionable taste... As for good looking ships... the list is too long. Credits to the people who modeled them, but let's not forget the people who created these ships to begin with. I suppose that, while you might be asked to create a weapon with practical points in mind, you still can spend some effort into making it look great!

I have no trouble making them work, but apart from Shimanto and the very good Gokase, the line is very underwhelming, with many other ships being way more interesting to play (including the CA line). Maybe if I'm in the mood of shooting down planes, as they do this extremely well starting Omono... And while I appreciate Shimanto, there's Mogami right there... Oh, and while they repeatadely said that Omono had the turning torps, I have never seen them wriggle. It's mostly cosmetic, but they can't apparently get this right... What a disapointment this line is. At least they nailed Tokachi. Love this ship.

Agreed, some maps are fairly pretty, but I don't understand why they have to blind us. Game developers have to put bloom and motion blur and stuff like that in their game. It looks nice, but it makes things so horrible to play. Unfortunately I don't know how fix it. Maybe there's a mod for that? I never really bothered with it, but if someone knows I'm interested too.

Zuihou is a really good girl, after all, that is understandable. I think she was my main CVL, back when I still played KC. The ship looks great, too. That camo is top tier.

OK. Listen to me for a little second, read carefully what I write. The damage that OP did with his guns, when taking into account the number of hits, isn't in my experience reflective of the performance of the guns. The screenshots illustrate my point. That is what I am saying. Nothing more than that, nothing less than that. At no point did I say that the ships are good, or did I compare them to other CLs. You are arguing against something I never said. Stop it.

OP has 20k damage with 120 hits. I have more than twice the damage with less hits than that. My point was that he might have done something wrong on his part. Might. I have said nothing more, nothing else. And these torpedo hits weren't lucky. He couldn't avoid them at all. Here's a couple more games in Shimanto and Takashi to illustrate more "regular" damage per hit with the guns. The three torpedo hits on Nakhimov were from 14km away, by the way.

Did you not pick IFHE? Did you keep firing at thick parts of the armour? I only had 15 shatters there...

Not much of an "achievement", but after many many tries I finally got operation Hermes in Shimanto, and the AA performed way above my expectations. 518k plane damage, 72 of them shot down (out of 109 in total shot down by the team). The counter went up insanely fast when the planes attacked us in the center, just as the BB stops to heal. I'm not sure they had many chances to drop the team XD. Decent damage too. The torps are very nice against the BB wave.

Finally, after all this time... Let's hope they don't screw up this.

It's so pointless that people you are the most likely to report probably already have 0 karma anyway. I often don't bother anymore. It's nice to give and receive however. You have a nice teamate or opponent, you can give that compliment. It feels good to give, and it's always nice to see that little notification in the bottom right when you receive it. "Hey, someone appreciated what I did! Neat." When such a great part of the playerbase seem to run on salt or to be mentally absent, it's a nice change of pace. Mine seem to be stuck around 380 (Just like my skills, which seem to not really improve anymore. Ah well.). Receiving reports and compliments has become extremely inconsistent. Ultra carry with 3k base exp in ranked? Super toxicity in chat? Nothing. Play just ok? Basic team communication? Get a report/compliment. Ignore it if you don't like it. Just for the aspect of giving and receiving positive karma, I'd like to keep it. Being good to each other is already rare in this game as it is...

Second battle in the Yodo, testing out the waters. She's nice, but I wish she'd turn. This is a bit painful to sail... Link to the replay. :)

So for some reason, Shimanto and Takahashi get depth charges, while Yodo gets plane ASW.... I need to play them a bit more, but I'd say Shimanto is ok. Not particularly good or bad, not mediocre or meh, just ok. She can be enjoyable at times. Which is a step up from Omono. I just unlocked Yodo, and I need a few more battles in Takahashi. The AA though. Muah it's good. Seeing these planes come after you and just "poof" disappear in a puff of smoke is so satisfying. With defAA active, it is eleven clouds with almost 10k damage each, on a full AA build on Takahashi or Yodo. And that long range? It's not enough to delete everything in an instant, but you're almost guaranteed the squad doesn't make more than one pass.

But you do have ASW. It's the depth charges. Press G, or whatever it is on your keyboard. You didn't have to ram the ship.... Plane ASW at this tier is so bad, regular depth charges might actually be better.

I found one in the wild. He told me he joined the game to play them. It's over, frens. We had CV mains, now we have submarine mains. :(

You... spent the XP? No really, that's the only logical explanation I can come up with. You played 3 games stock or with only one module, then unlocked one or two modules with the XP + free XP, bringing you to 0. I suppose the 7k XP you got on that captain were from these 3 games. So I don't think it was afk penalty, otherwise you wouldn't have had that captain XP.

If they didn't change the mission since the first BP, it's an easy weekly chain that unlocks 3 stages per week. The missions have to be completed in order and are unlocked each week, but do not expire. You can complete all the missions, one after the other, on the very last day of the patch, for example. I suppose you get all the missions even if you buy the premium pass on the last day, too. At least this sounds logical to me.

I was told the Japanese CLs can't have any meaningful impact on the game. To which I agree, this was all meaningless, surely :) No replay because this was one hell of a boring match, chasing ships that went all the way to the A line. I was glad Amagi finally ended me, in a way. No definitive opinion on Shimanto for now, but she is definitively not a great ship.

Everything went above your head, faaar above it, didn't it?

@Redcap375 I'm talking about Gokase, a ship "the masses" already got their hands on... You haven't played a single match in these cruisers. All you do is making assumptions about ships you haven't played by taking stats with little context, other than "the ship is new". Stats do not give context. Now I understand why you compared this guy's stats in the Johan to yours in the Rhamat, in which you have ONE solo game... Have you heard the term "statistically significant"? Oh, and since I'm here. (I wanted to reply to an earlier post, but the site bugged out and I lost my message, so I gave up at the time). But: contrary to what you said, Yodo, as well as Shimanto and Takahashi, do NOT need IFHE to pen 30mm. It's easily available data. And while the ships weren't announced with these characteristics at first, it was very quickly recognized as an error in the dev blog and corrected. Finally: And I respect your opinion but... I have better WR and do more damage AND PR in my tier 6 Gokase than your tier 7 Belfast. Belfast is considered an OP ship. So you saying "it's bad" forgive me for bringing it back down to earth mate. I hope you'll apreciate the irony...

"Gokase sucks" Guy who hasn't played Gokase By what metric ? By my own experience in more than 100 battles, with very good results (take a look at the leaderboard...) On wows numbers, if you rank the ship by the top 25% or 10% players, you'll see she's right in the middle. A bit lower with the top 50% or top 5%. In my experience Gokase has a high skill floor. The average potato will struggle to do anything apart from dying quick. I think that's why she is so low on average. If you cull out the potatoes, you get stats more representative of the ship's true potential. The stats seem to go along with my impression. And by "great", I don't mean only "performs well", I also mean fun. She's the second fastest cruiser in the game of all tiers (without speed boost). It's super fun to sail around at 39 knots in a cruiser, you know ? You can't take stats out of context, you'll only get wrong conclusions. Look at Moskva's average stats, and come tell me she's a mediocre ship...

"Ship X sucks" People who haven't played ship X People were crapping on the whole line, and Tokachi as well, before even touching it. Turns out Tokachi is a super fine ship, and the line has at least one great ship, the Gokase. Flamu is often right, but it doesn't mean he's always right, nor isn't prone to drama queen mode... Remember Harekaze II: he looked at the ship in port, basically said "Lol no" and moved on after a minute or so. -2 sigma from median IQ move.

I didn't know the torpedoes stopped aiming based on the expected collision point, not distance from your ship. I don't think it was explained this way in the official posts... Good post!