eliastion

No, no, across-the-class nerf, most BBs actually got a significant concealment buff with this Not that they have that much use of it since they have enough range for their concealment to still be bad enough that they usually will be spotted regardless (not to mention that they're likely to be spotted even when not firing) but, well, it's still a straight buff for most of them, as minor as it might be. What it it is an across the board CHANGE... that happens to punish stealthy DDs with workable guns more than anything else, go figure.

Stealth-firing as in "the ability to shoot things that can't shoot back because they're inherently slower and can't catch up to you to spot and shoot back"? I can understand the reasoning behind doing something about it. Bot not in a way that just outright kills off any form of gunboat stealth play. If there was a MUCH shorter blooom time for small guns, one could employ hit-and-run tactics, getting the damage by attacking form unexpected angle and vanishing before sustaining heavy damage in return. If the super-visibility was restricted to ships you shoot at/near to, you could still use your stealth as long as you make sure to stay hidden from your target by something and/or by killing the target quickly/forcing target to run away and smoke. Brainless "let's give DDs huge concealment-when-firing penalty and BBs a concealment-when-firing buff" (as presented in PT) only hurts the game rather than improving it.

Still, if your bloom duration was gun caliber or ship-dependent and, say, around the 5 seconds mark for Akizuki, that would open a very important opportunity for you: stop shooting -> vanish. Currently when you decide to open fire (if not stealth-shooting), you basically ensure prolonged exposure to enemy fire. With the bloom being relatively short in duration, it would let you easily disengage when things get hairy. So while stealthfiring with impunity would disappear, you'd get new options to use stealth to your advantage! In case of Akizuki: If you get to flank an enemy and open fire from 7 km, you can get a couple close-range salvos before the enemy can turn guns your way - and when he does, you can just disappear again! Opening fire would make you more visible, yes, but it would make firing your guns much less of a commitment because the price would be the inavoidable 5 seconds of being spotted rather than the full 20 second we have now!

Another thing as a feedback to these balance changes. Although it's not really an opinion as much as just some readily available facts. A little funny realization. stock New Mexico without a captain displacement 32 000 long tons, firing her 356mm guns in salvos. Visibility: 14,6 km right after firing, 14,2 for 13 seconds after 20s penalty expires and guns are still loading fully upgraded Akizuki with full concealment build and AFT displacement 2 700 long tons, firing her 100mm guns in salvos. Visibility: 14,9 km So. On PT it is right now perfectly possible (although unlikely for many reasons, of course) to have a situation where there are two ships equally distant from you, both firing their guns and the one you'll see is the destroyer with smallest guns in game rather than the BB with more than three and a half times the caliber. What's more: it's also possible that both of these ships are actually firing AT YOU (in open water) and while the destroyer will remain constantly spotted, the BB will be slipping in and out of view with every salvo.

It does sound quite funny, however, when a BB firing her BIG guns is less stealthy than some long-range DD peashooter... And don't get me started on the fact that firing on cooldown DD will keep the penalty up while for a BB it's going to oscillate between firing and base concealment values.

No, your reasoning misses the same thing that "firing from behind islands won't be affected" BS does. Imagine a short-range BB that positions herself behind an island and opens fire on something on the other side. It doesn't matter what the spotting range of DD is, the target can't spot the BB BUT as it was up to this point, pretty much all you needed was a ship with decent draw range and line of sight to shooting BB to spot her. Now? It's much more likely to stay undetected. Sure, BBs won't benefit that much from it - they are still very visible after all and relying on being unspotted in a BB makes little sense. Still, yes, it is a boff that can be exploited in a couple specific scenarios. So, not a very big buff but most definitely a straight buff nonetheless. Well, everyone assumed hat goes for maximum concealment possible when firing - the idea of cutting some BB visibilty when firing by half kinda didn't follow the reasoning behind the change and, frankly, seems pretty ridiculous. I'm pretty sure most people who even noticed that this seems to imply BBs being less visible after firing their guns just assumed that it's unfortunate wording rather than an actual BB buff... PS: Although I must also say that this particular aspect might be a slight buff for many cruisers and buffs for cruisers in current meta are generally a good thing. They're squishy enough without being spotted from beyond ranges at which they can shoot back.

Well, that might be because you're testing this on ships that aren't built to engage on longer range (the arcs) so stealthshooting itself isn't too important for them (they can do it but it's hardly worth it in most cases). They rely on other methods of not being seen - like best smoke in the game. And when it comes to facing the side effects of the changes (spotted long after the enemy you were fighting is dead): USN DDs have handling characteristics to survive when under fire (they are capable of dodging much of incoming shells).

Terribad. The worst problem is the removal of any form of stealth play for gunboats. Despite what WG claims, the actual impact is much bigger than just preventing people from being able to shoot at enemies incapable of returning fire. Easiest scenarios: 1. A gunboat (say, Akizuki) meets an enemy DD in cap. Akizuki opens fire and either kills the enemy or forces him to turn away and smoke up. - previously: Akizuki disappears as the DD no longer spots her - now: Akizuki most likely remains spotted by some cruiser 10+km again or a DD in another cap 2. A gunboat finds a place to fire at enemy BB over an edge of small island - previously: Akizuki can fire at the superstructure of the nearby target inflicting significant damage - now: Akizuki is likely to be spotted by some OTHER enemy that's significantly further away but has the range of sight to Akizuki 3. Akizuki steams at her whooping speed of 32-33kn through an arhipelago, shooting at enemy cruiser locked in fight with another friendly ship. Other enemy ships start aiming at Akizuki (or maybe the original engagement she took advantage of ends) - previously: Akizuki can get behind and island and disappear... - now: ...not if any of the other threats has line of sight to her I used Akizuki as an example as she's the most obvious victim of the change: her concealment after firing was tiny (due to small guns) and her ability to stay alive otherwise are very limited (she has neither the speed to run away nor nimbleness and small size she'd need to dodge incoming fire; a bit more hp is hardly of any use outside DD vs DD fights) I honestly thought WG was going to give the stealth fire removal some thought. It COULD have been done sensibly, either by introducing completely new mechanics (maybe some form of target-only visibility so that if you shoot at someone he can always shoot back) OR perhaps by something simpler: replacing caliber-driven visibility bloom radius with caliber-driven visibility bloom duration (so that big ships remain visible for 30+ seconds but peashooters can disappear within a couple seconds of going silent). Alas, WG learned nothing from the popularity of KM DDs and their problems - what they chose to do was to shaft stealth play for all the other DDs in similar manner. "Fair for all"? Well, guess what: not everyone has BB armor and BB guns... Well, not for now. I heard we're at 40% and rising. Not that surprising in light of the "upgrades" other classes keep getting - like this one to stealth mechanics.

After short testing, one of the most annoying behaviors is still present, reagardless of control settings: if you set your planes to fly somewhere the waypoint can prevent you from ordering a drop (or barrage run) because the waypoint spot is unclickable. One presses ALT and clicks - be it with right or left button - and literally nothing happens. This has led me to some frustrating missed runs in the past (as the planes just didn't acknowledge the order given to them) and it's not changed now - despite of us having TWO mouse buttons now and regardless of the fact that ALT alone should make map clickable regardless of waypoints set... Perhaps there is some slight improvement to overall responsibility as I did seem to notice less planes ignoring an order (often a take-off order) if a couple of these is given in short succession. Hard assess with small amount of testing, though.

What you're forgetting is that the idea isn't necessarily to make a snipe impossible - it's to make it unattractive as an option for the sealclubber. Imagine a t4 CV with defensive AA consumable and a bit improved AA. What does it mean at these tiers? Well, it's literally the toughest ship to attack with planes! It will take a lot of time to fly your planes to him, THEN you need to wait through the consumable (probably losing a couple planes on first approach unless he panicks and gets baited to use it prematurely) and then you need to snipe (losing even more planes and on low tiers reserves are very limited)... and he's quite likely to still survive since the striking power of a CV at this tier isn't so great! CVs not having fighters would take them off each other's back initially and make the CV low tier play more forgiving. It should be accompanied by reduced alpha potential (simply less damage from low tier bombs and torps) so that it would be easier to: - deal SOME damage - keep your planes alive but at the same time harder to: - completely dictate the battle - overwhelm enemy CV through your superior CV skills I don't agree with all the points from the opening post (auto drops as a captain skill? Surely not) but the general philosophy behind it has its merits.

So what exactly is Akizuki supposed to do? She can't engage cruisers because she'll be spotted and she has neither speed nor nimbleness to come out of that alive. She can't engage BBs for similar reasons: she only gets solid output from close range on a broadsiding target where she's wrecked by secondaries and can be easily hit by primary guns. She can't take her time torping things because, well, one launcher - even with torp reload that's hardly a weapon you can rely upon. She can't take the anti-AA role because her AA, while extremely strong for a DD (esp. her tier) isn't enough to save anyone, not without defensive fire and with pretty low range. And now you suggest: don't contest caps. In light of all the other things she can't/shouldn't do... not much is left, really.

That for starters. More importantly, stealth firing allowed for the stealthy approach that has now been eliminated. Despite WGs claims to the contrary, it doesn't hit just open water sniping - I in my Akizuki often find myself fighting in caps. Of course I get spotted there but the thing is: if the enemy dies or smokes up, I go out of sight instantly or, at worst, need to turn away and smoke up to cover myself from the closest enemies - those further away can't spot me even if I'm running too fast for the smoke to completely cover me. This lets me strike into the cap with good chances of successful withdrawal if need arises. 20 seconds is A LOT of time for a DD to stay visible. Now. Do I believe stealth firing is needed? I don't. But stealth play that doesn't boil down to sitting in smokes? Certainly is. Stealth fire could go without much harm for the game IF it was replaced by some other mechanic facilitating stealthy play. What could it be? Well, there are many possibilities, two most sensible: 1. Not removing SF completely: just making you visible (or even just rendered) but only to the enemy that's either fired on (targeting) or struck by your shell (so you can't completely "cheat" the system by firing without aim assist) as long as there's line of sight. Now it's possible to retaliate (perhaps with additional penalty of lack of aim assist if stealth shooter is only rendered) without breaking the stealth play completely. 2. Introducing caliber-based duration of worsened stealth. Huge guns could make you spotted for half a minute or more. Small caliber peashooters would, however, give the enemy only a brief, say 5 second window to shoot at you. That way shooting from stealth range wouldn't make you a priority target (since you can disappear before they fire more than once, if at all, for slow turning guns). But enemies willing to give you attention could force you to break off the engagement or face retaliatory fire - no more safe 1v1 thousand needle spam on the last BB alive on map. WG decided to do nothing of the sort. They just nerfed concealment after firing, giving back nothing for people who would like an option to stealthily use their gunboats. I must admit that I'm pretty bitter about it since stealthy gunboat was exactly my preferred kind of ship, to the point where I actually bought premium camo for Yugumo - precisely because (despite the consensus being that she's underpowered) she was the only t9+ DD that was stealthy and with nice gun arcs making her so much more than a one-trick torp-boat. It's not the removal of stealth firing that gets me, mind you. I never thought it a problem, even when falling victim to it (well, I don't play only DDs), but I can understand its frustrating aspect. The problem is that as much a time WG took thinking about it, they did NOTHING to keep afloat the - much enjoyed by me - concept of benefiting from stealthiness while using guns to any capacity. And it doesn't really matter if they, say, buff some Akizuki's stats so that she's effectively a russian DD with AP or a RN cruiser without a citadel. What I mourn is less Akizuki as a ship an more: stealthy gunboat as an idea. As for CVs, the seal-clubbing on low tiers was a serious problem and yes, the reasoning is understandable, but it misses two crucial aspects: - manual attacks are NEEDED later on. If not learned on low tier, we're forcing new CV players to suddenly find themselves in need of this skill at the same time they hit t6 and start facing really strong AA. And enemy carriers who can actually be aware of what the manual fighter run is capable of doing and how to perform it with some reliablity... - manual attacks are what carrier play is about (other than the clunky interface). It's no fun to just point and click a couple squadrons: manual attacks are where you apply your skill and what makes the game fun and engaging. What COULD have been done instead? Well, for starters: a buff to auto attack would go a long way. It would slightly lessen the gap between those who can alt-attack with everything, those who need to focus on a couple squadrons and those who struggle with alt-attacks in the first place. Then, low-tier planes could be made tougher but weaker - give them slower and not as hard hitting torps, give them worse dispersion, give them less powerful barrage. So that the early CVs don't get so much power in right hands but are more forgiving in the wrong (or just learning) ones. And all of the above is just off the top of my hat - WG supposedly has specialists who should be able to come up with better ideas or perfect these... instead the only way to combat sealclubbing happened to be an approach that prevents people from actually learning the mechanics of their class: because they're not even given access to these mechanics! Overall, WG disappointed me heavily with these patch notes. Little actual though put into the way to tackle identified problems. Instead: easiest solutions that only take away from the game instead of improving it. The game WILL be just that much less varied after this change, even if we were to assume that balance won't be affected much (and/or will be properly restored where affected).

My question (once again) is: what the hell is the feedback they listened to, seeing how popular the change is? I mean, even people who believe the game shouldn't have invisifire due to its frustrating "getting shot at while unable to shoot back" aspect (so basically people that should technically support its removal) don't like the change as WG has devised it...

Well, recently the rest of the world decided to keep up with WG EU - this new patch, earlier the killing off of Super League... these are all global decisions.

You know what's the funniest? Each of the other propositions (well, save for the pillows ;) ) of yours is more viable: - forced delay (maybe not full 5 sec but a bit of delay) on BB guns would actually teach people to aim since looking where your shells go helps to find the lead. I myself, when first playing BBs, tended to start a salvo by firing a single turret to make sure I'm aiming at correct postcode. So, in fact, experienced players would find it harder to nuke everyone in low tier BB while inexperienced ones would learn to aim big guns (that are not very forgiving when it comes to bad aim: bad salvo is a lot of time lost) - forced delay on torps would hurt DDs but they'd still learn to aim torps and predict target actions a bit The thing is, neither of the above hurts (the one with guns might even help) people's learning to play their class. The BB still learns to aim. The DD still learns to launch torps. Removal of alt-attacks for CVs, on the other hand, PREVENTS people from learning to use CVs. Worse yet: it teaches bad habits. Never facing strafing attacks, how can they learn to disperse their planes when needed? Never being able to alt-torp, how are they ever going to be prepared for the enemies they WILL face at higher tiers, when manual torping is absolutely necessary? You wanted to poke fun at WG but your non-pillow propositions actually made more sense than what WG decided to do. The one thing WG did that wasn't outright retarded was to improve auto-drop: yes, this actually lessens the gap between skilled and unskilled and while manual drop is still necessary in the long run, it also means that not being able to use them every time/very well isn't AS crippling. However, didn't the patch notes suggest that improved auto drop is only for the lower tiers? So that these new players end up at t6 where manual drop is not only needed - the auto drop they relied on so far suddenly gets worse for no apparent reason?

The problem isn't really the invisifire itself (it was important in some situations but not the core of gameplay for most DDS). The problem lies in two other things: 1. Even if you don't have line of sight to your target (you're shooting over an island, for example), you can still have line of sight to other enemies. The range of invisifire isn't really comfortable for aiming in most cases BUT good positioning allowed you to make use of islands - now that's exactly what gets nerfed because with "invisifire" you could fire at enemy behind the island and stay unspotted. Now if there are any enemy ships to the side (and you usually shoot over the corner of an island, not over the middle), you will get spotted. 2. Low detectability after firing allowed some ships to disappear right after finishing off their enemy. I, playing Akizuki, didn't even rely on stealth-firing all the time, my bread and butter was actually fighting enemy DDs. I often relied on being able to kill them quickly (before cruiser support for either side intensifies) - and that immediately allowed me to disappear again. Not with the horrendous visibility bloom she's going to get now...

Well. Now the only class capable of shooting on cooldown and being unspotted for some of the time at least are BBs - after all, their 20sec concealment debuff wears off earlier than they shoot again.

I don't like detonations (playing a lot of DDs, you see) but I must correct you on this one. I remember at least a couple occasions where I was glad I got detonated. It's 10 brand new signals in my depot ...and I'm not even joking here - detonation flag management is a thing and detonations can happen on low hp or when terribly overextended through some combination of brainfart on my part and unforseen well positioned enemies with a radar (although vulnerability to the latter could be counted as brainfart too, I guess). In such situations it's actually preferable to die to detonation instead of being shot to pieces normally. I can honestly say that I've had at least a couple "yay, I got detonated" moments across my WoWs history

We know nothing about what she could do in the first draft, so it's hard to talk about her being nerfed... Basically, it's a CV. For other ships one can make some guesses about their performance based on gun number and size, historical armor layout, historical max speed etc. CVs? None of these really matters. You could have a CV with half the hp of other CVs at the same tier, 15kn max speed and she could well be the best CV around based on available planes and loadouts. What we see is: 90 plane hangar 7-8 fighters (depending on whether the one during take-off counts), 10 dive bombers and 10 torp bombers on deck. So, it's quite possible that one of the loadouts would have one huge fighter group (7 fighters) and big (for IJN) bomber groups (2x5 TB, 2x5 DB) or with otherwise asymetric groups 2x4,2x5,2x5 - but even if we assume that, we still lack the knowledge of what planes are these going to be! Could be low-ish tier (to balance out bigger groups and reserves). Could be asimetric (good fighters but slow and squishy bombers, for example)... It's hard to talk about nerfing when we know nothing about the "current" most important stats. And that's AFTER assuming that the planes we see on the pictures reflect one of the actual loadouts. And there could well be more than one, right?

That's now what they say when someone brings up the abysmal IJN DD stats, though.

You're generally right - I'm not sure what wakk25 is smoking, it's insane to think that anti-DD measures like Radar or DD torp nerfs don't affect DD performance for any skill level. These are not changes in mechanics - these are straight-up nerfs. Of course good players are more likely to be able to perform well regardless of the nerfs but the same good players would definitely be even more dangerous with stealthier torps and without the fear of the Radar... All that being said, I don't believe DD weakness is the driving reason behind BB overpopulation. DDs are still pretty strong against BBs and Radar, for example, is generally speaking a cruiser-mounted thing. DDs basically love to see BBs engaged in fights with friendly BBs and therefore lots of BBs on each side tends to make DDs more powerful, so it's a bit of a self-regulating mechanism. The main problem lies elsewhere, it's: 1. Cruisers are too easy to dispatch for BBs, making cruiser play unforgiving and potentially quite frustrating. And people come to the game to have fun so they just don't play much cruisers. 2. CVs are... well. They still are very dangerous to BBs in the right hands but boy, are we short on any hands, never mind good ones. Cruisers are currently in a spot that encourages transition to some other class, be it DDs or DDs. If they switch to DDs, they end up in lots of DDvsDD fights so the torp output (and other means of DD on BB harassment) doesn't really increase much (nothing to discourage BB play). If they switch to BB, they contribute to the die-from-any-angle-when-spotted environment for cruisers that may, in a sort of feedback loop, drive away even more cruiser players. That will go to play BBs or DDs. This leads to the meta we have currently - lots of BBs, almost as many DDs... and cruisers mostly as decoration. Btw, I do believe that were we to get a hard limit on BB count, the queue times wouldn't really rise nearly as much as could be expected. Basically, if there was a 3-4 BB per side limit, the cruiser gameplay would become more enjoyable and less frustrating. So people would actually start playing cruisers more. It would cut the feedback loop that drives cruiser numbers down, allowing cruiser population to re-grow, leading to BB queues shortening back to waiting times comparable with other classes. Of course, the above is just an educated guess that most likely won't be verified - WG has spoken firmly against balancing class numbers by MM limits.

(I was blind and replied to an issue already answered, please disregard).

No, not every created clan - all there has to be in place would be "inappropriate clan name/clan flag" report option. WG would only need to care about clans that accumulate a couple reports of this kind. Only then would it be handled (like, you know, tickets get handled by real people) and flagged as either ok (no further reports go through unless the flag gets changed) or Bad Stuff (flag gets banned and the clan receives a warning - at, say, 3 warnings the clan's dissolved). I'm pretty sure the system could work.

Yes, it's possible but really, REALLY rare. Oh, and... Well, hits to the magazine don't cause auto-explosion and frankly, I don't think we really need this additional level of detail where magazines can be damaged - there are so many secondary and AA guns and all the main turrets and stuff... I think the current approach to module damage is ok and we don't need magazine damage mechanics. ...Radars and Hydro working on line-of-sight basis would be another thing entirely though, leaving some (gasp!) actual counterplay for them... although that would also make Belfast and Black even more OP compared to other Radar platforms...

While that is a valid argument, let me warn you about certain trap in this reasoning. You see, people who buy premium ships are likely to - be more invested in the game (well, they are investing their money on top of time, that might show some dedication) - use the ships with experienced captains and (obviously) never ones on skill-reducing retraining - use the ships because they like them and feel good in them (EXP on premium ships is mostly useless, it's also the reason - even more pronounced - while Akizuki's stats are probably much higher than her power: she's just not a stepping stone to anything, people play her for herself and nothing else) - never be burdened with stock grind (premium ships are always fully upgraded) Of course there are also factors that should make the stats lower (for example a new player can buy a high tier premium ship and proceed to suck horribly). What counts, however, that there are some factors that we just can't control for - how much does a premium ship gain from never being stock compared to some others with terrible stock grinds? The difference must be there and it's inevitable for it to influence the stats - but we just don't know to what extent. A good way to remind ourselves of how imperfect our statistics are is to pick tier 7, cruisers - and compare stats of last 2 weeks between various myokos (I'll only take 4 of 6 existing for this comparison): ARP Ashigara: 51,30% winrate Myoko: 50,17% winrate Southern Dragon: 49,89% winrate ARP Haguro: 46,97% winrate Why is it so? We know for sure thet Myoko is objectively superior to any of the other ones - she can mount a camo while the others can't. Why does she have over 1 percent point worse winrate than Ashigara? Is it the influence of never being stock? But then we have Southern Dragon: 49,89% winrate. Why so low? Perhaps it's because it appeared relatively recently and has only the one possible option of a captain that is pretty low level for most users? And finally we have ARP Haguro. It's literally the same shipas ARP Ashigara. It can have the same captains (no retraining needed). It has the same stats, the same modules, it's literally the same in everything other than name and aesthetics. And yet one has 51,30% winrate while the other sits on an ABYSMAL 46,97%. WHY. I, frankly, have no idea whatsoever. Maybe some bot farm uses the latter? It would explain it having more than twice the number of matches of ARP Ashigara and ARP Myoko. But that's basically a conjecture possible because we KNOW that it is exactly the same... so the gap in performance seems ridiculous. But if they were two completely different ships? It would be so easy to assume that one is pretty good and another: completely trash. When comparing non-identical premium and silver ships, we lack the prior knowledge of their actual relative strength. We try to gauge it based on stats - but seeing how unreliable these stats can be and how many factors can possibly influence them? We need to remain cautious. Otherwise... Well. Atago, tier 8 premium: 54% winrate with over 22 000 matches last two weeks. ARP Takao, tier 8 pseudo-premium (ARP): 51,36% winrate with over 20 000 matches last two weeks. Clearly p2w, right? The ship that can be bought is so much better than the one people could get for free! Who would've thought that a camo makes that much of a difference? Or maybe it's not the camo but rather captains or something else entirely? Maybe bots bringing Takao's score down? We can only guess what accounts for Atago's clearly superior average performance over the last two weeks - we can ponder on it, we can include as another information the fact that OVERALL stats of Takao are, in fact, slightly better than Atago's (and 1-week ones: much closer than 2-week ones). We can wonder about this situation but what we're really left with (or what we SHOULD be left with) is a healthy dose of humility. There are factors we just can't seem to identify, much less: control for when comparing different ships that can be acquired in different ways. Yes, stats are very useful but, in the end, we must always remember that there's just so much we don't know that the stat-derived picture of what ships are objectively superior to others might be much less conclusive than we'd like to think.