eliastion

Of course, it's a work of a genius! No, but perfectly seriously: WG maybe overdid it a little but they weren't COMPLETELY wrong. The all-of-nothing nature of flooding was a bit problematic. And, in fact, even fires are a bit all-or-nothing right now. Imagine, however, if the changes were done A LITTLE differently, in two parts: 1. Damage nerfed as heavily described, but flooding, at least on BBs, becomes applicable in 3 rather than 2 places (bow, middle, stern rather than only front,aft - that would actually show the power of "high flooding chance" torps like IJN big torps and DWT torps, since torps of most DDs and certainly plane-dropped ones have negligible chances of flooding the middle section on BBs) 2. The effect of DCP changed. Instead of "instant effect + immunity" DCP would be "duration of DoT effects (ongoing and incoming) down to 5%, rounded down". There, voila. If the resulting DoT damage would be too heavy, the values could then be balanced accordingly. Now, think of the advantages of the system as described: 1. Flooding mechanics actually noticeably reward ships with high flooding chance, since one of the areas where flooding is possible happens to be the area that is protected by torpedo bulge where a lot of torps usually fail to make a hole (especially planes are notoriously bad at doing this). 2. The only moment when DoT fails to apply is when the part is already flooding or burning. A ship actively repairing is ALMOST immune but not quite - it still takes (assuming no duration-reducing effects) - 1 tick of fire on DDs and cruisers (5% of 30s = 1.5) - 3 ticks of fire on BBs (5% of 60s = 3) - 2 ticks of flooding on everything (5% of 40s = 2) With any relevant duration reductions, the number of ticks of newly-applied (with DCP active) DoT falls down to - 1 tick of fire for DDs - 2 ticks of fire for BBs - 1 tick of flooding for everything 3. Once you inflict DoT, you always get a little bit of damage out of it (it might be a consolation prize if the target hits DCP right away or it's already active but you DO get SOMETHING - no more 0 damage floodings unless the target dies before the first tick) 4. You can actually create unique DCP consumables for special ships/lines - for example you could have a line with DCP on very short cooldown and infinite charges BUT cutting the duration less (so you can use it much more but more ticks slip through when you do). 5. The DoT values can be easily tweaked up or down for balancing reasons if deemed excessive/insufficient - increasing times/DPS more consistently results in more damage even for DoT that we expect to be damage conned a lot. ...damn, this was just a loose idea, but when I started thinking about it, I kinda started liking it more and more. I doubt anybody up there will care about it, but I guess there's no loss in at least trying to find someone to push it upwards to people making some decisions as a suggestion? @MrConway, would you be so kind and do me this favor, especially if this sort of approach looks to you half as good as it does to the not-so-unbiased me?

No, no, you don't understand - flooding will now be causing more damage because people won't be wasting DCP on them, that's clearly a buff to DDs, WG style (I somehow managed to respond to one of the other people but forgot to clear your misconception from the opening post, can't leave it like this )

It can't. It can be shot at by the ship's AA, yes, but it can't spot it. Although that's off topic when it comes to this particular thread.

Flooding damage never was an issue for DDs, though - they rarely eat torpedoes AND survive AND are out of DCP at the same time. Also, the Radar changes are a buff against USN Radar (then again, the ranges of USN Radars are buffed for tiers below 10) but the Soviet Radars receive a massive duration buff - their power against DDs is increased with these changes. Especially considering that these 6 seconds only really matters when the Radar ship's allies expected to see you and had their guns roughly pre-aimed before the Radar is activated. Yes, after these 6 seconds you are already running away - but the volume of fire only increases with time and these early salvoes rarely do much unless you really are a fan of sitting in smoke in predictable places waiting for Radar and/or torps.

Have you actually played CVs? It doesn't sound like you did. CVs technically can attack things on another side of the map and they don't pay for that with dispersion like BBs but with what's pretty much cooldowns. Planes, even at 200+ knots, don't teleport, you see? It takes a lot of time to bring them to the other side of the map, even if you discard the return time (and you really shouldn't because this significantly increases the waiting time to be able to use that type of plane again - this becomes a very big deal as the game progresses and some planes are lost). A BB shooting at max range has bad dispersion but the same cooldown. A CV attacking things too far away spends most of the time flying the planes and doing nothing, reducing the number of attacks significantly. The damage doesn't become less reliable (harder to land) but the overall DPM suffers heavily. "Removing this bad mechanic that's present in most matches would mean that this other bad mechanic could end up causing too much damage on rare occasions when the player does a perfect strike and RNG gods favor him a lot, and I don't think WG will do something about this second bad mechanic, so we need to keep everything bad." - that's pretty much how your reasoning sounds here. Well, CVs rarely happened so they were pretty irrelevant. Few people wanted to even experience their gameplay so its annoying nuances concerned few. They were also relatively rarely seen, so their victims didn't suffer from them too much either. And even people that were concerned about many things pretty much gave up long ago, especially once the standard reply to any concerns (including bugs) ended up being "well, rework is in the works". Of course it was quieter about them than now when the rework hits, people are interested in playing them, people fight them on pretty regular basis AND there are many people that had some expectations that ended up often... well, not entirely fulfilled, let's say. If that was the case, wouldn't she be suffering in non-CV games, though? She seemed pretty balanced against them, though. A nasty sting but pretty vulnerable. And against CVs... a nasty sting making her invulnerable. Oh, well. Anyway, yes, I don't think we're going to get to much understanding here, we can just as well end this discussion

So can a cruiser, or a DD, or a BB. How does have anything to do with the matter at hand? If that's too much, AP bombs should be removed, they are basically a bad joke anyway. If there are mechanics that make it impossible to allow that first attack to go through, these mechanics need to be changed or removed - and that applies also to the high alpha dreamed 3-citadel AP DB strike if that happens to be the problem. No, it was not ok. It was one of the many not ok things about old CVs and AA mechanics, right next to "unicum CV wants DD dead, DD dies" and many, many others. Just because things were present in the game and complaints relatively rare due to low CV population doesn't mean that the things were ok.

WG: We're nerfing flooding to the ground so that people start ignoring it; that will cause more damage to be dealt by it Also, we're making it easier to remember the ranges of Radars... BY BUFFING THEM ALL TO THE T10 STANDARD Also also, we're introducing a grace period of 6 seconds when only the Radar ship will be shooting you, the rest occupied with turning their guns, as usual. To compensate for the fact that they will be turning these guns based on the icon on minimap rather than your rendered hull, we're increasing the durations of all the duration of all Radars that previously were short enough that you could survive 'till they ran out Damn, DDs receive so much love this patch that their backsides are going to hurt - and it's presented as HELPING THEM because, say, people won't be so cautious of floodings Also, the order of spotting Oh, sure, because being spotted by a stray plane is more important than being spotted by an invisible DD, right? But, the stupid order is less of a problem, the main thing is... NO MATTER WHAT ORDER YOU PICK, EVEN IF YOU MAKE IT CUSTOMIZABLE BY PLAYER, IT WILL BE BS. What we need is a system that shows you in what ways your ship is detected, NOT just one option picked based on an arbitrary order.

But a cruiser CAN attack a BB at will. It's usually not worth it, mind you, as the price is likely to be steep, but you can attack and you will be able to inflict considerable damage. And if it's not a complete 1v1 and the BB's attention is elsewhere, then engaging one actually becomes a thing cruisers do pretty often. For heavy AA ships the usage of said AA is passive, whether they pay attention or not matters much less (the sector reinforcement is crucial for AA DDs but not so much for other classes). It stands to reason that passive immunity to damage from CVs just shouldn't be the case. Sure, it shouldn't be worth it to attack an AA fortress of the same or especially higher tier - but it shouldn't be completely useless, even in case of a t8 CV attacking a t10 AA cruiser. If a full squadron goes for the attack and doesn't treat flak as power-ups, at least the first strike should go in. A pittance of damage at the cost of the squadron, making it a very bad trade, but it should reach the target. Just like a t8 DD that feels brave can open fire on a Worcester, although the trade isn't likely to remain very favorable when the latter shoots back. Torps... not really - and even when there's enough place for them to arm, the very process of dropping is pretty strange and not completely predictable when your TBs do an attack run over a mountain. As for rockets... in case of an island high enough to hide your approach? Rockets do strange things with aiming when going over islands, it can go either way.

It doesn't. It blocks vision - and planes that aren't spotted aren't taking damage. But if they are spotted, then at least the DPS aura doesn't seem to have any problems dealing damage right through solid ground. Not sure if flak still spawns, though. Also, it's often impossible to attack an island-hugging ship from the side of the island. Not just with TBs but with rockets too. DBs fare slightly better but also are unreliable with over-island approaches to say the least.

Not a requirement. Not the case. Nope, no task. Feedback is welcome, of course (since the purpose of having beta tests is to iron things out and get the game ready for full release) but there's no obligation to provide it. Now, going to the second paragraph: Well, it's not work, for starters. It's just playing the game in the beta-test stage. And just like players playing the released game can (and do) talk sh*t about said game - so can (and do) beta-testers. Again, a beta tester is simply a player and the only way his outrage might "count more" is by virtue of being with the game longer than people who only came to the game after closed beta ended. Also, the guy in question didn't really sound particularly outraged and calling certain mechanics simplistic isn't inherently an insult. WoWs is simplistic. It is, at its core, an arcade game about naval warfare. There most definitely are other, more realistic, "deeper" and whatnot games - which doesn't make them better, though. Or worse, for that matter. It makes them a different genre. Nope, not really. Beta tester has just been around longer than most. Of course, being around for a long time can cause many people to have some sense of camaraderie and some deeper affinity with the game but - at the end of the day - they are just (to make a non-gaming comparison) the regulars that are coming to the pub since it was first open with unfinished decor. Or, in fact, they might be people who came a couple times then and just returned recently to complain that it was better back then Nope. Beta testers have as much contact to developer's team as you do. And, in fact, they don't actually have any role whatsoever. The closed beta was years ago. People who played it have a special patch they can use, special commemorative flag they can hoist, Arkansas Beta if they haven't sold it and a honorary "beta tester" group on the Forum if they posted here during beta tests. That's it. Well, as already mentioned: being a beta tester ended when the game went live (unless you get too stuck on the fact that it technically was released as "open beta" and the version we're at is still 0.8.XXXX - so it would seem that we are actually still in open beta - technically making everyone playing the game now a beta tester as well ). TL;DR: You are wrong about everything that concerns beta testers. A beta tester is just the player that took part in the closed beta stage of the game. This was possible by acquiring a closed beta key in some way (mostly either request it on the webpage and wait patiently/get lucky or purchase one of the starting packages that contained a premium ship, a closed beta access and some doublons, if I'm not mistaken). And a "beta tester" on the Forum is a player that was a beta tester (played in the closed beta) AND also actively used the forum (as in, wrote a post or two during the beta test period).

Nothing can outturn Haku torps, they drop into the water and, like, immediately make a 90 degree turn to the side

...you don't have the faintest idea what a beta tester is, do you

...you do realize that these citadels, while they give satisfying ribbons, don't really cause all that much damage compared to their American cousins, right? The alpha potential is similar, getting them to achieve that alpha is harder and the advantages are really only two: assuming that you do manage a lot of citadel strikes (normal pens and overpens are ludicrously ineffective) you're dealing hard to heal damage and your alpha isn't further reduced by damage saturation. HE bombers, on the other hand - deal their due share of damage even outside the citadel area and regardless of angle of impact - cause fires that can drain big health pools pretty well and synergizes with flooding possibilities from torps or follow-up fires from rockets - destroy AA, making subsequent attacks easier I'd say it's... debatable whether AP bombs are actually superior overall. If flak+continuous damage baffles you, don't look at dual purpose guns that do continuous damage, spawn flak AND shoot at ships at the same time And seriously, it's been very clear why WG shifted more towards continuous damage: competent players proved to be very good at flak avoidance, making their planes borderline immune to enemy AA. You could easily perform multiple strikes against heavy AA ships that weren't even alone. On the other side, the bad players were just catching all the flak and their planes ended up simply dropping from the sky without doing anything. Skill of the CV players making the difference is a nice thing, but when the difference is between "borderline godmode" and "loses whole squadrons to DDs without AA build" then the system clearly needed some serious adjustments. To sometimes temporarily triple the damage output with defensive fire consumable? I'm not saying that the system is perfect in that context, but C-hull still remains the superior AA hull by far - you're trading the "standard" damage (that is too low to do much even to t6 planes anyway) for the burst damage with def. AA active (that can actually have some effect). The sad reality is that DD AA is very reliant on def. AA consumable and pretty irrelevant without it - so getting it or not makes a lot of difference even if the passive auras change between the hulls isn't very favorable.

You do realize that aircraft carriers as well as submarines that you also mention are warships, right? No. The delay is terribly put. The delay should be applied either between an attack and pressing F (so that you can't press the F key right away, just like you can't immediately re-enter attack run or press F before the squadron is done taking off) OR between pressing F and escape (so you'd press F and see a timer starting with planes only blasting off after the timer is done, so that you'd still need to keep your planes alive until then). Planes dying the most and being at their most fragile when out of player control (after the strike or after pressing F) is not a good gameplay mechanic.

Well, it was pretty clear that Haku was going to be hit by a nerf bat, hard. If someone had her, the option to "refund" her would stay for quite some time, so they had no need to "abort" her. Those that didn't have her but wanted her badly based on her early performance, should've anticipated a fast and decisive nerf (again, based on that very same early performance), making the purchase a very risky deal. Buying a "borderline OP ship" for her performance is a risk of nerfs somewhere down the line. Buying an "extremely OP ship" in what's basically her testing period on live server is, I'm afraid, basically asking to be disappointed. These ships are in the phase that normally would be done by Supertesters - the first live server trials. And we know how much ships can change during supertests - precisely because they can happen to perform really well or abysmally badly when confronted with the reality of real game environment. The difference is that this time there were no "post-rework CVs" to compare Haku to. The class (and therefore the possibility to just give the ship to supertesters to try out in established environment) just didn't exist, no environment to be put in for a new addition... which is why, basically, WG decided that their only option is to pretty much release the two branches of new carriers in their "pre-supertest" state - and then perform all the normal supertest-ish changes and balancing within the upcoming two months. And, well, when Haku proved to be extremely effective and even allowed some semi-effective, extremely frustrating (for the enemy) tactics that required no skill whatsoever from the player? Well. It was pretty obvious that the changes coming for the ship were to be pretty drastic - and certainly not of the kind kind (yeah, I could've used other words but it's late at night and I perhaps could stop myself but found no motivation to try).

...according to you. You see that BBs in WoWs have big damage numbers and you assume that they wouldn't be BBs otherwise. And I tell you you're wrong, there are many ways to make it feel "battleshipy". Yeah, big guns. Not necessarily translating to big damage, though. Sure, you expect them to pack quite a punch with each shell (after all, these guns are bigger, wouldn't make sense to do less damage per shell than small ships) but their overall damage that comes out at the end? That is up to balancing, not "being a battleship". It just so happened that being slow, with utility pushed towards cruisers, BBs were designed in the game as "big damage number" class since there was no other real way to make them balanced and somewhat entertaining to play. But if there were some other ideas about how to do that? These big guns could have very well been made less effective if that was the case. They would still be big guns, you see. Just the stats overall wouldn't really turn out with biggest average damage numbers. And, in fact - we actually do have shades of this as well. BBs damage is boosted by their staying power - they just live longer than cruisers, boosting their damage over the match. But DPM of BBs actually isn't all that impressive. Poor FdG, being less of a battleship not only compared to the other BBs but also the cruiser Saint-Louis, since the latter also deals more damage And let's not even mention t10s like Minotaur and Khabarovsk, these two also deal more damage - just a look at their stats and you know they are the epitome of battleshippyness compared to FdG! With that level of artistic license when describing the role of each class, where you discard real-world and in-game tactics wherever it suits you and only keep the parts yo like, I can describe CVs like this: The role of Aircraft Carriers was to provide mobile platform for aviation to provide scouting and firepower without exposing the expensive, vulnerable hulls. And they do just that both pre- and post-rework. Do they attack things? They do. Do they scout? They do. Do they do these things with planes rather than by going close and personal to punch it out? Yes. Nice, they fulfill their role, just like battleships, cruisers and destroyers! You will say that the priorities are skewed compared to the real world, that CVs (especially late war) had more striking power, did less scouting and other things like that? Well, you gave yourself the answer to that already: That's it. What they do, to what ships, what things the emphasis is on - these are all within the category of different tactics due to different gameplay mechanics. Different priorities in gameplay, different target selection, different results, different power balance between classes (BBs really weren't super-vulnerable to DDs), different emphasis on various tools. What differs CVs from their historical role is the same things that you so conveniently ignored while describing how great other classes fit into what they were historically supposed to do. Your preconceptions are based as much on history as on the previous game version, where RTS carriers were present. But there is only one place where post-rework CVs significantly depart from their actual role: their aviation no longer really serves the role of fighting off the enemy aviation. Yes, that is one important historical role that they don't really perform anymore. But getting damage numbers that should specifically be bigger than some other class (or all other classes) because CVs were OP in real world? No. THAT really isn't a departure from their role, not any more than BBs vulnerability to DDs is.

You literally got this chance. If you had one CV line fully researched before the 8.0 patch, you had the option to just sell it for credits and freeXP - that would give you enough of both to research the other line all the way to t10. But you got that chance ONCE. I don't know if you used it already, or perhaps didn't have either line researched before and just freeXPed to Haku after the patch. Either way, you made your choices AFTER the Rework happened, with all the information that there are likely going to be HUGE balance changes to the AA, CVs and whatnot. Despite that, I assume, you didn't wait for 8.2 when the Rework is expected to be more or less complete, or even 8.1 (the first major patch after Rework going live) to make your decisions then. You used your options (whether it was swapping lines or using free XP to jump to t10 in a line you didn't have previously researched) right away... and then the changes happened. As WG was stating that they were going to happen. I'm very critical as to the way Haku got nerfed but this doesn't change the fact that... the chance was there. If you did something to lose it, you really don't have anyone but yourself to blame and expecting WG to let people swap lines AGAIN is... pretty unrealistic, to say the least.

I disagree, I chuckled reading that lineup

I don't see what purpose that would be serving. According to your words it seems like they are going to either leave the game or get bored to death playing the new CVs - ultimately keeling over completely on their own. Either way, the problem solves itself without any need for violence

Yamato? With her health pool and torpedo bulge? Not just noticing off-handedly but "getting raped" by something as insubstantial as mere 6 plane-dropped torpedoes? The CV must've had some mad RNG with flooding rolls, that's the only thing I can imagine.

With the number of people that were playing the so-much-more-engaging old CVs regularly (I don't even say "as their praimary ship class"), even all of them leaving the game would hardly make a dent in player numbers...

Shima with CE and concealment module has something around 3.3 km air concealment Kagero goes down to 3.0 km On t7 (the biggest DDs that don't get to enjoy the module yet) the most visible DD is Minsk - with CE alone the aerial concealment gets below 3.9km. The stealthiest, Shiratsuyu, enjoys something like 3.1km. Basically, they are all quite stealthy, often too stealthy to even attempt an attack in the first rocket fly-by that finds them, giving them substantially more time for reaction and making sure that planes actually briefly lose contact (if AA isn't active) while lining up the next attacks (since even rocket planes need a little prep time if they want to land some of these rockets on anything smaller than a Yamato). And all that's assuming they are getting found in the first place, which really wouldn't be that easy... if not for the early warning system alerting planes of their presence

This sounds like something that could be tested in training room by taking a captain with manual AA sitting in some premium DD with only one AA aura (so that they don't get mixed up). With 20:180 damage distribution it should be easy to check with t4 planes if one side deals some damage with the other basically having no effect (as you'd expect with 1:9 damage ratio).

Balancing and limits aren't the same thing, however - because ships can be balanced for certain numbers and blatantly unbalanced (one way or the other) once you increase that number. Departing a bit from the actual ships we have, imagine a ship with special "magical" passive quality: caster of invisibility. The ship closest to it, within radius of 2 km, has her concealment radius reduced to 2km even if she fires her guns. The "invisibility caster" would be a big, fragile cruiser with bad concealment, poor guns and very unimpressive short-range torps. Basically, a very strange support ship that can be useful in certain situations, gimmicky like hell but not really OP, right? ...but imagine if the game allowed you to enter a match with a 2-ship division of these things. Suddenly the unimpressive support vessel breaks any semblence of balance in the match - because instead of a highly visible, fragile, underarmed ship that can stick to another ship, keep her guns silent and grant stealth--firing opportunities to the ally, now you actually have two invisible ships that can go wherever the hell they want, shooting their peashooters with impunity at close distance... or, say, perform a stealth-torping attack from 3km away on some unsuspecting battleship. This is just plain broken - but not because a single ship is extremely strong (it's ridiculous, yes, but not all that strong) but because of the way they synergize in certain situations when there's two of them. On the other hand, 2 of them being as broken as they are... adding a third actually is mostly meaningless - after all, invisibility is granted to the closest ally so the third one wouldn't be able to make an invisible triangle with the other two. This is, of course, a very artificial example, but the point of it is: something can be balanced if there's just less than a certain number but spin out of control in some contexts when there's more. Hard caps can solve this problem. And the reverse is possible too, btw: there are things that are a powerful addition in small numbers but get redundant when you have a lot of them, so hard caps can, again, be useful - this time for the benefit of player playing the potentially redundant thing so that they can feel useful. Not because the thing is too powerful - but because it wouldn't be individually powerful enough if there's too many.

No, if anything, it's like cruisers calling for a hard cap on BBs. You see, it's about how certain classes synergize with other members of their classes. BBs (in the context of killing cruisers) synergize great. They have long range and if they're spread out a bit, it becomes much harder to angle against them. Higher number of BBs on each side makes cruiser lives exponentially harder. DDs (in the context of killing BBs) synergize poorly. Torping from more than one direction, on long cooldowns, doesn't really increase the pressure on BBs that much - those that would avoid the torps will avoid torps from more surces as well. Straight line sailors will eat torps even from just one source. On the other hand, more DDs means more DDs screening BBs (on purpose or by accident, just by virtue of being closer to the enemy) and more DD vs DD fighting. Higher number of DDs on both sides doesn't increase threat to BB nearly as fast as the number of DDs increases, pretty much stalling after 3v3 - any more than that and DDs will be mostly fighting each other rather than BBs (until the numbers get reduced and torping options start opening). The main way in which BBs suffer from overabundance of DDs isn't the threat they pose but the fact that they take up slots on the enemy team, meaning less good targets for BBs to shoot at. CV vs DD threat, by comparison, grows... well, not exponentially, perhaps, but pretty damn fast. A CV pretty much denies a whole sector of the map to DDs that want to retain stealth advantage. If there are two CVs then that much more of the map is "covered" since they usually don't fight in the same area. And if the DO start to support each other, then they can actually harass a DD non-stop with no downtime because the rocket planes are fast enough that one CV can be attacking while the other is flying a fresh squadron to the spot. Or, if they attack together, the DD is likely to never even get the time to hide under allied AA, or be completely crippled before that happens - something a single CV can't achieve even if they find the DD (and while we're talking about finding the DD - when one CV finds the ship, the other can relatively quickly join in on the fun). Long story short: - doubling the number of BBs makes the life of a cruiser in that match MUCH harder, even the jump from 1 BB to 2 BBs makes the threat much more than double the original value. - doubling the number of DDs makes the life of a BB only marginally harder - the one exception migh be doubling from 1v1 to 2v2 when the DDs don't get into each other's way that much yet, so two DDs are roughly twice as bad as one DD. - doubling the number of CVs makes the life of a DD MUCH harder, the difference between 1 and 2 CVs might not be as dramatic as 1 vs 2 BB but, on the other hand, the initial threat of 1 CV to DDs is also much more pronounced than the threat of a single BB to cruisers. PS: I actually am in favor of 3v3 DD limits, but for the purpose of improving the DD rather than BB experience. BBs would benefit only a little bit - the main winners would be DDs... and perhaps also no-Radar cruisers - indirectly, because limited DDs would mean more spots in each battle filled by cruisers and cruiser vs cruiser fights are pretty nice when you're a cruiser, especially one that doesn't have Radar to hunt DDs but has relatively big guns with AP to hunt other cruisers.