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Well, I think the comparison to World of Tanks is not completely fair. In World of Tanks, the timescale was screwed up from the very beginning, and not enough thought was given to any possibility to make iconic tanks work as they were historically. It would have been possible to balance the Panthers and Tigers with their historical armament, just not at the tier they're at now or with the tier-for-tier balancing that the game uses. And as time passed, the fantasy crapbecame worse and worse because the balancing went further down the rabbit hole. I'm not going to be the fool that claims this is being done perfectly in WoWs. Especially the 38cm refit for Gneisenau is a big counter-example - it would have been possible to balance this ship at T7 without the silly paper armament. But I still think that on the whole, this is being done a lot better than in WoT. Most historical ships, especially the premium ships, do not rely on extensive fantasy equipment and work at their tier. That everyone criticizes the lower German battleships for fantasy upgrades now is understandable. You could even turn it into a balancing factor - no AA on German ships until T7, period! Instead a buff to some soft value you can't be proven wrong with. This would have been a way to go for the devs and they didn't. My guess is that this would have been very unfriendly for the noobs that are doubtlessly going to crawl over the German battleship line. Which, honestly, is also a valid argument in my opinion.

Reading comprehension is a skill rare as noontime dew.

I highly doubt that it's possible to overpenetrate cruiser citadels with cruiser shells.

Besides, you can always play through the Imperial dreadnoughts using only their A hull if you prefer it, and König Albert appears to be in her WW1 configuration. The premium ship certainly looks accurate historically. Personally, I don't have a problem with refits that make sense from an engineering point of view, even if they're hypothetical. What offends me are improbable fantasy ships like Roon.

In my experience, the only people who think Fuso is better than Nagato are 20km tryhard snipers. I can't verify if this is you because you have elected to not use your real account to post. In a normal engagement, Nagato will win 8/10. Similarly, Amagi is much stronger ship than Fuso; much faster and more comfortable. Better guns, better gun placement. In-tier it's a more complex story since the threats to the two ships are quite different.

T8 Cruiser: Anorexic Bismarck

Keine einheitliche Mittelartillerie sondern getrennte schwere FlaK -> verschwendetes Gewicht bei FLS, etc 43% des Gewichts ging in die Panzerung verglichen mit 33% bei Yamato oder 40% bei SoDak, aber SoDak hat einen besseren Gürtelpanzer, besseres Deck, bessere Schotte, bessere Kommandotürme, bessere Türme... Yamato sowieso aber der Vergleich hinkt. Bismarck kam über 41.000t und Panzerung und Artillerie sind eher so auf dem Niveau eines 35.000t Schiffs. Das einzige was Bismarck hatte waren die 2-3 Vergleichsknoten mehr Geschwindigkeit, und sich 3 Knoten zu erkaufen mit 6.000 Tonnen und immer noch schlechterer Panzerung ist ein mieser Deal. Schau dir lieber mal ein paar Entwürfe von anderen Nationen an und was die aus 35.000 Tonnen alles machen konnten. Bismarck war kein schlechtes Schiff und hatte viele gute Seiten, aber sie war extrem ineffizient konstruiert. edit: Und beim Gürtelpanzer komm' mir nicht mit dem ach so tollen Schema... Das uralte Panzerschema, dass bei Bismarck entgegen anderweitiger Entwicklungen immer noch verwendet wurde, ist eine Sache der Philosophie. Nicht prinzipiell gut.

Then the third slot upgrade would only get the reduced reload and a marginal increase in range. Not sure if want.

Okay, enough joke posts. Let's make a serious one. There is a very good reason AA guns can't simply be added to the hull. Space and height. On both American and Japanese dreadnoughts, the bulk of light AA modernization was added to platforms around the bridge and funnel. Make fun of the pagoda mast all you want, but American battleships also received a significantly enlarged superstructure. Anti-aircraft fire-control directors also benefit from good angles and thus mounting them higher up makes sense. You can see this on Kongo, where the Type 91 fire-control directors are mounted around the air defense level of the Pagoda mast, quite high up on the ship. From a naval engineering standpoint, it is incredibly unlikely that the German navy could have upgraded the anti-aircraft suite without changing the superstructure significantly. The main reason why pre-WW1 designs had much smaller superstructures than WW2 designs is exactly this. More light guns and more fire control simply requires more space, space which can be generated to a certain degree by enlarging the superstructure. For example, if Bayern had survived the war, it's quite likely that she would have received a quite tall superstructure around the foremast because her compact size doesn't really let you put the additional equipment anywhere else. So I would prepare for a pretty different C Hull Bayern if I were you. I mean, do you think the Japanese thought their Christmas trees looked hilarious or something? No. They wanted a lot of searchlights and AA and they relied a lot on bulky optical fire control. The ridiculous superstructure is a result of this engineering requirement.

Maybe Kaiser should get a pagoda mast!

I think there should be a what-if upgrade for the Kaisers with Gerät 58 FlaK.

I think this is correct by the way and should be taken into account even though I recommend the secondaries build. If you can remain at medium distances and blast cruisers, it's still superior.

Random game I just played with completely average damage. I didn't get a kill either. The ranges in this game were quite short though and I wouldn't expect this hit rate every time. Would you say no to 10k free damage?

I can't talk about the viability of this post-next-patch, but I have 350 games in Nagato right now using the secondary build and about the last 50 of those are with Manual Control. It is viable with Manual Control. Without it, hmm, I'd say no, it's not. With the skill, the hit rate of the secondaries is quite good, about 10-20% depending on the size of the target in my experience. Nagato has the advantage of being top tier against a bunch of helpless T5s quite often, and they melt very quickly under the secondaries. But my experience is still that you need to pick your battles very carefully. I've died several times bumrushing a bunch of cruisers. It's useful to remember that most of Nagato's secondaries fire AP and not HE. This is a problem. You get the best results against broadside cruisers, and in such cases you can end the game with 30k damage from secondaries. If the enemy angles, then they usually can't kill them alone and you have to help them into the grave using the main guns. Nagato's secondaries have excellent firing angles and you can expose less than you need for the rear turrets and still use most secondaries. I love the secondary build personally, and it's viable, but it's not "more than viable". It's nothing exceptionally powerful. edit: In the end, the question is actually more general. Is it Nagato or the Manual Control skill that makes it viable in some people's eyes? And if it's Nagato, which part of her is? In my opinion, it's about 50/50. The Manual Control skill is absolutely central to a secondaries build. The reason it works on Nagato and not on others is Nagato is relatively low tier and enemies tend to be dumber and ranges shorter The firing angles on Nagato's secondaries are very good She has quite a lot of them and they generate a high shell volume The secondaries have 5km base range, so the buffed range is a good 7.6km Since the -60% applies after T7, I would say that this build is viable on all battleships that fulfill these criteria... which is only Nagato right now. But the addition of the German battleships might change this and add more ships with viable secondary builds.

With good aim, hitting cruisers at 14km is still pretty easy. At 18km it kind of devolves into a lot of luck, though.

Dude fix your sarcasm detector. I understand that you like the historical models, but giving those ships a hypothetical 20s or 30s upgrade is consistent with the other ships in this game. Myougi is presented with a Pagoda mast that was never in the original design. Upgraded Myougi is not even a paper ship, it's a paper ship with a hypothetical 1930s upgrade. I can give you more examples if you want.

Ah, the grand historical accuracy present in such storied ships as the Myougi, famously upgraded with a pagoda mast in 1936 and sunk during the Ninth Battle of Guadalcanal.

I don't think aimbots are very common, though. Even the truly impressive shots can be explained away by the shooter being just that good. And most people shoot into the mushrooms anyway.

He's so incredibly bad lol

Is it Groundhog Day again?

Well, the game doesn't scale the spotting right? In clear weather, visibility is roughly to the visible horizon, which is about 10-15km from a battleship. In heavy weather it's basically zero. The spotting mechanics in this game don't make much sense, but I always took it to mean that even if the graphics show sunshine and all, the spotting range assumes mediocre weather - not a rainstorm but not clear either. Like, the graphics are just there for beauty. If you wanted to make these spotting mechanics realistic, you'd have to smoothly scale down spotting ranges relative to the weather from visible horizon down to basically the hand in front of your face. That's really hard to understand for players. So I always thought the developers just thought, all right, destroyer is visible 10-15km in clear weather and not at all in rainstorms, so let's go with the average and give destroyers 5-8km visibility.

Why are you giving us Scharnhorst's armor scheme? Wasn't the discussion about König Albert?

Okay, so. As we all know, the scope used to work like so: on maximum zoom, the markings would show arcseconds for a target @90° and 20kn. However, this doesn't work for me (anymore?) for fast ships, especially at shorter ranges. I doubt it has anything to do with the addition of new scopes in one of the last patches. I think I'm just getting more finicky about these things and it was always like this. These days I always need to lead more than I should have to based on the target's real speed. Likewise, when the spotter plane is used, the perspective seems to make the scope only accurate at the very center of the scope, with all points from there being skewed to varying degrees. That the arcseconds are no longer accurate for spotter planes makes sense to me given the elevated view, but I can't explain the inaccuracy of the scope for fast ships.

Hm, okay. I need to think a little about what the game does to make this happen mathematically because that isn't intuitive at all. Apparently it's rescaled to shift the impact by like 80 meters or something... Thanks a lot.

I'd aim for the ship, just not waterline but above it at the casemates and lower superstructure. Every hit into the casemates is 2900 dmg with an easy penetration. It will depend a lot on the dispersion, but it has great secondaries and torps, so bumrushing is always a thing.