Verblonde

The 'ignore' function is your friend; trust me...!

If you've been away for a while, the boring answer is to - more or less - act like an entirely new player (only without the avoidable mistakes). Get yourself up to speed again on all classes up to mid tier; don't rush up the tiers. A lot has changed, so it'd be a good idea to get used to the current meta. With regard to CVs, if you must play them, I'd suggest initially getting reacquainted with the class via the US/IJN lines - the RN line is generally felt to be the poorest, so relearning will be painful with them.

Haida: fear my Mighty Secondaries!

My guess is that it depends on a combination of which direction WG to drive the player base in, and relative abundance of the various currencies. Goodness knows what the 'rules' are though - presumably, they pick a resource the we don't all have in abundance (they want us to play more, after all), but that people can realistically get in a meaningful time frame. There's probably an aspect that they want more people to use the RB, after all the negative press it got when the idea was first floated...

Depends a lot on the sort of play you like; I have all three, and Neustra is far-and-away the best for me. That's me though, and I really like DDs, and Neustra happens to dovetail very nicely with the sort of ship I tend to do less appallingly badly in. Neustra is really all about the zombie heal - it gives her the ability to perform the primary DD mission ('not die') better than most. You're also pretty sneaky for high tiers, so you usually have at least parity in the vision game; combine that with good enough torps and guns, and you have a pretty well-rounded ship. Apart from not dying, she doesn't excel at any one thing, but is good enough at most things, making her an excellent generalist that can usually do okay in most likely MM scenarios. AA (with DefAA) isn't entirely awful, by DD standards, too - but the usual stuff about competent CVs will kill you regardless still stands (although you can effectively 'mission kill' them by making them work for it over time, although that isn't much fun for you). My Yoshino essentially lives in Coop; supercruiser with long-range HE, and notorious 20 km torps (which most users end up hitting their own side with). I find mine quite useful to have around for HE missions, but my ability to cruiser isn't nearly sufficient to be of much use in PvP. As a DD driver, I don't usually view these things as much of a threat, for what that's worth. Salem can be quite effective in the right hands (potential serious threat, from a DD's perspective); to me, she's kind of Des Moines, only with a better heal, but reduced radar range. She seems to be more useful to have in your collection than Yoshino, if you want to win games, but you need to be able to cruiser (which I can't really). The other thing, of course, is that she's very similar to Des Moines; does one need both? Of course, Salem is cosplay Graf Spee, so I was always going to get her for that reason alone...!

Very true, but I'm assuming the upcoming Kitakami is what really concentrated minds on removing FF. For most games, the main plus of FF being removed (although I don't approve, due to being generally opposed to dumbing down) will probably be getting scragged less by 'friendly' Italian cruisers who struggle with quite how long their torps tend to be in play...

She's great fun (although only based on a few battles) - think in terms of T10 Haida...

I'm assuming she's essentially a slightly eccentric curiosity - sort of like Friesland, only with extra tea in lieu of HE. If nothing better comes along before I get the necessary points (I generally only do regrinds when I can bag the x2), I'd quite like her - for me, she'll be a useful tool to force me to get less bad with DD AP shells (which I'm prone to forgetting to use)...

In case anyone missed it, there is a free day of premium account to be had; it's buried in the final section of the patch notes, and requires you to click the relevant button whilst logged in: https://worldofwarships.eu/en/news/game-updates/update-0105-the-grand-battle/

Isn't Tone the hybrid? Apart from making my beloved stealth play irrelevant (I refer people to all the rude things I said on the subject re: Ise), she shouldn't be too egregious from a FF point of view - isn't Kitakami, with her zillions of torps, likely to be the big problem in that regard?

Oh well, I better put my regrind trousers on then - I recently cleaned my RP collection out getting Vampire II...

What WG want you do is convert it to free xp, which (naturally) costs doubloons. Unless you have plenty of spare money and/or are *very* impatient, this is usually unwise. If you really must do it, keep it to a minimum (I occasionally use this method to unlock key upgrades on new silver ships, if I'm slightly short on earned free xp), and - if possible - do it when one of the occasional 1:35 conversion rate promos is on. The free xp conversion thing is one of the pay-to-advance-faster mechanics in the game, and that's what all the accumulated ship xp on premiums, specials, and elited silver ships is for; it's also no coincidence that almost every silver line in the game has at least one ship in it that sucks, to 'motivate' you to spend money in this way.

Presumably, to provide some variety; personally, I think she's pretty dreadful, but then I do have Z-39 and she throws Z-31 into pretty stark relief. I think my main issue with Z-31 is that she's fundamentally not terribly good at being a DD; as all the blurb said early on, the new KM DDs are more like tiny cruisers; in that case, the problem could easily just be me - I like/need my DDs to be good at 'DDing' and Z-31 isn't.

I have one or two Russian Dashas, I think, but didn't get any of the others because of the voice-over - I find it incongruous to have a - say - French Dasha talking Russian. I'm aware this doesn't make much sense, given that I have a bloody enormous gorilla doing something unmentionable to the mast of one of my ships...

As a general approach, I don't get anything that's AA focused, unless it's 'by accident' i.e. it gives a useful surface-to-surface bonus as well. It's largely pointless buffing AA as - as we all know - if people stopped playing CVs, WG would lose face and things have been set up accordingly to avoid said face loss. As the forum's CV-meisters have demonstrated previously, the positive results of buffing AA don't generally make a substantive difference to a surface ship's chances against a CV, so why waste the points/upgrade slots? The only exception that I make is where something gets DefAA which can't be swapped out for something useful; I have a small number of ships with the DefAA coal mod in Slot 2.

For me, and with only a small number of games under my belt (most of them in Ranked), she's very much worth having, and is distinct from the various alternatives: The combination of MBRB and decent (for the tier) concealment can make you a fairly effective DD slaughterer; get close to the hapless target DD, switch on MBRB and reduce it to swiss-cheese. You do get DefAA, but don't expect unassailable AA magnificence - it's generally enough to make typical T8 CV players try other targets first though. At the very least, you'll get rid of spotting fighters that have been dropped on you. No hydro, but - in all fairness - she'd probably be horribly OP with that as well! 8 km torps (mine go 79 kts with a Swift Fish captain, but no ship upgrades) are very usable, especially in small map modes; it helps if you're used to playing IJN DDs, where launches at shorter ranges are most likely to get results. ...and eaten fewer pies; ZF-6 being dramatically sneakier than Blysk makes her much more comfortable to play, tier-for-tier, at least as far as the vision game is concerned. IMO, of course.

Probably not soon, based on previous events. It might turn up as bait for the next round of Satan Boxes, I suppose. As @BrinklyWolls says though, this is WG we're talking about, so this time could easily be different. If you want one though (she's pretty worthwhile IMO), there is a good chance you'll not get another opportunity for quite a while (or possibly never - Benham) after the event ends...

I refer people to everything rude I said about the introduction of Ise, apropos spotting. In general, it's just another bleedin' BB; unlike Ise though, it isn't real (is there *any* historical basis for this thing, as far as anyone knows?), and - as mentioned earlier - it buggers up the key plane-free tier. Apart from the lack of a cap on numbers, I mind Ise less: she's real, interesting, and actually fun to play...

Dev Blog (majestic new moustache added to the game; oh, and some new Dutch tech tree, or something): https://blog.worldofwarships.com/blog/163 Behold!

Exhibit A:

You know me - always here to help!

*But* there is only one football-related spheroid; which brings us back to the original interpretation - as the song says, Hitler was famous for only having one...

I haven't been playing my Asashios that much recently (I kind of thrashed the nuts off her when I first got her - last I looked, she was still my most played ship), but I think the meta is currently no worse than it ever was for her to operate effectively in, and quite possibly even better: The obvious problems of radar, hydro, and CVs are pretty much as always (although I haven't given mine a run-out since Ise was released). The hard cap of one CV seems to be holding (unless you play at really antisocial hours). If anything, the number of BBs has gone up, so it's extremely unlikely you won't have plenty of chubby targets for your torps. There isn't any sign that players are any more wary of the IJN DD guns. The only newly released DDs are woefully lacking in counter-DD tools. For clarity: I'm talking about Randoms; I agree with those who feel Asashio is a bloody stupid pick for Ranked (due to the importance of scragging enemy DDs as early as possible).

Presumably, a certain amount depends on *how* he loved dogs - Blondi does have a distinctly startled look in some of the newsreels...

I believe it is (as Coop earnings are gimped); don't forget that earnings are most powerfully driven by relative damage done - kills are nice, but they don't dramatically boost your rewards. What you're fundamentally after for xp/silver gains is damage to smaller ships first, then larger ones (as you probably know, 1K damage to a DD will be rewarded more handsomely than exactly the same damage done to a fatty). (Note the last sentence.) Whilst Randoms (and Ranked too, come to that) are generally significantly better for earning xp and silver, it is worth noting that player skill is a pertinent consideration: if a player is entirely hopeless, they are more likely to get sunk in PvP before they can do enough damage to ramp up the earnings, so for the clueless (or anyone just having a bad day), Coop can provide more reliable earnings, they'll just be less than a competent battle against real people. Just to be clear: I'm not endeavouring to take a King Kong sized dump on Coop mains, but rather to illustrate that you generally earn less in Coop. Of course, if you have a 'get x ribbons' type missions (so fires, torp hits, floods, main battery hits etc. etc.) you're generally less worried about xp/silver, so those sorts of missions are more effectively despatched in Coop (if the mission allows it).