Verblonde

Last night, when I was finishing up the first set, it was saying it was a few hours away...? You're right, new sets of missions usually open up on Tuesdays.

The simple Japanese one with the cherry blossoms - whatever that's called...?

Dunk is actually pretty decent for the tier (for a start, you don't have to give broadside to be able to fire all your guns at your target); she's very helpful to have available for use in Ops as well. Suggest trying not to get too hung up about being shot at from extreme range; BBs that lurk at the back, firing at the limit of their range are generally not being useful to their team - they won't hit much at very long range, and they aren't absorbing fire that otherwise would be directed at more fragile team-mates. I'm not a BB meister, but I gather the optimum 'starter for ten' range to be thinking about is at roughly your surface detection distance: you're close enough to hit things and tank damage, but you're not so extended that you can't easily go dark if return fire is getting intense, or you need to heal. Keep an eye on your mini-map though; as a DD main, I'll launch on any BB that presents an easy target (and non-camping BBs are worth taking out if possible, as they're much more of a threat than the ones hiding at the back).

Absolutely not! Having grown up in the UK watching Saturday afternoon war films on TV, have you any idea how cool it is hearing actual authentic "achtung torpedoes!" on voice comms?! (Besides which, the Germans in the clan I'm a member of are thoroughly splendid; I would hate for them to get booted off to their own server - that would be very poor form.)

I haven't played mine that much (I find the passive 'torp truck' play style a bit dull these days, and I own Haida/Z-39), but the old 12 km torp setup was pretty doable (she's sneaky enough that you don't really need more range than that). I suppose you *could* make a case that Yudachi might be useful for training pre-CE captains for a relative newbie? While none of us would dream of taking a T7 for a drive without CE, I get the impression quite a few newer players might do and that extra reach could be handy if you're trying to play around 'stock' concealment; sure, you can make some serious progress with War & Peace before your fish arrive, but still... As I've said elsewhere, we should probably applaud premiums like Yudachi in that she doesn't contribute to powercreep, and she does do something that same tier equivalents don't (long-range sea mines)...

I fear we may be stuck with what we have - as @MrWastee alludes to, the switch to %-based boosts means that things like Yudachi get a weaker boost from the relevant captain's skill than before. This is a recurring problem all over the place though - the %-based WD40 for turrets skills and upgrades also have the greatest effect where they're needed least. I do wonder if WG are having a bit of a 'sea mines' moment too - don't the new KM silver DDs have 50 kt torps?

Be careful what you wish for: Yudachi is not OP, but she is more than possible to do the job with, assuming one has the basic DD kung fu. For a healthy game, it's would be an unfortunate development if too many premiums tended to be OP compared to silver ships; basically, that would result in 'if you want to increase your chances of winning, pay money' - that would be grossly unfair to the f2p crowd. There are concerns at the moment (due to the new 'nerfable' premiums) that WG are about to enter a cycle of releasing OP ships, selling the hell out of them, and then nerfing them, followed by repeating the exercise. Although I could afford to play that game, I don't want to; I want to win because I - unusually - managed to mess up less than my opponent, not because I bought the newest and shiniest toy (that gets nerfed six months later).

That makes the most sense - WOT has been around for quite a lot longer than WOWS has (the friend who introduced me to WOT way back spent at least a year trying to persuade me to try ships before I succumbed). I've been playing mostly WOT for the last few weeks, and it plays very differently to WOWS; crucially, what works well in tanks is often entirely disastrous in ships. When I returned to boating last night, I made a couple of howlingly bad misplays (even by my tuberous standards), because I've spent the last two weeks crashing around mainly in a mixture of brawling heavies and medium tanks; it was the same when I first started in WOWS - I was epically bad, at least in part because I was instinctively trying to play my ships as I would my tanks, and that tends to go badly...

Me too; at the moment, to my (ill-informed) eyes, she looks rather like a T10 Haida (albeit distressingly short of Mighty SecondariesTM) and that - at least - has the potential to be rather fun...?

This. That's the precise approach I try to take, with attempts to avoid rewarding at least some specific Richard moves (captain costs being the most recent one)...

Sanctimonious stuff like the above, and this: That's pretty clearly "you should not spend money on WG", and that's trying to tell people what to do with their cash. Frankly, and slightly childishly, every time someone posts something like this, I feel a powerful urge to spend money that I wouldn't otherwise. I cheerfully admit I have far too many premiums (you're welcome, BTW, for my small contribution towards helping to keep the game running), but I'll complain about whatever the hell I like. If WG are being Richards, I'll call them out on it (and have, frequently), but I'm not going to cut my nose off to spite my face - if they produce something I want and the value proposition (to me) passes muster, and I have the necessary rhino available then I'll buy it.

If you aren't interested in the German DDs then probably not; although the dockyard ship seems a rather more promising prospect than the silver line, it's not going to get any more or less promising if you do the missions and pay the minimum amount of doubloons. If it's purely about the steel, you might as well wait (if you don't care about ZF-6) and get whatever rewards you can for free.

I think it's still 500 to move a captain between silver ships; it's the resetting that's ludicrously expensive now... This - I feel - is another lever to encourage spending amongst the new players; if you don't find your way to the forum, or have experienced player friends that you know, you are almost certainly going to mess up your early captains somewhere. When you work this out, you can either spend a lot of resources on fixing it, or you can just say 'f**k it' and buy a new one for doubloons.

I'm afraid you don't get to tell people how to spend their money, but it is very obvious that the new commanders are all about money, plain and simple. As a general principle, I'm refusing to spend money on resetting captains at the moment, as I don't approve of the way WG have done this. It's entirely acceptable for a company to want to make money, *but* there are plenty of alternatives that don't disproportionately shaft certain groups of the player base...

Apparently, I registered something like 3-4 years ago now; premium time has worked the same way as long as I've been playing WG titles (WOT first, then WOWS added in a year or so later). The only significant change was back when title-specific premium was introduced i.e. WOWS premium doesn't work on WOT, and vice versa.

Yup: 52,500 to be precise (it's buried in my post #11)...

Okay, I can be bothered (on a break between spreadsheets): 35 bundles, at 1500 doubloons apiece, gives 52,500 doubloons in total if you get the T9 silver DD in the last bundle. That's of the order of a hundred and fifty quid in UKP...! I definitely can't be bothered to work out the permutations on what you can get with the tokens that have doubloon value (permaflages mainly, unless you count dragon flags, which I don't really). BTW I had a light whale myself (yes, I know, a fool and his money...) and got 11 bundles; of those, roughly twenty-something percent were worthless (single-use cammo) besides the tokens, and the rest were dragon flags (which I do actually want, hence the whaling). I did get enough tokens to unlock the T7 (Z-31?), and after a couple of Random games in her my feeling is she's rather like a cr4p Z-39; so, if you do want to spend money on something Teutonic, most people will do better just buying Z-39 outright...

Depends a bit (in a similar way to how the North Atlantic is a 'bit' damp) on luck: I got whatever the T9 silver thing is for 1,500 doubloons on my alt account, by the simple expedient of it being in the first bundle that I opened. I haven't done the maths, but I presume the 52K is if you open all the 1,500 doubloon bundles and you get the silver T9 in the last one? If you're talking about the dockyard, of course, that's an entirely different kettle of fish - the ship from that is a premium, not to mention a different mechanic...

Worst? They *all* will give you cooties...

<waves> A bit of an out-of-shape one though...

Excellent - only a few weeks to go, and I get a free pass? Splendid news!

Supposedly, the typical WOWS player skews a bit older; I'm an old git myself and part of the appeal of WOWS is that it doesn't really require teenage reflexes that are long gone for me...! Mind you, I still play WOT as well, and that seems to attract more teenagers.

I don't have Siegfried, mainly due to not having enough RPs until it was known that the secondaries (and therefore the entire ship's interest to me) were going to be knackered by the rework, so I don't have any skin in the game. That said, I agree that in her case (and probably only her case; maybe AGS, but does anyone care much about her in this context?), WG ought to do one of the following: Give Siegfried back her secondaries, by whatever means. Offer a resource refund to all Siegfried owners. Neither of those is especially hard, neither costs WG anything (apart from a few minutes work), and either would be a small gesture to counteract all WG's recent Richard moves that have been annoying the customers lately. As a commercially-minded chap, this - to me - is a complete no-brainer; naturally, WG will do nothing of the sort...

FWIW my usual view is: Try all classes (even CVs). Play IJN and US first, as they're the standard 'no frills' nations and illustrate the basics, before wandering off into gimmick land. (I would file the newer US BB line - to Vermont - under 'not essential' though, unless you like to contemplate the infinite.) After that, the Germans can be fun (don't know about the released-today DD line yet - that may be a bit dull), and are relatively short on gimmicks, and following on from them you start getting into specific nation/class combinations; for example, if you dig DDs, the RN line is good fun, and the Russian cruisers to Nevsky are worth a look too (railguns and long-range radar with a tolerable run-time). Beyond that, it's worth taking a look at some of the more 'speciality' lines, having learned all the 'good habits' first from the more-or-less vanilla lines...

WG appear to be providing me with a useful service: a reminder that I *really* need to get out in the fresh air more. Blowing some coal on Immelmann triggered this message: Right, heading outside immediately...!