Verblonde

I don't; this is my Haida captain as of now (and I didn't change him when IFHE was reworked): When I've got him to 19 points, SI will be my final pick. The logic is based mainly on the main RN DD line (as Haida is basically a T7 Cossack, more or less): pre-rework, the feeling was that IFHE was necessary on the T9-10 RN DDs, but less so on T8 and below (113 mm versus 120 mm). The reduced fire chance since the rework pretty much kills off IFHE for me on anything RN DD flavoured; if I'm getting too many shatters I need to remember to use AP instead. I tend to think that the four points you need to spend on IFHE are better utilised elsewhere on Haida. That, of course, doesn't mean I'm right - I'm not a very good player!

I agree that what they've done is deliberate, but they've still messed it up...!

Well, small update: was pratting about in Halland a few minutes ago and some hapless T10 IJN CV came after me (mid-forties overall WR player, to provide context); after I entirely shredded his first attack wave, and took out 90%ish of the second, he left me alone. I finished the game with 24 plane kills (one more than the Des Moines on our team, who was second by that metric). If we really must have CVs in the game, then you can do a lot worse than play Ikea DDs (well, high tier ones anyway). Of course, a more competent CV driver would have probably torn me a new one, but there aren't too many of those about...

You can do a lot worse; depending on how much coal you have, the coal hydro mod might not be a bad idea (it gives you 216 secs run time, which is glorious - I have it on mine from a previous T7 event - sprint, I think)...

The glib answer is 'whatever you do best with', with a bit of refinement on the basis that AA will - of course - be irrelevant. I'm a DD main, so my starters for ten will be Z-39 and Haida; both are good for their tier, and both are premiums, so if I can contrive not to suck too much they should generate decent rewards. Edit: Ranked is enormously frustrating a lot of the time, so pick something that's fun to play too!

I may be wrong, but I get the impression that WOWS doesn't have credit discounts on ships that frequently, certainly when compared to WOT. My working hypothesis is that because the credit economy in WOWS is very forgiving (at least until you hit T9 if you have premium, and around T8 otherwise), and you get clan discounts and stuff like that, such discounts are less crucial to a lot of players, so reducing their impact as a promotional tool. If you're struggling with credits, a couple of things to look at: Premium consumables soon become free, which will improve people's economies dramatically (especially on consumable-heavy ships); in the meantime only use premium consumables where the return on investment justifies them. Concentrate on what reaps the most rewards i.e. damage. More specifically, you want to focus on doing high proportions of damage (10K hp knocked off a DD will net you greater rewards than the same damage done to a BB, say, as you've taken a higher proportion on the DD's hitpoints). Try and improve your standard of play, such that you contribute to your side winning more frequently - wins get you better rewards. In a similar vein, make sure your captains are good enough for the tier you're playing at (at least 10 points as soon as you're in the +2 MM bracket), and your ships are fully (and intelligently) equipped. The aim is to give yourself the best chance of lasting long enough to do the damage you need to make decent silver. Have a look at your end of battle results screens, and assess which ships tend to generate the most silver (usually because you're better in them) - play such ships more frequently. Also, I note you have quite a few CVs - this class can be quite hard for a typical player to consistently make decent silver with (mainly because - I think - they're quite hard to do large amounts of damage with). This chap has it right; being realistic, you don't have to be actively good in any given ships (most of us can't be - proper unicums are a small proportion of the player base), but the better you can perform in any given ship, the better your income will be. As is often said on here, the 'point' of the game is not to get to T10 as soon as possible, but rather to enjoy playing the game on the way there. I would suggest not getting too hung up on stats in and of themselves, but rather use them as a tool to assess critically when you are doing well/badly, and try and keep doing the former, whilst fixing the latter. Beware of small data-sets though (e.g. I have a 62.5% WR in Minsk after 32 battles - there is no way I'm remotely that good in the thing; I would also hope I'm not quite as bad as my WR in Fletcher, after 27 battles, would suggest - 33.3%!). Overall, it can often be easier to drive your top-line income than to make purchases easier by focusing excessively on cost reduction.

Whilst there are some glorious DDs at T8, I would avoid like the plague if you don't have at least a 10 point captain to put in them - the lack of stealth will make you food for players with better captains.

Isn't this about trying to breathe some life into that Orion thing (or whatever it is)? They're doing something similar over in WOT as well...

<thoughtfully contemplates rental T8 - probably - CVs plague in the hands of bright shiny newbies, and what my high tier Ikeas would do to them> Oh yes, please! I think it's a splendid idea - capital! (I'm a bad person)

It's not like you have to entirely stop being a potato to work round radar: I'm still pretty tuberous, and I can do it (some of the time)... Speaking of radar, I see from the gossip sites that the upcoming Russian BB gets radar too...!

Daily Bounce (similar to previous post, but includes mention of subs, and Russian CA early access): https://thedailybounce.net/world-of-warships/world-of-warships-update-0-9-4-changes-and-additions-supertest-datamining-submarines-are-coming/

Additional: along with Z-39, Haida is perhaps the best T7 DD at the moment, but a newer player should avoid her: She's the only Commonwealth DD, so no use as a captain trainer. You won't have a high point captain to drop in her already: no silver line, and very unlikely you have a 19 point captain to generate the necessary elite xp. She's not a newcomer's ship, as she has only one torp launcher and rewards being practiced in the arts of gunnery (more specifically, how to manage its impact on your stealth, as Haida relies on sneakiness), and smoke/hydro.

T-61 is the best T6 DD at the moment, bar none (if you get her, stick a coal hydro upgrade on her if you can), like borderline OP best (in the right hands, so not mine); as alluded to earlier though, you do need *at least* a 10 point captain (anywhere from T5+ in my view), and it might give you the wrong impression of the difficulty of T6 DD play (recall that you meet T8 for the first time, including the 12 km Russian radar, which can take some playing around). If you fancy KM, Z-39 at T7 is also very good (perhaps not quite as good as T-61 tier-for-tier), although she is perhaps less of an ideal fit for captain training, as she has the bigger guns that don't benefit from BFT. Again, put the coal hydro upgrade on her. Sims is quite worthwhile (especially since her torps were given a longer reach, although they're still very slow), and matches pretty much exactly with the captain skills that are optimal for most of the relevant silver line, although her stealth isn't great. A crucial point to emphasise though is, as others have said, that DDs really need a 10 point captain to do well with (at least from T5 and up); most opposition you face will have such a captain, and you'll be at a significant disadvantage if you don't (spotting being the main cause). FWIW you can do a lot worse than have your first ten points - for a DD captain - be as follows: This is what some people refer to as the 'standard DD build' and it works for pretty much all DDs (although some experienced players may tweak it slightly).

Appallingly bad CV player's perspective: Hosho is almost certainly the best T4; I mainly got Hermes for the aesthetics. All of the T6 CVs are useful, if only for Ops (which is where mine tend to live); for the latter, Ark Royal (premium) is also excellent. I have Furious partly for the aesthetics here too, although she is actively good for Ops as well. At T8, my knowledge of which CVs to take against real people starts to flake out; I have all three silver T8s though, and - at my skill level anyway - the RN one is the worst... Honourable mention for GZ though: hilarious for mortal secondary combat in Coop (which is, for avoidance of doubt, entirely idiotic)!

Aye, but I haven't played her yet and don't really have much idea what to do with her when I do (I was pretty poor with Donskoi); I suspect I'll be what is technically known as 'cannon fodder' when I do eventually take her out...! (Like the new avatar BTW!) Not *entirely* true - based on a few games yesterday, I may have devised a new clever - nay, cunning, nay, fiendishly cunning - strategy for dealing with CVs when playing DDs. In the tradition of all the great military strategists I have even given this strategy a name. Are you ready? Brace yourselves: "Play Halland". There. I'm a genius. Being sensible: as @principat121 alludes to, DDs are generally a lot more boned by planes than they are by radar - see my previous remarks for explanation why.

It certainly contributed to my deciding to switch to tanks for a bit...! How was I not last for our team? We must have had some utter stinkers...

BTW it's occasionally the case that you'll want to leave a high point captain relatively low in the tech tree, in terms of which silver ship he's assigned to, if you've really built him for one of your weird premiums. For example, I have a 19 pointer on Fubuki, but that captain is really built for Asashio (TA being the key difference compared to what I more usually use) - he's only assigned to the T6 as that's the least silly place for him (actually 'her' - I think it's one of the HSF captains) to be IMO.

I may have actually found a use for this whole regrind business: it's a way to sell the contents of a tree without it costing anything to demount the modules. Okay, you still lose half the silver, but (in my case) you still generate much more than is needed to buy a shiny new Ikea T10 on release morning...! So, yay, I guess. At least I'll get the double research points when I get round to regrinding the line too...

@loppantorkel just had a ringside seat to the latest installment of the ever popular 'Verblonde makes a fool of himself in front of a forum member'...! I was giving Halland her fifth run-out, and (predictably) made an utter pig's ear of it. Kind of you not to laugh and point, sir!

By the standards of radar, you're absolutely right (I show 36 secs on my Moskva, which I haven't played yet); they are short duration compared to planes though...

I've played two battles so far*, and this looks a pretty good summary. If you got the permaflage, she gets the splendid economy too, which is a significant improvement on the T9 (which will come as no surprise to anyone, but it's worth mentioning). *Lost first with a tolerable performance from me (by my standards), and then got hugely embarrassingly sunk blundering into an IJN torp or several with only a single torp hit to show for it in the second...!

For me, it varies a bit based on things like resources available, how impatient I am, how much time I have etc. (if there is a specific need e.g. a good captain for something like clans), whether I'm embracing my inner whale, and so on. Some (highly subjective) pointers: Playing in the +2 MM bracket is painful without at least a 10 point captain (and more if your ship 'requires' something like IFHE and you don't want to compromise stealth); if you don't have lots of 10 pointers lying around, this pretty much requires that you do at least some moving of captains up the tiers as you go. A medium-term aim is to get your first 19 point captain as soon as possible, not because he'll be more powerful (although that is nice), but because he'll generate elite xp, which can be used to speed up the development of other captains (once you get the first 19 pointer, the second happens faster, the third faster still, and so on). This will take a while though. Are you f2p, a whale, or somewhere in between? Unless there is a promo on, or you have spare xp, you're going to have to use doubloons to move a captain between ships without a performance drop - unless you have a suitable premium ship (captains work at 100% in premiums, whereas they don't in silver ships until fully trained for that ship). That said, if you want to drop a 10 point+ captain into a new silver ship, you'll probably face the same issue (most new higher point captains tend to be specialised for their tree's T1). Premium ships are very helpful for captain training - if you have the right one(s); besides retraining (see previous point), they also speed up getting your first 19 pointer, if only by means of the extra daily first win bonus. How you approach new silver ships will have an impact e.g. if you're going to play the thing stock, you'll effectively have a hand tied behind your back, which argues in favour of moving the captain up from the previous ship, whereas if you free-xp some/all of the mods, the need for a captain above 10 points is somewhat reduced, so you can leave your previous captain where he is, if you want. Within limits - don't go mad - take every opportunity to pick up higher point captains (at least until you have all that you'll ever need), especially if they're free. Whales have an advantage here, as there are quite a few 10 pointers that you can only get by spending doubloons at least. As always, if you have all the time/patience in the world, you can do all this stuff for free; paying money will speed stuff up considerably. So, as a general approach, what I personally do is to take my best captain (or two) up the tiers with me, leaving ten pointers behind in most things from T5 up, and selling most things below that (I keep a *lot* of ships). Anything where I'll be playing it quite a lot after I've gone past will (if possible) get a better captain than that e.g. Gneis is quite worthwhile in Narai, so I have a 17-18 pointer on her, whilst Bismarck only gets a 10 (as I have two Tirpitzes for the T8 brawler role). When I was short of captains, I used to leave ships I'd gone past empty with a view to repopulating them later if/when I needed to play them (snowflakes, missions etc.). Something to have on the radar for long-term planning vis-a-vis captains is the Research Bureau: as you know, this whole thing involves regrinding lines that you've already got to T10 with, to get rewards (premium ships, LUs, and so on). One approach to take is to pick one line that you really like and to regrind it several times (I did this with the IJN torp DD line); if you're doing this, it's helpful to have a reasonable captain for each ship you aren't going to free xp (in my case, that means T5-T10, and occasionally T4). I mention this as it changes how one tends to approach whatever that favoured line is' captains.

I have both, but bought Georgia first and play it rather more: Georgia is - to me - more fun; ridiculous secondaries and speed boost, whereas Thunderer feels like a more typical BB (full disclosure: I generally find most BBs a bit dull). Georgia is more use for doing common missions i.e. secondaries hits; for the sorts of missions where Thunderer excels, I have rather more alternatives. Neither is real, so no-score draw there. A big potential plus is that Thunderer ought to be more useful as a captain trainer (Like MA, Georgia probably wants a specialised captain for maximum fun, although a standard 'tank' is probably optimal if you actually want to win) as she dovetails nicely with the regular RN BBs. So which one to suggest getting will depend on your specific needs and which ships you already have - if you like BBs, they're both worth having.

I do have SE on all my captains - do I remember correctly that this indirectly boosts healing potions? Whilst it's not close to a zombie heal, my experience is that the one on the Ikea DDs is 'good enough', although that's not to say I haven't been sunk a lot (but that's true of almost any ship I play!)...

I think I have 13-15 points on T6-8, and 18 on the T9, or something like that; the addition of CE and one of BFT/TAE (I've taken the former so far) really does make a difference, as does the extra healing potion if you take SI. On the latter point, it took me a while to work out why I seemed to be getting more use from the heals than I usually do on other ships i.e. because DDs don't get citadelled, and a lot of the damage you take is from HE, so you tend to have more 'healability' (is that even a word - you know what I mean) available for each potion. I think I've got two dreadnoughts so far with the things, and at least one was before getting the extra heal. Why this didn't dawn on me re: Kidd years ago is beyond me - must be being blonde. Edit: at the risk of tempting fate, we may have to accept that WG have actually done something right for once with these DDs (apart from 2 million free xp for the semi-premium). I feel faint...