Verblonde

Not me, I think - despite the CVs, there are too many ships released since the reework that I'd miss too much e.g. most of the RN DDs for a start, and Haida.

Anyone want to bet that some sort of - obscenely expensive, naturally - way to get hold of Benham will - entirely coincidentally - appear just around the time of the season start? Of course, this removes yet another CV-free mode; I find it breathtaking that WG are cretinous enough to think that CVs are fine for all modes now - they're close, but most emphatically not fine. Trying to be positive, this might turn out to be vaguely fun in some circumstances - there are a small number of T9s that are arguably better than the corresponding T10, plus it'll provide an interesting challenge for the really good players (of whom I'm not one)...

I think some people at WG have a bet on: Ivan bets Vlad that he can make 25% of the keener player base's heads explode within six months, and Vlad bets he can't. PR follows, then 2 million free xp DD, *then* CVs in Clans. I do rather fancy Ivan's chances here... As a long-suffering DD main, my instinct is that CVs in Clans is a monumentally stupid idea with things as they are now, but I'm open to the idea that I could be wrong.

2 million?! Outstanding. WG should be saluted for their kindness - they really do seem to be hell-bent on curing me of my 'premium' (you know what I mean) ships addiction.

The textbook answer at the moment is JB, as that's about to be removed; others are far better placed to comment on differences/similarities compared to Bourgogne, but JB ought to have a somewhat better economy...?

I've put mine on Daring (although I'm keeping the existing 19 pointer for Clans etc.), not because I believe it to be optimal, but rather because the DDs are the line I play the most and I might occasionally make use of one or other of the special abilities...

This is the crucial thing, and is why I mainly suggest making it much harder for planes to spot surface ships, particularly DDs. The rest is 'just' balancing...

I'm not certain it needs to be this drastic; I would suggest the following, at least as a 'starter-for-ten': Remove planes' 'you have been spotted' sixth sense thing; the key issue with CVs is their spotting of sneaky ships - DDs especially - and this would make it harder, albeit not impossible. Make AA great again - bigly. As the CV meisters have pointed out, AA is currently a bit academic, and in terms of ROI isn't really worth investing in; I might look at re-introducing AA that matters, but make it come at a cost in terms of surface to surface effectiveness. I would also like to see the return of stealth AA (where AA range is longer than air spotting distance), but only on one or two ships per nation, at most. The danger to avoid with all this would be a return to 'blobbing' which was highly unhelpful to interesting gameplay. Maybe give up on flak clouds and return to something more like the RTS AA mechanics, only balanced for the current state of affairs. Either that or maybe give the flak clouds some minimum damage, so that the very skilled take at least *some* damage from them. I wouldn't nerf CVs damage output any more, and they might even need a buff if AA were to be boosted. No doubt a lot of that is - as it is written - b0llocks, but I do think that CVs are not too far away from being sensible; they just need some tweaking to make them tolerable for everyone else, whilst (important) still being fun for thems that play them.

Just finished, finally! Probably wouldn't have made it without buying London early on. Think he'll be my next Daring captain, once I've got him a bit more developed...

Nice to see you, sir! Okay(ish) from a sociopathic 'just get the mission done' point of view - about 3/4 million potential damage. About three more games after that finished the directive, got me Cunningham, and means I can breathe a huge sigh of relief and play a bit more sensibly again...!

It isn't terribly surprising if you were being flamed in game/on the forum for sniping from long range in a BB; most forumites are experienced players (and a lot - not me - are very good at the game), so you may well be suffering from a loss of their sense of humour over something that most of us have seen multiple times before and that has contributed significantly to game losses. Not justifying people being rude, but explaining it (and as someone who has suffered badly from clueless BBs myself, trying to resist the urge to join in). Jolly good, context sorted; what to do about it? Some ideas, from the perspective of someone who needs BBs to function on their team, rather than an expert BB player. Join a clan. As soon as possible, and preferably one that has people willing to teach and that uses voice comms (use voice comms yourself - Discord or TS are the common ones, but you can use the in-game one fine). Besides helping you learn, you'll get some worthwhile economic benefits, assuming they haven't been neglecting base development. Make sure your minimap is large; the key to being useful in a BB (and most other classes come to that) is situational awareness, and that requires frequent use of the minimap. Keep track of where everyone is; keep a mental note of where concealed enemies are likely to be (especially fat lads who might be able to hit your broadside and sneaky feckers in their DDs); try and learn to project likely future courses of action for the enemy ships e.g. if someone is going to turn to avoid torps, say, it might give you an opportunity to hit them in the broadside, and so on. Learn which targets to shoot and in which order; counter-intuitively, you job is often not to shoot BBs, at least not initially - think strategically. For example, if you kill the enemy radar cruisers as early as possible, you give your side's DDs a lot more options (they're your eyes and fat lad killers, assuming they have usable torps); killing enemy DDs does something similar, as well as blinding the enemy and reducing the threat to you personally for their torps. To start with, unless they're silly enough to give you broadside, enemy BBs are often the least of your worries, unless you have nothing else to shoot at. Switch ammo types as needed (because of BBs' slow reload, we return again to situational awareness - plan ahead): DDs call for HE, as do skinny cruisers when they're broadside (think Smolensk), and bow-tanking BBs. Your aim is to do as much damage as quickly as possible, and the more that can't be healed (if the target has a heal) the better. Basically, if the ship has a citadel, you want to hit it (beware KM turtlebacks though); this applies even in things with monstrous HE like the RN BBs and means make plenty of use of AP. Tank damage; this is key - your aim is not to finish the battle without taking a hit (enable the display that keeps track of potential damage - that'll indicate how you're doing on this front), but to take as much not-damaging fire as possible. If the enemy is shooting at you, they aren't shooting your more fragile mates. Angle your ship, so you aren't getting broadsided, and be prepared to disengage/hide if things get too intense. Which leads onto positioning; proper BB players will be able to help more on this, but the idea is to be close enough such that you can actually hit things, but not over-extended such that you can't escape if focused. For most BBs, the sweet spot is somewhere around the surface spotting distance (the circle is shown on your minimap), as your fire should be tolerably accurate at that distance, but you can still go dark when you need to. There is a place for charging the enemy and beating him to death with his own shoes, but pick your spots - you're no good to the team sunk early because you were too manly too early. Manage DCP intelligently; things like fires and floods do DoT and it's all healable (although floods do slow you down, arguing in favour of a quick fix). If you're tanking right, you are going to get set on fire - especially - a lot; don't put out the first fire and sometimes not even the second, unless you'll die if you don't. People like me are always looking for BBs that heal the first fire immediately as that means a) idiot and b) we can stack DoT effects - set on fire, they heal, then torp to get floods = *lots* of damage. This talks to the thing about being able to hide too - recall that you can be seen from further away if on fire, so you may need to escape behind an island to go dark (and then heal). Speaking of fires, FP is more or less an essential captain skill for the vast majority of BB builds. The effect is greater than the blurb suggests it should be: reducing the number of fire locations from four to three sounds like a reduction in fires by 25%, but it's better than that. The way it works is that the two middle locations combine into one; most players tend to shoot centre mass, so the bulk of their shots land in this (now huge) middle area and it can only be set on fire once. So, against typical players you can spend quite a lot of time with just one fire burning because people don't give you a proper hosing down. Play other things besides BBs, particularly DDs and cruisers. You'll get a major insight into how each class works and how they interact with BBs, and what they need from them (and vice versa); it'll also make it harder for these other classes to scrag your BBs when you return to them. This applies to any player, and explains how I know about FP (last point) - a DD main, who still plays other things now and again. As an example, if you play torp DDs, you'll learn fairly quickly how to make their life much harder when they're trying to torp your BB (spoiler: WASD hacks). Make use of Coop mode. Yes I know it smells, but it can provide a good 'lab' for testing things like angling, DCP management etc. Just be mindful that the bots play nothing like real people tend to, so it won't help your tactical development much. Play at lower tiers: even though you have a lot of battles, you're basically trying to develop new skills (or hone existing ones) - this is easier in a more manageable threat environment, and that tends to mean lower tiers (not too low though as the earlier BBs get pretty flaky/frustrating). Hopefully, at least some of that may be of help. If any of it is gibberish, Google iChase's captains academy series on YouTube, and read the wiki: https://wiki.wargaming.net/en/World_of_Warships

Much as they've wrecked my fun in a lot of my DDs, and the balance is still a long way from being right, I wouldn't remove CVs: the period that the game encompasses goes all the way from the 'lucky to get off the ground in one piece' stage of aviation, all the way through to CVs becoming the preeminent warship type in the major blue water navies, so it would feel a bit artificial (in the later period ships, anyway) to ditch them. The key reason though IMO to keep them is that they add variety to the game; it might even be entertaining variety too, if WG ever got the AA interactions/details right (I miss things like Atlanta being able to ambush gormless planes). Ditch the planes and we get 2D battles rather than 3D (by the same logic, of course, subs should be a Good Thing, and I'm really not convinced about that), which would be less interesting. A secondary - and probably pi$$-poor - reason is that they are very pretty and I quite like zooming around admiring the planes in Coop; then again, I like 'pretties' generally.

I would suggest (as others have) playing several lines at once; for BBs, you can do a lot worse than the US (I totally understand about the complete lack of speed though) and the IJN - they were the first lines to be added to the game, so are kind of the 'standards' for learning how to BB. Don't fixate on getting to the higher tiers, whichever line(s) you play; it takes a lot of battles to get the hang of WOWS (I still haven't entirely, and look at my battle count), and things get a lot harder at higher tiers - mainly due to your opposition quite frequently having more experience than you do, and having substantially better captains (which do matter).

I would oppose the idea, I'm afraid, for one simple reason: language. For a team game, it's really helpful if most (ideally, all) of the team can use the same language; it's unlikely that a global server would see this. Randoms are hardly a model of coordination at the best of time, and I fear it would be much worse if everyone has no idea what the rest are saying. There's a cynical reason why it's less likely to happen, which has nowt to do with my preferences: money. Unfortunately, if you have separate servers, you can pitch pricing at whatever level the market will bear in each region. In WOT, for example, it used to be the case that stuff was rather cheaper on the RU server than on the US/NA ones.

I have all the Leg-ends that could be got by playing missions etc. so far (not sure if I'll make the current one though), but there is zero chance I'd pay that much coal for one. Basically, we're a long walk into 'diminishing returns' territory here: a standard 'interesting' 10-point captain from the shop usually costs around 5 UKP, maybe a bit more, and the 'normal' ones in the armory [sic] are less than that. Also, compare the prices for the Leg-ends with those of, say, the Dunkirk siblings. Short version: the improvement you get for spending 175K coal does not give improved performance even remotely in proportion to the price hike (I know they're different resources, but still) over more prosaic captains. The lack of a massive performance boost is a good thing, as otherwise these captains would be 'must buys' which isn't healthy, however they should certainly cost substantially less.

This is a very good point - the recent disproportionate application of the nerfhammer to YY springs to mind. I still do use permaflage on my T10s, but I tend to think in terms of them actually costing slightly more than they theoretically do (when making my 'should I spend?' decision) because of this e.g. Say you have half a dozen T10s and get permaflage for all of them; at 5K a pop, that's 30K total. If one of those T10s subsequently gets the WG 'treatment' and becomes useless, then your 'spend' per useful ship goes up to 6K (the 5K of the now useless ship, split equally between the remaining five, plus their original 5K each). That doesn't impact your total spend of course, but it's a way of thinking about ROI per individual ship. In the above example, spend per useful ship is actually 20% higher, which might well make a difference for people. Of course, given WG's record, the more T10s you have, the greater chance there is of *at least* one getting knackered (greater still, I suspect, if they belong to a nation that ever made Russia look silly).

They have at the lower-mid tiers, but not (I think) T10, as that's the really valuable one... Doesn't happen very often though.

Sheer quality: +1!

I wouldn't be too downhearted - DDs tend to involve rather high-risk-high-reward gameplay, and can take a little while to get used to as a result. I'm not actively good in any class (the same way that the Sahara isn't actively wet), but I do like DDs. The approximate approach that I took FWIW was to start with the more conservative gameplay options, so things that rely more on long-range torps (and have a decent stealth torp window, so mainly IJN); that got me used to sneaking around and more risk-averse (for DDs) strategies; torps can be very flaky and a decent player will avoid them easily, but they are useful against the bulk of the player base. After that, I started to add in things where the guns were more than an afterthought i.e. the bulk of your damage still comes from torps, but judicious gun use can make a difference and - more importantly - gets you used to gun use in DDs (you can probably hit stuff already, but managing the loss of stealth when you fire can take some getting used to). From there, more gun-orientated designs are the next step. Besides that, it's key to understand smoke, hydro, and radar, plus how vision works in the game generally (the last one is crucial); almost all DDs rely - to some degree - on being sneaky, and it's essential to master how to do that, as you don't really have much else to save you from the attentions of the enemy (obscene speed, in a few cases, theoretically can replace some stealth, but that's usually more 'advanced' DDs). A couple of pointers when thinking about vision and related stuff: You don't have to camp in smoke; it's often better to use it as a 'vision break', placed between you (and/or allies) and the enemy. If you camp in smoke, any self-respecting captain with torps in range will fire them into said smoke on general principles (you can occasionally use a smoke cloud that you aren't in as torpedo bait, but pick your moments - doing so tells the enemy at least which vague bit of the map you're in). Keep an eye on where enemy hydro ships are: besides detecting you (although usually at shorter range), each one represents a big potential 'circle of detection' for your torps - the gormless BB that you just fired a full set of fish at is a lot more likely to get away with it if said fish were detected by someone with hydro long before they would have detected them otherwise. Radar can be a bugger (technical term) as it tends to be long ranged (it's worth learning the ranges of the more common types) and goes through islands; try and keep track of where the enemy radars are (and try and persuade your allies to sink them if they can - don't get your hopes up though) and, if you are in range of one or more, keep half an eye on an exit plan - although radar can see you on the far side of an island, the island still stops direct fire (beware 'rainbow' gun arc ships though) if you can get it between you and the foe. Switch your AA off (p key is the default) when you don't need it - if your AA range is further than your air detection range. DD AA fire is not usually terribly good, and gives your position away much sooner - it's often better to try and sneak away from planes than to try and kill them. CVs are a major problem for DDs; however, the threat can be reduced from direct damage by learning how to dodge the various attack types - the main problem is being spotted. As with radar, monitor the CV, its planes, and know where to run to if they come after you (islands block enemy surface fire, and allies with decent AA can discourage the planes themselves). If you can make the CV's life difficult, they will may go after easier prey, or waste time on you that should be spent scragging someone else (assuming you meet a typical CV driver; a good will just kill you all kinds of dead regardless, but that's not unique to CVs). As to how to CV, I can't really offer much sensible advice as I *really* suck in them (the most fun I usually have with the class is driving a semi-secondary GZ into the middle of a bunch of Coop bots and engaging them with maximum manliness - hilarious, but bloody stupid); hopefully, more competent players will be able to provide spiritual guidance here.

I do, but not all the time; I'd like to see it permanently introduced in some way (perhaps an optional mode, rather than as part of randoms, to avoid upsetting those who don't like it), but definitely excluding CVs. Also, definitely prefer it to epicenter...

Splendid: I've switched to playing WOT for the duration (or at least until the last directive unlocks). Got hold of a rather fun T8 French premium (fun, although mine appears to be Cursed) today, so that's a result...

Spectacularly difficult to choose, if we're including all ships in the trees (silver and premium). I'm equally ton between KM (properly manly BBs, the DDs are splendid - especially the premiums, and the cruisers are great fun as well), IJN (fun - if not terribly manly - BBs, splendid cruisers - I love Atago and clones, great and nicely varied DDs). RN and (crucially) commonwealth edge it for me at the moment - while I'm not hugely keen on the BBs generally, the cruisers are glorious (Leander and up, and I like the heavies so far too), the destroyers are great fun (especially T7 and up), but what gets them my vote is Haida (and Cossack) - IMO a strong candidate for the most fun DD in the game. That's not to say I'm necessarily any good with any of these in particular, but I'm just thinking in terms of nice fun ships (bonus points for being real too, hence zero chance of a vote for the Russians).

Some interesting ideas - excellent post, sir! The above is the critical change that's needed, IMO; as @Procrastes says, the key problem with CVs is their ability to spot (yes, a good player will sink you, but there aren't many of those, and a good cruiser player will kill you all kinds of dead just the same) - removing the planes' spotted warning would give DDs a fighting chance to sneak away (perhaps increase the aerial spotting range slightly, so finding DDs doesn't become entirely impossible for the CVs).

I rather enjoyed it when we had the T9 thing a while back; with CVs in, I've decided to give the whole thing a miss. Normally, I feel I can play around CVs (well, not be any worse than I usually am), but magic healing planes are too much...

Brilliant - sir, I salute you!