Verblonde

Sort-of premium Balti, if memory serves (although not as good - apparently; I don't have her)...?

(entertainingly, I note that my WR in two-man divisions is about three points lower than in solo battles; sample's too small to be meaningful for three-man divisions)

Good luck with either of those: Playing in divisions is one of the more fun aspects of the game (and, no, I'm not a unicum, or anywhere remotely near); the social thing is what attracts many people to the game in the first place. If you can't division in high tier, why bother making the effort to get such ships? WG would lose a lot of income if they gimped T9-10 like that. So, the suggested options either make the game less fun (=less money) or make the high tiers less attractive (=less money). I'll let others assess the likelihood of WG doing either.

Not lucky, just already have far too many premiums, such that once I'm past the dross, there's only good stuff(ish) left. That said, I don't 'need' Fujin (I have Kami); I just rather like the cammo, and I'd get far more use from most of the T9s...

I may be misunderstanding, but I thought the next patch goes live on Thursday (12th), but the PR thing doesn't switch on right away? That said, it doesn't make much practical difference in the context...? Edit: progress on the PR thing starts on the 16th, according to the news story.

The latest on submarines (facebook Dev Blog again):

The WOWS Twitch stream is currently talking about an upcoming (WiP) Pan European tree - mostly Swedish, and mostly DDs it looks like. More DDs? Squee!

For me, the more valuable rewards come from T8-9, followed by the T7s and moving down. This is based on the usual minuscule chance of getting something good from basic Xmas containers; that said, I only have about half a dozen T10s, so it's probably about half an hour to knock all their snowflakes off, which isn't too egregious. Edit: the flaky rewards for T10 strike me as a little odd; WG must be relying on the final stage of the PR grind to generate this Xmas' push to get more T10s (either that, or they're assuming people paying for Xmas crates, and speeding up the PR grind will net them more money).

In previous years, the chance of *a* ship has been much higher than that (or I've been spectacularly lucky); a crucial additional element to the calculus is which ships do you already have - for example, there are at least a couple of suspect T5s that I don't have; I'm assuming I have to get through both of those before getting something 'good'. So, for most people, it's not a matter of getting just one ship, but rather getting several...

Incidentally, I *still* think it's pi$$ poor that the odds aren't clearly published - if they were, at least people could make an informed choice (assuming they understand odds)...

Incidentally, I note that the graphic on the news story shows the PT price (unless the first and/or third are massively expensive by comparison): Countdown to the first thread a la Black ships missions 'WG lied about the price...etc.'

For context, again in the UK Pounds, a flat-out buy of a T9 premium is currently showing 54, plus change.

You can make a similar case for most of the classes: cruisers are needed to blap DDs that get spotted - without support, the DDs are often boned/ineffectual (assuming the enemy knows his business); BBs are needed to knock over the enemy cruisers, so helping out the DDs; a CV that isn't spotting the enemy fleet early is a liability, and so on...

I almost missed that the 'classic' (apparently) OP premiums are in the list - WG show them right at the top (I initially was looking at the relevant tiers); presumably, the lure of moolah won out over the PR issues of only being able to get said premiums via gambling? I see that Fujin has been added too - sadly, I feel a moment of weakness coming on...

Like I said in another thread: WG needed to put the details of the mission at the very top of the page - it does make it clearer further down that the mission can only be done in the vanilla version of the ship (as mentioned earlier, it's about compensating those who basically got the same ship twice, plus a few cetaceous folk might actually buy the vanilla version after getting the black one), but nobody likes to scroll... We had the same problem last year, *and* it was mentioned on here before the ships were released this year, but we still get the confusion...

This. Having written equivalent text for offers and whatnot in other industries, you have to assume 'concussed duckling' reading comprehension or you get this kind of thing. There's plenty of wishful thinking involved often as well. The fix is simple; as @Yamato942 says, you need to expressly state what is and - more importantly - what isn't included. In the specific case of the special ships, this needs to be right at the top of the offer page, not a page or two down...

Usual order of business: Make sure all cammo filters are disabled. See if the cammo appears. If not, disable all mods and try again. If still no joy, you could always try something improbable like asking WG's tech support for help...

Nah. I suspect there are several aspects to this: As someone said in another thread, having one Smol on your side is beneficial; I would add to this that the player matters a lot too - Smol is laughably vulnerable (and a priority target, given its rep), so you need someone at least half competent to get anywhere near the ship's potential. Multiple Smols mean that you have fewer radars on your side, making detecting sneaky feckers a lot harder - as a DD main, I fear radar-heavy teams much more than teams with multiple Smols. This - in my view - is the crucial one. Multiple Smols also mean you've reduced the number of ships with heavy rounds by one as well; although Smol chucks out a lot of fire damage and is fearsome against poorly armoured targets as well, having fewer heavy AP rounds available to your side can be detrimental. So, I feel that if you have one Smol on your side in Ranked, and the driver knows their business, that's a significant positive; as you start adding Smols on top of the initial one (and/or the drivers are not up to snuff), the added benefit becomes less and less, and the disadvantages become more and more significant (assuming the opposing side has a reasonably balanced make-up).

Can anyone recommend some good current videos on the gentle art of playing the high tier RN cruisers, please? Quite a lot of what's out there seems to be a little out of date now... I *think* I can do the PR final set of missions without any extra T10 ships, but the (within sensible reach) Minotaur might make life easier. However, I would need to play Neptune in Randoms to get there, and that would currently be a spectacularly bad idea, given my present skill level (yes, I know that doesn't stop a lot of players, but I'd rather not make the situation even worse)...

The 'trouble' with that is that it doesn't really play to MA's strengths, and misses out on a lot of the fun with the ship. If you're going to do that, wouldn't it be better to get Alabama or something similar as your premium...?

FWIW this is the captain I have on MA: Whilst quite manly, I didn't go with Manuel Secondaries for a couple of reasons: I personally find that Fire Prevention allows me to do more damage than the extra firepower that Man Secs gives, simply because I tend to die less quickly (the theory that most players - and secondaries - always aim centre mass seems correct, so reducing the number of fire locations by 25% has a rather greater effect than the percentage would suggest). If you're a bit dopey i.e. me, having automatic secondaries provides a really useful warning system that someone you may have missed is sneaking around inside (say) about 10 km of you. I haven't used MA much against real people, but my German BBs run the same build (yes, it's sub-optimal, but it's more fun) and they've had much more diverse use, including Randoms and Ops, so that's where most of my viewpoint actually comes from. BTW I do tend to agree with the sentiment earlier that your first 19 pointer shouldn't really go on a specialised premium (like MA), although in the specific case of MA, you might make an exception if a) you also have the Black variant and/or b) you also have Georgia - either of those situations give you the same 2 x first win bonus case that a 19 pointer in a silver ship, with associated conventional premium, gives. (The captain on my MA(s) is actually a repurposed Gearing captain, post free point reassignment - after I got Ovenchicken to 19 points, a standard 19 pointer for Gearing seemed a bit redundant...)

Yes, assuming there is a reasonable overlap between ideal captain skills for the two ships. For example, the US silver DDs generally all work with the same captain build (with some choice for Gearing) and so do the vast majority of the premiums, so you can easily run a Benson captain (say) on just about any premium from Monaghan/Hill onwards. On the other hand, there are some premiums in the game that - to get the best out of - you really want a specialised captain; MA and Belfast are a couple of examples that spring to mind (due to secondary build, and IFHE, respectively).

Do people think SE is worthwhile on RN cruisers? I've tended to only run it on DD captains so far, but (apart from a couple of BB captains that kind of happened by accident) they're the only high pointers I have by and large...

That ambush was glorious!

This is why I stopped at R10; after that point, the whole thing becomes even less fun - very few rewards are worth *that much* aggravation. By comparison, the Sprints have tended to be verging on fun, at least some of the time.