Verblonde

I think you exaggerate: there is an extraordinarily vocal section of the forum denizens who dislike the new CVs; however, the dramatic increase in CV numbers in game is suggestive that - of the overall playerbase - they are a minority.

I tend to try and maintain a buffer of unused slots in the range of twenty to thirty, depending on how actively I'm going up the trees (I'm not very good at the whole selling ships thing, partly in case of another snowflake event, and partly because I'm a bit of a hoarder - I think I just passed 200 ships in port..!). Why choose - get all of them?!

I would urge you to make the effort with randoms - you'll progress a lot faster, and the rewards are generally significantly better (plus, there are some missions that can only be done in randoms). Don't worry too much about WR - especially earlier in one's career in WOWS, a short run of good luck (or bad) can wildly alter your numbers, making them rather meaningless (until your battle count is into the low thousands, perhaps?).

Probably serious: the old iteration of CVs on PC would have been rather difficult to port over to console; the general consensus is that the new version is more suitable (easier to control with controllers, rather than keyboard/mouse etc.). A significant minority of PC players are really not keen on the reworked CVs, in comparison with the old version, so you'll see a lot of ill humour directed at them; they are also still very much a work in progress, so WG will probably be reluctant to release a 'beta' version on console, until they've worked out some more of the kinks on PC (yeah, we're being used as guinea pigs)...

This forum deals with the PC version of the game; there's a good chance that advice for one game won't transfer reliably across to the other. In PC you want anything that improves the concealment of almost all DDs; torp advice varies a bit from ship to ship, and with playstyle preferences...

(emphasis added) I think I'll be sticking to Gearing for the time being then...!

Isn't Somers' Achilles heel that she has no DefAA, and pretty poor basic AA? She'll get her posterior handed to her against any half competent CV, at least as things stand now...

Just for the record: I'll give Ranked a go (at least until it gets dull, so probably around a dozen games), but please do not take my participation as any kind of endorsement of including CVs - I'll be playing *despite* the presence of CVs. FWIW I think they need at least another couple of months (at the present rate) before they might be ready...

Wait for a sale. You imply you're short of port slots - buy more when they're on sale (cheap usually equals 150 doubloons). As others have said, buy something you know will be fun. If you don't have a rampaging premium habit, suggest perhaps getting something that will fulfill multiple uses e.g. captain trainer, useful in Ops, etc. Have a look at AA abilities - some of the current premium DDs (especially) get badly tonked by CVs. Some suggestions, which may be way off - would need to know a bit more about your preferences/aims to be more accurate: Perth (fun, but useless captain trainer), Graf Spee (acquired taste, but not bad for Ops, KM BB trainer?), T-61 (probably OP, great smoke/hydro combo, good captain trainer), Z-39 (BFT doesn't work on guns - I think, otherwise excellent, smoke/hydro again, and you can fit a hydro mod for coal), Sims (decent AA, excellent captain trainer, glorious in Dynamo if it comes back), Haida (great fun, but worthless captain trainer, coal upgrades to smoke/hydro helpful), Okhotnik (glorious torps!), Warspite (classic RN BB, useful for Ops), Leningrad perhaps (obscenely fast, useful torps, useful trainer)...

I have perma-camo on almost all my ships that can mount it, so I'm not short of expendable camo; if I'm grinding a ship, or trying to get missions done (earn silver, xp etc.), I'll swap out the perma-camo for something with better bonuses. I run almost entirely premium consumables too; whether I buy them or not depends on whether I've run out of freebies or not (incidentally, I think WOWS should include the feature from WOT that allows you to buy consumables en mass). Not surprisingly, I run a premium account too - pretty much necessary for a potato to fund all the premium bits!

You may well have met people who haven't yet fully adjusted; whilst a T8 CV is worthy of respect in any of the US DDs I commonly play, I would expect to give the majority at least a run for their money - then again, I have at least 13 point captains in all of them (with BFT), and have at least one AA module mounted i.e. I haven't gone all-in for AA, but am at least partially tooled up. I also know to try and avoid fire from enemy ships when spotted by planes, so dealing with a single-axis threat presents less trouble (and allows more scope to manoeuvre such that a reinforced AA field is facing the planes more often/for longer). With (at time of writing) north of 5.7K battles, I suspect you're being rather modest apropos your own abilities too...

Ping me if I'm about and you fancy a division, although I'm a very long way from being a DD meister, alas...

I haven't been paying enough attention: does anything know if there are likely to be any new T10 coal ships turning up in advance of the next Ranked season? If there aren't, Salem isn't a bad way to get a profitable T10 for 'free', although a lot of people are rather sniffy about her, in comparison to Des Memes... (I don't have an informed opinion, as I only just got Salem, and have no idea yet how to play her)

I dunno - me in a CV would probably result in us losing (even more so than usual)...!

I have voted with my wallet already, and have shiny new(ish) GZ and Enterprise in my port...

I'm not so good on them - not a BB meister. I have both of them, but mine spend their time (generally) mucking about in Coop and Ops...

Okhotnik is hilarious, but the other two DDs are more 'sensible' premiums. BTW if you get Z-39, it's a good idea to put the hydro upgrade on it (for coal - use a coupon if you have one left)...

I'm a DD main, and have found the new CVs to be fun (lower tiers, so far); as far as I can tell, the personality traits that make me enjoy the other classes are the same as those that are making me enjoy CVs... Very few people relish change; each of us has to decide whether we want to adapt to the new CVs though, or give up and do something else instead. That's not to say we can't keep offering our opinions on how the latest incarnation of the game could be improved (you never know, WG might even get drunk and listen for a change), but the fundamental fact of the new CVs doesn't appear to be going anywhere.

Dunno - I'm not seeing her in the Armory (online version); she probably shouldn't be available though, especially given the recent furore...

I would say they're better than that; whilst a good CV will take you to the cleaners (the best you can hope for is to hold him up for a bit), an average DD player can hold their own against an average CV player - you just have to play a bit smarter than the traditional 'rush straight to cap' approach, and manage your AA sensibly. Full disclosure: I've mainly been playing US DDs T7-10 since the rework, so much of my experience is the higher tiers for this stuff.

If you do it from scratch, then yes. I'd suggest focusing as much on one captain as possible, to get them to 19 points; once there, keep playing them such that they produce elite xp that you can use to boost others; the effect then snowballs. If you have lots of ships you want to keep, then buy some ten pointers (for most ships, ten points is arguably the 'minimum' level to be competitive once you get into the +2 MM bracket), or bag them for free from events and Ops. What I've done with a couple of trees is have a 19 pointer on the T10, plus buy a couple of premiums that said captains also work well on; each day that I play, I can then cycle the captain through three+ ships and get the daily first win bonus on each, so maximising elite xp earned. This approach is effective when getting one's first captain(s) to 19 points, and also doesn't require the silver ship to be T10 (it's just that a T10 tends to reward a 19 pointer if you use it in competitive modes etc.). I rather feel the Armory commanders cost rather a lot of coal for what they are - Ironium ones are probably better value at the moment, plus you can get others for free via Ops (they just won't have the special skills that the coal ones do)...

Absolutely. At the low end, Yubari gives low tier CVs a really nasty surprise (I use a 'dakka' DD captain in mine), and Okt Rev is quite worthwhile (pro: captain training for upcoming Russian BBs; con: T5 MM). Higher up, Jean Bart is pretty decent, and it looks like there are others in the pipeline. In my ill-informed opinion: Wichita: premium income and captain training, and not much beyond that (if the T8 allied cruiser Op comes back, it'll be useful for that). MA: glorious secondaries; great fun, but helps to have a specific captain (secondary build, at least to a degree). Hood: over to you @BLUB__BLUB...! From my perspective, she's pretty good for Ops, and looks very pretty in AL camo (but then, I'm a bimbo). GC: OP, probably not available again (except in gambling boxes).

Whilst I'm thoroughly fed up that my IJN torp boats are still largely worthless in the CV meta, I also do approve of consistently high CV numbers in the queue (whilst still thinking that ships with poor AA need some help): With the RTS CVs, there was almost no point is loading a ship for AA; this reduced variety as there were fewer viable builds for each ship, it also meant you got *really* tonked on the rare occasions where you met a decent CV player (as you almost certainly had mostly ignored AA, things like Kidd excepted). Now there is a point to AA builds, which makes choosing what to equip and what to leave behind a more involved and interesting process; it also requires that we learn new ways of doing things. If nothing ever changed, the game would eventually stagnate and get dull; although there are still issues, the new CVs have at least refreshed the game and introduced new things to learn and react to - that's probably healthy.

Any changes will be global changes to mechanics (like the upcoming delay to initial plane launch that's mentioned in the Dev Blog); I think the basic framework is more or less fixed now, so avoiding refunds on premiums requires global changes. Doesn't stop the silver CVs being specifically messed with though; alternatively, ships besides CVs can also be changed...

You've possibly already answered your question a bit further down your post: The US DD line is one of the best to be pushing at the moment: they have (by DD standards) excellent AA, which keeps the newly resurgent CVs from stomping all over you as badly as they might otherwise - at T5 you get access to DefAA (with the second hull), which helps too. From T7, you also get access to the ability to stealth torp, which is a welcome addition. Returning to the question of continuing US cruisers beyond Omaha, @Zigiran's answer covers you pretty well. I would suggest the question to ask yourself is how much do you like torpedoes? If you find them pretty much essential, perhaps give the IJN cruisers a lash for a bit, or maybe focus more on the US DDs, since you're there already (the Germans aren't a bad alternative too); if you like torps as a 'last ditch' defence, perhaps have a look at the Russians - the guns are easier to hit with (much less floaty), but you still explode if sneezed at, and the torps really are short-ranged. I'm pretty pants with cruisers, so I'm not sure how useful my view is, but I tend to think that the US cruisers (BBs too, come to that) are more rewarding once you've learned to shoot straight, as guns are your only option. Whilst you're getting the hang of effective gunnery, torps can be pretty helpful for doing damage in the meantime. Either way, whatever you pick, it'll take a while to master - at time of writing, you're showing 205 battles across all modes; that's very few. That's a good thing too, as it gives you lots of scope for improvement and experimentation. Also, bear in mind, the lower tier ships are very inexpensive, and relatively quick to research, so now is a good time to experiment with as many ship types as possible, as getting to T4 (a good place to pause for a while, as you still have +1MM) won't take long or empty your silver reserves as badly as higher tiers will.