invicta2012

Light cruisers are awful, though. Possibly the most fragile, difficult to learn, limited and frustrating class of ships in the game. It's easy to see why people like the French DDs so much because they perform the support role in a much more engaging way than CLs do... We will probably see a large Italian DD line for the same reason. They are also better learning tools as they allow players to learn about kiting, evasion, ambush play in a ship which isn't constantly losing its citadel to something halfway across the map....but that does mean that many players are not looking to do the classical meta DD things at all.

Doesn't that just say that DDs need to play as teams, rather than lone wolves? Almost every DD I see goes directly to the cap nearest its spawn, which usually means going alone. Not doing this - going to team up with another DD - always provokes a fury of map pinging, karma downvoting and abuse about spotting and yet more often than not it seems to result in +1 cap and -1 enemy DD in the first 3 minutes of a match.

Yes. The last version I saw was rather OP. If they release it as it went to test, buy it - it's the next Belfast.

Aigle does, as the man says. Guepard is also good, but you have to be careful with your positioning and lack the smoke farming ability of her sister. Smoke is key, really - it's why Leander, Perth and HH do better than many equivalent cruisers. Molotov will murder the first few waves but she doesn't like Fuso as much....

They're supposed to give the financial advantages of a Premium account on a per-ship basis. HTH.

I think that the Yashima looks rather dull, in all truth. I would rather that they put the 20inch guns on another hull and preserve the special nature of the Yamato sisters. Perhaps a speedier BC style ship, an IJN Georgia, or a massive tanker, Izumo style, with all the main guns forward.

Clearly the super Yamato is a cash grab for the unwary - biggest gunz!!! Liking the Orkan, although I think the radar/no smoke thing will be tricky to pull off in a slow RN DD.

Aoba and La Gal Gaede and Icarus Fuso and Queen Elizabeth Tier VI is worth dropping some money on Premium Ships, as almost all of the Alternatives to are better or more sensibly arranged (Molotov/Budyonny, Gallant/Icarus, WV 41/New Mexico, Perth/Leander, Ark Royal/ Furious, Aigle/Guepard, De Grasse/LaGal, Warspite/ QE).

Col. Pete's been replaced by a Haiku bot again.... I would agree with the OP. I was playing Raptor Rescue last night and became increasingly appalled at the behaviour of my team mates. I don't normally look up stats (because it shows me how everyone else is better) but I did and, frankly, I was aghast. People with a PR of 0 after 30 games in a New Mexico. People with Tier X ships and an overall average damage of 4000. Most importantly, people who don't seem to understand that Operations are pretty much scripted. It wasn't fun, and I turned the game off and did something else. Happens quite a lot. There seems to be nowhere in the game to play free from bad WG decisions or players who have advanced too far, too fast.

Given that this is a Cruiser event, shouldn't the captain be Henry Harwood? (Harwood was commander of the British cruiser squadron at the Battle of the River Plate, possibly the most famous cruiser action in the history of the RN. During his career he was also captain of both Exeter, Hawkins and London.) PS. HMS Drake. We've told you about this......

Well, I'm not sure it's that good a module. Yes, it hits PA DDs hard, but if it's a French DD that's fired it's torps at you, then then this module's fixed detection range actually makes them harder to spot. (Le Fantasque's torps have a 1.8km base detection, the current TAM1 +20% bonus to torpedo acquisition would make that 2.16km). It also buffs Yudachi (1.9 down to 1.8). :) Personally... I would make it 1.5 - 1.6km guaranteed detection (for secondary builds and brawling BBs who don't care about Concealment) and offer DDs an enhanced TA skill for 3pts (+7kt / - 10% range / +10% reload), moving TAE to a 2 pt skill.

Bear in mind you don't have to play her with the radar/DFAA set up.... hydro and spotter gives you much more flexibility.

Nope. We've gone beyond the point of Git Gud and AIO. No-one has to play a ship class they don't enjoy.... and really, all you're doing by saying that is applauding WG's increasingly bad decsion making. Perhaps you might enjoy the current meta.... it's clear that the numbers of people who do are declining, and accompanying this is a decline in the quality of the people who are playing. Not great for (apparently) the most influential class in the game.

All true. The additional issue is that interactions within the DD class itself are becoming more problematic. Everyone looks at the team list and finds the red ship with radar, with hydro, but increasingly, as I mentioned, there are certain types of DD match up which just aren't going to go well. If you bring a "standard" destroyer, are you going to do well against a Mogador or Kleber, or perhaps Smaland with it's newly buffed 1.8 second reload? So many ships carrying immense damage potential... it forces other, older ships out of their designed playstyle (which wasn't easy to execute in the first place) into something that they're really poor at.

Well, this is what you get when many Destroyer lines are no longer particularly viable or fun to play. The golden rule of Destroyer play was always about spotting while not being spotted but - especially at high Tiers - the penalty for a mistake has never been higher (with CVs, Smolensk et al) and it has never been easier to be spotted. So people don't do those traditional DD things - they YOLO and hope to take out the enemy DD in the 30 seconds before they die, they stay out of spotting range and spam long range torpedoes, or they try and do something else entirely, like chasing the CV. They do these things because they don't know what else to do - it's just what I used to do when I didn't understand the game meta at all. I am entirely serious. Giving DDs the ability to build to be better spotters from a more comfortable range is important. The generalist spotting DD is an endangered species. WG keeps loading higher tiers with ships that have a ludicrously high damage potential and the only way Destroyers can survive is by being given speed and massive HP pools (like the French) or ever-ludicrous amounts of Dakka (like the Brits and the upcoming Europeans). They thought about making the Euro line have more potential for spotting with radar and the like, but short range radar doesn't work at all - it's too easy to counter and leaves the radar DD too vulnerable to a challenge from one of those bigger, faster, shootier ambush DD lines or ultra-dakka Cruisers. All this is fine if the ambush playstyle is what everyone wants; seems quite one-dimensional to me....

In the hands of people who aren't trying to do Secondary based Directive missions?

I think the main problem destroyers have - especially high tier ones - is that the balance between ability to spot and survivability/concealment is properly out of whack. It is almost as if DDs need a special version of the Target Acquisition Module which increases the range at which they detect other ships (i.e.reduces the effect of CE captain skills and Concealment modules on other ships).

Lightning is better. Cossack does one heck of a lot of damage if you can get into a gun fight but Lightning has stealth, smoke, AA and the nimbleness to dodge some of the incoming. Radar is what it is, so are Italian cruisers..... If your team isn't smart enough to understand that the firing order is a) enemy DDs and then b) things that specialise in finding and killing friendly DDs, then you're shafted. Few teams do, so DD players suffer as a result.

Indeed. I'll attach it to the memo about the flammability of aircraft carriers... :)

True, but this is all QF ammunition (in British parlance) with combined shell and propellant charge. Not especially prone to detonation. Magazine explosions tend to be the preserve of ships with larger calibre weapons and separate ammunition parts.

Sure about that, old chap? Battle of Jutland, Savo Island, Tassafronga... I think the OP does have a point. One of the things about the RTS gameplay was that it made a player work with limited resources, which is rather more closely related to the actuality of WW2 than the current platform. And yes, I get the fact that this isn't a simulator, but this is a game which makes much marketing mileage from historic ships and this sets much of the player expectation about the game and gameplay. Throw that away and we have a weak fantasy shooter game instead.

I'm afraid the Hosho CV plague rather spoilt the fun of Tier III so those early French DDs (atypical to the rest of the line) have been overlooked. But the II and III are strong ships (a little too strong, I feel!)

Wows discussion seems to start at Tier V, these days. Fusilier is a strong ship against other surface opponents... too strong, really, with that weapon loadout. This nerf means her max HP pool, upgraded, is the same as as the stock Tier IV French DD, which seems OK... although I think that both should end up at 9500 in the long term, the same as Vampire and Valkyrie.

I had to look up when open water stealth firing was removed. 2017, it seems. So long ago that it seems daft to keep going on about it. I think a rudder buff would be more useful overall but armament traverse changes have a similar utility without trespassing on the USP of other ship lines. It's still a strong, fast, heavily gunned destroyer. If it suffers from anything it's from Tier VII MM and that from Tier VIII on the game progression and ship development starts to become fantastical.

Perth's guns actually feel a bit lightweight compared to HH, which can happily blat the citadel of any other Tier VI cruiser. Where HH suffers is having RN squishiness without RN manoeuvrability, which makes dodging tricky in a ship which desperately needs to do it. Perhaps they installed Russian engines along with Russian guns...