HaachamaShipping

How does HE resistance work both ways? It's not HE immunity, but at some point your superstructure runs out of hp. Also, if they only shoot your superstructure you basically only burn in 1-2 places. Compare to Amagi where I can basically hit anywhere on the deck and deal damage and set 3-4 fires without aiming at sections where I don't do damage. It's a straight up advantage. Similarly, no, it's silly to argue "you get as much damage as if you had gotten citadelled". Yes, if I empty a broadside of a Colorado into a Bismarck point blank so 8 out of 8 pen, I might reduce the Bismarck by half its hp. Up to almost 33k damage might be chunked out (subject to damage saturation, 50% repairable) that way, which is like 3 citadels. But if I do that against a NC, I likely will get 3 actual citadels (not subject to damage saturation, 10% repairable) if not more and the rest will still be full pens, at which point it may very well happen that the NC just explodes. It's like people are crying about how Bismarck doesn't have the best T8 survivability just because it's not Magnu-S forcefield and you still can eat some damage and die.

IFHE is not necessary to pen any superstructure. 19 mm gets penned even by DD HE (except the 114 mm guns). But that's not a Bismarck-specific thing. Every BB suffers from that. The difference is that hitting anywhere apart from the superstructure is mostly resulting in shatters, whereas many others (including Amagi) take full pens when all the deck is 32 mm. And sure, it can take 20k from a salvo. What BB doesn't take tons of damage from getting fullpenned? If you angle the ship though the belt is pretty solid and vastly less easy to pen than Amagi's (before autbounce angle) and eating 20k is still far better than ceasing to exist because you got your citadel deck overmatched as can happen on the USN ships or Kii. I find it silly to point out "weaknesses" of a ship that basically universally apply to the class and are only "weaknesses" because the ship doesn't suffer from worse. Like, the only reason you have to farm Bismarck superstructure (til saturation) is because the rest of the hull is pretty much a middle finger to HE spam) and the only reason the ships eats heavy AP salvos is because it doesn't eat worse from cits. It's imo even more questionable than the often-claimed "Bismarck burns well", which basically is just a combination of people not taking FP unlike on other ships and fire damage outscaling direct HE damage whereas on other BBs you lose massive amounts of hp already from the HE shells themselves so fires become more of an afterthought.

Untouchable citadel HE resistant armour scheme hp pool hydro turret traverse Bismarck has more than just good secondaries. And if you ignore the secondaries, you could even add concealment up there. In straight up comparison to Amagi also AA. It's not necessarily the best, but I'd certainly not sell the last decently well-balanced KM BB short.

EM to turn the turrets.

Regardless of how often it happens, the logic always applies. In the cases where it doesn't happen, you are lucky. But that doesn'tt mean you should do it.

"Muh IJN shells too slow for range, but too fast for island camping." "Donskoi railguns can be used behind islands" Please make up your mind. Atago basically is T8 Ibuki. It has a better deck vs Musashi and Yamato, less defensive torp angles, much worse range, much worse reload, similar in most other aspects. Ibuki AA is much better. Frankly, to me, if you replace Mogami with Atago, you basically have a consistent line of progression from T5 to T10 in the IJN CA line and Ibuki basically is settled well inbetween Atago and Zao. Not that Mogami is a bad ship. It just is an outlier.

Izumo gets a buff to 2.0, because they likely realised it gets utterly powercreeped by Musashi. The accuracy with 1.8 is however average and just because WG decided to make Izumo into a very accurate BB doesn't mean its accuracy was crap before. Or are we going to say Alsace was too accurate with French base dispersion and 1.7 sigma and needed the 1.6 sigma to have an average accuracy? I doubt it. As I said before, Ibuki's armour is rather average. It's a step up from the terrible Mogami, as it adds a bit more deck armour and the repair party, though obviously you don't want to unnecessarily tank in this ship. In this sense though, it beats ships like Seattle or Donskoi, which have only 25 mm armour and arguably it beats the Saint Louis which also is at 25 mm. The Buffalo and Roon have better armour, but mostly only vs ships with 38 cm guns, wich in T9/10 are the vast minority. What we can guess from this is that Ibuki pretty much relies on the same recipe as most other T9 cruisers, which is to not get hit in the first place and for that, 35 knots, a responsive rudder and a great concealment help a lot to not just get oneshot. And smoke on Neptune is not a replacement for armour or concealment. As for shell speed, I have no clue at what ranges you are shooting, but I find it pretty decent. Maybe when I go with spotter plane it's hard to hit stuff smaller than a BB, but you don't need that range to fight cruisers or DDs.

Izumo has pretty average accuracy. Ibuki's armour is pretty ok for a T9 cruiser. It's nothing special, but it's also not some Neptune. The only T9 cruisers I'd consider much more armoured are Buffalo, Roon and the supercruisers. As for slow shell speed... What? It's basically the same as Saint Louis, slower than Donskoi and Roon, faster than any other tech tree T9 cruiser. It's a very average shell speed and I really don't see where the problem lies. It's the same ballistics as the IJN 203 mm guns before and only Zao gets faster, but by Ibuki one should be used to these ballistics. I frankly find Ibuki pretty decent. The ship is a decent follow-on from Mogami, being slightly more durable (not by much but noticeable so), getting a bit more base range and the 203 mm rifles don't feel like too much of a downgrade, due to the great accuracy and now somewhat decent RoF. I'd never skip the ship, unless you need to really skip the last hundred thousand exp or so to get a ship for CB immediatly. But it certainly is grindable. You can lolpen bow on Omaha with an Omaha. It's almost comical when you meet an Omaha in Helena and just delete it with a salvo of 15 AP shells through the bow into the citadel.

I mean, if you stay angled and don't rush into 6 km, Hood can beat Scharnhorst. Scharnhorst can't overmatch, Hood can. Hood has vastly more hp. Hood is faster. Hood also has better firing angles and improved pen angles so if Scharnhorst tries to bring 9 guns to bear, it pays the price, while Hood never has to to present enough broadside to worry.

16 inch guns vs 14 inch guns (or 406 mm vs 356 mm in metric). That's the main difference and a significant one. For me it's one reason why I could never get excited over New Mexico and why Colorado was finally actually fun to play. Furutaka?

Tachibana If you get a good enough captain it's pretty powerful, it's cheap and regardless of how CV rework works out, Tachibana doesn't care. Other than that, I'd wait to see how things turn out.

Maybe they got it as an extra ontop of steel?

And this is supposed to be the same class as headbutt loli. Have you seen BB Kaga's skills?

15 hits on DDs would result in 15 overpens and corresponding damage. 15 hits on angled BB could very well result in a grand total of 0 damage. so, well...

It's the German ship that caused the Admiral-class as a response. The German counter to the Admiral-class would be the Ersatz-Yorck.

It's average. I have no clue what people struggled with when the ship came out, but I know it still is reasonably tanky and the speed is ok and noone really works on actively countering that (not that the speed is its greatest asset either). AA always was either god-tier or crap, depending on how much of your AA is alive or dead and how close the CV drops. Nothing changed there.

We recently got a first change with the abolishment of AP secondaries. I would take that as a sign that they are actually on it.

Honestly, I don't consider the difference in power between a well-played Amagi and well-played Bismarck to be great. Bismarck is imo the last truely competitive KM BB, with a good balance overall and no massive weakness except AP DBs. If someone where to ask me whether to get Bismarck or Amagi solely based on which of the two ships to get, to me it'd be a toss-up. In this case though, with circumstances as they are, Amagi is clearly the better choice for a good few reasons. Also, hydro can be used aggressively. Bismarck can do quite a bit of work leading pushes into caps and such vs enemy destroyers with hydro, as DDs have to give way to her. They have a hard time torping the ship and even a Harugumo would struggle to gun it down in time. Hydro is not as offensive as torps, which can decide BB vs BB fights (and nuke the occasional idiot in smaller ships), but with its newly buffed massive range and Bismarck's decent maneuverability (unlike later Germans), it really has a ton of potential for pushes.

Most times, hydro beats torps. Hydro helps get you through torp-infested waters, hydro allows you to get away with positioning and pushes where other BBs would struggle, hydro allows you to counter smoked up targets and allows Bismarck to brawl or bully away DDs, hydro spots around corners, hydro doesn't get destroyed. It's way easier to make a hydro count than to make torps matter. Bismarck certainly is not the "lesser" Tirpitz. It's a more well-rounded BB, which in a high tier meta that does not exactly favour rushing in to brawl is certainly no disadvantage.

The T9 and T10 are pretty poor, but up to T8 they are decent to quite good. Izumo is a decent ship and gets buffed every second patch it seems.

It's good. It's like a more well-balanced Tirpitz. As you have Tirpitz already, I'd say go Amagi. Bismarck isn't bad, but just for the Bismarck experience, no point in getting it when you have Tirpitz.

Myoko and Yorck already have similar armour at T7, so it's not much of a step up. The cruisers that get 27 mm meanwhile at higher stages are typically low dpm and USN don't even have torps. In general, I'm not that much bothered in Nagato or Colorado, but I find the Germans do well and against cruisers are just a tankier Kronshtadt with torps. And while 28 cm guns might suck a bit when a Cleveland can angle and bounce AP, at the very least your ship has 50 mm deck plating, so much of the HE they shoot at you on a charge is negated. And while a Nagato might be pretty decent in dealing with cruisers, BBs become a very existential threat, given they just overmatch you, can angle against your armour and here the Germans have the great equaliser in a set of torps. Obviously, you can apply your big guns for supporting fire and just try to never have to 1v1 intelligent BBs, but that you could also apply to cruisers.

I don't take my Huang He out, because there's a 100% chance I'll face a situation where I'd rather play a Perth or Leander. Meanwhile, with those other ships, yeah, ok, it might not be great, but I can still make a difference. The issue with using Huang He as an example is that you get people like me that dismiss you on the point, because the proper way would be to take a completely average ship, not a ship WG tried to shoehorn into T6 when it could've just been dropped to T5 and been fine.

That's not an issue of T7 or Scharnhorst. Scharnhorst uptiers quite decently and any pen issues vs T9s you'd also have against angled T6s. In all other areas, no, they don't have more armour than you, except in tiny 25 mm sections. But when shot at by a Musashi, your ship is better off than a Lion or Alsace. And firing range... Why fire 28 cm guns at ranges beyond your max range + spotter plane anyway? Maybe it's because Huanghe is not a very good T6 ship? I mean, I could also go the other way and ask, why remove +/-2 MM, it's the only way Giulio Cesare meets a proper challenge. Nitpicking individual ships makes not much sense for general MM discussions.

I find they actually uptier quite well. Unlike most T7 BBs, these two have only a very minor section that is vulnerable 25 mm armour and you can tank far more than, say, a KGV or Nagato thrown into a T9 match. Both ships also are fast, so unlike the likes of Colorado, you don't struggle with that. The main battery isn't exactly great, but adequate. For Gneisenau, 38 cm guns are quite decent, Bismarck one tier higher only adds one more turret and does fine. Secondaries are short-ranged, but if you specced into them, they stay relevant due to 31 mm pen. Scharnhorst meanwhile has maybe some issues making 28 cm guns count vs T8 and T9 cruisers, but Scharnhorst has these issues partially already against T7 ships and T6 BBs. Whether BBs now get 32 mm or 25 mm plating makes little difference. what both of them get which stays relevant on all tiers is torps. Frankly, I find it hard to find a T7 BB that plays as consistent vs all tiers except maybe Hood. A bit of a contrast to Nelson that can go from OP vs T5 to free kill vs Musashi.