HaachamaShipping

I heard they contribute AA, but only when it is within the reach of the frontline...

Sorry, didn't notice you. Was kind of stressed out, because I'm about to head out and it was my last game for the evening. Match also wasn't anything special and I only noticed the Neptune, but it was gone before I could open up on it. Had already the AP loaded, as it seemed it had rammed that island from the minimap. Seems you did well, congrats. I'm not too satisfied with my performance. I hope next time we can be on the same team and I'll try to be better by then.

No, I say it dies faster because of smaller hp pool. When you spam a BB in your KGV, unlike with Helena, that thing doesn't struggle vs 50 mm deck. So you deal a good deal raw damage with every salvo and then some fires. The fires are percentage based, but it's not hard to understand that the raw damage from your shells is not percentage based and is more significant in comparison to the smaller Scharnhorst hp pool than the larger Hood hp pool.

I mean, just because you have three ships of the same type in a div doesn't mean you have to play dumb. I had cases even with 2 DD div or 2 BB div where we were the only ones of our class on the team. It's those sad moments where you notice, you gotta split up, but that div doesn't prevent us from doing so. Mostly, it reassures me the other DD/BB in my team isn't braindead.

See, I value for both Ranked and Randoms my good old Harekaze, which has gained in value since WG decided to slap high effective HE dpm on anything that moves. Also they nerfed Akizuki concealment, so I never have to fear getting surprised by that thing anymore.

Most of the time T9 gets thrown into T8-10. and even in T7-9, unless for some reason the cruisers are all T7 (and lol if it's one of the radar premiums), there exist enough of them to have radar. I just found it weird that you embrace a DD that suffers from the same issues as the DD you caution against, despite Shima likely having less issues in most matches, at least with non-radars, because it is faster and keeps its smoke for panic button, while it doesn't need TRB to create torp walls.

I see that too. Many are terrible though.

>Suggests Yuugumo with F3s >Says Shima is problematic cause of high tier and radars. Uhm, what?

If it is illiterate, how can it write forum threads?

Is crap torp boat though.

If the CV were the top carry, it would further up. Yes, your CV was bad. It isn't the main excuse though. Especially given that if the main concern was a CV, sending the Gneisenau over would have helped. In that moment, he was the bigger potato. I don't know their stats. Maybe their overall stats are better. But how well they did in their last x amount of games doesn't matter if they mess in this one. Maybe tired, maybe drunk, maybe just not otherwise on the height of their performance, there are many reasons for errors. Scharnhorst is easier to kill for KGV not because it is easier to burn down, but because it has less hp. KGV gets full pens on the ship with HE. If you play something like Helena, they both are terrible targets, because you basically shatter half the time and it's laughworthy when you see a full Helena salvo do ~700 damage on your German, because of deck armour. Fire itself is percentage-based, they both burn down as fast. KGV though is way easier outclassed by a Gneisenau than a Hood, because Hood can only pummel it with 38 cm full pens till it dies, Gneisenau can rush it down and torp or get the secondaries to go to town. Scharnhorst, like Gneisenau, is best suited against slower ships, which it can rush. It is not good against Hood, except maybe by actually trying to HE spamming it down, if the Hood tries to kite. The main issue of the Hood is the low effective dpm, which translates into needing much longer to kill most T7 BBs. But it needs long to kill a good Hood and it cannot be reliably rushed. Translating that into match impact is harder than with Scharnhorst. After all, not all of them only fight each other. Take Colorado, Scharnhorst kills Colorado far faster than Hood.

Harekaze is a great ship, but for torp attacks is worse than stock Kagero. It's more of a hybrid thus.

Ok, last post about your replay, because its getting offtopic. If you want to argue on afterwards, do it per PM. I hate to say it, but your mistake started with you going right. You spawned left. There were three Gneisenaus already spawned on the right and one Bayern left. The Bayern might have been able to defend against the Fuso (which soon got spotted, so you know it's a mirrored spawn, not inverse), but for safety, I'd have gone there to avoid the situation where the Bayern does potato and nothing else helps keep the flank up. As happened, that Fuso topped the scoreboard. This is where it began and I was skeptical already. But I hoped you'd at least try to leverage that overweight at the right (which is harder, due to Lancaster's Law) and you basically proved why BB divs often fail. BB divs have to either split up, or they need to create the necessary overweight to steamroll things hard. In your case, you went arount the Easternmost island of Trident, then to the top right corner, being nowhere to support the left flank and you managed to kill a bottom tier Iron Duke, a Yorck and that Gneisenau that was useless for most of the game. Frankly, after the C cap was secured, I would have turned the ship around behind the island at C, then steamed west, killing the Iron Duke as it approached, leave the Gneisenau to rot in the corner and reinforce the west while defending also B. Hold the cap advantage you had at the time. Hood, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst all are fast BBs and when top tier need to leverage this advantage in being able to readily reposition. Especially Gneisenau and Hood need to use positioning to make up for their rather bad dpm, while Scharnhorst needs it to make up for pen. I mean, the Gneisenau messed up. But that is related to skill, not ship. It says almost nothing about Hood vs Gneisenau when you can kill someone because they play bad. It's about Scharnhorst and Hood. And Hood's competitiveness against other same tier BBs certainly is something that many would consider relevant when talking about how viable Hood is vs how viable Scharnhorst is.

Frankly, the main RNG element I'd take out of the game is detonations. The rest is within reasonable limits. I find when a Gneisenau for example loses to a Shchors in a gunfight, it's rarely because German RNG dispersion and more because the Gneisenau was crap. RNG mainly decides how much hp is lost in the process. And good players know how to account for it and reduce the impact RNG has on their performance.

I'd say, the best thing would be to nicely point it out what the limitations are, then ask for support for capping. Try find a friendly Cleve, Chapa, Edinburgh or some other supportive cruiser and coordinate with them. As @Xevious_Red pointed out, reverse into the cap carefully and do the spotting (you outspot everything not named Asashio, Kagero or Harekaze), for your cruiser that stays somewhat behind you. If you spot something, your friend can open up on it and give you the edge needed. You might even lay a smoke for them, if there is no decent terrain cover or the terrain cover still leaves them too exposed to shells lobbed over it. Something like a Cleveland can get a lot more use out of that smoke than you with your IJN lolguns. This might also earn you some karma points to keep the balance, as I expect that the ship gets reported a lot. Yes, it is difficult to cap in it, but the main thing is, you have to put in the effort to at least try get it done somehow, because it's the DDs role and your Asashio isn't entirely uncapable of it, when supported. It's the price you pay for being easily able to farm BBs and it's your responsibility to take into consideration when you queue up with your ship, how to be useful to a helpful team and not just gimp them. Because frankly, you are in a ship that noone forced you to play. You decided to risk it in random. It's your fault when you cannot live up to reasonable expectations, which include spotting and capping still. If the team is terrible and won't support you, then you can just play on your own judgement, torp and cap as you see fit. I don't like the ship for the points @T0byJug mentioned, it feels too limited. Also I find the whole concept terrible (but I don't want to rant). Asashio's limitations basically need to be overcome by teamplay, which sadly often is a rarity in randoms, but still, as the Asashio player it is best taken care of by you to initiate the exchange in chat by looking for your most likely support and hooking up with them. It really can make a lot of difference, as this ship certainly is not the kind of solo carry Jack of All Trades that other DDs are (obligatory reference to Harekaze being such a DD).

You don't get my point. It's not about whether Amagi's secondaries are worth it, it's about AP being the gamebreaker. It's not. Case in point, prior to German BBs, secondary Nagato was not that bad. Why? Because yes, that cruiser at 7.5 km (max range that can be achieved) might give you torps (if it actually has any with such range), but in the turn, they eat more damage than with HE. Similarly, any BB that isn't angled towards you is more reliably penned by AP at these ranges. HE secondaries are useful when they can pen (majority of targets Massachusetts and Bismarck meet don't care about that much) and otherwise are nice fire starters for when you have a few minutes to barbeque that angled ship. Is it reliable to have aP secondaries? No. But neither are HE secondaries on most ships, as only Kurfürst and Gneisenau can basically select targets with impunity and expect secondaries to be able to do the job on a cruiser or DD in due time, with Massachusetts being able to do it with DDs and light cruisers. But suppose Bismarck's secondaries would fire AP, you would basically see a difference only in two cases: T7 and lower DDs eat less damage if they angle (otherwise they get wrecked harder though) and if the engagement is drawn out over time. But for short engagements were fires are too slow, AP isn't really much worse than HE from T6 up. If a cruiser rushes you, the dpm on the 15 cm guns is laughable and the rest doesn't do any real damage except the occasional superstructure shot. However, the Amagi sucks as a secondary platform in most other areas compared to Germans, that is the main reason secondaries aren't worth it. I wish there'd be a IJN premium for secondaries though that isn't T2 Misaka. I like my Kii. Amagi is great, but I sold it to get credits for Yamato. Kii is kind of slightly less firepower (reload and accuracy), but it still works fine. AA and torps are hilarious when you get to use them. And it looks so beautiful. Honestly, I almost never take PM, taking PT instead. Might do it in DDs that aren't IJN DDs. But in general, even for BBs, I prefer seeing how many target me, just because it gives me an indicator of how many unspotted ships I have to care about, whether I'm getting attention or not and so on. For DDs, it mostly tells me whether I get the attention that necessitates popping smoke or whether I can actually gunboat around or just wait till I'm out of detection range, because people seem to not care. Also, as Flamu pointed out often (and people may think about him whatever they want, he has a point with this), it can help with predicting incoming torpedoes. It might be that enemies keep torpedoes selected to not give it away, so one has to still be careful, but when the indicatoor jumps around, false positives are rare in my experience.

I use the captain on Hindenburg, PE and HSF Graf Spee. It actually is my original Graf Spee captain (had no other cruiser captain with SI), so it now isn't optimal for either of the ships. EL is utterly worthless on Graf Spee and I have EM for the Spee turrets, which is maybe not the best pick on the others... or even the Spee. I'll switch it out next CB season for more useful skills. I reckon the options for both Hindenburg and Eugen are pretty much the same: Generalist build: PT, AR, SI, CE, DE, EL, then AFT if you run defAA, if you run hydro, just take JoAT and DCCA, PM and IFA. Honestly, towards the end, you really can take whatever. For CB, I'd take BoS over the three 1 pt skills. AA-heavy build: PT, AR, SI, CE, AFT, BFT, EL, DCCA. Manual AA on Hindenburg is worth less due to the main AA being on 57 mm guns, on Eugen you really don't want to put all your eggs into the AA basket, because it's not even the best AA ship. Ok, after playing some more Hipper yesterday, I'm just going to flat out say, it there are better ways to spend 28 Euros (potentially including an evening at the local bar). Frankly, before buying this ship, anyone should ask themselves: Are you buying this ship for top tier performance? Please don't. If this ship is your Ranked pick, maybe, but even for Ranked, there is better ships. For performance alone, Cleveland, Chapayev have more influence, as has any DD. Loyang is cheaper. For randoms, T8 cruisers are not performers. And of the T8 premium cruisers, Atago deals with T10 better than Prinz Eugen. Its deck armour is not overmatched by T10 BBs and the Eugen sides aren't going to hold up vs T10 either. Prinz Eugen's armour basically becomes worthless fast, Atago's concealment stays useful. Atago also can stealth torpedo, which is a valid approach when fighting ships that simply outclass you. Are you buying the ship for credit earning? Prinz Eugen as a T8 premium has no bad credit earning potential, which is enhanced with Adler camo. Too bad it still is a slightly improved Hipper. I rather take out a T8 premium BB or DD and deck it out with signals for credits. Not to mention, buying this ship and the camo is more expensive than buying Hindenburg permacamo, which pays off more. Are you buying this ship for captain training? Elite commander exp is a thing. Are you buying this ship for sentimental reasons? Frankly, that's a reason. Though I'd question paying 40 Euro just for a port queen that is basically a 3D model of a nice ship. Your 40 Euro are discouraging WG from fixing this matchmaking. The Hipper at least has a grind towards the Hindenburg, but Eugen? Yes, it is better than Hipper, but that doesn't say a lot. Hipper is just even worse and painfully so. I'm going to rebuy the Yorck, but with recent buffs to the shells, Yorck is basically a much more comfortable ship, given T8 MM. Yorck cannot bowtank any BB it meets, but Hipper/Eugen won't bowtanks much either vs T10. And that was basically the one thing Hipper/Eugen improved over yorck (now that shells are no longer crap on Yorck). Yorck also has more useful HE. The one thing that really kills Hipper/Eugen as "competitive" ships, imo, is that they are balanced around armour that 75% of the time is just worthless. If you are top tier, you can try to leverage it, but if you are vs T10, it's basically terrible and you really become Prinz Pudding. There is 1 T10 premium BB in the works that Hipper can tank. Take for example Cleveland, which has radar and dpm, every T10 DD will still have to take that ship into consideration and the dpm still works great vs T10 BBs or cruisers. Which brings up the second reason Hipper suffers. The proliferation of high dpm high pen HE designs. Hipper doesn't just suffer from being killable by BBs. Run into any HE-slinging cruiser or some IJN gunboat DD and your armour is basically pointless too (contrast to regular DDs that cannot touch you even with IFHE). I always considered the 10 cm gun buff too strong against cruisers, but fact is, Akizuki or Harekaze can easily ambush you (been there, done that). Either by just smoking up while an ally of their spots you and then gunning you down, or just openly gunboating you if you are already damaged. Best case in such an exchange, you survive on a sliver of your hp. So, Eugen at least can get some hp back from that, but Hipper has real issues. Eugen with full hp and heal will die in a minute to an Akizuki and lacks the dpm to reliably put the Akizuki down with its 13.5 sec reload and terrible HE damage, unless it starts on full hp. Hipper dies in maybe 45 seconds, faster if more shells hit. The safest way of avoiding running into USN CLs or IJN DDs HE dpming you into the ground obviously is to stay at range, but that kind of negates much of the AP viability and it totally negates the torps. You could as well play Charles Martel. And I goddamn hate Charles Martel. Prinz Eugen is not a ship I would recommend in the current meta and I don't see it changing anytime soon. The buffs to these two ships helped, but they are still not ships I play except for liking their looks. Frankly, for all the crap T6 MM gets, Graf Spee is a more fun ship and cheaper to get. As an added bonus, every idiot BB spams HE these days and you basically cannot tank that ever. It's not exactly the most effectiveway of putting your ship down, but it certainly is frustrating to play against, especially when it messes up your modules. The ships look gorgeous (unless you pay WG even more money to get AL Hipper permacamo to ruin even the looks of the ship), but other than that... I mean, I still think that my earlier statements on how to best play the ships holds kinda true, just that even then you lack competitive edge. And it's hilarious when people complain about HE spam when playing BBs (especially German BBs, which have all the means to survive the high dpm the longest, when your cruiser just straightup dies to it, same with AP bombs and deep water torps, which can screw Hipper/Eugen over (though at least you can guard against one of the two by making yourself almost defenseless against the other).

I still have to find a ship to put that cat on, but when I do, it gets the cat flag. Sadly it won't be the Harekaze with cat camo, because I sure as hell am not training that 6 pt cat up to where it needs to be for the ship to shine. And I got a 19 pt HSF captain already on it... Purrfürst flag.

I'd recommend bog standard BB survivability build. So, PT/PM (up to personal preference), EM, SI, CE, FP, BoS, AR. The secondaries aren't special and neither is the AA. If you do end in a CV match, look for some cruisers you can accompany, it's more useful than any captain skills against a competent CV. The only reason to build into AFT is if you share the captain with Kii and/or Mikasa, in which case sacrifice FP for it. CE is better because Amagi is way more flexible once it gets Concealment mod and CE and can actually try to get away out of detection or move around without being seen. FP is helpful, but as the ship is mainly 32 mm plating, the majority of damage from HE spam comes upfront, not in form of fires and you will have to disengage sooner or later anyway so you can put the fires out and stop losing hp to shelling, else you just die (in contrast to say Bismarck, which will lose much more to fires than direct HE spam usually, so FP increases tankiness by a lot). The main killer is MM and the range difference between Amagi and Germans. Amagi actually has turtleback armour (just not on German levels, Amagi gets citadelled relatively easily at range, but not at short range, it's what many lament about Kii which has worse turtleback that is basically not functional) and secondary AP at these ranges and tiers is not that bad. Thing is, on Bismarck, only the 15 cm guns do meaningful damage, on Massachusetts, the 127 mm guns need IFHE to do meaningful damage, most of the time they'd just be setting fires at best. Which means, sure, if someone just stays there in your secondary aura for prolonged periods, they just burn down. AP secondaries don't suffer from only 1/6 pen and basically can pen most things that aren't angled. Which means, yes, if someone angles towards you, the damage falls flat, but if they don't, they might actualy still eat damage where they wouldn't if the guns shot HE. That is not to say that it is worth speccing into these secondaries, because the return still is crap, but if Nagato had Amagi levels of cit protection and wouldn't share its tier with torp armed 32 knot Gneisenau, the AP secondaries wouldn't be that terrible for brawling builds as it can basically rake BB sides and citpen cruisers that get too close and careless. I ran secondary Yamato for entertainment and testing and the AP secondaries do basically as much as HE secondaries against ships the HE can pen, but outclass HE the moment you run into ships that the HE just cannot pen. Also, after running secondary builds on low tier ships, HE secondaries at lower tiers are worth a lot more, because at T5 and lower HE just pens everything even without IFHE. Obviously though, if you turn your cruiser anything close to paralel to a low tier AP secondary spec, you're dead. Well, ok, Omaha (and clones) can be citpenned through the bow too. On Amagi though, it really isn't worth any investment, even though top tier Amagi can regularly end up in range.Lulzily enough, it is more valid to build for IFHE secondary Kii, given you basically got an Akizuki per side and torps. Not that Kii is very amazing in brawls with a vulnerable citadel though.

Looking at the stats in wiki, the AA is insane, rest is decent, hp and reload are pretty good too, firepower and torp stat still are not even on Leander's retrofit. So, I assume the stats themselves are not ludicrous, the stats in combination with DD guns and two barrage skills is?

Whatever floats your boat. Feel free to watch your own replay and watch the left flank collapse. It is unsurprising and your ships don't have 32 knots so you can move onto the enemy base when the centre cap needs defending. And skill is a piss poor evaluation criteria for ship performance. You can excuse anything with enough skill disparity. Truth is, with equal skill certain ships perform better in certain circumstances and some worse and highlighting how potatoes potate doesn't help a ship's case meaningfully. When people evaluate ships based on what skilled players would do, then that has a purpose, because it shows the limitations that are in place and the potential threats that exist. Saying you were once lucky to get away with it is best presented as an anecdote with a disclaimer though, however it tells little about the ship itself.

The Gneisenau lost because it for the most part did not angle sufficiently at the start losing tons of unnecessary hp, it was shot at by two people, by the time you "soloed" it, it was already 18k to your 29k and it failed to respond to maneuvers at all, while it consistently missed a broadside Hood at like 5 km, which isn't Gneisenau accuracy, that's the player being crap. Also, your team lost because two top tier BBs chased a Gneisenau into the top right corner, ignoring that the other flank was getting rolled up and that they should have defended the objective. That Gneisenau had removed itself effectively from the fight, but so did you. Rudder shift is the time it takes to move the rudder from one extreme to the other. Which means to move it fully from a neutral position, you have to take it by half. 2 seconds faster rudder is nice, but it still doesn't make up for it. Also, no Hood is actually slower, losing more speed in a hard turn than Gneisenau and it has the exact same max speed of 32 knots.

You really want my full dissection of the replay? Also, that Gneisenau stopped firing at you for a good time, dueling your team mate instead. And at no point was it a turning contest. Also... you do realise turning radius has a meaning? Rudder shift just means how fast you can start turning. Gneisenau will have its rudder over in 0.65 seconds after Hood, but has a shorter distance to run.

I heard worse than foxes, but good still. Fleets 3 and 4 come after beating chapters 4 and 5, I think. Just click on them and it says.

Same armour layout.