RUSSIANBlAS

How does the Gearing differ other than being a bit more aggressive vs other DD (other than getting squished by Khaba)? I'm literally a few games away from unlocking it finally but I was planning on using it like a Super Fletcher.

USN DDs at T7 onwards are the complete Destroyer. They've got decent torps, good guns for knife fighting, are small so can thread through small gaps (dodge torps). Plus they have the longest lasting smoke in the game and higher tier ones even have Defensive AA so you can give carries the middle finger. Russian DDs are actually more like tiny cruisers. They generally have awful concealment but excellent long range guns to harass larger ships. Finally however, you should pay lower tier ships more respect. They will teach you the game, going up the tree too fast can be a mistake.

In Aslain's mod there is a mod in it called "Sunglasses" I think which dampens the glare you get from sunset battles. I've never had to install it myself however.

That's why I never go to the other cap and always protect my team & go to our natural cap. You can guarantee that 9 times out of 10 someone is going to try and spot/block the cap and usually badly so you can have a +1 DD advantage within minutes potentially. From there on the game can only get easier. Not saying that's a fool proof method but it's usually easier to defend with a team than attack or go it alone so why take the unnecessary risk? And before this thread goes any further Please don't buy Gallant on reading what I've said here. If I thought I could rank out in a ship I already owned I'd have done so and I made a calculation on the Gallant's stats and reviews then decided it was for me.

Actually yeah, that's something that's part of Ranked. The mindset in which you play it at, you simply need to talk to your team and establish a simple plan. Always try and agree on a cap, usually its the nearest one to your spawn. If someone disagrees then try and persuade them otherwise let them yolo, no point starting the abuse as that just ends up annoying everyone. And sometimes the team may want to rush the enemy cap, if so then you might as well join them if you can't make them see things otherwise. An entire team doing something a bit risky is still better than 7 people doing their own things. Of course you have to write off a percentage of people who don't speak English plus the idiots who are there to disagree with others and arrogantly do their own thing to make it 6 vs 7 within 3 mins but that's Ranked. Also consider even if you do everything right, you probably won't win more than 60% of your games. That's 4 out of 10 games every time you click the BATTLE! button that are unwinnable from the start, it's something you'll have to learn to accept and possibly learn how to farm top loser if all is lost. Although even without being top loser, you'll make steady progress if you can win anything beyond 50% ish of your games.

You mean Neptune The T9 and T10 RN Cruisers are so so squishy, the Edinburgh is relatively sturdy in comparison. I do enjoy RN Cruisers but I find I cannot grind them quickly, I'm on the Edinburgh at the moment and it's stressful as hell to play since everyone knows BB calibre AP will ruin your day at any angle, any distance. At least with something like a Russian or IJN Cruiser you know you can shoot, start a fire and slip into stealth again whereas RN Cruisers need to be close and need to be firing constantly at something to do damage.

The way RN BBs are worded on the news site implies they may not arrive in August at all and are still being tested. I imagine WG are having nightmares balancing them as they can't be too weak or too strong plus their release will completely obliterate the MM for weeks or months...

Same old WG not keeping their player base happy and charging huge money for Prem ships. Alabama was the last expensive purchase I made. If everything was 25% (or more) less on release and didn't have insulting £90+ bundles with time locked ship only packages I'd likely own Hood and Enterprise...

It's a bad idea, just like strong Prem ships. We're going to reach a point where Ranked and other unregulated competitive modes will be utterly twisted by people with OP setups. Part of me feels dirty at the thought of taking a 19 point captain Flint into a Ranked season...

DDs have the most utility with speed, smoke, high torp alpha and great spotting potential. Their potential to team play is the highest. Yeah arguably cruisers with radar, hydro, AA etc should be but WG has messed up CV balance and allowed the Cruiser's predator to dominate. You can see this from high level Ranked which is often DDs and BBs only with one Cruiser if you're lucky. A BB offers little team play other than shooting what everyone else is shooting and getting in the way of incoming projectiles...

With "Let the Wookie win" perk?

I actually felt this way until I went nuclear Gallant... In some ways this season is more pure than the others. No radar, no super CVs and no clearly monster ships. I think WG tweaking the BB XP was their misguided way to inject more life into Ranked but instead it just encouraged Fusos sailing into corners whilst heavily angled after the first DD commits suicide. You might be stuck due to being in the lower league late in the season. I've fallen down to 6 on occasion later on and it's utter hell. The meta is markedly different as it's about killing rather than team play which still exists at the top league to the bitter end. Sure it's often not brutality brilliant team play but at least people try.

lol... Yeah was a horrible game. I actually think the Fuso and the Colorado on our team were worse than the Fubuki as they went the other way even though it was clear their entire team went the east side so that side just got out muscled by their focus fire...

Got two SC since the "changes". 50 Valentines camo and 100 Uruboros flags. Can't complain...

The Dunkerque grind missions has really got me going, I always liked this ship but I'm a huge fan now. It really is the successor to the Kongo. Lightly armoured Battlecruiser that's rewarding to those who know where to push. Ranked this season taught me a lot about BB play and Dunkerque is one of those ships that benefits from knowing when to use HE and when to use AP. The two quad turrets on the front make the ship incredibly flexible as you can almost always fire all your guns. Dunker is especially funny in T6 games where other BB have 14" guns and nothing larger, you can bow tank and basically be completely immune to all AP they throw at you. Smart BB will switch to HE but "smart" and "BB" are not words that go together for a lot of the players For captain skills I use Directional Control for the double fighter, helps fight off CV attacks, AR because there's simply no need for EM, SI and CE because I don't like getting nuked by higher tier BB at the start of a game. I'll probably take FP next as Ranked has shown it's an extremely useful skill vs the HE spammers. Either grind the Flower of Steel missions or the Dunkerque only ones because the alternative camo is awesome, take a look at it.

Meh, finally got it. In my Gneisenau of all ships. Two Belfasts were kind enough to give me broadsides, amusingly we had a yolo Minikaze that blamed me for his death in smoke to one of the Belfast... Too bad I already own the WW1 raider boat thing, can confirm all you get is a port slot and a few credits.

Yes DDs both this season and the last. I chose to make myself learn DD in Ranked because I understood it's a spotting, smoking and DD hunting meta. Any ship that does not directly influence that meta is a Ranked leech imo. The way I play DD is I try as hard as I can to make life easier for others on my team, I will root out the DDs, I will smoke folk on my team who deserve it (don't ever ask someone where they want smoke, it's your consumable and you should have the experience to know where to lay it so they don't get torped etc). Quite often this did result in low to no damage games but the star was the reward. BB only players simply do not appreciate the job that smaller ships do for them. The risks, the in game awareness etc...

This mission is utter bull cr@p, there are barely any RN ships around and the two times I did get 30k I got killed shortly after as my team collapsed WG should have put this on ice for a month for the release of RN BB. Would be easy then...

Well I had stalled with BB in the Premier League so I tried to do what I already knew how to. E.g play as a fleet defending DD as I did it pretty well last season with the Sims. I found Farragut not up to the task due to awful concealment and torps. Also found Shino not viable as it felt too long and the guns were sucky ( I know they have high Alpha but when Cruisers out reload you then you know there is a problem). Anshan would have been good if I had something above a 10 point captain. Gallant's concealment and USN style guns made her perfect for my play style, add that to the complimentary 19 point captain being given away then my Season 7 has been literally p2w as 34 games later I was at R1 and looking down at all the folk still grinding... Doesn't make the season p2w as there are plenty of ways to skin the proverbial Ranked Cat!

Molotov is rubbish in Ranked... Or atleast all the ones I've seen at the top level get nuked very quickly if they dare open fire outside of smoke or island cover. The p2w argument will rumble on forever but this season it was definitely a p2w one for me. As Gallant took me to the summit and WG even gave out a rental 19 point Dunkirk captain to use until the end of the season. I've actually never won a Season of Ranked without a Prem ship. Atago, Sims and Gallant... I don't pretend to be a good player, I just know how to play to the meta and use what advantages I can obtain. Whether that be via my brain or credit card You can argue that's unfair or unskilled but WG have set out the perimeters of Ranked and I've played within them.

It can be argued the other way!! I've had quite a number of games where I do little to no damage in Ranked but won. Even a handful without firing a single shot. Maybe the DD is the leech? My own stats this season tell a story too. with Warspite its something like 1.7 kills per game and an average damage of 50k+ yet I found it impossible to advance... It's back to that old debate, what stat actually matters? Probably WR and WR alone

As common as BB are in Ranked, I found it impossible to make progress in the Premier League with BBs. You are simply waiting for others to spot and smoke you in order for you to do any meaningful damage. I tried so hard to make the Warspite work too but I had to play DD as I was sick of others not doing their job...

I think people's issues stem from BBs having huge damage dealing potential whilst taking very little risk. Earlier I played a Tirpitz game and got something like 90k damage, I sailed at medium range, had others spot for me, took almost no damage in return and simply peppered everything with AP. It was easy and I dare say after a season of Ranked relaxing... However for a Cruiser or a DD of the same tier as the Tirpitz to do 90k damage you're going to have to take some huge risks, diving in close to torp as a DD, risking BB AP fire as a Cruiser etc

Probably hit that weekly mission that gives 1 mil credits!!

I'm in two minds about this. BBs are incredibly hard to kill and their dispersion isn't the balancing factor as WG intended. The new skills nerfed DE and buffed BB more with Fire Prevention (I've used FP in Ranked and it greatly increases a BB's already huge ability to tank). Most BB players now have learnt to shoot DDs, so as long as they're spotted they can be killed even at medium range. Yet although I'm probably a little above average, I simply cannot win Ranked with a BB. DDs rule the Ranked meta still and probably always will unless WG does something insane to the game balance, even if the smoke nerfs come into play it wouldn't stop DDs being the spotting and torping facilitators. If I had it my way I'd say start with removing the Concealment module for all BB possibly and/or tweaking the CE for the captains. Then seeing how things play out from there. Maybe make BB shells only overpen DDs so you don't get those massive 4k+ super salvos on a 15k DD, although that may not be possible due to how the armour in the game works.