dasCKD

Well, those ships will likely always be a problem unfortunately. There is just no effective way to make the lower tiers grind easy for the weak players, whilst disincentivize the stronger players from bullying them.

Added strictly for legal defense purposes.

So if I display a player that outperforms their carrier in other ships, will you go away? I can sail a Minotaur up to the enemy team and, if they are sufficiently braindead, have them all dead in minutes. Carriers, on the other hand, physically can't kill a team of twelve in 13 minutes. The reclaiming, supplying, and relaunching time alone makes it impossible. But then, I guess you were never one to shy away from convenient fiction were you? Says the one who is endlessly citing the stats of his opposition to try to justify some inane point. Besides, he's not downplaying your points with ad hominems, you are. Your education has failed you, and for that I am sorry. Genuinely. From the bottom of the bottomless charred black pit that passably serves as my heart. That said, I regret to inform you that 58.12% (Agar's carrier win rates) subtracted by 62.52% (Agar's battleship win rates) is not in fact 10%. It is actually -4.4. It's pretty close though, I could see where you could have made a mistake. Better luck next time. I see your writing is just as sublime and exquisite as your arguments. Your written "Ahhahaha" as masterful of Milton's condemnation of Lucifer in his Magnum Opus. I see why you are so fast to talk down to us. Truly you are the muse of our age. Yes, it's not like carriers get the OPTION of choosing between HE and AP bombs or anything. That would be silly! Which is why battleships, primarily damage dealer and sponge, could carry just as hard as destroyers who close to the entire team depends on for vision, cover, and offensive fleet spearheads. It's not like ships with fundamentally different characteristics will inherently be able to better influence the outcome of the match or anything. But honestly, your childish tirades are barely worth the effort responding to. Worth it only for the nearly sexual glee I get from beating a dead horse. Your arguments are insipid, at least the brief spurts of words that actually qualified as arguments at all, sprinkled like old chicken over the rancid rags of ad hominems and circular nonsense that you allege as proof. You speak about matters you have no knowledge about, regurgitate tired memes without basis, and fall back to childish projection once confronted. A better man would not have bothered with you. Me? I'll make sure I'm here to kick you whilst you're down.

Well, it is a fringe benefit. I am just personally opposed to the fact that the effectiveness of a ship is now so heavily tied to captain skills and how the fact that these skills are available to every single captain regardless of the ship they're staffing makes it nearly impossible to balance the captain skills is in fact one of the main contributing factors to why the game is so badly balanced right now. WG says that they want to force players to choose between one set of skills or another i.e. add AA firepower or add secondary power but it makes it so that a ship could be completely overpowered in one respect whilst a massive liability to the team in another just on the basis of how the captain is set up. I think the best example of this is BFT, a nice skill for destroyers to cheaply augment their firepower. As WG 'nerfed' battleship versatility, they moved the skill to tier 3, making it far more expensive for destroyer captains. Upgrades can be tied to ships instead of captains, and would have prevented this situation. In any type of tactical shooter, there should be a strict limit on how much a player can specialize the player unit and the captain skill throws a spanner in those works. It's not that they are harder to play as much as that they are simply incomplete ships without certain captain skills. I doubt that WG implemented a gunboat destroyer with the stated purpose of being unable to hurt battleships directly at all. There are simply ships that need those skills to even make them function, and that makes playing them without those skills extremely annoying. When I encounter a ship that I can't use a captain I have for, that doesn't compel me to use my captain XP to upgrade them. It compels me to not play that ship at all. The value is that no ship would have to be played before they've reached the combat effectiveness that WG designed them to have, and that captain XP doesn't have to go into making a ship baseline useful and instead can simply be hoarded purely for captain retraining.

So from something that was suggested specifically to help less experienced players and facilitate captain transferred between ships, you somehow drew that I wanted to make the game easier for myself. Despite the fact that I could dispatch 19 pointed captains to just about any premium ship I have access to at my leisure. Right. Look, sunshine. One of the great things about the internet is that when you are bad at something, you can hide it very well and prevent embarrassment. Both to yourself, and to everyone around you in the way of second hand embarrassment. What I'm trying to say is, next time you come up with your internet psychiatrist diagnosis, you might want to keep it to yourself. Just a word of friendly advice.

Where, in my entire writing of that article, did I so much as suggest that?

Which was why, in real life, battleships utterly dominated the seas and annihilated everything whilst destroyers and carriers constantly broke down and were relegated to AA barges and shore bombardment for much of the second World War before being entirely abandoned as an effective weapon system after the conclusion of the war. ...wait. Ships are also half the size they are in the game, and shells take about double the time to hit the target. Also, no convenient little markers above enemy destroyers. Just shadows in the water that could easily be obscured by weather patterns, landmasses, and the darkness of night. No shared spotting either, spotters relay their coordinates through radio which means that hitting a ship is like trying to perform heart surgery with a blindfold on whilst being directed through Skype chat from someone using a satellite phone. It also takes about 1 or 2 ship torpedoes to put anything that wasn't American permanently beneath the waves. Each engagement also has about 20-40 destroyers and submarines to add to all the realistic fun. Airplanes.

Poor RoF and DPM sounds fair.

Though to be honest I'm not objecting to WG giving us free XP for all of the tier X ships we own. I like to hoard after all.

This article will be unstructured. What do you want? I'm trying hard to procrastinate at my internship right now! Honestly, sometimes I feel like none of you appreciate the work I put into not actually doing any work. War gaming continues its inability to maintain company secrets with the smoke screen changes that appears to be created for the sole purpose of driving the entire teamplay meta alongside the entire fleet back to the back lines where most of the battleships have already set up tents and are already breaking out the acetone torches. The smoke nerf, according to WG's propaganda ministers, aims to address the issue of certain ships (mostly battleships) sitting in smoke screens and shooting at ships with impunity. Due to this, they have decided that every gun fired in a smoke screen, depending on their caliber, would deplete the smoke screen. It's not strictly necessary for me to explain this, but I feel compelled to. There's no reason really. When it comes to smoke however, ultimately I do not think I could leave behind my biases. I never had a very high opinion of ships that utilized a combination of smoke and gunfire to do their role within the game. My opinion on this matter is unlikely to make me popular, but it hardly matters. I have almost all of the smoke screen cruisers, and I have different opinions of all of them. Even with that however, I can't help but feel that this is another justification for nerfing things that hurts battleships. When it comes to smoke, they are both responsible for alleviating and exacerbating the camping meta. Each ship can be thought to exert a sphere of influence, a sphere of power that holds most strategically aware players away. The power of the sphere becomes more pronounced closer to the ship of origin, as guns, secondaries, and torpedoes all increase in lethality up close to the enemy ship. As ships closest to the enemy get shot at first, being able to close to range whilst invisible offers massive opportunities for teams to push forwards together. Even once the smoke fades, the team can exploit the far more strategically strong positions that they would not normally have access to due to the fact that they would have far too little health left to burn once they get there. In a way, it temporarily nullifies the sphere of influence of a lot of ships, unless the enemy team has access to a radar suite in the optimum position. A smoke also, in many ways, exerts a nearly unlimited sphere of influence. Anything on the enemy team could theoretically be hiding in a smoke screen, and that anything could have access to radar suites, nearly unlimited AA, and potentially hundreds of guns ready to fire at the first thing that gets spotted. There is a reason most ships steer clear of smoke screens. It's not like there aren't any counters to smoke. There are plenty of counters, and most of them are at least moderately effective. The problem arises however because War Gaming insists on balancing around meta instead of games. Putting it simply, they balance World of Warships like it's Starcraft and not League of Legends. That may be a little confusing, but let's say you're playing as the allies in RA3, and I'm playing as the Japanese. If you sent a scout over and discovered that I was fielding three or four dozen attack helicopters, you would probably begin to stock up on missile buggies and interceptors to stop me. This is a viable tactic: giving incredibly strong units an inherent and insurmountable weakness that makes it possible to counter them and to stop cheesing tactics. This raises the skill of players and mandates variety in army compositions. War Gaming probably wants to see a similar thing in their games. Each ship lines probably takes approximately the same amount of effort to complete, modeling and initial programming accounting for but a tiny fraction of the development period. The problem is the matchmaker. If you see a Minotaur division on the enemy team, you can't decide to field an extra radar ship or two. If you see a tier X carrier on the roster, you can't decide to switch out your hydroacoustic search. War Gaming expects that eventually players will simply switch to the tools that are better suited to dealing with persistent problems, but that is a terrible way to balance. Theoretically, players will gravitate towards a line that can deal with the problems they face. In reality, most of the players who play the game, even those who have played the game since launch, don't even have access to their first tier X yet. I very much doubt that most even have tier 8 ships on most of their lines. Even assuming that players will gravitate towards the correct counter, that theoretically prevents issues that will happen eventually in the future. It won't solve the issues that are happening in the match right then and there. This isn't an RTS player refusing to field AA units against a player who has been cheesing bombers and attack choppers. This is MM screwing a team over. I remember last night in an epicenter match in my Z-52. The results of that match was decided the microsecond the enemy team didn't have access to a Z-52 or a radar cruiser through no fault of any of the players on the enemy team. I'm not certain if WG understands this issue, or if they are under the delusion that this is the issue that will sort it out eventually. There are mechanics in this game that are nearly insurmountable except against a mechanic that instantly annihilates any pull that said mechanic might have on the outcome of the match. In the case of smoke screens, even one laid by a destroyer, an extra ship with the hydroacoustics removes all but the tiniest sting from torpedo destroyers. Their primary weaknesses are carriers and radar searches which is great when those items are available, but their availability is far from guaranteed. The dominance of ships like the Fiji and the Belfast are in fact artifacts of how rare the tools to deal with heavy firepower hidden inside of a smoke screen are in the middle tiers. One thing this does address is the issue of the dominance of divisions. A pair or triplet of Minotaurs could sit inside of a smoke screen that will last the entire game as they chain the entire smoke screen and is more difficult to remove than a terrible idea from Lesta's head without the use of radar and focus fire, something that is only occasionally provided by the matchmaker. This new change would certainly create an organic method of stopping the dominance of multiple Minotaur divisions who can just sit in a ring behind good torpedo cover and entirely shut down a whole flank or a double Minotaur and Des Moines division that could keep any plane, destroyer, cruiser, or battleship from approaching them save for some very accurate into-smoke firing or a radar cruiser. The Des Moines could also be replaced with the Conqueror with a radar suite, which this change could be a preemptive nerf to. If the smoke screen of a long Minotaur is balanced in such a way that their combat effectiveness doesn't change very much if there is only one of them inside of the smoke screen, then I don't see many players complaining too much. It would probably diminish the effectiveness of smoke based divisions, but I think we can all agree that smoke divisions can be rather unfair especially against extremely inexperienced players. Ultimately, my feelings on this change is mixed. On one hand, it does massively discourage team play and extremely aggressive ship action all the while making it harder to slow down enemy pushes using good application of combined arms and tactical manuvers. On the other hand, it might help diminish the dominance of divisions. Smoke screens help a large number of cruisers survive in this meta, but ultimately it is a bandage that is covering the nature of the problem that lurks beneath. Smoke only really helps the cruisers that have them, and very few destroyers are centered around firing from smoke. Whichever way this swings the meta, for once I am not sure.

What about that ship being completely unbalanced? You have a lot of games in your Khabarovsk, OP. 485 to be exact at time of reading. In your games, I'm sure you've gunned down countless enemy destroyers from full or nearly full health to nothing with negligible to no damage to your own ship. You've also probably burned countless other cruisers and battleships without them being able to do any significant damage in return. You have spent a lot of time to get your tier X ships, but the other players have also probably spent just as much time to get theirs. It is not fair to them that, with similar time expended, you get to faceroll them with them having little to no chance of fighting back.

Well, she just soaks up too much damage. It makes sense, considering how lethal that ship is in the correct position. She just seems like one of those ships that are just about impossible to balance.

Which would be fine against 1 battleship, not the 5 or 6 you see in the game right now. The problem is that battleships are simply too good at killing destroyers right now, and stopping their shells from even arming against smaller ships will go a long way to help destroyers, It's not like they don't already have to deal with the batteries of secondaries that lines all battleships.

When a battleship shell hits and penetrates a destroyer for 0 damage, it's usually because the battleship hits an external module like a turret or torpedo tubes. Even a fully saturated superstructure, bow, or stern of a destroyer will take damage from HE. The destroyer midsection also can't be oversaturated. Assuming that all shells it the same place, AP shells will do proportionally the same damage to destroyers as their HE shells. Battleship AP only becomes a problem once they start landing standard penetrations on destroyers.

It will make just as much sense to switch to HE once battleship AP does nothing but superficial damage to destroyers.

You do realize this will mean that a battleship will lose 8-10k of health to every incoming HE salvo from a high tiered cruiser, right?

Yes. Massive targets. You would think that, considering how big that overgrown rusted bathtub is, she would at least carry a lot of planes but NOOOOOPE.

They should just clone the British tree, but give them better armor and HE whilst taking away their smoke.

My greatest ever achievement? Getting a devastating strike with a Kiev, using her secondaries.

I use Clip Studio Paint and a Wacom Intuous.

How is Gallant by the way? I have her, but I'm notoriously bad at judging the effectiveness of destroyers.

I'm actually against that, but for a quite convoluted reason. I might need to write a bigger article explaining myself later. To put it simply though, it exacerbates the gap between weak and strong players.

She is a beautiful carrier, but her total strike weight is far too heavy and her effective strike weight is far too light and dispersed. She seems like another annoying attempt to shoehorn carriers into balancing the battleship for the dev team.

Might have been nice. How do we use quick commands?

She is a beautiful ship, but the drop pattern annoys me. For a CV with such a small hangar, I would have preferred if they gave her a more conventional drop pattern with fewer torpedo planes. A CV with 4/3/0 with 3 torpedo bombers per squad would have been perfectly acceptable instead of this artificially created difficulty.