Capra76

Have you checked the game-play statistics recently? Outside T9/10 DD represent roughly 15% of games played, even at T9/10 they're still hugely outnumbered by BB.

The two should compliment each other.

Who said solely? What proportion of players do you think choose to take radar over smoke on a RN CL? So why is there a need for change? Have you thought about what is going to replace the smoke meta?

It's a 30% - 40% cut in the duration of smoke for ships who are balanced around firing from smoke, how can that not cause a huge cut in the damage output of those ships?

Yep, the problem I see is this: excluding CV there are 13 full lines in the game and I can't see a convincing reason to sail anything except KM BB, the other 12 lines (but CA/DD especially) might as well not be in the game.

The problem is that the situations where smoke is useful become much less frequent, especially in random, so no matter how good the player is it's still a huge nerf to any ship that's balanced around the smoke consumable. Players will adapt, they will adapt by not playing the ships and switching to either long range HE spammers or yet more BB. I get that the current smoke meta possibly isn't ideal, but what's going to replace it and is that any better?

I don't think the average WoWs player has the patience to wait 2-3 years for them to turn up.

Not official but: https://sea-group.org/?p=3216&lang=en Tuccy appears to confirm it's in testing in the Belfast/MK thread, of course nothing is final until it hits the live client but WG have a history of pushing through terrible ideas so I wouldn't be surprised to see this on PT 0.6.9.

I suspect a lot of BB players have simply ground their through the lower tiers and are now just playing at T8-10.

What percentage BB at T8? If this is it test for a reason, then the reason is that the developers have no ing clue what to do about BB numbers and simply engaging in "displacement activity" instead.

I've seen a couple of players do that, when you check their stats they have maybe 10-20 games in random in total.

I think the air battle is the critical part for 5 stars, not only do you have to shoot down the fighters to complete the secondary task, you need to keep enough of your own alive to go after the subsequent bomber waves.

Competitive is what? 0.0001% of the game? How can WG make changes balanced around that?

. I wouldn't bet on that, smoke-firing was obviously next on the chopping block after the stealth-fire nerf, and whatever OMNI say that hasn't changed. WG have a history of pushing through ideas that are pretty much universally derided as terrible and to be honest I'd be surprised not to see some variant of this on the 0.6.9 PT server.

One quick tip, those 19 pt captains generate elite commander XP, so if you don't have other 19 pt captains it's a nice bonus for playing the scenario.