Capra76

Fair enough, but you don't have any cruisers that are capable of stealth firing except through smoke, perhaps if you did your opinion would change.

This. The other consumables are somewhat peripheral for most ships but RN CL and USN DD are both balanced around their smokes and for any half decent player that means premium smoke, this is a huge and totally unjustified nerf for 2 lines that are already "high skill cap".

I'm not sure why USN DD and RN CL need such an epic nerf.

Let's have a think for a second about ships that have a smoke generator and their rate of fire: USN DD: Nicholas and above, 15+ RPM, 4 second reload - permanently spotted; RN CL: Emerald - Edinburgh 8 RPM, 7.5 second reload, spotted 2/3 of the time (if ripple firing then worse), Neptune/Minotaur, 12/18.8 RPM, permanently spotted; Mikhail Kutzov: 7.5 RPM, 8 second reload, spotted 62.5% of the time (worse with ripple fire, premium ship so possibly exempt or otherwise in receipt of compensating buff); KM DD: 15 RPM, permanently spotted from T2+; VMF DD: 12 RPM, perma-spotted: IJN DD, variable, but no better than 2/3 spotted; did I miss anyone out? Notice a pattern? All the ships with smoke generators have very fast firing small caliber guns and as far as they are concerned a 5 second visibility would be the same as removing firing from smoke completely, in fact with your plan the only ships that could effectively fire from smoke cover would be battleships

5.25" guns if I'm not mistaken, would've been odd to have one ship in the tree armed with those and the rest with 6" guns.

Well, ok, but in that case the entire justification for BB being able to one shot cruisers goes up in smoke, so are you suggesting major buffs to CA v BB?

This, it simply isn't worth 4 points in it's current form. My fear is that once the developers realize that no-one is taking it they either buff it until it becomes game-breaking, or they lower the cost until every man and his dog has it, which is also game-breaking.

Edit your post to include the parts of mine which you deleted, that mostly addresses the question.

Remember that due to the huge popularity of the ship, most of the time, it's going to be matched against other Bismarck's, so that 1.5% difference comes from a relatively small proportion of games when it's matched against something else. If Bismarck was matched against Amagi/NC that difference would be much larger. We're not on the NA/RU/SEA server, and even if we were the Bismarck still retains its advantage in the other areas on those servers.

1.5% WR difference above the Amagi is huge, especially for such a popular ship. Best damage, best number of kills and this is against 2 (AFAIK) very, very good USN/IJN BB. But most importantly of all, the most played ship in the game................................by f***ing miles (or km if you prefer).

This ties in with the possible changes to the commander skills, if Bismarck wants to use its secondary guns to the full it needs to give up at least 2 tier 3 skills from BFT, FF, Vigilance and Superintendent, making it substantially more susceptible to airstrikes, fires, torpedoes or less able to heal damage. Cro-pwr made the point (on the PT/skills thread) that you don't need vigilance on a ship with German hydro, but if that's getting nerfed then maybe you do. Obviously this is all a work in progress and further changes will be made, but I stand by my suggestion that the captain skills re-work is substantially about balancing the KM ships against the other BB in the game.

To be fair they are travelling at not far off twice the speed, but yeah, they're not exactly nimble. It feels to me like these ships were balanced around having better ballistics than USN DD and quite a big/usable stealth fire window only for WG to make a (literally) last minute decision to thrown the game mechanics out of the window and give them gun detection penalties (for the 128 mm!) on a par with if not worse than some battleships, which leaves them as big clumsy torpedo boats with unimpressive low-alpha torpedoes and decent guns they dare not fire except in an emergency. Well done WG, I've no idea how much you spent developing this line but all I can say is I'll continue with the Bayern grind instead.

With premium you get 6 minutes total coverage with a 2 minute cool-down between charges, so there's still a vulnerability to torpedo attacks, SI might be the better choice for the extra heal and hydro charge or BFT for the enhanced AA (especially if full-AA BB become less common resulting in more CV in the game) and buff to the secondaries, but either way you're giving up 2/3 of these to get FF. Maybe it's worth it, maybe it isn't, this is a test after all and for once WG seem to be actually using it for balancing purposes rather than checking for bugs in content that's getting railroaded into the next patch no-matter what.

The thing is that German BB has to give up another very useful skills to get this one (either vigilance, superintendent or BFT). The way I see it there are 3 mainstream BB builds with this tree (2 of which are functionally the same): Full secondary/AA build: any 2 level 1/2 skills for 3 points; and one of FF, BFT, Vig or SI for 6 points total; both AFT plus manuals secondaries/AA for 14 points total; final 5 points split as desired, probably level 2 + 3 skills Survival build: one level 1 skill; High alert, JOAT and EM for 7 points total; FF, BFT (for the AA boost), SI (for the extra heal) and vigilance for 19 points total. So what I think is going on here is that WG are leveling up the IJN/USN brawling abilities to a similar level as the KM whilst discouraging full AA builds to possibly encourage more CV back into the game. The KM will presumably stay with the specialist build so will be more vulnerable to either fire, torpedoes, air strikes or lose a both a heal and a hydro search, at the same time the secondaries will be less effective against survival build BB. I have a problem with this being another case of buff BB, nerf everyone else and if WG want to do this I think they really will be at the point where they need to look again at the inter-class balance, but I can't say I think this particular skill is anymore hand-holding than some others and I can see what WG are trying to do.

I'm unsure on this, it looks like a powerful skill but as a 3 point one taking it implies a significant compromise elsewhere in the build, KM won't take it because surely they must be looking for a full secondary build (could possibly give up vigilance), USN might be willing to give up a full AA build due to low numbers of CV and IJN, dunno? Being optimistic, maybe this is WG giving a one-finger salute to the BBabies: Bbaby: fire is the worst thing ever, please nerf; WG: are you using the firefighters skill? Bbaby: no; WG: go away; then again they've nerfed DE as well so maybe not.

I'd say it's not worth 4 points in its current form, but that's the problem with any skill like this, it's either going to be completely worthless or ludicrously game-breaking, there isn't a middle ground. The problem now is that if it makes it into the game in the current format then it's likely that a patch or two down the line it'll get a huge buff turning it back into what we all fear (the alternative could be to move it down to level 2 but then almost everyone will have it at which point is becomes a slightly different sort of nightmare). My biggest concern at the moment is the two is better skill at level 1, what are other peoples take on this?

Forget KI for a minute, the level one, two is better perk looks game-breaking for DD. Two aircraft contra-rotating 3 km away with vigilance and target acquisition mods are going to be able to spot torpedoes out to what distance? Am I wrong here, is this effectively a 6 minute window of near assured torpedo detection out to what? 6+ km? I suppose the saving grace is that (I think) Bismarck can't get this without losing hydro.

2 hours 10 minutes.

Could just be the MM, there are relatively few complete potatoes at tier 8-10 but no shortage of them at 5-7, Benson's torps aren't any better than Mahan's (bigger bang with the upgrade excepted) so relatively slow and easy to dodge with a bit of proactive maneuvering.

I see this as a buff to bring the USN/IJN BB up to the level of the KM, the Bismarck all need full secondary builds so absolutely must have 2 other 4 point skills so taking a third needs an 18 point captain and requires them to sacrifice some very nice lower tier skills, with so few CV about USN/IJN BB might be tempted to avoid a full AA spec, pick KI and go for a survival build (eg. firefighters, BoS and superintendent). Just a guess.

Go and read the feedback on the changes to bastion mode, overwhelmingly negative and completely ignored.

I'm willing to bet the feedback in the PT thread will be overwhelmingly negative and the skill will make it into the game anyway.

If the ST's are saying it's a terrible idea and it's made it to the PT server then what chance the developers are going to listen to us plebs?

Working link: https://worldofwarships.com/en/news/common/publictest-060/

Not sure about skipping vigilance, the hydro's nice when it's up but that's for 100 seconds with a 3 minute cool-down (and i'm not convinced it's useful enough to justify premium), meanwhile it's a big ponderous ship so vigilance can be useful to avoid blundering into torps fired at someone else. The other thing to remember is that the KM smoke's are the worst in the game so superintendent is less valuable than on other ships. New skill tree is likely coming in the next few weeks so it's probably not worth worrying too much about it at the moment.