Capra76

Experienced players are dropping down to T2-4 to grind these, it's not surprising that the result is a total slaughter of the rest of the low tier player who don't have the skill to fight them. Give it a couple of weeks then see how they're doing.

The first shot is the one that counts though, even the dumbest BB driver isn't going to keep sailing in straight lines after the first wave of fish goes past him, and 90 seconds reload isn't that impressive except compared to some of the higher tier IJN ships. Nice. That's a bit of a stretch, you're assuming that after the first wave hits the player will keep sailing in a straight predicable line until the next wave arrives rather than do something sensible, like sail away from the threat making the relatively short range torpedoes useless. Also reload is 90 seconds, premium DCP has an 80 second cool down and even if your target isn't running that you're talking 30 seconds at about 0.4% to 0.5% for 12% - 15% of his total hit pool. And of course flooding, like fire is 100% recoverable. Up to T7 the range only really keeps pace with the increase in the ship detection range making them ineffective against anything moving even slightly away and useless if he has any kind of support, only when Z-23 gets access to the concealment mod and longer range torpedoes do you start to get a really useful window for stealth torpedoing. Balance, is that the idea that battleships should be countered by another class rather than being free to stomp on everything else? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying these ships should be totally OP, it's just the low alpha torpedoes, invisifire nerf, smoke nerf etc makes it feel like a line of ships that the developers want to spend their time fighting other DD and maybe cruisers but which should under no circumstances attempt to damage battleships. Just my 2p worth going off the stats alone, if you think the torpedoes are better than I do then fair enough. I'll play them once the initial rush passes but I have to be honest and say I'm not very excited by the prospect.

Just going off the stats alone it looks like another line designed to keep battleship captains happy: adequate but short range torpedoes with decent enough speed but with the hitting power of a T5 all the way to T10 (yay! land all 8 on a Yamato for 46k damage); nice enough guns but moderate range combined with fairly low speed and poor maneuverability makes it a fairly easy target (with the base ship you're actually inside Bismarck secondary range); AFT looks a must have, so no buffing your fire-starting ability; long range invisifire removed; smoke nerfed to worst in game to prevent invisible fire from there as well alright stealth but nothing special; it just looks to me how battleship captains would design a destroyer, a relatively easy to see, easy to hit target for cruisers to shoot at that presents a minimal threat to anything except other DD. Edit: Off topic, but what is the maximum secondary range of Bismarck? I thought it was about 10 km but I did see one or two people say 13 km, in which case the line is a bit of a joke.

Does this apply to Emerald? She seems to take enormous damage from all angles and only gets the regular 0.5% HP/second heal and since you're usually talking about losing 16,000+ health with double citadel hits you've got a maximum recovery of about 5,000, and the only thing that's a more tempting target than an Emerald is a low HP Emerald. Maybe it's the maps, or maybe it's me, but the moment you get anywhere near the front line in that ship you get deleted. The problem I see with that tactic is it makes you vulnerable to torpedoes, if it's your own smoke cloud then because it's so small it's an incredibly obvious target for torpedoes so to counter that you need to get up to speed quickly, if you're sailing backwards at 7 kn when the warning goes off what do you do? A couple of days ago I did manage to find a Wyoming and NY sailing parallel courses 5 km apart on New Dawn that completely ignored me as I sailed between them and dropped 4 sets of torpedoes into them at point blank range but that's just relying on them being bad players, anyone half decent would've seen me, turned and blasted me out of the water. The thing is rushing BB is the kind of thing that works towards the end of the game when numbers have been thinned out and going bow on against BB doesn't mean giving broadside to something else, hence my frustration with the ship, it feels like you have to spend the first 15 minutes concentrating on staying alive then try to make a crucial contribution at the end.

But they make it feel a whole lot better:

Fun fact: Benson is the 12th most played ship on the server, the eleven more popular ships are all BB.

Don't get me wrong, I'll try to take caps if I can, but the problem is that Emerald isn't a particularly sneaky ship, but is incredibly fragile and is now everybody's number one target, so you need some kind of covered approach or enemies sailing in a different direction. For example, a couple of games ago on Straight I was almost into the C cap at the start of the game when I was spotted, I take a risk to try and make it and bang, 20,000 hp gone in the first 2 minutes of the game, get into the cap, smoke up and manage to take it but in terms of having any further meaningful effect on the game, forget it (and frankly why bother when the potatoes on that team have all sailed past A without any of them trying to take it). Quite how you're supposed to hunt actively hunt DD with T7 BB shooting at you I don't know and in terms of cruisers, that's often 2 per game, both of which die in the first 5 minutes and usually I find BB are about the only targets available to me (DD staying hidden, CA already dead). As I said earlier, in many respects Emerald is the perfect ship for the BB heavy meta having a tool that allows her to survive in T7 games, but it's just not very interesting bouncing volleys of AP off battleships for 495 damage a time then getting smacked for 20,000 the moment you're spotted.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say Emerald isn't actually a bad ship for a T5, the smoke generator is exactly what a T5 cruiser needs to survive in a T7 game (or even a T5 one). The problem I find with it is it's a very boring ship to play. The game-play seems to be load premium smoke, come to a stop at edge of detection range, pop smoke, shoot, wait for smoke to come off cool-down and repeat and only at the end of the match can you then try a torpedo ambush on a BB or maybe go hunting for a DD. It's 15 minutes of chipping away at BB for maybe 20,000 damage then 1 minute of trying to survive long enough to get torpedoes away. Is there another way to play the ship I haven't noticed?

Not sure, you need to get 3 pins to progress at each stage, so assuming that the "play 1 game" mission doesn't give you a pin, that implies that you'll need to complete one of the XP missions at each stage twice, and the time limits look like they're quite tight. [Cynic mode] Is this a grab for premium time? If I buy premium time can I select the same task 3 times and thus complete it once whereas non-premium players have to do it twice? [/cynic mode]

The problem isn't T3/4 MM, the problem is the sheer number of German BB games at T7/8 dragging in everything from T5 - T10 into their matches.

I'll be careful because I think I've had a post deleted on this (nope, posted on the wrong thread). It seems an odd decision to give away a KM reward ship when KM BB numbers are somewhat excessive compared to other lines.

Fun fact #2: There are more German Battleship games played per week than all 3 destroyer lines combined (about 600,000 to 500,000).

Sorry, wrong thread, right one over here: http://forum.worldofwarships.eu/index.php?/topic/56433-discussion-thread-for-some-interesting-info-from-ru/page__st__2160

Erm, given the number of Bismarks in the game that's not really surprising.

Unfortunately I've tried this in Emerald (smoke & hydro) in the training room and confirm that the quoted range is the maximum that can be achieved, with the RN at least hydro does not stack with assured acquisition,

Thinking about it, Ocean might be quite a good map for the epicenter mode, at a minimum it might be useful training for BB captains to teach them that crawling along line A isn't the right thing to do. Perhaps WG could adjust MM so that BB players are forced to play it again and again until the manage to cap the inner zone.

Elenortirion, on 19 December 2016 - 05:31 PM, said: well thats how the hydroacustic search was officially explained long time ago [few patches later they changed the situational awareness for it to use radar icon instead of "spotted by ship" icon] I'm happy to be corrected, can anyone adjudicate?

Bismark alone accounts for 50% more games than any other ship on the server (Tirpitz excepted), Bismark and Tirpitz combined are knocking on the door or 3 x the number of games of any other ship, which has ripple effects on MM throughout the rest of the game.

The 5.6 km gets added to the 2 km assured detection range to give you 7.6 km detection radius, which is more than Kagero's base detection range before camo, mods and captain skills and is also more than the optimum torpedo launch range (good players aim to launch at 7 km, great ones 6 km).

Cro appears to be busy so allow me to jump in. I expect ships of the same class to be of roughly the same strength, if they deviate significantly nerfs/buffs to the new line would seem the simpler solution. Atlanta recently got radar added to it, which significantly increased its performance. KM BB line is now what? > 6 months old, not really a justification for its current performance. Er, yeah. I'd rather the game were about the skill/team-play of the players rather than who decided to bring the most (or least) powerful ship into the game. If it's Esa in his Gremy, that's not a surmountable gap. They're not sold again for a good reason, it's a business decision, it's not going to change. Flint is not OP, it's just the only players that have it are the absolute elite. RN, possibly a bit early to tell, KM, the case appears to be strong. Depends what list and by how much. high tier IJN DD were at the top of the list in games played and got nerfed as a result, Khabravorsk was top on damage and got nerfed, Bismark is by far the most played ship in the game bu tthat's ok.

Don't panic, they're IJN torpedoes, they're unlikely to do any damage.

So, erm, how do you think a cannon fight between a destroyer and battleship is going to end? Maybe, just a thought, play a bit more than 200 games before demanding fundamental re-design of the game (I'd played probably over 500 and it was still somewhat idiotic).

Isn't that what the forum's for?

You have given 2 options: Better players There are 50% more Bismark games played per week than any other ship on the server (and if you mention Tirpitz I'll just laugh), it looks unlikely that this is an elite group of players dragging the stats up and the results of the elite players seem to bear this out. The RN CL are still fairly new to the game, it could be that player-base effects are dragging the stats up, we'll have to wait and see. "Better in the environment today" Translation: they are better ships, which is another way of saying OP, which is kinda the point. Why not? Or are you saying that there should be a continuous power creep with older lines written off as obsolete and a game that consists purely of KM BB/DD and RN CL?

750,000 free XP to be precise, which assuming non-premium time and 1,000 XP average per game equates to 15,000 games, obviously that can be sped up with flags/premium etc but it's still going to be a fairly elite who have that amount of free XP hanging around. Seriously, arguing a ship is balanced with stats better than those a tier higher on the basis of a premium ship is either being deliberately disingenuous or just plain stupid.