Capra76

What is the source for this confirmation - I can't see anything on the website.

Possibly, but I suspect the EU cultural effect is smaller than the US one, which is suppressing the KM BB numbers on the NA server rather than boosting them on the EU one, we don't for example see the same surge of cultural support for Warspite/Dunkerque. More importantly (since I assume this is in response to the T5 MM thread) you do still see the same sort of BB bubble at T7/8 it's just distributed somewhat differently. Copy and paste from here: http://maplesyrup.sweet.coocan.jp/wows/ranking/index.html

This, plus the fact that all counters to BB have been nerfed to the point of near uselessness means that there's no real incentive to play anything but the 3 BB lines hence everyone eventually arrives at T8 and doesn't bother grinding the other lines. Possible solutions: a really nice T5 premium as a relatively easy mission give-away (but not one from USN/IJN/KM or you could make the BB problem worse); make the T9/10 economy less punishing so there's less incentive to stick at T8, maybe speed up the grind as well; re-balance the game to make cruisers (and maybe even DD) more popular, hence more lines people want to play meaning more games at lower tiers.

Originally I voted yes, but on reflection it won't work. The problem is not the +1 mm at T3/4, especially as far as T5 is concerned, the problem is that there are far more T7/8 games played than there are T3/4. If T5 could meet T3 it really wouldn't make much of a difference, the most popular ship on T3 is Campbeltown with about 7,000 games per week, the most popular ship at T7 is Gneisenau with 53,000 g/w and every silver ship plus some of the premiums is over 7,000. Similarly with T6, you have 18,000 Danae g/w but 80,000 Bismark g/w plus another 60,000 Tirpitz and most of the silver ships are ahead of Danae as well. So the problem isn't the +1 MM, getting the opportunity to seal-club the occasional T3 in a Kongo isn't going to help. The problem is the 200,000+ T7/8 KM BB games dragging every other ship from T5-T10 into their games. I don't know what the solutions is, would moving +1 MM up to T7 work?

It's bad out there today, AFK's every match, I was particularly unimpressed at losing a close game to a single BB when we had a full HP CA and a CV still left.

Possibly a job for a high DPM cruiser? A Minotaur could in theory take it down in 30 seconds. I wonder if the problem is most players don't know how the game mode really works. For example I've just learnt that the surveillance stations have a 15 km spotting range but the forts alone only 5 km, so if you take down the 8,000 hp stations the effective gun range become (I assume) 5 km. I agree with the basic problem though, you're committing significant resources to inflict temporary damage on a target with a far from certain prospect of eventually capturing the zone.

Better guns doesn't mean they're any good though, you're still talking about glacial turn rates, lousy range and lowish rate of fire. They're at best very situational. To me it just feels like the ship doesn't have the tools to do any job, both IJN T5 ships are probably better torpedo boats, the US/RU/KM all have better guns and in some cases better torps, Hatty's left with weak guns, unremarkable torps and not all that great stealth/maneuverability.

Which is unpleasantly like being drunk, and if you want to know what's unpleasant about that ask a glass of water.

There's your problem, after the first 4 minutes of fighting for the cap you become reliant upon the rest of the team doing their job, if the friendly BB are more interested in shelling enemy ships for damage/XP instead of forts then it's pretty much game over for everyone else. Odd that WG are trying to impose teamwork on CA/DD whilst largely removing it from BB..

Can you imagine the BB tears? "Trident D5 missile and thermo-nuclear inferno OP, plx nerf". Serious suggestion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Johnston_(DD-557), as a T8 ship with the Fletcher A hull would be pretty easy to implement and a worthwhile contender as a USN T8 premium.

What is the addition of forts/surveillance stations meant to add to the game other than making it very difficult to capture a zone held by the red team? Why is this addition a good thing?

However the point remains that in addition to vaporizing CA and/or melting them with secondary fire the Bismark also has the ability to hunt DD, i.e. its supposed counter-class.

All the T10 BB captains were unhappy with the old T4 Isokaze captains making them look like idiots.

The ship was probably scuttled by the crew but it's irrelevant, as a fighting ship she had already been destroyed by the RN, if it was scuttled, sunk by torpedoes or spend the next 5 years as an abandoned floating wreck it makes no difference. Yamashiro possibly? But I think the point is a more modern design might have remained serviceable after the torpedo hit and made it back to port, or failing that might've kept the main batteries going long enough to inflict at least some damage on the opposition.

It was designed to fight in a limited war against France and would probably have done well in that role, it wasn't designed to go up against major naval powers that could deploy huge amounts of air power and almost limitless BB as well.

Saw a 14,000 average damage NY on Shards recently who decided to camp behind the island at H6 for the whole game then proceeded to post in chat "idiots" and "I've reported you" - Dunning-Kruger in action. This is beyond potato, this is peeled, cut into long thin strips, fried in oil then dipped in tomato sauce (or mayonnaise if you prefer).

I think the problem is they were designed to fight in a limited war against France and they would probably have been relatively successful in this role since apart from the Dunk's the French didn't really have too much to counter them. The problem of course is the same as for the rest of the KM surface fleet, that they ended up fighting the RN who did have the ships to fight them.

I'll bump this rather than start a new thread, but can anybody explain the Shards map to me: Why do teams spawning south go for the A cap and teams spawning north the C cap? This seems completely backwards to me. Recently I had a game (south) where someone called A and said "islands give us cover" but they just don't, they cut anyone on A off from the rest of their team, limit your mobility and allow uninterrupted fire from the north, I would've thought the obvious play is for cruisers to move onto C with BB pressing B and providing support to C if needed but this rarely seems to happen. Am I missing something?

I think your best bet for a T6+ DD is the Farragut, just because you stand a good chance of coming up against a Bogue. Cleveland maybe a good bet for the cruiser mission as there's still a reasonable number of CV down at T5-7.

You need to look at the reward though, a 12 point captain is something you'd tend to expect to see at around tier 8, suddenly having a bunch of newbies with a high skill captain could be a problem, I mean you could put that captain in your Arizona for a bit and train him relatively quickly for the Sampson with BFT, last stand, vigilance, demo expert and concealment expert, hell I've seen T9 captains without all those skills, at T2 that would be an absolute joke. Also, the current ARP missions include a T8 ship as a prize, do you really think it's a good idea to be suddenly dropping new players into top tier matches?

Not to forget the target acquisition system upgrade that gives you an extra 20% on top for T8+ ships, so your 12 seconds is actually 14.4 seconds, or damn near half way into the run for the Yugumo.

Yes, I know that, but even with 200,000 silver doing 50% of the work it is still 25,500 XP, which is a fair amount of XP to accumulate without a trained captain. Yes, if you have a premium ship or use premium time + flags it isn't the end of the world, but it just seems a fairly worthless reward for such a tricky mission.

I'm curious, the final reward is a 12 point Montana captain, what use is that to anybody? Are there Montana players out there who don't already have at least 12 point captains? Realistically, the reward for this pretty ridiculously hard mission is the opportunity to pay WG 500 gold in return for a not particularly good captain.

Can we please stop talking about how OP KM BB are; if it carries on we might force WG into buffing the other BB lines.