Capra76

I'll give you the super-tester's opinion: mtm78, on 13 September 2016 - 06:36 PM, said: Seems that RU forum is the reason of the changes, now my Russian is kinda weak but I'm told there are a lot of people complaining about HE and fires being the worst thing of the game. I want to bet that this big vocal group is mostly driving battleships.

What 2-3 CA? I saw a game today with 1 CA out of 24 ships! Yes, 2-3 CA can wreck a lone YOLO BB pretty quickly if they have the range/maneuverability to avoid return fire, but the moment the BB has any kind of support the situation is reversed.

Some certainly seem to be unable to produce comprehensible text. . I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are you suggesting that all the complaints about torpedo soup didn't result in nerfs to IJN DD? Are you suggesting all the complaints about fire being OP haven't resulted in WG pulling the entire RN CL line? Are you saying the current 5-2-5 game balance is acceptable? Could you elaborate please? Explain that to the CA/CL captains, if you can find any. So how do you think the ecosystem should work? Are BB meant to be an apex-predator that feed on smaller ships and nothing feeds on them? If there is supposed to be some rock-paper-scissors in this game where do BB sit in it? Either way how do you control BB numbers if everyone wants to be the lion and no-body wants to be the zebra.

Do you realize that what you are suggesting is likely to turn the game into a naval themed version of whack-a-mole for the BB players. DD are scary with their torpedoes and not very easy to hit but we do need them to spot for us so let's limit them to 3. BB are the only thing that can really hurt other BB, let's keep their numbers down to 3 as well. CA are soft, easy to hit targets, let's have as many of them as possible. So what you have is a game where the only real threats to BB can easily be countered with a bit of angling and some WSAD usage leaving BB free to stomp on the squishy cruisers without having to worry about taking any damage themselves, at least until all of your allied cruisers have been eliminated and the enemy BB focus their attention on you. I know this isn't what you're asking for, but I have seen other BB specialist players pushing the same agenda and it does feel like that's what they want the game to be.

Ultimately everything can be balanced if WG is prepared to upset BB captains, the problem is that so far they've given in to them every time they ask for nerfs to other classes. BB were meant to be balanced by torpedoes, but they didn't like that so WG destroyed IJN DD. Then they ended up being balanced by fire, but they didn't like that so WG pulled the RN CL line and are trying to turn them into something different. What options are left? They could turn cruiser AP into something that can citadel BB from long range but you can guarantee they won't like that. You can make it almost impossible for BB to hit CA but BB won't like that either.

Well, WG and I disagree with you.

Have you taken a moment to sit back and think about how a first in first out queuing system like that would work, let's look at some numbers. Yesterday according to WT, at tier 8 there were 17,000 BB, 13,500 CA and 8,000 DD. Lets change those numbers a little bit and assume that every minute 16 BB, 12 CA and 8 DD join the queue and see what happens: at the end of the first minute all the cruisers have been allocated to the game (and will always be allocated because they're in the exact proportion needed), only 6 off the BB can be allocated so 10 have to be carried forward to the next minute; at the end of the second minute only 6 of the m1 BB can be allocated, 4 more and all of the m2 BB will have to wait another minute, there are now 20 BB queuing for battle; at the end of the third minute 4 of the m1 BB and 2 of the m2 BB are allocated a game, 14 of the M2 BB and all 16 of the M3 BB will have to wait another minute, there are now 30 BB queuing for battle; you can continue this further if you like but the pattern is clear, the pool of BB waiting for a game increases by 10 BB per minute. So lets now have a look at the effect this has on waiting time: minute 1 BB start to get allocated immediately and are cleared within 2 minutes; minute 2 BB need to wait for minute 1 to clear, they face a wait between 1 and 4 minutes; minute 3 BB need to wait for between 3 and 5 minutes minute 4 BB need to wait between 6 and 8 minutes minute 5 BB need to wait between 8 and 11 minutes; minute 6 BB need to wait between 12 and 14 minutes it should be obvious therefore that the only thing that stops the waiting time escalating to hours is that players eventually get bored, leave the queue and go and do something else (like rage about absurd waiting times on the forum). You may disagree with me, but balancing the game by stopping people playing it seems a poor idea from a business point of view. In any event, WG have stated that they don't want to introduce caps for exactly this reason and I expect them to balance BB/CA numbers in a similar fashion to what they did with IJN DD.

i think it's just a specific bug rather than a change to the game design their talking about.

What you're asking for is balancing by queuing time, which is a terrible idea that ruins the game for all classes: BB and to a lesser extent DD players will face appallingly long waits to get into games, 5, maybe 10 minutes or more, most players I suspect will give up and go do something else. CA/CL will still be getting one-shot killed by BB in the first 2 minutes of a game and be largely unable to do anything except max range HE spam against BB, ruining their game as well. WG have already demonstrated their preferred approach to balancing is to nerf overplayed ships and buff underplayed ones, there are far too many BB in the game and too few CA, so it's time for BB to be nerf-hammered hard. Unleash the mighty Yamato crushing Royal Navy light cruisers.

I think those are the stats for the original version that has been binned, the 9% fire chance is the original proposal and it still seems to have smoke.

The thing to remember about seeing out of smoke is that it's the other side of the mechanic that allows you to see ships while you are outside of their detection range. If you want to block the ability to fire from smoke you also have to change it so that only ships that are within detection range can see other ships, which is going to be a very big change to the game.

Herein lies the problem, it isn't that HE spam, fire or torpedo soup are OP or a problem, its simply that they're a mechanic that BB players (or rather the BB players that infest the RU forums) can whine about without implicitly demanding nerfs of their own line. Maybe if WG gives them a line of cruisers that can seriously hurt them with AP they'd shut up (ok, they wouldn't, but it'd be a useful lesson to them). Smoke me a kipper.............

T5 Minekaze in a T8 battle, OMG! that's terrible, what are the poor top tier BB going to do?

Ok, but the weakness of the armour has been pretty much confirmed by SubOctavian: "Smoke and HE is probably the only way of making light cruisers effective, whereas heavers cruisers have other options" Now there's nothing stopping WG from just upping the armour in the models to whatever is needed (especially with the fictional T9/10), and as far as I know the Town and Crown Colony classes weren't any worse protected than the US/IJN equivalents so I'm actually wondering where the squishyness has come from, maybe this is going to be part of the solution.

I guess it really depends on what they do with the AP, if they give them amazing ballistics, astonishing penetration and change the bounce angles so that they can citadel Yamato through the bow and smack 20,000 HP salvos into her every 5 seconds then HE becomes irrelevant, but somehow I suspect that isn't going to happen.

It varies by tier, tier 1 ships have no fire resistance, tier 10 have 50% resistance, so that shells with a 10% chance of causing a fire only have a 5% chance when fired at a T10. There's a small variation between stock and upgraded ships as well. http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Gunnery_%26_Armor_Penetration

So a permanent 7 km range radar or super hydro-acoustic, it's an idea but I'm not sure what that's going to give you. I doubt the ships are going to be a priority target for torpedo attacks, sailing to 6 km, smoking up and shredding them from all angles with USN 127mm AP might be entertaining but you'll need someone else spotting for you, and against a ship that relies upon concealment that's going to be problematic. It might be slightly useful, but it isn't going to be a special feature to give the line a unique feel and isn't going to change the fact that they're going to be too weakly armoured to be anything but long ranges spammers of one sort or another. Edit, weird, I quoted my own post rather than the one I meant to.

My guess is they'll get HE ammo for DD hunting, but the fire chance will be reduced to something ridiculous like 3% to make them useless as HE spammers, which'll be fine if they can find a way to make them effective against BB with AP, but my guess is that whatever changes they implement it'll still end up bouncing off BB from the kind of distances these thing's will need to shoot from to have any chance to survive.

A Kamikaze torpedo run, against a Bismark, with the manual secondaries perk, with secondaries that can shoot out to 10km, in a fragile, easy to detect not particularly fast ship? Let me know how that works out.

Ok, so I think the lowest it is possible to get these ships detection down to is about 9km and if you can delete a DD with 2 or 3 salvos at that range then you're a better shot than me, realistically it is possible for a DD to survive focus fire at that range for the 30 seconds or so that radar is up, how long do you think an ultra-squishy cruiser will last under that volume of fire (and RN CL will be the absolute number 1 priority target for all)? Now, when your 30 seconds is up you're still spotted, he isn't, good luck. Also, what's in it for the RN CL player? He gets 2 or 3 shots at a DD then if by some miracle he isn't dead his usefulness to the team is over, he can't fight BB, he can't fight other cruisers, what is going to do for the rest of the game? There is also the question of balance. Radar is somewhat balanced in the USN/IJN ships because they have a relatively slow reload and in Atlanta because of its 127/38 guns, in a ship with rapid firing fairly hard hitting guns the balance is broken.

That'd be kind of like an early game DD battle only this time you can't run away, generally the pattern of those is neither DD does much if any damage to the other ship but both get smacked around hard by the rest of the fleet. It's not very much fun for the DD players but at least they can still perform a role even with 20% health, what's a cruiser with 20% health supposed to do for the rest of the game? Also, where does the ship get its damage and XP from? It might perform a valuable service for its team by pressing the Y button and surviving for another 45 seconds but who's going to want to sail a ship that the developers think is unplayable in its current form?

Destroyers at least have speed, size, maneuverability, smoke and stealth to break contact, these cruisers have none of that and citadels as well. Giving them the ability to break contact more easily doesn't really help because the point of these ships is they're meant to be in contact with the enemy, they're not going to be doing stealth torpedo runs against BB so the point of them is firing their guns, a short duration smoke might help you escape the first time but the next time you fire your guns you're focused again but this time your smoke is on cool-down so you die. A short duration smoke might be viable as a small balancing tweak, but it isn't going to transform terrible ships into something playable. The developers don't seem to know what all the cruisers role is either. They're meant to be in game to provide AA support, screen for torpedoes and fight DD, but they can't do any of this in the current BB dominated environment, so instead they sit at maximum range spamming HE against BB who then run to forums and complain about fire being OP. Very unsatisfactory.

Trying to defend cap and CV against 4 ships, both of us screaming for support for the last 5 minutes against an obvious push on the other flank, meanwhile all the BB sail to the other end of the map chasing a lone ship, you eventually die in vain and enemy wins by capping.

True, but even if it's just for a first round of testing 3 days seems an incredibly short period of time for such a huge change, and bad ideas that get included at this stage may well still end up in the game no matter how much testing. There's may be no release date but the developers are going to be under incredible pressure to get the line out as soon as possible, and situations like that almost invariably result in something that's poorly thought through, under-tested and results in huge problems, both in the gaming world and in real life.

The problem is that WG keeps caving in to demands from BB players to stop other classes hurting them whilst allowing them to obliterate everything else.