Capra76

The problem I see with this is that they're going to be priority targets for every ship in the game, so things will go bad the moment they're detected by anyone, so the ability to break contact will just mean that they can never do anything in the game.

That would be game-breaking since everyone would still want to sail BB so the only balance in the game would be queue time.

The scary thing is they're not just reworking the line but the entire game meta in 3 days trying to get the RN CL out quickly, if they get this wrong not only could they turn the RN into complete trash, they could make all the existing CA trash as well. It might be better if WG put the RN on indefinite hold and had a fundamental rethink about how the game is supposed to work.

I think this all comes down to a fundamental balance problem in the game, certainly at higher tiers. BB can devastate a CA with one salvo, the only way CA/CL can respond is with the hated HE spam; CA are a somewhat passive counter to DD, they can demolish them under the right circumstances but it's situational and DD can fight back hard; Torpedo DD are a weak counter to BB, the gunboats are more effective but again mainly with HE spam; so the only CA can survive let alone do anything is by sitting at max range, preferably out of detection, trying to set fires on BB. If you take away HE spam BB are going to end up essentially invulnerable to all other classes at which point CA and even DD become worthless and you have nothing but 12 battleships per side. There are 2 ways forward that I can see, either WG reinstate the rock-paper-scissors concept and make DD an incredibly powerful counter to BB, or they can junk it entirely and make CA and BB essentially the same.

But this is where the game is going, they'll be useless compared to other cruisers without magic AP, and with magic AP they'll be game-breaking. I can't see where the middle ground is.

They could be worse than useless. To be even vaguely competitive against BB without HE the developers will have to buff the AP to absolutely absurd level, but if they do that they they could wreck all other cruisers in the game making them the only viable cruiser line. But if the only point of the line is that you're very good at killing yourself then what is the point in playing it? Maybe they'll find some sort of fudge that makes the AP far more potent against BB than CA but, yeah, that's a total re-work of the game mechanics in 3 days. Don't hold your breath.

It seems the pointless mindless speculation has now been confirmed by SubOctavian. The developers seem to have no idea how they're going to make light cruisers effective without being HE spammers, maybe they'll luck out and stumble across a solution that makes them competitive without making other lines/classes unplayable, but I won't hold my breath.

Does no-one else want to take this unique opportunity to wind-up SkyBuck? Can't you think of a single way his idea could be turned into a nerf for CV players? My original point is a genuine idea for discussion, why not make CV rewards based on their performance relative to the opposition CV? After all if both CV kill 5 ships and cause 100k damage what have they actually done for the team? Other ideas, maybe not so serious.

So, reading between the lines, WG have no idea how to make RN cruisers work in the current meta. Best guess is they'll end up as extremely manueverable hyper-accurate long range snipers with incredible AP but terrible (if any) HE. Will they be able to do any meaningful damage to BB? Doubtful. Will they be incredibly dangerous to other cruisers? Maybe. Does the game need a whole line of specialist anti-cruiser ships? Probably not. What scares me is that they are making such radical last minute changes to the line, the ships could either end up as something that exterminates all other cruisers or as complete dogs.

So what are they supposed to do? Have you tried playing Fletcher with the range mod that takes it up to 15km. I have a hard time hitting the water at that range.

Your choice to play strike carrier, and if enemy is doing more damage in his balanced CV than you are in your strike then why should you profit? Hydro has about 5km range, what is the range of your aircraft?

Yes but we all know that fire is OP and needs to be nerfed (so I'm told) so I want to see their reaction when they get what they want and are shredded by invisifired machine-gun AP, if nothing else it'd be a useful tool to bring out whenever they start asking for nerfs, I can imagine the conversation: BB: fire OP, please nerf; WG: how about another RN premium cruiser; BB: buff fire, BUFF FIRE!

Are you saying that a strike load out causes less damage to an enemy team than a balanced or AS load? it's a good incentive for you to spot DD for the team. No but you can have bucket load of credits for sinking the BB.

Nope, any XP gained by a CV damaging an enemy BB/CA/DD could be debited from the XP of the negligent CV captain who allowed it to happen so a CV player would only get XP from shooting down planes or if he caused more damage to the other team than the red CV caused his. Also, I have another idea, perhaps the CV player should pay the repair costs of any ships damaged/sunk by an enemy CV.

Somehow I didn't think you'd like it. What better way to help the team than by stopping the enemy CV causing them damage?

I wondered last night whether you could deduct XP gained by the enemy CV for damage to ships from a CV players score so that, for example, if both CV cause 100k damage each ship gets 0 XP. Obviously the XP system would need to be adjusted to compensate, but would mean that CV's XP was linked to their performance against the other player rather than say 2 full strike Bogue's preying on the other ships without any opposition from fighters. Just an idea, not saying it's a good one, but it might achieve what the OP wants without it being dependent on the rest of the team.

Can you imagine the reaction from the BB players if they started taking 10k damage salvos every 4 seconds from cruisers 15 km away, that would be epic, in fact WG please do this.

FFY

That's the best sort. Edit: What isn't speculation is "In todays twich the developers mentioned that the RN cruiser line will be reworked, possibly getting Speed Boost, Improved Repair Party, better ballistics, orientation to AP, and may even lose HE." Which I think is evidence that something has gone badly wrong and I think we're right to be worried about what might emerge from a rushed last minute redesign of the whole line. Of course if the developers could give us some clues as to what's going on we wouldn't need to speculate.

Agree that speed boost is utterly useless for a cruiser and the fact the idea is even being floated is scary. I don't know how well the repair consumable works with Atago and the T9/10's but they're all heavy cruisers with better armour and bigger guns and WG have limited it to T9/10 which may/may not tell us something. As you say at the moment these things are going to be little more than target practice, unless they can find some kind of magic wand the only consumable that's going to be of any use to them is "RETURN TO PORT".

What's the point of having a witch hunt if you know who the witch is? Burn the witch, BURN IT NOW! Anyway the point is that they've built a line of ships that can only possibly function as HE spammers only to cave in at the last minute to BB players complaints about HE spam. Now they're trying to turn them into what exactly? AP brawlers with no armour? It's going to be a disaster.

I don't really see how a repair party is going to help, what good is repairing a few thousand HP when a single pen from a badly aimed BB salvo wipes it off again in one go. In fact I think a repair party could make the ships even more miserable to play, I mean imagine the scenario, you get hit for 2/3 of your health in the first 2 minutes, run away and spend the next 5 minutes healing back to say 2/3 health, head back into battle and 2 minutes later get vaporized in one salvo, what kind of masochist would play that ship?

But it was your point:

Balancing the line based on the top 1% of players isn't a great idea for the game as a whole. Also bear in mind that Atlanta is T7 so can meet T5 ships, I wonder how she would perform moved up to T10 and given a bit more firepower. Either way the point was the whole line has been designed as a stealthy HE spammer with the option to fire from smoke, now their talking about taking away the smoke and possibly even the HE and turning it into god knows what? An AP spammer with shells too small to penetrate anything even remotely angled? Could the ships be balanced without smoke? Maybe. Could they be balanced without HE? I don't see how. Can WG successfully implement such a radical change to the entire line in 3 days? You be the judge.

Atlanta barely performs at T7 with a player base that is not typical for the average T7 player and is rare enough that a lot of players facing it probably don't understand what it is, can you imagine what it would be like given T10 MM in the hands of the average player?