Capra76

Well done WG and thanks for listening

Perhaps the TK is removed once you do a certain amount of damage to enemy ships and the battles remaining is an estimate based on past performance, if you're doing better than the game expected then the games remaining may reduce faster than you actually play the games. Just a guess, I may be completely wrong. One final thought, if you go onto WarshipsToday and filter your activity for the last 2 weeks you might get a clue as to what has happened.

So, great for finding DD, but without the guns to hit them.

It's the same gun as in the Fletcher, and every other USN DD going back to T5, why would you expect anything different?

Just managed to get the 16th point for my Fletcher captain thanks to the 3x XP event plus a day's premium and every XP flag I have but I really didn't want to play that ship this weekend.

People are shooting at you. But in real life the accuracy of the guns is far worse and you have other officers to control the guns, spot targets and tell you what's going on, SA is a kind of partial stand in for this.

I guess it depends on the ship, I'd say it's essential on the RU destroyers and Farra/Mahan with their terrible concealment, you could possibly do without it on the IJN ships and Benson/Fletcher/Gearing if you've got concealment expert but then radar becomes a problem and aircraft are always a risk.

How much unnecessary work though? An hour? A day? A month? As I said, I'm not a programmer, but it seems an incredibly simple task to me.

But they claim that BoS is the most popular second choice for DD as part of their justification. I'm no programmer, but it doesn't look like a particularly complicated problem to me, so WG are either being lazy or trying to exploit the players.

Not sure that I trust them, I suspect they're including a lot of ultra-noobs who think it looks like a good skill but don't know what they're doing, if WG based their decision on 200+ DD game players I suspect they'd get a very different outcome. It seems to be developing in to a pattern whereby changes in the game end up making popular captain builds either unusable or sub-optimal thus forcing players to use gold to re-spec. First they screwed the IJN DD players with the Torpedo acceleration trap, now their trying to hold all DD players to ransom with a forced re-spec into something they don't want. In outright terms maybe very slightly, in relative terms very definitely not.

The statement "even on destroyers" implies that WG thinks that DD players are choosing BoS, the only way I can see that being true is if they're including all the T2 players who might pick the perk before they've even played a DD game.

Also, when is 0.5.9 likely to come in? I can probably find a spare point on some of my captains but don't want to spend it on BFT until I'm sure this is going to happen as described.

From the "interesting info from RU thread" WG claims: "According to the studies, be it old (before 0.5.3) or new, they conducted before the patch, the most popular tier 1 skill on all classes of ships after Situational Awareness is Basics of Survivability. Even on destroyers, and even on gunboats." I find that very hard to believe, unless the DD in question are lots of total noob players who think 15% is a big number and therefore the best skill and clearly don't know what they're doing. Is that really the best group to base a decision on WG?

I just don't see how BC lines work beyond about T7. At lower tiers, 30 kt BC against 20 kt BB, no problem, once you get to T8 and the BB are close to 30 kt what do you do? Make them faster than the DD, is that sensible? If you keep them down at cruiser level speed (e.g. Baltimore - 32.5) what advantage do they have against almost as fast better armoured ships? And, back to my original point, almost nobody built them after about 1920, so you're talking about 1/2 the line being pure fantasy.

Are there enough BC's to make a line? AFAIK Hood was the last of the RN BC and I find it hard to believe there are even paper designs for tiers 8-10. Is the same not true for other navies? As I understand it the BC was a short lived idea that resulted in a fairly small number of ships between about 1910-20 until the fast battleships took over in the late 30's, can't see how you're going to get even half a line out of that for any navy. Most likely Hood is penciled in as a T7/8 premium at some point in the future.

I'm curious as to why WG think that's a problem. Different ballistics and penetration to the guns before and after, is that a problem? If players can cope with jumping between BB, CA and DD surely any differences in BB main gun performance are going to be tolerable. It's a T8 BB, you're looking at 200+ games before you get up to the T9, by which point you'll probably not even remember what a Nelson is.

The problem with a hard cap on DD numbers is it means a LOT longer waiting times for DD, not an extra 30 seconds but more like 10 minutes or more, think about how a queue works and you'll understand why. Incidentally, according to the stats there are far more BB than DD in high tier games.

Hypothetically, 2 different DD captains, identical build, one is almost ready to take a 5th tier skill, the other has just taken the skill. Captain 1 has 4 skill-points free so can easily drop a single point into BFT and get it refunded as soon as the patch comes in, captain 2 doesn't have any points free so gets landed with virtually useless BoS instead. Captain 1 now has a permanent 10% firepower advantage over captain 2 purely due to the timing of the receipt of his 15th skill point.

Am I the only one who has some serious problems with that video and the tactic in general? First off he tries it against an Atago, that may have worked last year but these days I'd expect the Atago to launch torps into the smoke plus he kills the Atago with torps so all he's actually done is tip off the Atago that there's a DD nearby (and maybe he should not sail in a straight line, say 7km from a DD). Next up, North Carolina, fairly minimal damage and crucially he's not using the weapons that could seriously hurt the BB, namely the torpedoes. After that Zao and Baltimore, first off Balti has radar these days so that would've been suicide, secondly the Zao is the same as the Atago above, launch torps, turn into the smoke and Benson is totally f***ed. I think it's a tactic that worked last year when there were only two CA lines, no radar and players hadn't adapted to it, these days it maybe works against T6/7 USN CA (no torps, no radar) and lower tier SN CA, against anything else it's either suicidal or ineffective.

I don't think you are replying to me, but your post makes it look like you are. Edit: On reflection, I think you have completely misunderstood the point of my post. I am not for one minute suggesting that the IJN BB were bad ships. My post was a response to C_A_T's post suggesting that the fact that certain RN ships were sunk was proof that they weren't very good, my point was that using his own logic you could prove that the entire IJN BB line was terrible. We are then left with an alternative, either the entire IJN is terrible, or his logic is bo11ocks.

And what does that tell us?

Yamato - sunk 7 April 1945 Izumo - never existed in first place Amagi - destroyed by an earthquake before she was launched Nagato - ended up as a floating AA battery before being sunk in Crossroads Fuso - sunk 25 October 1944 Kongo - sunk 21 November 1944 Myogi - never existed Kawachi - sunk 11 July 1918, accident/magazine explosion. Those IJN BB were really s*** weren't they?

Interesting, I didn't know that, presumably KGV comes up to a similar figure as well. Using full load rather that standard displacement seems a slightly odd method IMO, since SD is the weight fully loaded but without fuel or boiler water any differences that FL introduce are only going to be due to fuel/water, so NC gets the same HP as Amagi because it has more than double the sailing range but that really isn't going to help you in a gun battle (unless you run out obviously).

I would've thought there's enough scope to balance the guns so that they perform differently to the Warspite's, being 30 years or so later than the QE's one could very reasonably give them much better range and accuracy, and Warspite is credited with the longest shot in history so it's not as if they were bad guns. Maybe in reality they were not a match for the Iowa but there's enough make-believe in this game to make it viable, after all what's worse, pretending that the guns are better than they were or pretending that the ship could be sunk by something that never left the drawing board? At the end of the day I think it's a commercial decision for WG. if they want it as a premium then T8, if they want a reasonably complete line with one paper ship at the end then T9.

The NC and later (not in the game) South Dakota class were both 35,000 tons; the Amagi is bigger but in comparison is an elderly battle-cruiser perhaps comparable to the Hood. Tirpitz could perhaps be seen as a T9 shoe-horned into T8 for commercial reasons; the way things are laid out the T7's are seem to be the last of the pre-treaty ships whilst the T8's are the treaty ships, since Tirpitz is really post treaty maybe T9 would be more appropriate. Either way I'm not saying weight is the sole determinant of tier, but I am curious why a ship of a similar size and same vintage as the Iowa couldn't be made to work at T9.