Capra76

Biggest difference at higher tiers is possibly the size of the ships, try it in a training room, put a Kongo next to a Yamato or a Aoba against a Zao, they're about twice the size of each other.

Yes, however time and again I see "bb v dd is doomed" trotted out as an argument for something so it's worth pointing out that most players don't view it as a likely scenario, hence why RPF etc isn't a sensible BB choice.

However if players don't run RPF and/or other anti-dd skills in their BB then what does this tell us about the relevance of "lone BB v DD" as an argument?

If you have RPF, bow towards indicated direction and try to press him against a border, or if the match situation is in your favour, run away and win on points.

I'm sensing some aggro, let's lighten the mood a bit:

If CV wants you dead then the only option you have is how long it takes for him to kill you, if you can keep a skilled CV player occupied for 5 minutes or so whilst he could be killing something else on your team then you're probably shifting the WR% 10% or 20% in your favour. And if that sounds like fun and engaging game design, well,.......... insert your own punchline.

Any kind of discussion of the game that ignores the power of CV in expert, or even competent hands is meaningless.

Long games, where you're one of the last 2/3 ships alive, where you can make a difference, where your skill is the difference between victory and defeat, those are the games I live for. And thanks to SkyPox, those games no longer exist, so I mostly don't play any more.

You can't just post raw stats without accounting for differences in the players' profile and think it tells you something, your typical Amalfi player could be completely different to your average Mogami/Cleveland/Hipper player.

My 2p is that this really took off after the IJN DD nerf, previously the Iso/Mine acted as a bit of a skill check to stop really bad players progressing to higher tiers, once they got whacked with the nerf-bat the way was open for potatoes to fail their way to T10. Edit, Found this post from a while back that illustrates the point:

What you need to consider is if those losses are meaningful, which is to say do they stop him contributing to the battle? If the worst case scenario is that you lose enough of X type plane that you need to use Y type for one sortie until the former regenerates/recovers then clearly this has no material effect.

Interesting. Seems that WG make a destinction between "premium" and "special", so anything bought with in-game resources is nerf-able.

It's a premium ship so no nerfs, it'll be pulled from sale instead.

In practice the only way that could happen is if every game became +/-1, not going to happen.

Plus there's the basic problem that the DD population is relatively low and those that remain tend to get themselves killed in the first 5 minutes anyway, so what are you supposed to do when there are no DD to shoot at? Edit: And who the at WG sat down and thought "dd players have it too easy, let's make another line of dedicated DD killers".

One option might be to link it to fires, maybe something like a 1% chance if one fire burns for its full length, rising to 2%, 5% and 10% if there's more than one fire burning at a time. At least it would give the bb players something else to whine about.

Question: if HE spam is an issue, why not play something that doesn't suffer from it?

FTFY.

I get the feeling that "mostly fine" is about to become the new "fun and engaging".

I'd be interested to know what "mostly fine" means. Does it only mean that you're happy with the damage they inflict on others or are you looking at other factors such as survival rates, survival time and the wider effects on the overall game experience (subjective as that may be). All I see is a class that ruins that game experience for everybody else and offers nothing back in return and for me that's mostly not fine.

What should happen, were the game well designed and balanced, is that the fire spammers would draw players from bb into heavy cruisers that can better deal with them thus forming a new equilibrium with maybe 2 or 3 bb per side. Instead what we get is the same old 5 bb every game just being played ever further back.

Played the T5 - T8 on PT and my impressions are not great, the sap ammo can be brutal against dd but the ships struggle to do damage to anything; the dpm is too low to be really effective against cruisers and the lack of fire starting ability makes them virtually powerless against bb. The fact that they're playable on PT tells me that WG is worried about them too. Overall, they feel like another line designed to keep bb players happy above all else.

What do you want to play instead? BB against 9 or 10 DD or DD against 9 or 10 DD?

Happened to me in a Kirov once, one of my first games in that ship, never saw any enemy ships, certainly never fired my guns, 2 minutes in and gg, wp and back to port, never took that boat out in random again. It seems that the baBBies are so busy whining about "spam" that they forget all the times that the spammers explode into a cloud of pixels.

Care to expand?