Aotearas

You might've done well reading a bit more of my comment. Specifically the third paragraph.

I'll be honest here. If I were to be in the position of the BB that gets hit by friendly fire and burning in three places, I'd let it burn precisely to get the teamdamage reflection to kill you. Three fires is a price I'm more than willing to pay if some jackass from my own team shot at me. Plus with how the damage reflection works, it's unlikely I'd even have to suffer the full duration before he gets sunk by the reflected damage ... and I can heal all that damage back with the damage repair party anyway. In fairness, I'd consider putting out the fires if (and only if) the guy profusely apologizes in teamchat and makes it clear it was a mistake. But if that isn't coming or I catch even a whiff of insincerity ... Same with oblivious people torping from second line. If I get hit by a friendly torpedo and get a flooding, I'll be thinking long and hard if my team absolutely needs me to blow my repair to survive (or if it would even make a difference to repair the friendly flooding only to have to contend with a couple full duration fires from the enemy after my repair is on cooldown) in order to win the game. And if the answer is no, I'll happily flood until I'm either dead or the reflected damage kills the guy who torped from second line. I'm not going to be very forthcoming to repair a such incurred flooding even if he apologizes though ... it's painfully obvious if there's a risk of hitting allied ships when torpedoing and even with longrange torps fired, all it takes is a message in teamchat to warn that torpedoes have been fired in that direction and that they're going to run for a long time. Someone doesn't care to open his eyes or flex his fingers for a couple seconds doesn't get the benefit of the doubt.

Would entirely depend on how this were to be realized by WG. With a skillbased MM that puts you against (and with) roughly equally skilled players instead of just voluntarily checking a box, I'd see myself trying it out for sure. Would probably necessitate the exclusion of divisions to really get the skill metric working though. The one big (like, really BIG) issue I see though is communication. I more or less expect that the more skilled part of the playerbase actively tried to work as a team. Problem with this being the EU server however is that there is always the very real possibility that you get people from all over Europe in a team, some of which aren't very proficient in the English language which puts an instant dent in any attempted team coordination via team chat. I wouldn't mind tougher games against skilled opponents, even though my winrate would inevitably drop a good chunk in such a competitive environment. A good, challenging and tense game is more fun than a high winrate, at least for me. But being able to reliably communicate and coordinate with my team is the bare minimum I'd expect for any sort of competitive randoms ... this is a teambased game after all. On the NA server this would probably work out pretty well, to a slightly elsser extent also on the RU server. But for the EU and SEA server, the language barriers are a series problem to any such undertaking.

H4X!!!

BBQing some forumites That was a friggin' nailbiter. Game started out pretty good, our team managed to sink all three enemy DDs in the starting minutes and only lost one DD in return (Ognevoi got detonated ...). We got a neat cap advantage and I just started doing what the HIV is best at, farming damage on BBs. And farming I did, got a double-Witherer worth of fire damage (and very nearly got the Conqueror, just three or four fire ticks more and he'd been dead). Had actually contemplated just stopping to kite and rush the Conqueror and @Troublemaker_CRO in his Missouri and almost finished turning around to that effect, but I noticed the state of our team (namely the incessent dying of the same) and figured I'd actually have to try to stay alive and keep kiting to ensure our victory. Turns out that was a good decision (though Troublemaker still got me in the end), because the team one by one started to throw their ships away, helped by a generous amount of tenacity from the [OSC] division that wanted to win as hard as my team appeared wanting to lose. Clock saved our victory though. 2,4k base XP, 246k damage done, 125k of that from fires. Oui, oui, I like the Henry. I like that ship a lot!

Just met @Troublemaker_CRO and @TravashRI sailing their Missouris on the red team as I was taking out my HIV for a cruise. That was a nailbiter of a match in the end and I swear had there only been an additional minute on the game clock my team would've managed to throw that game despite the overwhelming advantage we had for the majority of the game. Such as it was though, we won, despite you two guys' best efforts (and our Montana's ...). Left a compliment for each of you, worthy opponents indeed

And so it has begun ...

German captains are efficient. They have exactly the amount of memory needed to be proficient in commanding one specific ship with no inefficient surplus memory.

Fires don't wreck BBs. That fire damage is 100% repairable. You at best inconvenience a BB or chip at it along with a couple other ships. Fires are also RNG dependant and I can tell you playing an Atlanta in a tier IX game with crappy fire RNG isn't very fun, nor overly effective. And I like to believe I'm somewhat decent in my Atlanta. Plus tier VIII+ BBs with 32mm hull armour are largely immune to direct damage save for the superstructure and that gets depleted rather fast so is not much of a source for damage. Guess what you see most in matches at tier VIII or IX ... a metric ton of tier VIII+ BBs. Typically 5 per team. So that's five ships you can barely do any meaningful damage to. You can still do plents damage to cruisers, but only if they let you. At tier VIII+ every CA will outrange you, most will still outrange you even if you use AFT (and that is already assuming you get a much longer firing range than on the Atlanta which reaches a bit over 13km with AFT) and most of them will also have better ballistic properties, so in any form of ranged fight (which you're much more likely to get forced into due to the tier VIII+ map selection) they will wreck you, even with a supposed 25mm hull armour they will win an HE duel as long as they don't stupidly allow you to maul them up close. Anyway, my point is that having the De Grasse simply being a uptiered Atlanta isn't going to work without significantly changing the rest of the ship to make up for the lack of effective firepower and there isn't a whole lot WG can do in that regard. De Grasse didn't have torps, it wasn't exceptionally fast and her tonnage wouldn't mean that much HP. Give it smoke to enhance her survivability and make her easier to play in large, open maps? Flint says hello, hell if we're targeting tier IX then Neptune and Minotaur can happily chime in. To make the De Grasse work as a tier VIII or IX, you'd have to tweak her performance so much it probably wouldn't be playing much like the Atlanta anymore ... and that's really what the Atlanta is all about.

Let's not forget that the "Iron Chef" persona is just that, a routine for the show. Why? Because it brings more audience in. Also, because this thread is now in offtopic and this topic is in serious need of some humour:

But guys, we can't have those poor, poor BBs get hurt that much. Big ships have feelings too. If we get shot, don't we leak oil all the same?

Would probably be tier VIII at the very most and even that is stretching it already beyond feasibility I'd say. Those 127mm guns already need IFHE to do reliable damage against tier VI and VII ships, but with the armour threshold at tier VIII and above you can de facto forget doing any direct damage with such small caliber guns against anything tougher than a DD. For everything else you're entirely reliant on fires after superstructures have gotten saturated. Even if that ship were to get the 1/4 HE pen exception, that's still not enough to penetrate tier VIII BB hulls without also speccing the captain into IFHE, so I really don't see this ship having any place. And you can't really put it at tier VII because for one the Atlanta is already there AND the AA would be even more ludicrous than the Atlanta's. The fact we already have the Atlanta pretty much dooms the 127mm De Grasse into obscurity.

Dayum, BBs monopolizing the top 5. And it's even been the year of the CV with such strong contenders like the GZ Test 1 ... I can only imagine how those popularity statistics would look like in a year of the BB.

Yeah, I made a mistake and added the concealment bonuses together before doing the math (so 11,88 x 0,75) instead of applying them individually ( 11,88 x 0,90 x 0,88 x 0,97). As for the Edinburgh though, Cleveland will have one huge advantage: it has HE, meaning it can still reliably deal damage to heavily angled targets, especially if you have an IFHE captain.

Just swam across @BeauNidl3 and his clanmate @Gamegon in their Fletcher and Missouri respectively on the same team as I was sailing my Yugumo. Was a pretty comprehensive victory, despite half our team lemmingtraining up to A on Okinawa ... AFTER teamchat had somewhat agreed on B+C. Dropped a compliment for each because they played well (and more importantly, where the actual fight was). I actually got reported in that game (pop-up after the game said I was complimented, but my Karma stayed the same). I'd guess one of those lemmings took offence to me stating the obvious. That game was also gave me enough XP to unlock the Shimakaze . Though I won't bother buying her for as long as those awful 20km torpedoes are the stock torpedoes. I refuse to play with those and I won't waste free XP just to get servicable torpedoes on what's more or less a pure torpedoboat. And just now in the next game I played I had @Gojuadorai in his Alsace on my team as I was having my daily Chung Mu. Again an overwhelming victory, though the fight over B was quite a stalemate for some time since Gojuadurai was literally the only ship that supported me me there ... took a while for that match to really get going for me.

That's not what I wanted to hear, mate. What I want to hear is: Unless of course the free XP ship on the horizon that isn't a BB just so happens to be the USS Hull that we're talking about. In that case, proceed as planned.

Maybe instead of increasing her survivability via HP, they're going to give her more armour. Trade endurance for actual tanking. Could be a prototype for a battlecruiser template. Cruiserlike HP, sufficient armour to reliably angle against BBs, main armament filling the gap between CAs and BBs. Would also make sense considering how the community has been asking for battlecruiser lines for quite a while now (and some nations should have enough designs to even fill a complete tech-tree, i.e.: the germans and british very much liked their battlecruisers and even went with different design focus that could make two distinct iterations that play differently). At least that's what I'm hoping for.

Ah, I don't read reddit so I didn't have that information. If that is true, then that's good. Still don't understand why they removed the citadel vulnerability if they understand how it's caused, unless it also negatively effects other parts of the balance, which they haven't alluded to in the statement though ... In other recent news: Very nice. Now we're talking about a much more pliable baseline without having to balance the rest of the ship around a ludicrous health pool.

Assuming they're going to reintroduce the broadside vulnerability is just as much speculation as everyone else's. Fact is they said there's an issue. Fact also is they now understand the issue (they have to in order to remove it). If simply understanding how the citadels came to be was the important part, then they've achieved that already. But they're removing it still. The rest was marketing talk, the usual "we hear you" yadda yadda.

Let's also not forget that the new Cleveland will have absurdly good concealment. With 11,88km surface detectability, a full stealth build can get her surface detactability down to 8,91km which is tied for the best cruiser concealment with the Minotaur if I'm not mistaken. Plus if the CLs get the same radar as the CAs, at tier VIII the Cleveland will get a 8,95km radar range, meaning as soon as she gets spotted by a DD, she can counter radar. And with a DD providing smoke and spotting the Cleveland should be absolutely disgusting with a 5,64km smoke firing detectability. She also gets a free spotter plane in its own slot, so at least as far as bombarding BBs goes, her range should be sufficient. Not going to be of much use shooting other cruisers, let alone DDs at the extended range though.

I didn't want to insert my own opinion but yeah, that's the gist of how I feel too. The only damage model they're going to improve is in favour for potatoes and battleships (because that's the class most popular with potatoes). Yeah, that's why they're instantly removing the issue of BBs taking too much broadside damage ... did we read the same announcement?

I've been working a bit on my anime backlog and finally started 'Kyoukai no Kanata'. Show is pretty neat. Very good animation, nice artstyle, beautiful visuals and the humour is amazing. But that wouldn't be enough for me to go rambling about in here. No, the reason was I just got to episode #6 and it's so stupidly hilarious I could hardly reign myself in from laughter. Absolutely comedy gold, so I'm sharing it for you guys if you need a bit cheering up: Even found the complete episode in solid enough quality with English subtitles. Watch it, it's hilarious!

Well, the typical nomenclature is that builds in alpha and beta have a build 0.X.Y and after coming out of beta get a 1.X.Y ... there's no absolute rule that says it must be so, but as far as common build designations go, that's the norm (and for a good reason, since that way is pretty intuitive).

Translation: We didn't really test the new ballistics very well and it turns out that people showing broadside got wrecked. That was a bug and we're going to have it fixed ASAP. We did notice that many people actually liked the results brought about by the bug as it allowed punishing poor play, we're going to remove it anyway. We are totally, absolutely, pinky-swear going to continue improving the ship damage model and the tweaks are going to be as extensively tested and mindfully implemented as the last time. Translation of the translation: Can't have you punish poor play. But we're totally going to keep improving the damage model ... as long as it doesn't punish potatoes like that recent bug.

That Forrest Sherman-class destroyer with the MCLWGs does actually sound like something absolutely amazing to play. If WG were to put that into the game with the ship stats roughly equal to what the guy wrote up in the link as a tier IX free XP USN DD, I'd throw free XP at the client in obscene amounts. One million free XP? I'll have two. @MrConway, @Tuccy, @Crysantos ... plz gib.