Aotearas

Toss-up between the IJN torpedoboat DDs and the USN CVs. I'm very slow in actually advandcing up the IJN CVs to begin with, but I have eyes and a working brain, so the USN CVs past tier VI are just not worth the effort until the Midway and I'm not going to grind myself through the pain of the Ranger and Lexington against Hiryuus, Kagas, Saipans, Shokakus and Enterprises so I get a barely functional ship with the Essex until the tier X. And IJN torpedoboats ... nope. Torpedoes as primary armament are just too unreliable and too easy to counter. If the split line continues from the Akizuki I'll probably have fun there (Super-Akizuki onegai!), but Shimakaze looks unappealing and the way up to there is meh just the same!

Too bad I hadn't had cleared stage four of the weekly mission at that point yet. Now that I actually need aircraft kills, no CVs getting seeded into my games, let alone ones inattentive enough to let me feed on their airplanes ... But I'm starting to like the Charles Martel as much as I appreciated the Algerie (and I just upgraded from the stock ship to the B hull, don't even have the improved range and guns yet). Very solid allrounder and reliable damage dealer (reliable as far as fire RNG can be trusted to be reliable ... I swear these last weeks my fire RNG is a fraction of the listed fire chance). Not much in the way of anything else, but this thing can kite!

You know, if the RN CLs would get the same treatment as the RN BBs with an underwater citadel that you can only hit in a submarine, I might just switch the smoke for the radar ... But eh, who are we kidding. They're not going to buff a cruiser line if they can make BBs even easier to play yet.

"But be sure to spend ~40 bucks on the new upcoming tier VIII premium IJN BB!" - WG Or the tier V premium RM BB Gulio Cesare ... or the October Revolution tier V premium VMF BB that'll come to the EU server soon™. You see comrade, is no BB overpopulation if BB is only population!

Look, another one who can't be arsed to actually read as little as the opening post.

How about simple observations? Even if a blind shot just happened to get lucky to hit an exposed part of a ship when otherwise the aim was inaccurate, you still see where it hit (assuming the player actually checks his fall of shot and where a hit actually occurred). You see where you hit and violá, that's where the enemy ship is, it's really just that simple. No rocket science involved! And my own personal experience is only there to show how bloody easy it is. I take potshots at smoked up ships all the time if I have nothing better to shoot at (a habit I will soon be forced to unlearn due to BS smoke spotting!). I see others taking potshots at smoked ships all the time. I get (accurately) shot at in smoke myself pretty often. It happens, plenty people do it. Getting the goddamn location of a ship guesstimated to a fine enough degree is easy!

If I can hit a unspotted destroyer (small target) from 10+ km distance in his smoke, I dare say I got the distance down pretty right. For someone who accused others of just wanting to complain (for allegedly no good reason), you're using a whole lot of suppositions to bolster your opinion. Not every ship has railguns that travel in a neatly flat trajectory with little drop where you just fire them across the horizon above the waterlevel and anything in between gets hit ... most ships have considerable arcs to their gunnery and just having a shell intersect with the ship doesn't mean it would've otherwise kept on flying for kilometers before actually hitting water. Nevermind that "single pixel makes >2km difference" argument you tried to pull earlier. It's rather simple, decent players actually can get a very accurate approximation of where a ship is in smoke. Good enough to somewhat safely approach smoked ships without blundering into hydro range ... and this is only talking about the RN CLs that have small margins to begin with. Other cruisers that might use a smoke will have bigger margins, or not have hydro equipped at all. But I digress. I only intended to show the error in your argumentation regarding that point about blundering into hydro range. I have no issues with raised detectability for ships firing in smoke (as long as they're reasonable and for the most part it looks promising). The only thing I'm fundamentally against with the new smoke changes is that ships inside smoke can actually spot other ships by themselves so long as they fired. Teamspotting should be the ONLY way for smoked ships to acquire targets (aside from assured acquisition by proximity, hydro or radar detection), period.

Alright, I'll be doing my König Albert raffle this Thursday. If you haven't applied before that day, you won't be entered into the pool. Again, only those who don't already have the König Albert need apply.

But you still see the shell tracers and the origin of shot ... for plenty people that's already enough to reliably hit them, nevermind knowing halfway accurately how far away they are.

Firstly, yes. Secondly, false. Yes, it is absolutely possible to approximate the position of a smoked ship accurately; not always accurate enough to shoot and hit it in smoke (partially due to the reduced accuracy without the target lock), but the actual location with an error margin of 100-200 ingame meters is entirely possible, if you had ANY reference point to start with (and I will assume that trying to push into a smoke without any reference points (ergo also not knowing which ship you're actually pushing into) is a stupid enough action to not warrant discussing). And the gun bloom appears to be the usual 20 seconds, so if the ship had at any point fired from inside smoke (which gives you a very accurate location to start with) it should be pretty easy to slip into the margin zone without overshooting, again assuming one isn't stupid about it and blazing all ahead flank with a Khaba at ~48 knots into a Minotaur. And no, a single pixel of mouse movement doesn't equal >2km difference. That only holds true when looking at extreme long ranges. Anywhere in actual combat ranges (10-15km)a p ixel makes very little difference and at close ranges (such as when pushing close to a smoke ...), the difference is entirely negligible.

ALL THE KISSES!!! With tongue! And make pictures plz so we can share it in the dirty, edited trick clan thread!

Atlanta has an insanely high skill ceiling and an extremely low skill floor. Given those two characteristics, I'd be veeeery careful trying to buff the ship, because a change that makes the ship work better for the average or bad players might just become blatantly overpowered in the hands of a good player! IF, and only IF any buffs were necessary (which I personally don't think), then better concealment, faster topspeed, or faster acceleration and deceleration would be the only things I'd dare touch (ship parameters that improve the players capability to position oneself correctly). And I wouldn't compare anything to the Belfast, that ship has no right nor need to be able to use the tier VIII upgrades that give it such ludicrously good concealment ON TOP of all the consumables it has ...

Nope, not just you. It's getting increasingly harder to silence that little voice that tells you the game is going down the drain and at this point I don't know how much nonsense changes/additions/BB buffs or whatnot I can take before I finally just uninstall. Hell, even the game itself isn't that much fun anymore now that almost all games are just a BB spam fest with five battleships per team (and I haven't seen WG take any substantial measure regarding that problem despite their constant empty words about solving that issue ...).

Except I'm not giving up Concealment Expert. My build is: PM+AR+SI+CE+AFT+ManS+PT (in that order) I give up Fire Prevention, but to be honest I don't see much value in that perk and don't use it on any of my ships and I seem to survive fine enough.

Welp, I take everything positive I said about the smoke changes back. This is stupid. Ships in smoke should never be able to spot other ships outside of assured acquisition mechanics. And who the hell cares if there's a smoke in between two ships? Manouvering to use visual obstructions to break line-of-sight is a skill that shouldn't be penalized. If someone wants to use a smoke to fire undetected and decides to not risk increased detectability in smoke and instead manouvers outside the smoke (where can be spotted by other ships at far greater ranges, nevermind aircraft) than that is a simple trade-off and a deliberate decision that can backfire just as easily as it can provide an advantage. Welp, guess that's my fault for being naivce enough that WG can actually design something that isn't somehow broken ...

That doesn't make any sense at all. Unless they utterly screwed with the basic spotting mechanics, then anything firing outside a smoke will only be spotted if someone else has a direct line-of-sight within their (increased upon firing) detection range. A ship in smoke most notably does NOT have a direct line-of-sight and relies on third-party scouting or assured acquisition mechanics (proximity detection, hydro or radar) to spot anything by themselves. In short: if one ship smokes up and the enemy ship is firing, the former shouldn't spot the latter, regardless of its detection range or penalties, since no direct line-of-sight exists between the two. The new smoke mechanics should only ever effect ships inside smoke (who won't benefit from a universal 2km detection range regardless of default detectability and firing debuff). Ergo what you experienced was you smoking up, yet another ally was spotting the BB for you (possibly within the raised detection range after firing) and once that debuff stopped applying after the customary 20 seconds, the ally no longer spotted the BB for you and you were blind as per known spotting mechanics. If however ships firing outside smoke can get spotted at raised detection ranges from an enemy inside smoke without third-party smoking, this has to be a bug that needs to be fixed ASAP.

Torpitz syndrome. Have torps, must use them. The good thing is, a standard manual secondaries build (AFT+ManS) doesn't sacrifice otherwise valuable captain perks in a way that negatively impacts conventional playstyles, but once the moment comes that you can push up aggressively, they're a very useful tool and speccing into them typically yields very positive returns. It's just the typical hightier mindset trap. High tier ships have a serious performance jump coming from tier VIII to IX, whilst simultanously growing more sluggish to manouver, which makes any form of aggressive gameplay a walk on a rope ... take a wrong step and it's bye bye game, hello port my old friend. That just means prospective players have to grow experience to get an accurate read on when they can push and when not and my stock FdG is more often than not NOT pushing (into secondary range that is) ... thing doesn't turn, it's just tectonics.

First two games I had in my FdG were such a turn down I put it on ice for a month or so ... just recently started playing it again and it's working out much better though I'm far from considering myself experienced in the ship, mine is still stock as I'm hogging XP to upgrade the hull first (yeah, I'm playing stock ships ... don't look at me so funny!). Even stock that ship is tanky as hell when you can properly angle against the enemy. Problem is that ship handles like a brick in molasses, so tough luck trying to reposition yourself once someone gets on your flank. Also, the guns are temperamental. You're one-shotting cruisers one time and the next you'll consider yourself lucky if you even just get overpen hits. I suppose the Kurfürst can compensate by simply having 50% more shells flying in the targets general direction resulting in a higher chance to hit, but the FdG is rather inconsistent as far as my experience in concerned. Will see how it turns out after I got the hull upgrade with the improved ruddershift (pun intended). And the 10k extra HP won't hurt either ...

Only way to hit those RN BB underwater citadels!

When a teammate does more damage to you than the enemy (and is being a deliberate cuntwaffle): Some douchecanoe for no apparent reason torped our division. And there wasn't even any enemy in the direction that his torps went, just allied ships ... so yeah, he must've been doing it deliberately!). @FlutterRage took a torp and a flooding and since we had essentially already won, I didn't both trying to evade them aswell and just kept on my course, ate two of his torps and got a flooding. Both Flutter and me let that stick until that sucker got sunk from the reflected damage, then repaired. What a [insert explicitive of choice] ... And oh boy, have I ever mentioned how much I love my Des Moines? 3,2k base XP, lotsa credits (despite my premium having run out and me not feeling like getting more right now). Nasty carry that game.

Swam across @Kittykami and friends. Much lewd.

Yay, now I can report-bomb those filfthy Scrubs that be stealin' all muh killz! Inb4Scrubspermabaneachotherfromchat24/7

Naw, he's a dealer. Got the best den in all of New Hampshire.

I'm sorry