Aotearas

First of all: wrong forum section. This would belong somewhere into the gameplay section, not offtopic. Secondly: been there, done that and will maliciously abuse if a team can't defend their base. Most hilarious example was when a mate and myself as bottom tier ships (him a Cleveland, back then tier VI and me in a DD) advanced down the middle of the Hotspot map and there was not a single enemy ship to be seen. Turns out the enemy team split perfectly even with one half going for the 1 line and the other half going for thr 10 line. The entirity of the middle of the map was completely free, including of course a straight path into their base (Standard Battle of course, as is topical). Our own team very much did the same with slowly crawling towards the 1 and 10 line (emphasis on the slowly!), except for my mate and me. So we went straight into their cap and just sat there, the cap conquest and match timer happily ticking away. We asked in all chat if no one is going to defend their cap. Clock kept ticking. Our team's 10 line group spotted theirs, still happily advancing slowly (again, emphasis on the slowly!). A handful salvoes were exchanged. Just a couple seconds before we capped, we actually spotted the first ship ourselves, a cruiser that apparently noticed "hey, they're really capping us out" or some such and came back ... though even he must've waited until turning around a good while after after we asked in all chat if someone's going to defend their base because he never got close enough to spot either of us two and as such we won by capping out. Neither of us two ever fired a shot. Hardly anyone on both sides actually did any damage really because the maximum base XP for that game was in the low 200s (both my mate and me leading the pack, back then you actually got some XP for capping). Most of the scoreboard was around 100 base XP, some didn't even manage that. Both my mate and myself where basically pissing ourselves laughing from the moment on we noticed what's going on, throughout the whole rest of the match when it became apparent they won't defend or wouldn't even be able to if they tried at that point and for a straight five minutes after the conclusion. We were positively wheezing from laughter, breathless and my sides were hurting like mad, but oh boy was it worth it! Moral of the story: defend your goddamn base.

Do you have something to back that up? Examples?

Nice to see you can't even apply your own logic.

Quite the opposite. They won't blow a hole into the enemy like other higher tiered BBs, but they come with a self-buff to FP and don't consume much oil per sortie so they're quite decent if you want to save some oil and don't need the absolute maximum firepower. Their reworks into BBVs though, those are useless!

I don't think it's the BBs or DDs that are your problem.

The problem with that idea is that it favours the CV disproportionally considering whatever ship he's attacking has to deal with more things than just the attacking aircraft, They still have to watch their angling against enemy ships and dodge incoming fire (which basically means it isn't possible to simply manouver against an airstrike, much as a CV can currently force a ship to give broadside to its team or risk catching an entire airstrike in its side) whereas compared to that the CV can focus entirely on controlling the strike as he'll be in the back (probably tucked behind an island for convenient cover) without any immediate concerns to its safety.

Brooklyn is a cheap cruiser buff with her fire command skill so a decent pick for a cruiser vanguard if you don't have better ships fulfilling that role. Maryland and her sisters by extension are meh. I do believe the current tierlist cites them as the worst battleships in the game.

It's sad really that basically everything I expected (and feared) came true. Even worse however is that I hadn't expected WG to turn AA defense into a pure RNG gamble and basically eradicating the ability to protect other ships with your AA. This rework is such a conceptional failure it should be aborted and WG go back to the drawing board. But hey, that ain't happening because quite apparently WG wants to force the issue just as hard as they were ignoring the previous CV issues until they flipped the table rather than actually work to resolve any of those.

Which is the opposite of what we had on the second night, a third of our games we saw 1-2 Stalingrads being fielded. At least no one tried the 4+ Stalingrad, or maybe those guys already jumped ahead in the ranking. Salem could be bought with pure money investment if people were stupid enough to buy the premium freedom containers and then simply exchanged the tokens for normal freedom containers, the latter of which always contained coal. Then again you'd have to be equally stupid to field a Salem in CBs where it's short ranged radar is practically useless and even the improved heal won't save a Des Moines hull when push comes to shove. As for steel ships, for now they can't be bought, but with the "Steel Monsters" premium mission set coming along, steel is no longer immune to monetization and with WG already committed to making steel more accessible to everyone outside competitive game modes you can bet it's going to continue being monetized so even if the P2W at tier X concern isn't yet valid, it will be sooner rather than later. On the other hand, with WG making steel ships more accessible for everyone they won't be able to hide behind the excuse of "the ship stats are so good because only unicum players are playing them" so they might just have to actually balance those ships properly in the future, so who knows how accurate the "W" part of "P2W" might end up to be (then again, I'm not too confident in WG balans anyhow ...).

Code invalid for me no matter what I do.

That's something I've found the most laughable with these threads. I mean, if the argument is they can't deal enough damage to a rushing DD, then why don't those people spec into secondaries? ANY battleship, especially after the recent change to BB secondaries (everything shoots HE now) specced for secondaries is going to deal a significant amount of damage to any DD trying to rush it. It's the one available method that is literally the most effective at the precise horror scenario those threads describe, yet apparently no one bothered to spec into them prior to screaming "THE END IS NIGH!".

No it doesn't because in that case he'd still be alone against a DD and basic balancing applies in which a DD against a BB in 1vs1 wins, period.

Same thing as in the other threads that sprung up about this: if there's only you in a BB being able to shoot a yolorushing DD then you're simply horribly out of position and a DD should be able to punish you for it, be that by stealthtorping you or making the decision to trade a majority of his HP for an "assured" kill by rushing up close. You know how you survive in a BB getting yolorushed by a DD? Not being alone so the other ships that are actually supposed to be effective against DDs can dpm the sh*t out of it before it gets you. It's a very advanced tactic though, so I'm not surprised not many people have caught onto it ...

One could argue that if you need to triage game content to manage your participation, it's too much by definition.

But but but, CBs is all about winning as a team and nothing else, so if people could compelte individual missions they could potentionally jeopardize their clan's victory by doing something selfish to get a mission done, that's why no one should even think about allowing CBs to count for mission progress on principle alone!* *Actual argument having been regurgitated by people when the same suggestion had been made during the last CB season.

That was literally the first thing that came to mind when I saw the topic title.

First time I'm seeing this. Also going to be the last time. A resounding horay for adblockers!

You want to get reported for edited dirty trick clanning again mate?

I originally didn't want to involve myself in that heated discussion that has clearly gotten unhinged by now, but you're literally asking for it then I would most definately contest the "I am superiour" statement and that's not exactly painting anyone in a favourable light. On an emotional level no one has impressed anyone with happily dancing the escalation tango with @Reaper_JackGBR (that goes for you too mate) and if both of you, or in general simply everyone could just calm down, that'd be great. I mean seriously, if you two were actually dancing a tango with that much aggression you'd either end up at your throats strangling each other in front of the judges or having the kinkiest type of hate-sex imaginable in the changing room. As for the objective outlook on player skill, the closest we can go is solo stat averages and you can check that for yourself if you don't trust my word on it but the two of you have pretty damn equal stats with both of you edging out the other here and there, so none here can claim to be superiour in that regard aswell. I would also hope that establishing that with both of you knowing what you're doing we can keep the assumptions on who can't do what properly out of the way. I believe everyone who has played the Des Moines can say how those shells can bite into a target at sometimes downright ridiculous angles and the Stalingrad isn't going to be any different in that regard. So, can everyone just calm the hell down. @Reaper_JackGBR? @Commander_Cornflakes? Everyone else? No point in ending up on each other's sh*tlist. Optimally I'd ask people to share their counters to Stalingrad heavy setups or how clans that field Stalingrads (ergo have firsthand experience) would do so, but obviously I wouldn't expect everyone to share their trade secrets literally first day into the season (by all means though, prove me wrong and share all the juicy positions to really annoy those Stalingrad comps). And once more, because it can't hurt to say it again: chill folks.

I'd like to relativize that argument, because the raw dpm numbers are misleading. Only Stalingrad, Hindenburg and Henry IV. with IFHE skill can effectively HE pen a Stalingrad. The rest will see a very steep decline in HE damage once saturation on the bow/aft and superstructure kicks in. I'm going to omit discussing AP dpm because quite frankly no one good enough to have a Stalingrad at this point is just going to let themselves get farmed in the open by AP without angling. In addition to the effective dpm as opposed to theoretical dpm, with the vastly superiour health pool it also means that a Stalingrad can take a LOT of HE damage before going down. I don't know the exact data for a Stalingrad, but we established last season that a decently positioned Moskva can tank on average 100k damage before getting sunk, that figure should be equal or higher for a Stalingrad. Ergo at this point we're not comparing theoretical dpm numbers, we're essentially talking about if a Stalingrad can outtrade other cruisers in a fight. And though I'm sure the basic go-to counter would be to focus-fire, that's only possible if a Stalingrad gets caught out of position where it can't back up into concealment or cover, the latter of which doesn't seem to be particularily likely given the generous amount of island cover in the current map pool. That's just something I wanted to say in regard to the dpm argument. I'm not going to stick my head into the rest of that hornet's nest of a discussion this early into the CB season however, especially considering we already brainstormed setup changes that should help in dealing with Stalingrads. Also, by any means I can only encourage everyone to keep using Stalingrads sicne all that data is eventually end up in WG's hands to analyze, for whatever that might change.

If you already knew, why ask the question in the first place? Are you this desperate to be the nr1 poster?

Once per ship.

Give EA some time, they'll change it.

How to PR disaster 101

Build me like one of your french ships!