BillydSquid

Weeeeeew, so don't play the RN CL line then, given the effective range is 10/12km, based on that reasoning. Seriously, shtap, just stop digging.

terrible idea, this has been established. Close range ie anything under 11km will result in the CA getting instantly deleted.

I'm racking up 100k damage in a Minotaur on multiple games and my team will still lose, why? Nothing wrong with CAs/CLs simply most BB players are utter shite and prefer to snipe from 17km away because RNG will net you a lucky citadel and the game rewards you for dealing a % of the target's HP as damage. So why get close and scratch that nice shiny paint. Let the Minotaur take on the Izumo, Baltimore, Des Moines and Kagero, sink the BB and T10 CA and almost get cross torp'd by the enemy CV while the brave BB gives supporting fire, 5km behind you.

Scharnhorst. No question, excellent BBs and you benefit from favourable T7 MM. The Eugen is weak for a T8 CA, avoid it, it's probably not worth the money if you're looking for a premium ship or until you've got more experience in higher tiers.

I was going to get ready to grind the RN BB line after I get to the Moskva, but I'm now tempted to go for the Des Moines. I prefer CAs to BBs anyway, but I've already got the Hindenburg, Zao and Minotaur I'm on the Donskoi and almost at the Moskva.

Minotaur, live life on the edge.

It's a good thing you were here to point out the obvious, good teams do better than bad ones? Clearly a shocking revelation.

Pfffffffffffffffffffffffftttt. I'd take 3 competent DDs over 5 retarded DDs which don't know what to do any day. Poorly played DDs get shredded extremely quickly by CA/CLs and achieve nothing but giving away points. Are you going to try and adjust and control for player skill as well?

No Its not. It'll melt any DD inside of 10km in a matter of seconds, good luck hitting a competent and jinking DD outside of that though, by comparison the Zao and Moskva can nail a DD with their high velocity shells and flat arcs significantly easier at longer ranges, but suffer from the lower RoF. And vs CAs, the Minotaur suffers due to the lower dispersion, higher rate of fire, shell penetration being less likely to over pen and better shell arcs compared to BBs, plus the fact the Des Moines and Moskva both have radar, which can neutralize the Minotaur's smoke. The Minotaur performs better in the BB heavy meta than other CAs by virtue of the fact it has the hall marks of a big DD and having a significantly larger target to aim at for superstructure and upper belt armour hits. Not a CA. If you're in a CA and get citadel'd by a Minotaur, you screwed up and gave him a flat broadside at close range, all the T10 CAs can bounce Minotaur shells bow on, and with a significantly smaller super structure the damage saturation quickly builds up and with no HE your damage drops off vs the higher rate of fire and HE damage that the other T10s can put out on you very quickly.

So why are you not using terrain? Why were you focused by 4 BBs in range when they're not difficult to spot? Why were you in the open at the range were their dispersion was low enough to make their fire effective? You can be aggressive as a CA/ CL the Minotaur/ Zao are both great at it, and you can comfortably pull in 75k+ damage without it being an exceptional game. The problem you will find is the expectation to have BB players behave in an even half competent manner and not camp at the back and spam AP. Don't ever go into a game expecting support from the BBs on your team, because in all likely hood you won't get any, and the ones that do, well you'll have a pleasant surprise, but you shouldn't base your behaviour on the hope that you get some good BB players on your team as you'll encounter what you encountered, you'll be focused down and shredded by BB fire. CA/ CLs in T10 are perfectly capable of accumulating a lot of damage, even in the current meta, but they'll also be brutally punished for mistakes and over extending. So shift your game play to account for the lack of support use hit and run/ terrain positioning to block line of sight to get shots on DDs and CAs and play conservative initially to avoid being focused by BBs in the first half of the game. If someone tells you to push a cap in a CA while they're in a BB, tell them to go [edited]themselves, because in all likelihood you'll be the one focused and obliterated while he sits back picking his nose. Nothing wrong with T10 CAs/ CLs they're all very good ships, but you have to adapt to the realities of high tier BB camping meta, you may want to play in a manner which relies on BB team support, but you'll be punished for it.

The extra rudder shift is good, especially for angling but I don't know if it's worth the additional concealment generated by the combination of the mod and the skill, particularly as I want to get in close as possible without getting spotted and focused by every BB in range when I can use my radar vs DD and RN CLs. There are times when I have to turn away that I'd really love the better rudder shift, but I like the capacity to aggressively position and use terrain to block line of sight so not getting spotted a mile away without the armour to bounce shells makes me feel I can position more aggressively 13.5km without the skill is horrendous, it's the same detection as my Kurfurst, 12km is workable. Either way the first half of the match you've got to be cautious or have a thought out plan of where you're going to position yourself around the terrain for cover and have an escape route planned out in case the crap hits the fan.

Unfortunately that is the big drawback of the KM CA line, the AP is devastating, but the penetration angles are complete garbage. Vs any competent player which doesn't show broadside or angles as soon as he can your damage will drop off sharply. Most of the changes WG has made to the KM line are bizarre, I remember way back when they still had semi AP HE shells, and a low fire chance, my expectation was to buff the AP angles a little to make them a little less fickle, instead they buffed HE. Other than that she suffers that fate of all T8 CAs, no repair party, and and oversized citadel in a BB heavy meta tends to hurt them badly. CAs themselves aren't in a bad position, they're very good and balanced as a class and I like them a lot, but the glaring weakness being at T8 with the lack of a repair party and all CAs and CLs having a very large un spaced citadel which makes OHK from BBs aty long range too easy for the role other players demand CAs should play in the game with the current heavy BB meta.

Problem I've found with the Donskoi is the detection radius of the ship, you really do need concealment expert and the module to make the ship workable (unless you go 20km sniping, personally I prefer 17.8km increased RoF) the combination drops the detection down to 12.5km. Open water is really dangerous for the Donskoi, so you have to play the first half of the battle at arms length or plan ahead using terrain to block line of sight and use radar to screw over DDs in smoke. Once the battle lines break up a bit and ships start to mix up it gives opportunities for long range sniping while their attention is else where and she can rack up the damage very quickly. Screw up and give a broadside, you'll be focused and obliterated given the size makes you an easy target. It's a big change from the Minotaur and the Zao with it's trolly armour layout and low detection.

It's a start but CVs have numerous other issues. They're not exactly weak in damage potential, lets be honest here, yet a tiny fraction of the games actually have CVs in them. Why? If it was just down to damage, we'd see CVs more regularly anyway. Doesn't bother me that much to be honest I just swapped some modules on the Yamato as the slow turret traverse was driving me nuts and replaced with the AA. Kurfurst has good AA anyway and as I tend to get close I'm often in the vicinity of CAs which at T9/10 shred planes. While all my other T10s are CAs and CLs. I don't see this affecting the game meta too much tbh, but we'll see.

Then the problem is you're either yoloing in and getting focused down or you don't have the high tier experience and can't judge the flow of battle well enough to know when to commit and wreck people and when to hold back. That's on you, not the CAs and CLs. Everyone screws up occasionally or gets outplayed from time to time, but if you're consistently finding a problem with being able to push effectively in a BB, well the issue is more with your lack of experience in higher tiers and knowledge of terrain than anything else. My Kurfurst has a secondary build, and the vast majority of my fire fights take place inside 15km, usually 10-12km or less, I also have an 18pt captain and the damn thing has a 13.6 km detection range, there's nothing more terrifying for a CA than having a massive BB with x12 420mm guns appearing out of no where with hydro active and a 10.6km secondary gun range. My average damage, about 95k per game. German ships a the best mid/ close range fighters in the game, and they have no problems fighting close in if the player knows what he's doing. I like the Yamato, but compared to how aggressive you can be in the Kufurst, it requires more passive play to get the best out of it.

T9 Lion was supposed to have hydro, unless that's been changed. The thing is I don't think anyone asked for an AA buff to the Hood, the complaints were in relation to the sigma, when the Warspite had significantly better dispersion countered by glacial turret traverse forcing one to risk broadside to maintain target tracking on fast CAs and DDs. WG just thought, well clearly what needs fixing is the AA... buff moar! FFS guys

Which is always hilarious because the more there are the more T8 BBs sprawl into high tiers and the more they take a beating from the high tier CA/ CL players and the more they whine that the nasty CAs touched them inappropriately.

Yet, it wasn't necessary for the ship's fire control system to be the one within optical range of the target ie: Yamato's guns were built with the capacity of hitting targets past the curvature of the earth, so the fire control system relied on plotting co ordinates from a spotter plane. Exactly the same as artillery, spotters relaying positioning information and fall of shells has always been the way that long range artillery fire has been directed. What the OP seems to be getting at is "bohoo, the nasty RN CLs and DDs can shoot me from smoke because I'm being spotted and they shouldn't be able to, nerf now because I can't learn how to estimate positions and blind fire on targets." BBs UP, much buffs needed.

Survivability expert stacks very well, get it. The Repair party heals a % of the total HP of the ship, per second, hence the greater the HP the larger the % healed per second when RN repair party is activated. It's actually very good. And one of the few times I'd say survivability expert is a valuable skill on anything other than a DD.

Which fits the RN style, function over style and capable of being fixed with gaffa tape, WD40 and a spanner.

No, magically making a 460mm shell do less damage to a CA than it does to a BB is bizarre. CAs and CLs suffer from easy OHKs due to the oversized citadel which is easily target able and the increased size of CAs and CLs as you move up the tiers. Simply reduce the citadel size and space the compartments. If you sail broadside on to a BB inside 15km, you deserve to get deleted because doing that was asking to be citadel'd. being more difficult to delete at range is the only survivability buff CAs and CLs really need, they should still get obliterated at close range by BBs, but it's very easy to simply OHK a CA at 15+km either broadside, or through simple luck of penetrating through the bow or aft.

It's not the BBs that would be the key problem, 14 inch guns can't overmatch high tier CA bow armour, 15 inch can, and unlike the Shiny horse (which is awesome) you have the likes of Zao, Moskva, Minotaur and Des Moines running about they're all very powerful in a skilled players hands, and a T8 which can't overmatch is going to be easy pickings for players which are used to the high tier meta and taking on ships with at least 406mm guns, those T10 CAs are going to take the KGV apart, and as funny as that might be for me and others playing them, I don't think the BB players are going take it well, queue endless whining. It's going to depend heavily on the speed, turret traverse, concealment, rate of fire, normalisation angles, AP fuses etc. Shiny horse, has all of these stacked in it's favour and beneficial MM being T7 so even though it only has 9 guns and mediocre dispersion, it gets away with it because it has a lot of other benefits. KGV with 14 inch guns, it's possibly workable, but she's going to struggle and frankly I'd rather not have the KGV becoming a dedicated HE spammer with mediocre dispersion carpeting the area with shells, it'd be a disappointing 1 trick pony.

Yeah, this is something I've noticed. I've got the Minotaur, Zao, Hindenburg and onto the Dimitri Donsky. Also have the Kurfusrt and Yamato for BBs. The difference between the play style of T9 - T10 isn't that different, by that point you should already know how to play your ship, and frankly you're just grinding through the xp to get a better MM and be top tier. So it's just irritating to have to grind excessively to get to T10, significantly more so when the real learning curve is around T7-9 when you encounter the higher tiers more regularly. Yet players are able to grind their way through to T8 quite quickly and yet pick up none of the skills required to actually play effectively and predictably get their arse handed to them in T9/10 MM. When I first started this happened to me, I blasted through lower tiers very quickly then slammed into T8/9 where as a new CA player using the Hipper I got pulled into T10 MM and got absolutely demolished by T10 CAs and BBs. This was quite a while ago, back in the days of CV nerfs and torpedo soup, but I dropped down to T/78 and played several hundred games before pushing into T9/10 again, where I perform well enough now quite easily. Still like dropping down to T7 & T8 to play the Shiny horse, Gneisenau and the rest of my T8 BBs and CAs

I don't think too many people are putting that much stock in the leaks, they seem generally applicable to the RN, but as they said they're subject to change. What did set off alarm bells was the radar and hydro consumables, the fact it was tested. That raises eyebrows given how much criticism there has been of the BB heavy meta and lack of effective counters.