VC381

@T0byJug I'm not with you on this one and since you asked I'll actually explain why I voted not to scrap it. 1) I actually think this is a really interesting implementation for an IJN DD, that actually properly captures the spirit of IJN battle doctrine of using torpedoes to counter larger ships. These ships have been tough to balance around powerful torpedoes and currently main tree IJN DDs are lacklustre and vanilla because otherwise they would be OP. Asashio to me really feels like what I want an IJN DD to be. 2) Bad players will always play badly, Asashio no more encourages noobs to backline than Kidd encourages them to YOLO and die for nothing. You can't blame the ship for bad play. Which brings me to... 3) Good players, even not great ones, can and will scout and contest caps effectively in this. It still has joint best concealment in its entire tier spread and the guns are nothing to sneeze at. Im not an "experienced" DD player by your lofty standards but I have enough Benson and Fletcher games under my belt to know being permaspotted or kited by a Kagero/Yugumo is NOT fun and not easy to countet. Torpedoes don't even come into it in these fights. Asashio can easily do the same. 4) I am of the opinion that variety trumps balance especially in random battles. Anything can happen so why not let people have fun in their own way and give them unique ships to play how they like? As I said potatoes will potato in anything, and good players will carry in anything. Asashio is a very interesting addition to the game. 5) BB meta effects could be good. As a mainly cruiser player I don't actually have a huge problem with BBs being forced to be cautious or staying back a little. It also actually makes more thematic sense. What squeezes cruisers out of the game in my opinion is BBs being able to be too aggressive with impunity. It's hypocritical of people to complain BBs get all the cruiser toys and can now fight DDs and solo push caps without support due to concealment/HE/hydro/radar/secondaries or whatever... then also complain when something stops them doing exactly that! It's not punishing the "wrong" BBs, it's creating a safe space for cruisers. Personally, if there was an Asashio on my team making the enemy BBs hold back that's a cue for me to put my cruiser in harms way for him to support his capping efforts. Teamplay oriented ship that's good for cruiser gameplay, I approve! P.S. yes I will be buying one

With Cleveland I agree on the AA but Helena will basically have the same AA as Pensacola and New Orleans which isn't anything to write home about. That and CVs know to avoid US cruisers, so weirdly the deterrent effect makes investing in AA less worth it! DFAA and Hydro are fairly situational consumables. They're very powerful of course but I don't even use the premium versions as I don't feel I need to spam them, just use them once or twice at the right time. Guess DE it is then, may as well make those 15 guns sing

I too am intrigued to see what I can pull off in a buffed version of what is already one of my best performing ships. Or just how badly I fail when the heal makes me too cocky...

If there's one ship that doesn't happen to it's Eugen. Very trollish armour and in any case as a cruiser you can heal 50% of citadel damage. Plus big HP pool. Overall I think heal will enable more aggressive play which is what decides games, not DPM.

To be honest I barely see Saipan these days. I see your point but the problem you're describing is players not ships. Let people play what they want, how they want. Some teams will get carried by a GZ some will lose because of the GZ, no big deal in the grand scheme of things.

On the other hand, GZ is just one of now 4 carriers at T8 and a premium to boot so may not see that much play. And I would argue that variety is very important, and having a carrier that plays like that for people who want it is OK even if it's objectively unhealthy from the point of view of CV gameplay as a whole. After all random battles are just that, random, in many ways the competitiveness or interaction of ships doesn't matter to most people but choice of individual gameplay does.

Why is an RTS only playable if the influence is high? That's why I suggested the RTS needs to be tuned so CV players always feel like they are playing, always doing something, busy here, busy there, getting hits, losing planes, launching more. Then you can reduce the overall impact of CV on the other 22 players in the game but the CV players will still be able to have a fun game experience without being OP. The problem now is if the CV is good and the enemy team not, some people have a very bad game, but if the enemy is good or has a couple of ships with right setup the CV player is wasting 20 minutes of his life for nothing. Needs to be more middle ground.

Ok, but how else would you implement carriers other than "not at all"? To be honest I did have an idea where CV gameplay is essentially flight deck and flight ops micro but you have no control over what your planes do once launched (e.g. send planes to scout a square and come back, or attack a target and come back). Not sure how fun it would be for most people. I don't think the RTS interface is fundamentally wrong, just the skill/micro is in the wrong part like strafe dances and manual drops when it should be in more overall control of a bigger and more versatile air wing.

CVs are unfortunately on a balance impasse where they can't be allowed to solo dominate a game but people rightly want the feeling of awesome air power that the ships are known for. In my opinion the biggest problem with CV design in this game is how all or nothing everything about them is. If you win you win hard, otherwise you're useless, and if one team has a better CV player the game is a foregone conclusion. What is needed in my humble opinion is some kind of "normalisation", like BBs have dispersion, that can prop up bad players while limiting really great ones. I know a lot of people, especially the competitive kind, will hate this suggestion. But CV players basically need to be allowed to do more while actually doing less. Doesn't make sense? What I mean is give players more planes and more squads so they always have something to do, to feel like they are playing and have the air power, but make individual planes and bombs/torps much weaker so they are easier to remove and their impact is lower. Make it so you can bomb 3 BBs at the same time but total damage less than what you can do by focusing just one today. Make it so AA reliably and consistently takes out planes but CVs have so many they will always do a little bit of damage anyway, not too much. Then both CV players and targets will be happier, as there is more constant interaction and less instant hard win/lose.

For your own ship, hold Control and hover the mouse over your ship profile/HP bar bottom left. You get a tooltip on the right with info like remaining AA and secondaries. For enemies you can't tell but I think it would be too much information.

OK so I tried this and it felt very good, very smooth. Could keep the guns firing on auto cycle and dodge, stealth felt good enough. Also I discovered another reason why this has good synergy with Mogami. Turret angles on the 155s are pretty crap, but with basically instant rudder it's much quicker and easier (and way safer!) to unmask guns > fire > angle back. I think I'm keeping the setup!

Well, I haven't seen this ship for many months then over this weekend I saw three of them. Coincidence maybe but could be a renewed testing effort. I have no interest in her myself, just thought I'd share observation.

If Worcester AA is going to be anything like Minotaur (and it should be, if not better), it can make an entire cap an instant death zone for planes from behind the furthest cover. It isn't going to be fun.

That's an interesting assessment @philjd, since on paper Atago is less agile than Mogami (1s worse rudder shift, 40m worse turning circle).

Not really my experience. Of course T9/10 games are hard but I find T8 cruisers to be generally quite slippery and able to be useful. Anything that helps with that is a bonus in my opinion. I'm not talking about solo-pushing smoke (although that works too in the right circumstances); the high velocity guns on Eugen mean it's possible to support a DD hunt from a more comfortable range. Also forcing a DD to run away is still a big win from a cap point of view, very few ships can truly solo-kill an enemy DD that has at least some brain cells. That and good use of cover can put you in places where your hydro makes you almost as powerful/useful as a radar ship. There's a lot more to T8 cruiser play than long range spam, even when bottom tier. Of course if it doesn't work for you we can agree to disagree but it really isn't all doom and gloom like you say. You're right here, the buff won't boost Eugen's sales. And the reward system is unfortunately skewed towards damage, but that's a separate issue. I agree that after these changes Hipper will end up with higher average damage and therefore be perceived by the majority as the better performer. But I think Eugen, used right, will have a higher win rate because of what I said above and how the heal enables that. As I said I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do with this. Yeah, I keep looking at Martel and wondering what its weaknesses are. I have an Algerie that I really like, I may have to move up that line even though I wasn't really planning to just to see what the fuss is about and if actually playing Martel reveals weaknesses not apparent from raw stats. But even if Martel has massively power-creeped the tier, I don't think it should be used as a benchmark to buff the other ships. If it's making Hipper obsolete then Martel needs nerfing, not the other way around. In principle Hipper has other advantages like more torps, better AP, better hydro, better (or at least more trollish) armour. Of course you can ignore all this and compare DPM only in which case obviously Hipper loses. But that's not an argument in my opinion, just because most people subscribe to a "one playstyle fits all" approach and ignore or can't use the strengths of a ship doesn't mean those strengths don't exist.

@Aragathor it's not that simple. For the record I've only played Eugen and despite all the hate this ship attracts I don't personally think she needed buffs. But, I see the community wanted something and this is happening so let's go with that. I agree with the decision to buff Hipper and Eugen in different ways to stop the latter being a copy-paste premium. I've always enjoyed my Eugen and performed very well in it. Having heal does indirectly increase your potential because you can afford to get into more dangerous situations where you can actually affect the game better (e.g. DD hunting) rather than spamming from long range just to farm damage. Having heal might not directly increase your total damage but that's generally not what wins games, being aggressive and hitting the right targets at the right time does, or surviving to the end to make a move when most of the others are gone. Also these ships have a decent range advantage over Mogami/Atago/NO, and their effective accurate range is close to their maximum due to higher muzzle velocity. In short they have a much bigger threat radius to select targets in so they don't need to be top dogs in DPM to be competitive. This was always their strength, which in WGs own words the playerbase just failed to acknowledge and take advantage of. I think these ships will still be difficult to play and disappointing to many, but that doesn't mean they'll be weak ships or that Hipper will automatically be better just because she can throw more shells. There's no need to make every ship equally good at one thing to balance them, if you just want DPM play a ship that has better DPM. I'm looking forward to see what I can do with this buff. To be hones, I'm more intrigued by the rudder shift buff on Hipper. That should add a little to survivability and versatility as well.

Yeah, that's exactly the arguments I would have expected Flamu to make, especially seeing as how good he is at positioning and using cover, and yet he's said and done the opposite. I'm more in agreement with your last paragraph, Mogami with the CL setup has great DPS and it seems a waste to skulk around and drop to stealth all the time when you could be pumping out those 15 shells. With 8" Mog or Atago I would absolutely support the full stealth build BUT that's only because the reload is so long that it makes breaks in firing less painful and the alpha so high that a few good shots from a better position can make a difference. I did actually run a dodge build on Takao as an experiment and that failed quite badly (although I also didn't have PT, so that may have skewed results). You're almost never in a situation where you're 1v1 against the same ship. Outspotting at all costs makes sense on a DD when other people are bringing the DPS on your target, but not a cruiser where you ARE that DPS. Anyway I don't have the credits to spare to play with this at the moment, but food for thought. As I said I run a dodge build on basically every cruiser that ISN'T IJN, and that works very well for me.

What do you mean moved down to T7? Sure they're missing upgrade slots but are they altered in some other way? Yeah the interface gave me a headache after 2 games but overall I think it's quite pretty, the ship designs are cool, and it was fun (if hectic and noobish). I will play more, even if it's silly. To be honest, having T10 ships zoom around in straight lines and generally play like it was T6 was really refreshing compared to how static and boring T10 games normally are. How good a showcase is it? I'm using it to try out T10 cruisers to decide my next grind line but I felt like the battles were sped up or something else was off. Probably just the interface. So aside from upgrades, do the ships actually perform exactly like their normal T10 base models?

It's not a "good chance" if the cruiser player knows what he's doing and even if after a couple of salvos he ends up taking a chunk of damage he's wasted the time it took that BB to train turrets on him and fire those salvos. BBs ignoring each-other IS a problem, but that's not a cruiser/BB balance issue, that's really just to do with the bow tanking mechanic. Guess where BB play is the most dynamic and interesting? That's right, T6 and 7 where half the BBs can overmatch all bows and the other half need to show broadside to use anything resembling their full firepower. Unfortunately the cruisers there are also inexperienced, but if BBs were able to do reliable damage to each-other instead of having a "safe mode" most would not pick the guy who can wiggle out of their aim as their main target.

Nope, I don't agree. And even if I did I would prefer a reduction in rudder shift times or turning circles to adding heal, which is just boring.

@Paimentaja I appreciate the encouragement and I'm sure Lyon is strong but looking at things like turret traverse, firing angles etc. I have enough experience to know it's not really going to suit my style. I've kept Fuso for when I want to shotgun, that's good enough. Also I don't think of the ships in purely abstract gameplay terms, even if it's OP that alone isn't enough reason for me to play it (in fact it's usually a reason to not play something). I need an overlap between gameplay and looks/design/historical interest to want to play a ship. French BBs to T7 just don't do it for me.

Neither, because there is no need for drastic rebalancing. The second idea, there are enough different cruiser lines now for a player to pick the one that best suits their style without adding pointless and potentially game-breaking customisation options to all of them.

Threads like these make me lose a bit of faith in players/forumers I otherwise respect, as well as making me want to make a bingo card for cruiser whine like the BBaby one. Not stealthy enough? Not agile enough? Not enough firepower? Maybe, but just enough of each that they're very effective when used in combination. There's nothing wrong with one class being difficult to play and another easy. I accept there is sometimes a population issue but there are other ways WG can incentivise cruiser play or reduce BB population without directly buffing or nerfing ships. Educational videos would be a start. Even good youtubers do cruiser videos with prejudiced outlooks or subscribe to very biased "this ship can be good if you only do this one thing" type teaching. With that much negativity going around, of course people are going to be put off playing cruisers, and if they play and don't do well they will blame the ship (why not when even good players are doing that) and fail to learn or quit. Self-fulfilling negativity cycle while everyone on the forums does a self-pitying group-hug in a 5 page echo chamber whine thread. Wake-up call: WG aren't listening, and they aren't listening because cruisers are, for the most part, pretty balanced despite what so many seem to think. In fact, in my experience in all ship classes cruisers are crucial to victory, and the fewer you have in a team the more important they are. DDs don't win caps, they go in and either kill each-other or both run. It's the supporting cruisers that decide the outcome of the cap battle. BBs would happily bow-tank each-other until the timer ticks zero if it wasn't for the cruisers who are still around DPM-ing them from unexpected angles or forcing them to react to caps being re-taken. And sure many cruisers fail and contribute nothing but the team that loses their cruisers first usually loses the game. 5 BBs, even German hydro-secondary monsters and HE slinging RN, can't win against 5 DDs without cruiser help. BBs have received extra toys which is fine as it adds variety, and actually there's nothing wrong with a bit of role overlap. But to say they've become as good as cruisers at what cruisers are supposed to do is simply wrong. I've been trying not to write this post for a couple of days but I gave in. As a cruiser player seeing the class needlessly put down like that just gets to me. I know I hold a minority opinion that's not welcome in a thread like this but I'm saying it anyway because it needs to be said. So come on, hit me, I got PT, IFA and super rudder shift module I can take it.

SE is definitely a huge help for Benson, top choice for 3-point skills. BFT next, spamming is just too much fun. Disagree on PT. In a DD that stealthy it's easier to assume if you're spotted you're getting fired at. On the other hand, losing turrets and torpedo tubes is a pain so PM would be my top choice for first row skills. Anyway, I think aside from minor tweaks we've sorted the captain build. Let's see what the OP has to say and move on to tactics and playstyle. Personally I found Benson works quite aggressive unless you're bottom tier. At the range you're spotted you easily outgun anything you meet and you turn on a dime if you need to dodge torps or do a 180 to get back out. It's a very "seat of your pants" kind of ride, takes some practice, but is a very effective gunboat. Obviously don't YOLO every time, keep an eye on what support you and your enemy have, but it's generally your job to find enemy DDs and kick them out of caps, ideally in a seabed direction. After that, spot or find a nice place to lay a big smoke screen, point guns at a BB and tape your left click down until either he's out of HP or chickened and ran out of your range.

Premium ships of course have better earnings but high tier all silver ships do badly. If you're NETTING 150k a game in Lexington you're already doing very well. Unlikely to be doing better in other ship lines, if I make >100k net in my NC I'm very happy (no premium). Essex I imagine you'll make a small profit. Midway you'll struggle to break even unless you're really good, even with premium. If you need money play a lower tier ship you're good with or buy a premium ship and spam that. That's just what the economy is.