VC381

To be honest, you haven't played many games and you've basically raced up a single line. The answer to your question, and I don't mean this in a mean way but there's no other way to say it, is that the problem isn't with the ship. You should go back a tier or two and practice, the playstyle is the same. You're fighting at 15km, that's a good start, try around 12km and train your aim. Watch some YouTube videos of mid tier IJN BB play and see what you can learn. Nagato is a very, very nice ship. Don't frustrate yourself, the game isn't a race and high tiers aren't better. Play some other ships, other lines, and come back to Nagato when you're more experienced, you will be rewarded.

So, this came up in another thread as a joke aside point but I figured it should actually be done because it's a bit light hearted compared to the usual flame and whine. Basically, this poll has NOTHING to do with the power of the guns, the balance of the ship, whatever, only with how the TURRET LOOKS. I've even grouped some turrets into neat categories because they share an overall design (even when the guns in them aren't the same). Have fun Me, I really like the various designs with sloping roofs from the WWI period, so I'm torn between Warspite's guns and the IJN 14" turrets that share a very similar look. But in the end I went for the US early angular design, all those panels come together for a very sleek and strong look.

Yup, he's currently doing that on my New Orleans though!

Ah, yes, that's a very cool and interesting looking ship and quite a nice turret design. Maybe I'll do another poll for cruisers.

What's that from? Looks like Myoko to me but hard to tell with such a cropped picture.

I'm grouping Scharnhorst with the other T7+ German BBs as the turret design is pretty similar overall. Maybe I should put it separately?

Added

My only complaint about Cleveland's agility is that the turrets can't keep up with the ship. That's a ship where I actually use the turret traverse module, it really helps being able to wiggle and shoot and the hit to RoF isn't terrible since the volume is crazy anyway. You can give BBs a hard time in open water as well but you need a bit of team support so they don't focus you as you experienced.

A lot of what you're reading is probably old and comes from when the ship was massively OP. That's not to say it isn't still very strong now, but it's not easy-mode. She is actually pretty agile for a cruiser overall, but not in comparison to the tiny nippy T5 you just came from, and she is a big target. What she does have is utterly sick firepower, the kind the other nations don't get until T7. You need to use islands, be aware of your surroundings to not get cornered or flanked and find good windows to unleash the guns uninterrupted. Against same tier cruisers and destroyers it's a no brainer as long as you don't let them get in torp range.

Nah, the only thing it's missing is a decent rudder shift to go with that turning circle. That's about the only bad thing I can say about this ship if I really tried. A few times I've been caught out by it not responding near-instantly like say, Pensacola does.

23% win rate over 13 games is just bad luck. But you still need to think about it and learn so it gets better over time. Firstly, damage =/= win. It's not how much damage you do in total that has impact, but when you do damage and to which enemy. You need to strike a balance between being so aggressive you die instantly and so passive you are doing damage when it's too late to change the game. In a slow ship it's hard to find that balance. Unfortunately practice is the only solution and it can be painful. But think about your targets. Who can you shoot easily to remove someone from the enemy team and start snowball, where is the enemy going to be in a few minutes and so where do you need to go to be ready for him, that kind of thing. The game is actually not about shooting and damage, it's about position and prediction.

I found the Belfast weird. I can see why she can be really strong when played right but I find that stealthy super-passive style boring and never got it to work too well. She is seriously lacking agility and yes, very scary being that squishy without the heal backing you up.

Isn't the reason high tier CVs have good stats that everyone who can't make them work gave up before getting there? Anyway CV balance is tricky because it's the only class where a direct 1v1 competition exist. Individual skill makes much more difference than any other class. If you have 5 BBs on each team it can even out if one is a complete potato or a master player. CVs have huge potential game impact so it's really obvious when one is better than the other. In a similar way to the point about AA, what is needed is to reduce this huge gap between how a dedicated CV players can completely own a game and a bad one can't do anything. Yes, there should be some reward for skill, but the stakes should not be that high, and it's not like that with other classes. CV need to be more consistent and user friendly and less "winner takes all".

I've noticed a pattern here. Cruisers that are very versatile and have situational advantages that are hard to measure but don't have a prescribed playstyle based on an obvious strength get perceived as bad. The thing about Hipper (Eugen in my case) is that she is ergonomically one of the best cruisers in the game. That means she's really responsive and comfortable to play, and that props up her "hard" stats in lots of subtle ways. I think the guns need mentioning again. Because of the excellent ballistics and turret traverse, you can get reliable damage from medium and long range snapshots. The AP may not be reliable on angled targets but it is very strong out to your maximum gun range. You don't need to wait for the enemy to make a really big mistake because you potentially threaten a very large area and can quickly change target and unleash an accurate and devastating shot at the slightest hint of weakness. How do you measure the effectiveness of that vs. just having higher raw DPM? You can't, which is why people don't think about it and believe the ship sucks, but you feel it when you play the ship enough. The HE reliability is also propped up by the fact the ship is long ranged and very accurate at that range. You're not raining an endless stream of fire but how much of that is wasted by cruisers that do? The ship is opportunistic to an extent but nevertheless very strong because it does what you want it to do without making a big fuss or kicking you in the teeth with an obvious big weakness you constantly need to play around. It just feels right to me.

I assume it's something mundane like an easily available book or set of drawings showing Hiei but not Kongo. There is a polish series called Profile Morskie that definitely has a detailed entry on Hiei, it might have just been what the office had handy at the time. As for rangefinder height, I'm pretty sure it's not the only factor in WGs calculations and they can tweak as necessary. Also, Hiei had a more modern combined director control tower while the other three had the older separate rangefinder and director setup.

Well, "hydroacoustic search" is a pretty ambiguous term anyway. Is it meant to be active or passive? If passive, the detected ship should have no idea. Then again, magically knowing when someone can see you also doesn't make sense. So I guess don't think about it too hard. In gameplay terms, it would kind of make sense to have different icons. I mean, you have different icons for planes and ships spotting you.

I would completely support something like this, and would probably buy it. I have all the ARP versions in port and I love the Kongo class both as a ship and in terms of gameplay. But I don't play them much because T5 sucks... and not in the way you think. I actually think Kongo's potential is hugely wasted at that tier, constantly shoved onto small maps where you can't use the speed properly and dumb as wood team-mates in complete cluseterf*** battles (hint: I don't find low tiers fun). Having played Hood now, I think a Kongo class would excel as a T6. The soft stats would make it supremely comfortable ergonomically and you could dash around the map performing surgical strikes. In short, the perfect battlecruiser. To be honest, I'm not sure she would even need major buffs to be viable, I agree in principle with all your suggestions. I mean, Dunkerque is T6 after all and apart from the super unqiue turret layout, not much different in terms of overall power level. But, given we have Mutsu and Ishizuchi, now Kaga and rumoured Ashitaka (Amagi stock hull at T7), I feel this is something we won't see. It's clear WG are signalling the IJN premium "theme" is early fit of their respective ships, not later upgrades. I would sooner put my money on Yamashiro 1920s version being a T5 premium than Haruna being one at T6.

Yeah, that one gets hydro with top hull and yes the "detected" icon is the same as radar. It's a nasty trick for the unprepared, quite a strong DD overall mostly because of this.

But the Baltimore has same HE shell velocity stock and upgraded...

Completely agreed, one of my favorite ships in the game and exactly what I wanted from RN cruisers. Aggressive, brawling, seat of your pants gameplay, and really delivers results. To put it into perspective, my top 10 average damage ships are 2 CVs, 6 BBs and 2 cruisers. It's no surprise the big boys top the list, and one of the cruisers is Des Moines. I'll let you work out which one the other is

That's kind of why I went with rudder shift in both slots to bring it down to 5s. When the concealment is already bad I thought it's not worth going all out to improve it when the end result is bad anyway. I think I need to unlock the range mod and be a bit more passive early, then see how the battle goes from there.

Only the AP is superheavy, and I doubt you're firing that against DDs.

Got mine recently, struggling a little to start despite free-XP-ing the B hull. I never really like staying at range with this line, so I know I'm doing a bit of a square peg round hole thing with this ship but I figured it has a much better turning circle than the Chapaev so I'll go aggressive and see what happens. I'm yet to make it work but I'm still getting used to how it handles. I think with correct island use to set up that 12-gun broadside with AP nice things will happen. The biggest issue is the team abandoning you to be focus-fired after you inevitable get spotted first.

I'll add my vote to Concealment Expert. It becomes borderline OP with Shokaku, where you can get your detectability down to almost 9km, less than most cruisers. Amazing how much more you can do when you can shadow your fleet really close.

The HE velocity is fine, and the HE shells and velocity is the same from T7 to T10. Only the AP shells change and their velocity is slower but on T9/10 only. So, if you can't hit a DD at 8km with US cruiser HE, could I suggest it's your aim that needs looking at?