VC381

Well, to be a bit of a detail freak the grey in WGs Hood model is a bit too light. Home fleet grey in 1940-41 was pretty dark and also with a noticeable blue tint. What GhostRider shows in his picture is the ship in the Mediterranean fleet, which did use light grey (lighter than WGs model) and with recognition stripes for the Spanish Civil War in 1936-37. I like this look too but check out the secondaries. That's pre-refit with 6x 5.5" per side, so I doubt we'll ever get that. Unless WG make her modular like Mogami but swapping secondary outfit. Which would be awesome but even less likely.

It's a bit random, sometimes they orbit in opposite directions, sometimes in the same direction. If they orbit in the same direction usually they are on opposite sides of the circle but not always, I think it depends on if you're turning when you're launching them. It is a fairly nice skill but not one I would pick first, cruisers have better options on the first row.

Hood's "known weaknesses" come in two flavours. One was slightly thin deck armour, the other was a mythical "weak spot" via the upper belt then through the sloped portion of the deck. Both are actually irrelevant in the Bismarck case since the range was very short and Bismarck had very flat trajectory guns. Hood did indeed have a very small, possibly non-existent immunity zone against Bismarck, but if we're talking about closing the range and belt penetrations being the issue, the only BB of Hood's design generation that might stand half a chance would be Colorado. Everything else, QEs, Rs, Nagato, all would have had about the same chance of suffering the same fate. As for references, just look up the armour schemes instead of relying on anecdotes. Hood had a 12" inclined belt, QEs and Rs had 13" vertical and Nagato 12" vertical, Colorado 13.5" vertical. The effective protection of the 12" sloped belt on Hood is close to the 13" vertical on QE. The extent of the belt (height) is similar, as is the backing slope. We're looking at very much equivalent possible paths for a magazine hit. I'm not saying Hood's armour scheme didn't have issues, but it did not have issues that were significantly greater than BBs of the same age. She retained the term battlecruiser, which in RN terminology had largely already evolved to mean "fast battleship", which in truth she was given the extent of her armour. Remove the bias history attaches to the name and look at the actual diagrams of the armour scheme side by side with QE and the myths will be dispelled. And the fact remains that the magazine hit was low probability, and that Bismarck was also a ship designed around the same outdated (albeit overall thicker) armour scheme, as demonstrated by how quickly she was rendered useless in her final battle. Rodney is probably the only 1920s BB that could be considered well armored against Bismarck's guns at the ranges involved. KGV was brand new 1930s tech, I specifically said earlier designs. If you put a QE class in that battle, even the full refit variety, they have about the same change against Bismarck as Hood did, give or take.

The only thing to learn was that their ammo handling procedure needed looking at, which they did and was not an issue in Hood's fate. The fact is, at the range and target conditions of Hood's loss and against Bismarck's guns, no ship designed and built before 1930 would have been immune. But even so, the hit was low probability. In any case you can't use the crystal ball that is 80+ years of history and analysis to decide what was or wasn't a good decision at the time. Hood was arguably a huge success in peacetime, and no more a failure in war than most of the other battleships of her generation. Arguably also less of a failure and resource waste than Bismarck. Plus she, stands pretty even with the ships of her generation. The circumstances of her loss and the mythical term "battlecuiser" seem to distort all analysis and bring in so many misconceptions.

It is nimbler than DM, and smaller, and stealthier, and at times it feels like her armour is better at least in a trollish "how did I live through that" kind of way. But all that just pales in comparison to the disgusting DPM of DM. In fairness though, that is literally the only advantage DM has... but it is double the firepower.

Yup, I love how people latch on to one thing like sigma value in this case and don't accept anything else because it isn't the buff they think should have been applied. Especially something like sigma which has gained this mythical reputation as maker or breaker of BB viability despite the fact nobody in the community knows how it really works and that probably 90% of players won't actually observe the difference it makes in their day to day games.

This is only partly true. It's damage as a % of target HP. A cruiser that sinks a DD from full HP will get better rewards than a BB that takes half HP from another BB even though the first is probably only 10k damage and the second is probably 30k. Also I wasn't talking about rewards but about game impact. As you pointed out farming doesn't win games. Winning gives a 50% base XP boost anyway, which is more than you can probably get by farming at the expense of objectives, so it's not an excuse. But for BBs farming damage is their role, more than other classes, so they should do more damage because they are still not as good at other things.

You forget that dealing damage is one of the main things a BB is meant to do, the other is taking it. But they have disadvantages because they are usually slow and predictable and the damage can be quite unreliable from one salvo to the next, especially on small and agile targets. Unlike most BBs, cruisers are more flexible and can better choose when and where they do their damage and thus can have a big impact on the game even if the damage number total is smaller. Just damage out of context doesn't really mean anything and isn't actually what wins most games.

Cruiser killer and normal pen farming on BBs, sounds like my kind of ship!

Thing is, like any stupid tactic, it has a small chance to succeed just because the enemy isn't expecting you to be that stupid. That doesn't make it worth trying although there are situations where it's not such a terrible idea. Also, there are people that play for those rare moments when something stupid turns out awesome, and try it without caring about the numerous times it doesn't work. I guess we should respect their right to do that if they find it fun. I actually did this in reverse once, starting north on brothers pushed the west side easily while east collapsed, capped C and surprised the enemy team (who were now in our spawn) by coming back up the middle. This was a DD, a Des Moines and two Montanas. They had a Gearing defending the gap that must have soiled his pants when I turned my radar on from our DDs smoke. A few of their BBs then panicked and turned broadside across the gap... Yeah... It was fun.

I wasn't saying Kutuzov is a better brawler than Atago, of course she isn't, I'm just saying it's a better brawler than you would expect of a Soviet cruiser and more versatile than people give her credit for. As with all high tier premiums, there are a lot of people who are playing it... let's say sub-optimally, so being able to beat them isn't really a fair assessment of it.

RN cruisers, tricky bunch but very fun. Your reward for perseverance comes at T6/7. Gunnery. Get closer first, these aren't long range ships. When you think you're leading enough, lead a bit more. If your damage on a target drops because they angle, change target. Target selection is the key to maximising damage with AP. Be opportunist and exploit those people who think that just because you aren't shooting at them right now they don't need to be prepared to defend against you. Cruiser torpedoes. Opportunist or last resort. A few uses are holding them back as a deterrent against people pushing your smoke, or carpeting enemy smoke to flush out DDs. RN CL playstyle. "Safe" style is sneak around, use islands and good base concealment to mask approach, smoke up somewhere with lots of targets (plan escape route) and blast away. As you get more confident (and assuming you're at least at Leander) you can rely more on your agility to brawl when smoking up wouldn't be possible or ideal, and manage your heal to get you through and on to the next fight. Generally you need to be quite aggressive and it's a fine line between a glorious, successful charge and a painfully short one. But that comes with experience.

Not to burst your bubble but Kutuzov is more agile than Atago (better rudder shift and turning circle) and actually brawls fairly well due to this and high volume of AP. That's not to say Atago isn't good, of course it is, but they can overlap in playstyle more than you think.

The Baltimore is a solid ship but a bit disliked and difficult to play because it doesn't have the "easy-mode" of other cruisers which is just long range HE spam. It's a ship where you always need to be using all your tools, map awareness and position, stealth and agility (it's a pretty nimble cruiser), AP and HE. I've found it very tanky for a cruiser, arguably more so than DM. Quite a few times I made a mistake and just assumed I would be gone next salvo but ended up pulling through. Your friend is reload. She got a buff recently (10s), with the reload mod she's even better (8.8s) and with AR better still (7.9s at 50% HP). You can quite confidently rush BBs of your tier, dodge/tank their shots and wreck them with AP at close range, to say nothing of what you do to other cruisers (especially RN).

Sorry creamgravy but those screenshots prove nothing since you cherry-picked a perfect spread and a terrible one. You could swap the ships and those kind of results would still be easily possible. We don't even properly know the exact mechanics of sigma and how much impact it really has. Making the shells pen better at angle and overpen less is an increase in damage reliability. Whether that increase is the same as you would get by buffing sigma to 2.0 is not something we know at the moment or can really know. EDIT: Also Tirpitz to me has always felt like a very accurate ship. I'm starting to think it's all a matter of perception.

As a huge fan of RN and USN cruiser AP, the shell changes really make me happy to me the accuracy will matter less knowing each shell is more reliable.

I believe they are the reason why Hood has the defensive AA consumable.

Actually a lot of T8 cruisers have a concealment and agility edge over their higher tier counterparts and thus I think up-tier quite well as long as you understand the playstyle and limitations. Playing T8 is hard work and I would love to be top tier more often in some of those ships, but rants from otherwise good players are really not what I expect. It's not THAT bad, come on guys.

This is true, it depends on playstyle. I've only tried it on Edinburgh but I run that with smoke screen expert to amplify the effect further and I use rudder shift instead of concealment, smoking as a last resort in the heat of the moment not as a pre-planned thing. I agree if you're sneaking and planning you'll be hit worse by the duration reduction without getting much benefit from the bigger+later bubble bubble.

It actually benefits RN cruisers in general because you don't need to be as careful about slowing down first before popping smoke. http://forum.worldofwarships.eu/index.php?/topic/78390-smoke-generator-modification-1-on-rn-cruisers/

I actually wonder how much difference all this stat comparison actually makes. I mean yes, it categorically proves ship X is more accurate than ship Y, but how observable is this in practice? I have a feeling that the difference between a great spread and a terrible spread on a single ship is much bigger than the difference between a perfectly average spread of one ship and that of another. So really, with the tiny sample sizes we have (salvos per game) and the observational bias of players, it's a complete crap-shoot as to whether a ship will actually be perceived as accurate or not, regardless of the above.

The problem is the ship is a complex sum of its parts and you can't just cherry-pick a few stats and say "look that makes her another tier". She is faster than most T9/10 and has better armour than one of the T8s, does that make her T8? No, same way having slightly weaker guns doesn't make her a T6. Hint, Gneisenau has only 6 guns of the same size (although better shells) and is same tier.

Dunkerque actually uptiers extremely well for a T6 BB. The speed gives you huge flexibility on those big maps and you are an excellent cruiser hunter. You can HE enemy BBs but AP works just fine especially if you aim a little higher (and especially on Germans). Basically, ask yourself if Dunkerque would be OP as a T8 cruiser, and there's your answer to how to play her uptiered.

Thanks, I assume none of those numbers are in metres then, just coefficients of some sort but still good for relative comparison. When you say sigma is spread pattern, is it sigma as one would understand it in statistics i.e. it's related to the probability of getting a good spread vs. a bad one, or does it work another way?

So what does each number actually mean? Are these at each ships max range or all scaled to a common range for better comparison?