VC381

And Expert Loader? Those guys must need a hell of a workout to unload an HE shell and load a new AP shell in 2 seconds flat shame he's busy doing that on my NO

Yeah I've seen this a few times but I have no idea if it's asking about game balance, or lag/performance or something else. Thing is, I think I get it mainly in games where my team gets super steamrolled and I obviously click "no". Maybe it is about balance?

I'm all the way up at Edinburgh and Fiji (kept) is now one of my favorite and best performing ships. Minotaur looks fun but I've stopped that grind mostly because it's a long way to T10 and I don't really care for the ship as a fairly obscure "what if". Anyway it's playing RN cruisers that made me revisit the Atlanta idea because as you say the playstyle looks similar on the surface but also different in some key ways. I'm not an amazing player but I can handle myself in tricky specialised cruisers, can get the Pensacola to perform just fine. AFT necessary? I would almost think the bloom changes make it a liability, as with the DDs. Is concealment based hit-and-run not worth it? Looks like you can get it down to <10km. My Cleveland captain is only on 3 points because I don't care for high spec captains on mid tier ships and my good ones are on all the heavy cruisers. Anyway Cleveland desperately needs EM but that's a waste on Atlanta, so no AR or LS. Still not ideal. Also, you guys are at odds with BuccaneerBill regarding IFHE

The shooting over rocks thing doesn't sound overly appealing, I was hoping I could be more dynamic although I can see how being in the open would be a bigger risk with this ship than other same tier cruisers. I'm surprised you say it's less agile than RN cruisers since on paper the Fiji only turns slightly tighter while having worse rudder shift and both Leander and Edinburgh turn worse. Does it feel sluggish because of the speed loss in the turn? How does the engine mod help instead of rudder shift? Also, on a related note, does it need Last Stand? Good to know IFHE isn't mandatory, I was worried Atlanta would need a dedicated captain. Having said that, it still sounds like it does, or at least my US DD captain is not set up optimally to share with it. I do have a Benson and generally enjoy it although it's not my best ship looking at stats. As I said I'm a cruiser main and I'm a big fan of the US ships (kept all T6 to 10). I was hoping it would have the same kind of excitement as brawling in a Pensacola but with the added fun factor of vast volume of fire.

Alright thanks, gonna get AR now and then save up for either JoaT at 14 points or BoS at 15 points. I need more time to see what's killing me, if it's fire I'll wait for BoS. I don't want to aim for Fire Prevention because by the time my captain hits 16 points I'll probably have Iowa and will want to move him to that. Also thanks for confirming AA in slot 2, I was looking at that thinking everything is useless.

LM is a pretty decent DD although my top tip would be to grind out that 10-point captain for CE. I had a lot of fun in mine, basic tactic is to rush a cap and smoke up only if forced to. Ideally the enemy DD panic smokes first, then you pop hydro, dodge torps, fill his smoke with your torps and rush him to kick him out. Just bear in mind you need some support for this as the guns don't have great DPM. If your torps don't connect you will lose too much HP in a 1v1 gun duel for it to be worth it. The ship is probably the closest to a true "all-rounder" DD although maybe leaning a bit more towards torpedo use. If you're forced on the defensive you need to back off because you take damage very quickly but with short reload invi-torping and smoke+hydro for your team you're one of the best support DDs at that tier. You're also fast enough and stealthy enough to go flanking if the frontal assault is too dangerous. I would prioritise superintendent because the ship needs all those consumables. My highlight with this ship was alone in cap vs. 3x Akatsuki division. Result was first blood double strike for me and third guy running on half HP, all 27 incoming torps dodged and cap secured.

Look, I understand that cruisers are hard to play but they are not special snowflakes that need better MM than the other classes. Practice them, learn to use their strengths and deal with their weaknesses, and they are no more painful up-tiered than anything else. 5 BBs per team can make your life harder, but it's not the end of the world and anyway forcing MM changes or caps on ships in battle is the wrong way to go about changing the fact BBs are too popular. All cruisers have at least some tools to deal with BBs.

Oh I would love to see a County class in game but it's far from being a pocket battleship and it's not particularly unique. It's just another heavy cruiser with 8" guns, one of the least well armored treaty cruisers and only has 8 guns. Now that we've seen WG put Algerie at T7 I would not expect this anywhere else. Also, we didn't pick Dido because it's the only one we don't have, there are actually several other RN light cruiser classes we are missing. Dido is genuinely unique due to her 5.25" guns, kind of like the British equivalent to Atlanta. @creamgravy I would hesitate to stick this at T7 mainly because it's outright inferior to Atlanta in volume of fire and AA and the comparison wouldn't look too good. Although I guess with better concealment and the right consumables she could do it.

No but it's a pretty interesting ship, I think many of us would like it to, hence we're talking about it. Yes, but let's continue anyway. So you're saying, HE DPM somewhere between Perth and Belfast depending on chosen upgrade state, lightning fast turrets to boot. Yup, looks like T6 to me.

Most BBs only suffer very slightly stock.

Putting words in my mouth? All I said was buff accuracy, which is a known balancing handle and has nothing to do with reality on any ship in this game. You keep talking about penetration and I agree with you the guns are mediocre but what I'm saying is that doesn't matter. Give her great concealment so she can get into range where her guns really punch, or good enough accuracy to farm superstructure damage at ranges where the belt pen is lacking. That's what I mean by soft stats, not giving the guns artificially good penetration (although the angles idea I support). Guess what NCs and their mighty 16" super-heavy do against Bismarcks. Citadels? Nope, aim at the upper belt and watch the numbers roll in. KGV could do exactly the same. Guess what happens to an NC when it gets flanked at 12km. That's citadel city even to New Mexico guns so why not KGV (similar gun performance)? This is what I mean. I actually agree with your analysis of the gun itself but I don't think it's really relevant as applied to the game. It has worse penetration, fine, but it doesn't have penetration so bad that I can't deal very respectable damage in most of the situations a bigger gun could, especially if the ship is good enough to set up those situations. You're cherry picking situations where hard performance make it look sub-par when actually there's far more to it.

Meh, going to be fun seeing nothing but Iowas and Montanas all weekend. Nobody is going to be able to complete the mission since nobody is actually going to be playing IJN. The thing that annoys me is that, once again, there are no discounts on T8 and T9 silver ships. Oh well.

I used to lean towards the KGV at T7 side but honestly I'm now more keen to see her placed with her design contemporaries and with soft stats to make her work. Thing is, all you need to do is to give her excellent dispersion and sigma and she becomes a monster almost irrespective of other factors. Citadels through the bow are a very specific case when most BBs (and German especially) have vast areas of moderately armored upper hull and superstructure that's a normal penetration magnet. Who needs overmatch when you're farming 15-20k damage per salvo in normal penetrations? I've really come to realise that hard stats mean very little in terms of ship balance. Also, I would actually prefer playing a ship that was technically weak for its tier but accurate, responsive and overall comfortable to play than one which was squeezed into a lower tier because some stats didn't fit and had to be balanced by being made clunky and unwieldy.

Well, with cruisers especially (but with other ships too) it's possible to have broadly similar and historically contemporary designs spread across multiple tiers. Chapayev is a case in point, it's superficially similar to Cleveland with the only advantage of having great range and muzzle velocity. A lot of other things about it (survivability and agility for a start) are actually worse. Since its so easy to tweak things and make a ship work at a different tier I would prefer if historical time period had more influence on tiering than religiously using formulas to convert hard stats to game stats. If we did that we would need to accept that T8+ would be all "what-if" except for US ships (disappointed BTW with Algerie tier). I would rather they stretched real ships into higher tiers and made them work another way. So Cleveland doesn't belong in the T6 pack and the fact she happens to be fine in her current state is not an argument that she should be there or that we should be tiering other things around her. Mind you, I'm not convinced she's T8 material (I reserve that spot for Brooklyn), but I would at least bump her to T7. I also think you're over-estimating the RN cruiser reliance on consumables to be viable at their present tiers. I know smoke really warped the ranked meta but in randoms the ships feel very strong and I don't feel the need to do nothing but cautiously move from smoke to smoke, especially in Fiji. I'm getting 71k average damage (incidentally more than my Scharnhorst) and I've never found myself wishing for HE. In fact I've come out on top even against BBs, not because of smoke but because the AP is a more reliable and immediate damage stream than fickle fire chance and repairable DoT. Edinburgh could use some slight soft stat/quality of life buffs but that's another matter. Back to Dido, I agree the guns themselves are basically a slightly inferior 6" but I still think you're underestimating the ship. She should be pretty agile, turret traverse does matter in brawls and the volume of fire would be acceptable at T6. With the right concealment and let's say infinite AA (go with the Atlanta flavour) she would be a strong escort and good DD hunter. You don't need smoke+heal, give her HE, keep the RN SAP on top and Hydro in a separate slot like Duca, hey presto very fun and unique little cruiser. Even duelling cruisers should be a thing, with 6 guns forward and a small profile. Actual armor scheme is not that relevant in game compared to angling. I think she would cut it at T6 and you wouldn't have a late 1930s AA/anti-DD cruiser clubbing biplanes and WWI four-stackers.

What Ubertron said, display doesn't update but when you fire you see the timer starts at less.

Key word: "stock". Upgraded rudder shift is in the 5 second region (with steering gear) and the top turrets keep up at full turn.

The maps Dunkerque sees are relatively small and her guns, while not terribly inaccurate, work better at closer range and are at the front (favor closing not kiting). If you're so far back you are 14.6km away from the nearest DD that might spot you, then you are way, way too far away from the fight in that ship. You're better off with FP so you can keep shooting and pushing. Use your speed to get behind an island if you really need cover.

So basically it's a Saipan drop using the other 3 planes in your squad as meat shields. Having said that, it does mean a ship that manages to dodge one set might still get hit by the next. DDs aren't going to like this especially since the second row is tighter. Is there enough room to drop on a ship so 3 hit it and the rest start behind it and hit the next guy? That would make some rare troll moments.

Huh?! It drops them in two rows? Doesn't that mean that no matter how you aim you're always wasting half?

Revenge would be as OP at T5 as Mutsu is at T6, in other words not at all. Soft stats can easily make a ship viable at other tiers than what is "obvious" if WG wish to do so. I agree in principle that Revenge makes sense at T6 but I also like the idea of stretching what is possible to create an interesting flavour, in this case not having yet another BB at T5 with 10 guns in the 12"-14" power range. Also there is precedent for having different ships in the same class at different tiers. We might know they didn't change much IRL but WG can make up stats to differentiate them.

If they gave Revenge a 35 second reload, 72 second turret traverse like Warspite, 14km range, bad dispersion and 1.8 sigma, 21 knots, slow rudder shift and next to useless AA she would not be OP at T5. It might be hellishly frustrating to play and turn out a bit binary (either useless or "OMG what just deleted me" depending on range/position) but it would be "balanced" in some twisted way.

OK I can see that working Anyway I didn't spot Dunkerque. IMO Dunkerque needs fire prevention more than any other ship in the OPs list. It has a huge and easy to hit flammable area and tends to spend a lot of time chasing cruisers around and drawing HE spam.

Remember though that Cleveland has had some unrealistic soft stat nerfs to make her fit T6. As you rightly point out, soft stats and consumables can make a ship +/-1 tier, maybe even +/-2 compared to what you might expect her to be vanilla. But if we're talking potential RN premiums we should assume they will have the same tricks as the silver ships, or at least a like for like trade with new tricks (Belfast). I still think that 8rpm 10-gun Dido is T6 though. If you bump her up to unhistoric RoF she becomes equivalent to Atlanta (less spam but quite a bit bigger shells), again assuming at least one special consumable.

BBs don't really need Priority Target, most of the time if you're spotted you can assume someone's shooting at you, and you can't really do anything about it, so the extra information doesn't help. Preventative maintenance is probably the best (more or less only) useful first row BB skill. Double fighter is nice but only on ships that have fighters (double spotter is a waste). Fire Prevention is amazing. Not being able to have 2 fires lit on your superstructure is an absolute life saver and game changer. Unless you want to spec your BB for secondaries or AA (that it would compete for points with), I would say it's must have. Colorado makes a good AA spec, consider AFT and drop one of the 3-point skills for BFT. Concealment Expert on Fuso?! Really?! Also does it have a fighter? If it doesn't have a fighter the 2x plane thing is a waste. Nagato still makes a decent secondary spec, consider grinding the 14th point and going AFT and Manual Secondaries instead of CE and BoS (again, CE is wasted on this ship). To be honest, Concealment Expert on any BB at those tiers is a waste, the only thing it's good on is T8+ USN comboed with the concealment module, otherwise it's basically not a BB skill (in my opinion). BoS is good but overpriced, I would get it in a full survival spec but not before Fire Prevention. It's a luxury your limited points don't really offer you.

And Fiji's premium camouflage should have been 1942 Jamaica. Or we could get Jamaica as another premium. This pairing is just great: