VC381

Thank you fluffyblue and Ubertron for the balanced feedback! I didn't re-spec in the end but I still only have it on one captain who has now moved to Des Moines. I left it not because I think it's very strong but mainly because I felt I had everything I needed in the build even with those 4 points gone and I didn't feel like investing in equally situational AA instead. My main use for it is still working out if a cap is likely to be contested so I can better judge the risk of charging it. Last night though I made a terrible call, because RPF was pointing at B cap while I was going to C, I called "clear" in chat to my team and we all drove into 3 T10 BBs that were stalking the cap but not closest to me. Looking at DD builds and all the available goodies, I find myself struggling to fit my dream build in 19 points without even considering RPF (never mind that my highest point DD captain is only 14 anyway). So I'm not going to be taking it on anything else anytime soon, I'll continue to keep track of whether I suffer at the hands of someone else with it. I agree if the player base is split between "it's broken" and "it's useless" then nobody would shed a tear if it went. But since it seems to be here to stay we may as well have a rational assessment of its impact and how to play with and around it.

It's practically impossible for things in a game to be different but somehow all the same power. German DDs have Hydro which is a fun unique ability. It's an ability that could easily make them OP so WG just decided to be cautious with the other stats. Maybe they got it a bit wrong, but they feel like OK all-rounders, they can do everything equally well.

Maybe the stats didn't update but I played Gaede and Maas, which I still have and intend to get Z-23. I haven't played many games in them but I enjoyed them, I just don't have time to dedicated grind the line at the moment. For the record I didn't play them on PTS.

Because they're OK and fun as they are, and because not everything needs to be "competitive".

Not sure if you're completely missing my point or twisting it on purpose. How exactly does RPF prevent a DD spotting and screening his fleet? You still have stealth, you can't actually be seen. The enemy knows what direction to look for you in. Great, that means nothing if it leads him straight into your fleet. But it means you need to stay with the fleet, spot for them but be ready to fall back. BBs should do the same, follow the fleet and support with gunfire. Maybe you're on to something and shared vision needs to be tweaked to provide better incentives for that (but not to the extreme extent you're suggesting).

I agree camping is a lack of interaction but I'm not sure what you're getting at with the "not being able to fire". I would welcome incentives to discourage solo BB play as much as solo DD play (CV buff comes to mind) but that isn't the point of this thread.

To all those saying it ruins the tension and surprise of the game, can I point out that one of the key principles of good game design is "interaction". If a player can just be invisible most of the time with no consequences, occasionally popping up to do something then vanishing again, it doesn't matter if he's no more than a nuisance and the tactic isn't strong, that is very low interaction. That is fundamentally bad game design. Yes, fog of war is part of the game and information control is part of the skill, but all RPF does is force people to interact more with each-other than doing solo tactics. And if IJN DDs have been disproportionately hit by this, then the solution is to buff them in other areas so they can deal with it.

The disctinction makes sense but then inaccuracy isn't a property of the gun itself, it's a property of the fire control.

If you're hunting cruisers 12 guns is better than 8 bigger guns. But as I said before, I think people who are set on getting this because of what it is (a playable 1920s look battleship) will get it anyway and work around whatever weaknesses she has or just put up with them because it's cool.

I have the Fuso I got from the Christmas Convoys sitting around. I'm tempted to play it stock because the hull is gorgeous and that's something I never did the first time around although the range makes me nervous.

All US cruisers T8+ benefit from the "dodge build". Propulsion Mod 2 and Steering Mod 3. With the RoF on DM you aren't going to be waiting to fade into concealment between shots, rudder shift makes for better WASD-hax to keep you alive while shooting. Also, I took the reload module and Adrenaline Rush on my commander. At half HP the reload is down to 4.5 seconds. I agree Priority Target is a must!

Wait, so it points exactly at the centre of the square the enemy ship is in? I knew it was "inaccurate" in the sense that aligning it visually didn't always zero in exactly on the enemy ship (tested when the closest enemy was clearly visible) but I assumed it was random so it wouldn't be too good. If it's that easy then... dayum... Still though, the whole "your opinion doesn't matter" thing is BS. Lots of different people play the game, you can't dismiss them simply because they don't play the top tiers or ranked. I said in my post, I accept your opinion on those matters at face value if you have more experience there than me. But please cut me (and others) equal courtesy in exchange, and accept that the skill is not widely used or powerful in many other situations.

Well, actually it did give me some good awareness in a game just now. Two brothers, me and another cruiser went for A but all our DDs went to D. Because I had RPF, I knew no enemies where anywhere near A (the marker was pointing all the way across the map to their spawn) so we captured and flanked because we knew for sure we wouldn't get spotted doing it. Won the game. But still, quite situational and really a mistake on the enemy part.

The armour was on a big scale in numbers, which is fine, but doesn't take into account the complexities of the arrangement of others. In my mind, simply throwing thickness at the problem is bad engineering, it's fundamentally inefficient. It is very likely that other ships achieved the same degree of protection with thinner belts by using more clever arrangements. Also, while I don't instinctively distrust wikipedia, that quote is a subjective assessment. I would rather look at the numbers and draw my own conclusions. But you are right, I'm happy to agree to disagree and in fairness I am a bit on the fence on this one. I think the KGVs were good ships IRL given the limitations they were designed under. I think they could have been better, but IRL a BB is a BB and minor "stats" differences between classes matter less than how you handle it. However, my argument here stems from the fact that RL strengths are at best distorted, polarised and at worst flipped by the game mechanics. The citadel for example is high out of the water (good thing IRL, bad thing in game), and most combat in game takes place at ranges well below the inner bound of the immunity zone of ANY battleship armor scheme. If we take the North Carolina's 16" guns as benchmark for T8 weapons, they penetrate something like 20" of armor at 15km range, and that's already considered "camping" or "sniping" range by some. The KGVs armour scheme, like most others, was designed according to the immunity zone concept to protect against a given set of guns in a given range band. IRL these immunity zones were generally between ~20km for the closest you could get without taking belt penetrations and ~30km for the furthest you could be before plunging fire and deck penetrations became a real problem. Basically the way the game is designed around unrealistically close range combat completely invalidates every BB armor scheme, no matter the thickness, with only things like turtleback having an advantage (despite that being a horribly out-dated concept IRL). Also it shows deck armor should be basically irrelevant in game except for a few edge cases. With that in mind, angle is the only thing that matters (hence the bow in tactic) and here the overmatch mechanic dominates. So whatever advantages the armour scheme of KGV had IRL would either turn out to be irrelevant in game, or even actively work against it!

While some AP shells had excellent performance at shallow impact angles, most did not. The problem with the game mechanic is it's too simplified, with all shells bouncing at the same angle. If you made auto-bounce really small for all shells it would take a lot of the skill out of the game. But, what they could do is make the mechanics more realistic, tune each shell differently to reflect differences in real life performance, and maybe implement partial penetrations. Basically this would be something like a shell hitting armor at an angle and "digging in", not enough to penetrate, but the shell itself flips over and the base slaps the armor, making a small hole and allowing some explosive force to enter. Or shells that ricochet but still blow a section of armor out, which then bounces around inside the ship for some damage. But I doubt the game is interested in that level of realism. In fact we had something like this with the normalisation angles, which used to be different for each shell, but which were made the same based on shell size because "players couldn't deal with the complexity of understanding how different shells penetrating at different angles" (yup, we're all too dumb for realistic penetration mechanics according to WG). The ray of hope is with cruisers, both USN (that only bounce at 22.5 degrees) and RN that behave completely differently. I doubt BBs will see something like this though because it would simply make them too powerful (necessary lack of realism for game balance).

Also the KGVs armour belt is not the same thickness over the length it covers. The (admittedly impressive) 14.7" thickness covers only the magazines. This is pretty good in itself, but the majority of the belt length over the machinery is only 13.75" thick. In addition, it's vertical and external, making no effort to take advantage of angles or de-capping mechanics in the same way the schemes of basically every other BB designed after 1930 do. So the majority of the citadel of a KGV would have protection roughly equivalent to a New Mexico or Colorado (both 13.5" vertical belts) while being a bigger target. The same story for the deck, only 4.88" thick over the machinery (the majority of its area) and 5.88" over the magazines. So if you take the general performance of the guns and the armor layout, what KGV is, is basically a New Mexico that does 28 knots.

Separate to the discussion about what tier it should be at, this is incorrect. The guns themselves are... OK. Really nothing special for a 14" gun. The USN 14"/50s with the modern shells that saw service in the refitted New Mexico and Tennessee classes are arguably better guns for the caliber. There is absolutely nothing special about the KGVs 14" guns that would allow them to punch above their size in the way that e.g. Scharnhorst and Dunkerque do.

Sorry to burst your bubble Tano (and others) but the 1920s designs are extremely unlikely to fill the T10 slot. The BBs would be painfully slow at that tier, and the return to old designs would be jarring. Every other T10 BB is either a WWII ship, an almost WWII ship or a WWII era project. We'll see a mostly fictional sort-of-based-on-Lion... "thing", to suit whatever flavour WG cook up for the line, I can almost guarantee it.

Looks sexy I'm happy to have them around although I'm unlikely to grind one, too many other lines.

Which is why I said Scharnhorst. 1) it plays like a cruiser and 2) it's very forgiving so new players won't get frustrated with it. P.S. kite and burn is not the only way to play a cruiser...

Scharnhorst, simply because speed is fun, and it's supremely comfortable with fast turret traverse, fast reload and a very forging armor scheme.

NP. I agree it's unclear and it would have been easier for them to write it as "+15% time" since that's the stat people usually go by and is more visible in the UI.

To revisit the subject of range, the game uses the idea of "effective range" based on stuff like how high the rangefinder is and how good the ships aiming equipment etc. It's not that unrealistic since even in real life battleships didn't fire at absolute maximum range due to limitations on ability to aim accurately or in some cases even see the target. Of course in game it's taken to extreme, most ships have less than 50% of their real range, but that's basically to keep maps small so that a) games don't take ages and b) the game can run on lower system specs. Also to make battles more "fun" by forcing close range fights and making shooting depend less on RNG. There are a lot of things about the game that are unrealistic and WG tweaks what they can for balance, but major stats like guns and armor are usually correct, and the game armor penetration mechanics are quite good. Basically it's based on real ships but then distorted for fun.

There is no error. It's traverse SPEED not time. So for Yamato, traverse SPEED is 180deg / 72s= 2.5 deg/s -13% speed is 2.5 * 0.87 = 2.175 deg/s New traverse time is 180deg / 2.175 = 82.8s, as per your experiment.

I haven't been playing very long and not reached Tier 10 yet but I am mainly a cruiser player up to T9. I have no idea how cruiser survivability worked in early versions of the game but the way I understand it is, if you're getting hit by a BB you screwed up. Angling doesn't save you and in some cases can make it worse, as shells are less likely to overpen. The tactics options, depending on ships, are to stay at range, stay invisible, dodge like crazy or some combination of all of those. I don't have the Zao but I believe she can stealth-fire. That's one possible solution. There are also skills like Priority Target (tells you how many enemies currently have you selected as a target) and Incoming Fire Alert (tells you when shells are flying your way), both of which are great for telling you when you should hit WASD like a mad-man and stop shooting to fade out of detection. A nimble cruisers with some RNG luck can keep a BB busy for some time and even give more than he takes, but it's constant hard work. DO NOT expect stationary or angling based play to work in most cruisers against BB guns. Some of the armor on some cruisers can bounce BB shells in some situations but you're always gambling with that approach. Simple rule, don't get hit in the first place.