jss78

I use the same skills as you for 10 points. I find the concealment expert skill + concealment upgrade supremely useful in staying alive, especially in those T8-10 games. I'm about to hit 19 points on my NC captain, and what he's getting on top is BFT+AFT and Jack of All Trades. http://shipcomrade.com/captcalc/0100000010100000000011000000100119 I love Superintendent+Jack of All trades on BB's. More and faster heals just beats almost anything else for me. BFT+AFT are I guess debatable. With the AA range upgrade you get an impressive AA bubble which protects friendly ships too. Also I tend to close-in-brawl quite a lot, and BFT+AFT give a nice boost to secondaries too.

This was my Saturday. I quit after the third container, as I didn't want to break the perfect series.

Yes and no. In some ways Omaha and Cleveland are outliers in the entire tree. Omaha is a special case in the US tree in actually having torps. Cleveland is another special case in having some of the best AA for the tier, in the entire game. Otherwise similar to Omaha, but more guns and no torps. The rest of the tree (Pensacola - Des Moines) constitute the USN heavy cruisers, and are all about those excellent 200 mm guns. You'll be using AP a lot more in them. But in core gameplay they're still similar, in that they are agile, well-gunned, but relatively short-ranged cruisers. So just like in Omaha/Cleveland, you need to be brave, get way too close for comfort, and WASD like a madman to stay alive. Personally, what I did was keep both the Omaha and Cleveland, and take a third captain to the heavy cruisers.

I never got into anime. What I liked about the ARP ships is that one of the captains you got is actually not a one of those anime girls, but what seems to be a teddy bear with a heart on its forehead: I'm a grown-*ss man of 38, and I think it's cute as can be (with no sarcasm).

Honestly, currently my advice to a new CV player would be to: 1. Play T4's, to learn the ropes (sans manual drops). 2. FreeXP through T5's -- to skip the incredibly lucicrous mechanic of going against non-gimped T6's 3. Once at T6, do co-op to learn manual drops 4. Proceed as normal

My division mate seems to do really impressively in his Mikasa. But honestly these ships are so difficult to assess. He's a relatively experienced and well-performing player, and he puts this 17-18 point secondary-build Nagato captain in the Mikasa. The thing is, I expect this is a rather typical scenario with Mikasa players. Yeah, they will do well among the T2 population. What this says about the ship itself... who knows.

I was always kind of OK with the removal of the alt-attacks for Tier 4/5. There was a hell of a lot of seal-clubbing going on. This was a really crude solution by taking down the skill ceiling, but, I'm willing to begrudgingly accept that it improved the situation which was honestly quite bad. HOWEVER I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw they'd allow the gimped T4/5 CV's to be matched with fully-functional T6's. I literally thought I had understood wrong. Personally I would've only gimped the T4's, made that the "training tier" for CV's, and given them a protected MM.

I wonder if this could work as something that's occasionally used to add variety. A concept of "special battlefield conditions", if you may. Like we already sometimes have cyclones, heavily influencing gameplay, occasionally we'd have a game with "poor intel" and no knowledge of opfor composition. Stuff like this would be a super easy way to add a bit of variety to the daily grind. The way the MM works you'll always have a general idea about what the opfor is bringing.

Guns that shoot tribbles sound totally sweet and potentially OP.

The T4 and T5 certainly look fun in the Jingles video. Since giving up on the Karlsruhe, I'm in the market for a nice T4 CL to joyride in, and the Dew-GAY True-UH (I think) might fit the bill. Fragile but fast and well armed, it's kind of tickling my Pensacola bone.

Yeah, that one looks impossibly small and lightly armed to hack it even at T1. In general though I'd really love see something like a Europe Minor Nations tree of regular ships. Maybe a minitree only up to T5 or T6. A handful of Austro-Hungarian ships, and a careful selection of individual ships from other countries. Maybe 10-15 ships total, and it'd make lots of people happy. (Personally hoping for Väinämöinen class coastal defence ship.)

5x2 torp bombers and 8 squadrons total seem like something an exceptional CV player could maybe put into good use. You can always group them if needed, but with the big squadrons (especially USN), you're sometimes forced to overcommit forces. Also it'll cycle them super fast (5x2 TB's make it a lot faster that 2x5). Those T6 planes in T7 MM though ... lots of people will be breaking planes-shot-down records. At least it's different. If it turns out to be a stinker, I'll nickname it Caca and at least have a bit of demented humour.

I dislike a mechanic that punishes the opfor CV, not his fault really. I would however like to see some AFK punishment mechanic that's both harsh and automated. If you don't show up for the game within x minutes (say 3-5), you get an AFK'er tag for x games. Like the pink duncecap mechanic for team killing. As far as what to DO with the players with an active AFK'er tag, there are actually lots of options: - Force them to play co-op only? - Prevent entry to high-tier games? - Prevent playing CV's? Not meaning to be too damning of AFK folks here: I know there are "good" reasons like genuine connectivity issues, small kids, medical conditions, etc. But IMO if you cannot reliably get in the game -- for WHATEVER reason -- you should consider playing coop, and you most definitely should not play a CV.

Just a thought. Maybe their apparent "sixth sense" is because they've spent a lot of time in torpedo-armed ships themselves? They see you go, and figure "this is where I'd launch torps -- I better duck". Oftentimes there's a somewhat obvious time to launch, also even slight turn by you can give away your intention to launch, especially if they have some idea about your firing angles.

Before the concealment buff, I tried working through the Pepsicola twice -- ended up rage-selling the ship twice. I had really, really good luck the third time. For me the reduced concealment made a remarkable difference. It always had excellent guns, and excellent agility. It just couldn't survive being everyone's priority target, all the time, that was the full extent of the problem. One thing that might skew my perception is the T7 MM which felt remarkable friendly -- I felt I was top tier in T5-7 most of the time.

Yeah, I don't have the Alabama, but when it comes to NC -- I always felt that the Primary Gun Range vs. AA Range vs. Secondary Range, it really doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference. Maybe that's weird position to take, but I feel they're all really situational. You really don't need the gun range, AA is also a bit situational, and the baseline secondaries aren't good enough to warrant the range boost. I went with AA because occasionally you do get targetted by CV's, and it does help. With the Colorado it was the same conundrum -- there I went with secondary boost, because it actually gets halfway decent secondaries. What's interesting about the NC premium camo is that it's completely different for the A hull compared to the B hull. Here's a high-res of the premium on both A hull (top) and B hull (bottom). I was always sad that I can't use the A hull camo on the B hull. I think it's the prettiest ship in the entire game.

I didn't mean to attack you, I was basically agreeing with your sentiment. Namely, that regardless of what happens, it's just silly to spend your spare time flaming people in a video game. I was writing before my morning coffee, so was a bit cranky. Always a bad idea.

To me there are two very separate issues. It's a video game, and you have people who play it well, and you have people who play it badly. Not surprising and not very interesting. Then you have insulting other people. Then you have the people who think playing a video game badly EQUATES deserving to be insulted. Now this is really bizarre, and if you think this way, I'd seriously consider taking a step back and getting out of the basement. These folks are mildly entertaining as psychopathological case studies, but yeah they do look like idiots. Most people out there in the random queue are really cool, but some of these people... Not new to the internet (online for 23 years and counting).

I sold my Bogue. I get why they did what they did with T4-5 CV's -- the early CV's were admittedly too powerful, and ESPECIALLY if the opfor CV was too novice to counter your CV. So they took the skill ceiling down by removing manual attacks, which then makes it pointless for an experienced CV player to play these ships. I guess that's working as intended. I whole-heartedly supported the removal of open-water stealth fire. I have a few ships which had that ability, but they'll manage just fine without. Just like lots of DD's and CL's have always managed without.

So you'd want to make the T4 basically like an apex of WW1 'tech. Well, I agree, and I really like the WW1 playstyle in this game more than the WW2 stuff. I'd love it if the first few tiers explored that exclusively. It's only going to get worse though, it seems, with the new T4 French cruiser being a pure interbellum-to-WW2 ship, while it's facing Karlsruhes etc. in pure WW1 spec. Also it seems to be few of the tiers are really chronologically consistent, with e.g. Bogues and Clevelands coming in way too early. I doubt they'll go through the trouble of fixing all that.

Personally I'd love this. But I think to have any chance of actually happening, the addition of new ships would probably need to have a minimal effect on the rest of the trees. This in mind, I really like the idea of throwing the current T1 ships in a "Tier 0", training mode, or whatever you want to call it. This wouldn't affect the rest of the trees, since T1 is already separated in MM, and besides there's no chronological continuity from T1 to T2 anyway. You could then simply add T2 battleships and a full T1 with yet earlier stuff. Nothing else would be affected. Economical viability might be a problem unfortunately. Presumably the ships would take just as long to model, but any premiums would probably have to be in the 3-10 EUR range.

Edited my post for clarity. What I meant by "three-tier spread" is the current system at T5+, with a maximum of three adjacent tiers in a single game.

I'm not categorically opposed to +2/-2. In general though, I'd gladly wait a few seconds longer to increase the LIKELIHOOD of getting a +1/-1. You could then use the +2/-2 more often e.g. during quiet hours. But it seems to me that it's WG's paradigm to get the queue time down at any cost. It's a real drag in specific tiers, and most particularly T5, where you so often end up as filler for T5-7 games. It's literally making me play T5 less. Some people make the argument that the +2/-2 MM is desirable for ship diversity. I think with each new ship tree coming out, this is less of a concern. TL;DR: I'm OK with +2/-2 used occasionally, but I'd hope to see a +1/-1 MORE OFTEN.

My division mate runs that skill on his Nagato, and seems to do impressive work with it. He's running the ship in full brawler mode. I keep telling him it's not a German BB and he shouldn't play it like that, but he's having none of it: From a purely non-meta POV, I'd say that getting in their face with strong secondaries is absolutely hilarious. In that sense it's "worth it".