asalonen

Yes, although in the opposite order. Småland is clearly the best. The radar negates any concealment advantage and smoke. You can and you should skip Concealment Expert, which frees up 4 skill points. When you have the radar mod in slot 3 the radar is just about long enough to gun down any DD. Finally the great engine boost negates any speed advantage the enemy might have.

I started grinding Ohio recently, which means that I have replayed the European DD line up to tier 9 now three times, over as many weeks. This means a good number of battles in Visby, Västerås, Skåne, Öland and Östergötland. My gut feeling is that I've faced a CV in about 50 % of the battles. In maybe 5 to 10 % the CV has been so good that I've had to significantly change my play. This means staying back near friendly ships and use the 6 km AA to provide air cover for the blob. A dead class? I just don't see it. I played CV's a lot in 2019, but this year DD's have been by far my favourite class. You get some battles against 65+ % CV's that can truly suck donkey balls, but they're very, very rare. Most of the time you just need to adapt your play and be mindful of the plane spotting. I like the variation.

Yes, together with the radar and great gun DPM, it's a terrifying combo. It's what makes the Småland the ultimate DD oppressor. ...and possibly even why it's going away. It's not like it's really that popular? Except maybe in competetive?

If you like the idea of a smokeless DD, then I definitely would get it. It plays very different from Halland since the torps are so weak that only a gunboat build makes any sense. You can outgun any DD. With the radar you can also outspot any DD. With the very fast (+30 %) engine boost you can catch (almost) any DD. And then when you don't have any DD's to molest, then you can stay a bit further away and spam bigger targets. Take AFT. But it's not easy, and personally I've struggled to deliver wins. But so many strong DD players swear by it that I won't disagree. For me it remains the ultimate tier 10 challenge.

As a long-time player, I actually welcome the possibility to grind my skippers further. It's not only negative. I have no less than 45 skippers with 19 skill points. I have all unique upgrades that I want to use. I feel like it's too easy to max everything out. I don't really need or want anything more in the framework that we currently have. So I like the idea of raising the bar a bit higher. And I don't think I'm alone here, since many players have more than my 10.5k randoms.

Looking at some of the CV players in randoms, maybe it's not easy enough yet... But if you consider the option, would you rather give the CV player all his planes immediately at the start of the battle? So instead of starting with 20 and regenerate max 15 over the course of the battle, rather let him just start with the 35? (Pulling these numbers out of my [edited]btw, consider them examples). The CV unicums would love it for the additional tactical choice. They would do even better than now. Bad to average players would waste the immediately available reserves and would be irrelevant in late battle. The skill gap would be even greater.

The number of planes is still limited. The total number that you can throw at the enemy over the course of the battle is very similar to what it was before the CV rework. Try the German line for example and you'll find that the risk of having an empty deck is very real. The fact that the planes regenerate just ensures that you can't waste them all in the first 10 minutes. This makes the class more forgiving to play. Somehow this has been turned into countless "unlimited planes" memes by simpletons who are unlikely to ever do well in this game.

You're calling the French BB's main strength a gimmick here. It is what allows you to close the distance quick to your advantage. The speed boost is exactly what can, when mastered, make these ships so strong. It's also what makes the line so nice and different. I'm generally not very strong in the high-tier BB's, but the French line is the one BB line where I've managed to hold unicum win rates. They work great in randoms.

I think the Graf Zeppelin is slightly more accurate even without, and the guns also hit harder. I think the idea is that Graf Zeppelin secondaries are super strong even without manual secondaries. Especially after the rework the CV player is mostly elsewhere, not controlling the hull and target lock.

I made a graph for 0.9.5 that shows the secondary dispersions. I should update this... Of the new ships the German carriers as well as Oklahoma have the same secondary dispersion as Massachusetts (the green line). Also Florida has very good dispersion on some of the 127 mm's (the same as Wichita). @1MajorKoenig It's not that all 152 mm's have a better dispersion. The improved dispersion is a feature on some specific guns. For example Kongo does not have improved dispersion on the 152 mm's -- LWM has made a mistake there.

Overall I like it. It's potentially better than what we had before, and I don’t see anything making it worse. One question though: when are you demoted? Or do you stay in the same league to kingdom come, without having to re-earn your rights to stay there? Asking because I can imagine relative plebs getting their play together just enough to earn a promotion. Then with the incentive gone, can they then fool around forever with no fear of relegation?

So what are the other layers of elitism? An honest question.

The only real trick is to get the target burning again after he has used damage control. If you then immediately get a fire, then it will burn for a good while. If you get two fires, then you're already pretty close to Arsonist -- but only if it's you who finally gets the kill. The German ships have HE shells with low fire chance, so they are not ideal. But the best thing you can do is mount India X-Ray and Victor Lima signals, and spam HE nonetheless. If you can, get Demolition Expert for your skipper. If you can, focus on a ship that nobody else in your team can killsteal.

I have plans for three-Oklahoma meme divisions. Most likely it'll provide some good laughs in a tier 5 or a tier 6 battle on a small map. Then when it just doesn't work... at least you can comfort each other. I heard from elsewhere that Wargaming just ended up giving Oklahoma the old shells that New York used to have. Likely WG just got lazy when they wanted to nerf it. It's a tier 5 freebie, so just get it done. Make sure it's not OP, and move on...

The target lock is absolutely crucial in this game. It provides you with aim assist that most importantly helps you to shoot at the correct range. If your target lock is on a "wrong" ship, then most likely you won't hit since the aim assist corrects your shooting range on the wrong target. If you don't have target lock on ANY ship, then the dispersion ellipse of your shells becomes twice as big. The idea here is that if you lose sight of a ship, for example in a smoke or behind an island, then your blind shots are unlikely to cause good damage.

Looking at the Oklahoma stats, especially the main battery and the AP shells, I just can't understand what exactly WG has been thinking. The main battery has god-awfully long reload. But this is fine -- it's a defining characteristic of the ship. I can deal with that. The ship also has a great secondary battery with VERY long firing range for tier 5, more than 8 kilometers. This could potentially compensate for the very lacking DPM of the main battery. Take your secondary-build skipper from Massachusetts, Georgia and/or Ohio and you're ready to roll. However, for whatever reason, for 0.9.10 Wargaming nerfed the AP shell Krupp value by whopping 40 % (source), and the call it finished. So maybe the ship WAS too strong in 0.9.9 and needed a nerf. But it makes absolutely no sense that the AP penetration of the 356's is much worse than the 305's of Wyoming. Even South Carolina in tier 3 has very similar penetration. Is there an unwritten rule that if something is free, then it has to be bad?

I've understood that whales commonly spend about 200 euros a month. I mean the kind of whales that really get everything. So if Warships also allows you to reasonably spend that much, then a million doubloons lasts maybe a year for some people...

Richelieu is great fun and can be very strong. She would be getting much more love in these parts if her tier 9 sister ship wasn't so OP. But these ships have the same basic strengths. The layout and speed make it very effective to reverse into the nearest corner while firing HE. You get ridiculed in the chat, but only by frustrated plebs who can't stand how effective it in fact is. The speed boost makes well timed flanking attacks VERY effective. Richelieu lacks the main battery reload boost of Jean Bart, so the damage you can cause is just a bit more limited. In general, you see a lot of criticism of Richelieu that seems to boil down to "Richelieu is bad because Jean Bart is better". It makes no sense. Richelieu is great and Jean Bart is now gone exactly because it was even better. PS. Dunkerque is great too!

They play very differently. Nevsky is an HE spammer that's comfortable at very long ranges. The shells fly super fast, so you can deliver very respectable DPM to your maximum range. If you keep moving, the reds are unlikely to hit back hard. If it looks like the reds are gaining an upper hand, you switch your stern towards the enemy to control the distance, and just keep at it. Petropavlovsk is much more comfortable close to the enemy. It's super tanky and the 360-degree turrets guarantee that you can punish emerging targets with your AP -- whether they're to your left or to your right. It's a very easy ship to position well for aggressive play. For me, Petro is more interesting to play. Nevsky is clearly good, but Petro still feels OP. I don't really believe in the Russian Bias meme, but Petro and Stalin are two ships that I feel have received too much special love at the designer's table...

But ARP Yamato is not Yamato, remember? It has a higher voice and bigger breasts. Seems to me that many players are considering it a great bargain... And on a more serious note: Whatever you choose to call ARP Yamato, it is also pay to skip all the way to T10. I think I speak for many when I say that thank God it is so expensive. The pay-to-skip Tirpitzes are already bad at T8, so whatever you sell at T10 has to cost much more.

Randoms are random, so you can get anything in any tier. But I do feel that top-tier randoms are The Best thing in this game. In tier 10, you're more likely to get two teams of mostly good to great players. These can be excellent, tough matches between well-organized teams. It may not be common, but still more likely than in the lower tiers.

It's been more common for me in the last few months or so. It affects all attacks, so can be guns, torps or planes. It's particularly frustrating if you play a CV and such lag causes you to overshoot the target and thus completely miss the attack.

Now that Enterprise is gone it's either Kaga or Saipan, but for very different reasons. Kaga is a lot of fun and very strong. You can spam low-tier planes at the enemy like nothing else, and you can farm amazing damage then top tier. The sheer number of torps you can dump into enemy battleships sometimes makes them salty... Kaga would be my first choice. Saipan has very few planes but they are strong for T8. I've only tried it as rental, so very briefly, but the potential is obvious. Just take good care of the planes and don't eat flak -- and looking at the stats above this shouldn't be a problem. Disclaimer: I haven't tried Graf Zeppelin or Indomitable. But with Parseval now in game I'm not sure if Graf Zeppelin is that interesting anymore. And I haven't heard anybody say good things about Indomitable, ever.

What must be my fastest tier 10 game ever: A win in Småland, in 4:59. Video:

The Terrible was great from day one. Very strong and a lot of fun. I don't recall if it was buffed at some point, but nothing major at least. It's just that the majority of players weren't ready for it, meaning the concept of a smokeless destroyer, so it got a lot of bad press. It remains a Fantasque with better speed, faster gun reload, faster torp reload, but worse concealment and worse AA. It's less forgiving but arguably better.