asalonen

Jean Bart is likely stronger of the two, to the point that WG stopped selling it, so I'd use Jean Bart in the serious play. I've always used a pure tanking build in Jean Bart, and I use the skipper that is trained for the sister ship Richelieu. This being said, I've had very similar results in the tanking build Jean Bart and secondary build Alsace. In any kind of competetive play Jean Bart would be superior, but randoms are a funny place and well-timed secondary mayhem seems to go a long way.

Alsace and Jean Bart have the fastest firing secondary battery in game, by a good margin. In practice Alsace is a lot better of these two, since the turrets are laid out much better. The 152 mm's can all fire to either port or starboard, while in Jean Bart they can't. Also Alsace secondaries have more range. After these two, Shikishima is the third best. But I would go for Alsace. It is excellent in a secondary build, and farms the ribbons like nothing else. My current record is 913 in a battle, and hoping to break 1000 soon. Edit: About Massachusetts and Georgia -- They have better dispersion, so you land more hits from great distances. However, if you're really going to farm the ribbons, then you want to get near a red battleship. And once you do that, even Alsace secondaries get reliable hits.

Most likely the achievement works so that if you get a kill, the game simply checks if you took 50+ % of the target's HP pool during the last X seconds. X is something like 3. That 50+ % is highly likely to be from the same salvo, but doesn't have to be.

I didn't mean it as a meme though. If dodging the CV attack puts you at even greater risk, then you're likely facing a strong team or you put yourself in a bad position. The famous just dodge thing is your final bit of counterplay, and sometimes it does work wonders. Fundamentally, I really feel that the spirit of the reworked CV gameplay is such that a well-played CV deserves to get the first strike through. Blobbing up, using DFAA and dodging can make it a bad trade for the CV. The rework moved the CV player in that one squadron, and from the CV gameplay point of view I don't think that surface ships should have a magic button that suddenly messes up the CV player's controls. With no disrespect, I believe that if you played CV's more you would appreciate this point.

It just means that we, in fact, know what we're talking about? More seriously though, in my experience good map awareness alone gets you to around 70 % in CV's. It sounds easy when you say it like that, but then I also see many otherwise strong players who find no success in CV's. It is the majority by which the game is balanced.

May I suggest that doing so would make the game unbalanced? It's a bad idea, period. CV's have the lowest DPM in game. If the skilled CV captain is willing to take the plane losses from the increased continuous DPS, then likely he deserves that first strike. You can still dodge to mitigate the damage, and make it a bad trade for the CV. The average CV player eats flak, so his planes are likely decimated by the massive flak DPM under DFAA. This already makes DFAA very strong in randoms.

Colbert is very difficult to be successful in. You need excellent positioning and tactical sense to keep firing the guns without being quickly killed. It is by far the easiest cruiser to delete in T10. However, the HE DPM is absolutely epic, and Colbert lights up the sky like nothing else. It's one of the best memes in the game. If you like battleships, and specifically Massachusetts and/or Georgia, then Ohio is a very safe choice. You know what you get, and what you get is very good.

You can hit DD's with Richthofen torps, greatly depending on the DD skill, but they damage is very bad. It is so bad that, as a rule, the Richthofen player should ignore the DD's. That time is better spent by shitting on cruisers and battleships. The only obvious exception is when the DD is in a dangerous position, and you spotting it is likely to make the difference between your teammates killing it or not.

Unpopular opinion time: Is Richthofen really any stronger than other T10's? I checked the top 20 players in EU, in terms of win rate in Richthofen. Some of these players have similar or better stats in Midway and Hakuryu. The good CV players have already figured the near-optimal play style for Richthofen. The surface ships, however, include a great number of players who don't seem to understand the threat of the AP rockets. Most players learn slow, and some never. It's happy days for Richthofen, a bit like the spring of 2019 was for reworked CV's in general. If Richthofen is not nerfed, then very likely it will stay strong in randoms, but eventually maybe not special. And in competitive it is clearly worse than in randoms. And finally, the skill floor is high, so the number of strong Richthofen players will stay small.

Funny you should say that when Småland has great AA, even without defensive AA, and doesn't need smoke to be safe from CV's? Småland is a great, fun ship for skilled DD players.

Florida has mixed secondaries. Part of them have the usual secondary dispersion, so same as North Carolina, but part have actually even better dispersion than Massachusetts. For a tier 7, it might be a very viable secondary/AA build.

This is something that I have also wondered about. I can remember that for example my dude Dmitri was my very first skipper in Orlan when I started the game. Now he's my man in Nevski, Moskva, Kronshtadt and Molotov, and I'm sure he's close to a thousand randoms. Chances are that the game hasn't stored the information, so it would be difficult to correct neatly later.

Lately Halland has been good to me, but... Jean Bart is just a riot to play, and very, very strong. There's no match making that it doesn't handle just fine.

You just had a bad streak. You won 28 out of those 68 games, if I got the math right. Just 5 more wins and you would've maintained your previous win rate. Could be just rotten luck with the random matchmaking, and/or you could've been playing worse than usual yourself. If unsure, you can use sites such as wows-numbers.com to check if your Personal Rating (for example) has been normal during the bad streak. If yes, then it wasn't you. Note that stat obsession isn't necessarily the best way to enjoy the game. Speaking as a healing patient...

It makes some sense to me, if you consider it strictly from gameplay point of view. The real Graf Zeppelin did, in fact, have very heavy secondaries. In the game, the CV player is mostly stuck in the plane cockpit and not actively controlling the secondaries. So with the superior dispersion the secondaries land reliable hits even without manual secondaries and/or target lock. Parseval and Rekthofen also have improved secondary dispersion, just not as good as Graf Zeppelin.

The autopilot has felt been amazingly neglected by WG. Especially since after the rework the CV players were intended to rely on it. It was almost a year after the rework when the autopilot would routinely just beach the CV hull. This was fixed so that the autopilot was completely paranoid of beaching. It would often just disengage and stop you near islands. Sometimes it wouldn't move again. Right now it seems somehow decent though? I played Ryujo in clan battles and a bit of Weser in randoms, and I don’t recall major problems.

In the ranked sprint I played Alsace with a secondary build, and I had several games with 600+ hits. In a random battle I've had about 850, also in Alsace. Alsace has small-caliber secondaries that fire very fast, so it tends to get more hits than German battleships. However, the damage is minimal to battleships and most cruiser, so the secondaries are all about setting fires. The highest I've seen is 1503 hits in the Graf Zeppelin game that Jingles featured. Graf Zeppelin has superior secondary battery dispersion, so it lands much more hits than anything else in game:

Anybody who has played Yamato and Kremlin in game knows that the opposite is true. Yamato is great at long ranges and Kremlin is really quite awful. Picture seems deeply flawed...

I was also almost melancholic when I ranked out after 22 games. It was a LOT of fun, the best ranked season ever for me. 3 vs 3 on small maps is rewarding because you can quite easily make game winning plays. And when it so happens that it goes south, for whatever reason, it will be over quick. I saw remarkably little of the toxicity and frustration that's usually present it rankeds. And then there's the aspect that the small, simple engagements are great practice for randoms and clan battles. It's a good place to learn about your ship. I hope WG seriously considers making the next full ranked season similar to this sprint. @MrConway pretty please!

22 games to rank 1 in the secondary-build Alsace. I tried to convince the team mates to go straight in, while flank myself at 36 knots with AP loaded. Then if it ended up more static, the enemies had difficulty dealing with the secondary fire power:

Bretagne had very good AA for tier 5 before the CV rework, and it was a great choice for playing in a division with a tier 5 CV. These days though... igood main battery, decent AA and decent secondaries, but it has nothing to get excited about. It's too slow to be fun. And Turenne and Courbet are the same -- I don't think anybody returns to them for fun. However, they are worth it since the line has some great, fun ships in the high tiers: Lyon is a meme ship with the most ridiculous broadside in game. Richelieu is unique with the all-guns-forward layout and great speed. Alsace and République combine great secondaries with the great speed. They all suffer from poor dispersion, but you can use the speed to get into protected positions up close.

The damage numbers would be mostly unwelcome clutter on the screen. Secondary fire is all HE so it either penetrates or doesn't. If it penetrates you'll see the damage counter slowly rolling up. If it doesn't, then switch to a softer target if you can. You get enough feedback. And if you shoot the same target with both main and secondary batteries, you don't want to confuse the two.

It would detach the CV player from the teamplay. One of the basic goals of the rework was taking away the high alpha from CV's, and instead have the CV spot the enemies for nearby friendlies so that they can join the attack. If you take that capability away, CV planes would need a damage buff or the class would lose a lot of influence.

I feel the way the skill works in perfectly logical. Torpedoes arm after after some seconds in water, end of story. Nobody ever suggested otherwise as far as I can recall? I'm not sure how it worked in real-life WW2 torps, but a simple timer seems likely. Then you if you want to trade range for speed, in game you can take the skill. In real life they would increase the torpedo engine's power so that it would go faster, but also run out of fuel a lot sooner. For in-game CV's, I only take it for USN. It makes the torps more useful against small, fast ships. Japanese and German torps are more useful without the skill, since you can drop them in tighter gaps.

"Kill them first" is a bit bold, but I do use a matchmaking monitor, and I do give special attention to DD's with good stats. Or if it's a super unicum Halland, then you know to stay away from it, since attacking would likely be too costly. It's the most efficient thing you can do as a CV to help your team win. After CV's, good DD players have the highest impact in game. If you can negate them, then that's what you should do. This likely isn't good for the game, obviously. I'm hoping that the proposed aerial detection changes go live and make DD's great again.