tocqueville8

I had 19-pointers on: - Yamato, Ibuki, Yugumo, Kitakaze, Shokaku - Montana, Georgia, Baltimore, Gearing, Alaska/Iowa - Tashkent - Bismarck, Z-46 - Conqueror, Daring - Alsace (but mostly Dunkerque and Jean Bart) - Oland/Smaland - Chung Mu Now it's only 6: Halsey, Yamamoto, Sansonetti, another American, a Brit and a Frenchman. However, these 6 serve a lot more ships thanks to the alternate builds, and several more are coming: Baltimore, Hayate, Bismarck... Still, the rework was definitely a ripoff in this regard: - the 20th and 21st points are insanely more expensive - the new builds aren't better, just more expensive for the same skills (e.g. Adrenaline Rush went from 2 to 3 points)

Not sure she's got the highest performance ceiling, but doing >100k dmg between fires and secondaries just feels a lot more satisfying than lolpenning noses with 460s. Plus the GK tends to get stuck in at mid-range, so win or lose you probably won't have much to regret, if you play well. The Yammy is strong, but sometimes you just feel that even some great marksmanship simply couldn't avoid a steamroll loss.

Personally I've come to the conclusion that a good game in the Kurfurst is more fun than a great game in any other T10 BB.

IJN, German, British heavies, French

There are opinion polls every now and then, but if they don't please the playerbase it's not for lack of data...

Surveys are already in the game, and WG mostly doesn't pay attention to the results. I'm more worried about annoyed with players who think going for damage is more important than going for a win.

That's why we're talking about "solo WR". Nope. Damage dealt skews to BBs, CAs in general (they shoot each other for high damage, while most DDs have to get past other DDs first), as well as to ships that rely on light damage (fires, mostly), like Thunderer, Ibuki or Friesland. It penalizes AP or SAP-focused ships like Yamato, Druid, Venezia, Petro, Mino, etc., as well as all torpedoboats, as they rely on crippling (mostly unhealable) alpha strikes, not damage-over-time. Warship kills skews to CVs, as they have more freedom to finish low-hp ships all over the map, as well as BBs (same deal, if they have enough range), while it penalizes DDs, which usually have much fewer options. It also penalizes good players who will cripple, but not kill, a broadside cruiser 15 km away instead of finishing a yoloing BB that's already burning to death 8 km away under a barrage of shells. It also skews in favor of players who will hang back and only start doing stuff when the game is already lost: they might finish off more low-hp enemies, but only because they weren't the ones putting them on low hp in the first place. Sure, securing kills is important, but most kills are up for grabs, while the decisive action is to lower their hp so much that only a "kill securing" is needed. By far the most reasonable metric is solo WR at high tiers. Sure, you can still "dope it" by only playing really strong ships, or only playing with 21-points captains, but then you'd also be doping your damage dealt and your warship kills. But unlike the damage, every 1% of extra WR is a few more games where you made better decisions, tactical or strategic, that turned out to be decisive, however slightly.

PR accounts for WR and damage, weighted to how other people are performing on the same ship. But unless you play very specific ships, the overall PR just accounts for WR and damage, which is a more spurious measure than just WR, as you can easily farm more damage, especially on BBs and CVs, but you can't easily farm more wins: a player that secures a kill, does the right thing with capping/points, spots more, etc., will win a few extra games compared to someone who just farms a little more damage in a steamroll win or holds out a little longer in a steamroll loss.

On average, that division of OP ships (or rather, OP players) is just as likely to be on the opposing team as on my own. I once played 3 games in a row late at night where I had the same 3xYOBOY (or whatever) div on my team, and we obviously won all 3 in a steamroll. I could've been afk, it would've made no difference. Over enough games, it's just unreasonable to think that the win-rate is a poor predictor of the ability a player has to win games. Literally, what else could it be?

Look, Win-Rate is Win-Rate: what should Wargaming do? censor it? hide it? What am I even objecting to? You want to suggest a new rating, a "how-hard-I'm-trying-regardless-of-the-outcome-which-depends-on-my-team"-rating? Go ahead, come up with a formula. If you don't care about the Win-Rate, then look at the Personal Rating, or the kill/death ratio, or the average damage...anything that pleases you. But the Win-Rate is a pretty obvious statistic to keep track of: it's an easy number to explain, it doesn't depend on the tier (unlike the average damage), it doesn't depend on the class (unlike the kill/death ratio: CVs often don't die even if they lose), and so far it's the single most reliable measure of a player's average contribution to his teams. Mind you, you don't have to look at the overall Win-Rate of a player: there are ways to look at the last month or stuff like that...

No one should degrade anyone, but no other metric than a "clean" Win-Rate (meaning you have to weight her for divisioning, sealclubbing and only playing extremely strong ships) can tell how good a player is. Provided one doesn't regularly division with above-average or below-average players (there are tools to look at the "solo Win-Rate", anyway), the team composition evens out after enough games, and what's left is the individual player's performance.

It's garbage to think the two things are mutually exclusive. Of course you can be at the top of the team and lose, in fact it's inevitable that *someone* is going to be in that position, but it's simply incorrect to suggest that WR is *not* "biased towards individual performance": if the individual player plays better on average, the individual player will win more on average.

1) The current method for Win-Rate is to count the number of games you win, divide it by the number of games you played...right? What else could Win-Rate possibly mean? 2) It's a team game, so naturally Win-Rate depends on team performance. Again, how could it not? 3) It already is: you play better, you win more games.

I too think that many one-use camos are too flamboyant. Others have reasonable patterns, but they just look ugly: Type 3s, the ones you get for reaching Silver, look like someone gave a child the picture of a poisonous frog to color with leftover crayons. Basically, the best-looking camos tend to be: 1) permacamos, especially British DDs, French cruisers and IJN DDs 2) monochromatic one-use camos, especially the green-bluish ones (MS-21, etc.) I guess that's the underlying blackmail: "buy a permacamo or we'll report you to the fashion police"...

Basically: - all Premium ships have an inherently enhanced credit income, meaning they'll give more credits than a tech tree ship for the same performance - Premium ships go up to tier 9, while Salem, Yoshino, Marceau etc. are T10 and are called "special ships" - "special ships" don't get the enhanced credit income per se, but their permanent camouflage gives them more credits anyway: there's a credit bonus and a massive deduction to the maintenance fee As a result: - as long as you use the permanent camouflage the ship comes with, a T9 premium will always make a profit, but so will a T10 special ship (unless you're afk or something...) - if you use a different camouflage (maybe with a better xp/cpt xp/free xp modifier), the T9 premium will still get more credits than a tech tree ship, the T10 special ship will not The same should be true of any T10 "freemium", not just coal: steel ships, free xp ships, Research Bureau ships. Personally, I keep my one-use camos for grinding tech tree ships, as to use them on premium/special ships would mean to waste their ship xp bonus. Therefore, to me a T10 special ship is just as good as a T9 premium. It might make fewer credits, but honestly I've never noticed the difference. The point is that tech tree T10s have much higher maintenance costs than T9s, so the deduction you get in the permacamo matters more, and it allows you to turn a profit, which is otherwise difficult at T10, at least if you're not using premium time.

I was thinking about getting her myself, as nothing else for coal inspires me right now. Then again, I have Wooster and I'm aiming at the Austin for the next steel ship, so I'm not really sure it'd be a good idea...

If you only spend a couple of hours per week playing, you probably shouldn't buy premium time. If it's two hours daily, it's up to you. Frankly, premium time is fairly common even if you never purchase it, and if you do, you can go for as little as one day if, say, you're at home sick and you feel like playing WoWs for 6 hours. If you bought, say, 3 months with the New Year's discount, it's so cheap you can definitely afford to waste a few days of it for whatever reason. I'm completely fine with the current system, in fact, far from a ripoff, premium time is arguably the best way to spend dubs in this game.

Years ago it was much worse: +3 MM was possible, and matches where everyone is at the same tier were a rarity, if they existed at all below T10. Now they're commonplace at T9 and below. I think they improved on the MM a year, a year and a half ago, though occasionally you get the nonsense fair with 0 or 5 DDs, or only 1 BB per team, or some such. Yet the playerbase is about the same as ever.

Imho the Hayate is good, just not as obviously good as the Smaland. I messed around a bit with a pure torp build, including TRB, but I found she worked better as a gunboat (with smoke to farm, mostly): concealment, Fearless Brawler, maybe RPF once I have enough points. The good thing about her is that, short of IFHE, any combination of captain skills makes sense, so you can use her to level up 2-3 different captains, say, one with a torp build, one with a DD-hunting build, one with a jackass-farmer build. It should be a bit like the Neustrashimy in that respect: versatile, if not too exciting. This just in:

Neustrashimy a bit meh: great survivability, but the armament is lackluster with only 10 km on the torps. So far, not worth the almost 300k coal pricetag. For comparison, most people would say the Hayate is too expensive, but I've actually played her a lot more, either as full DPM or as a meme torpedo boat. While I don't regret the Colbert, because it's so much fun going pew-pew-pew, it took me a looooong while to bring her WR (barely) above 50% Friesland is also uninspiring. She was my second "expensive" FXP ship (the Nelson doesn't count) after the Alaska: I struggled with both, but since then the Alaska has been kind to me in Ranked, with many memorable games. The Friesland just never clicked with me, despite a few Devastators here and there. She has some nice tools, but German DDs do the whole smoke+hydro better, her AA isn't unique anymore, the Smaland laughs at her (I know, she's T10, but still...) and HE farming, while annoying to the enemy, doesn't win as many games as a well-placed torpedo salvo. I partially regret getting Scharnhorst and Ark Royal for dubs (with a coupon): they're okay, but having 200+ ships already I doubt I'm ever going to play them enough to justify the expense. The same applies to the Neustrashimy and possibly others: inevitably, the premiums one plays the most tend to be the ones one gets earliest

Indeed, an important exception is the other ships he asked about: Cleveland and Seattle, which get the buffed 1/5 HE pen, just like the Chapayev (and the Wooster).

1) IFHE is generally a downgrade, as you'll lose A LOT of fire chance, which is ALWAYS useful, in order to pen SOME extra platings, which may or may not be there depending on the matchmaker (the armor schemes of the BBs and cruisers, mostly, that you're going to face). At best, it's a sidegrade. Why would you pick a sidegrade when you can take Fearless Brawler, torpedo reload, fire chance or any other upgrade? IFHE only makes sense if it allows you to pen the "typical" platings at that tier. For BBs, it goes something like 19 ---> 26 (from T6) ---> 32 mm (from T8). For cruisers, it goes something like 6 ---> 13 ---> 16 ---> 25/27 (---> 30 on some lines) So for instance, IFHE on the Bismarck kind of makes sense, as it allows some of her secondaries to pen 32 mm, which is "typical" high tier BB plating, at least on the bow and stern, and it's all British and French BBs get. Likewise, IFHE makes sense on the Helena, as it bumps her HE pen from 25 to 30 mm, allowing her to pen T6 and T7 BBs at least somewhere. Still, if the Helena faces T8+ BBs, 30 mm of pen won't help against 32 mm plating, so she should go for fires instead, not IFHE. Basically, IFHE makes more sense if you play the ship in Ranked, where you're only up against enemies of your same tier, or +1 at most. Now to the Fletcher, going from 21 to 26 mm penetration only helps against some high tier cruisers, not against DDs nor BBs. Don't take it! USN DDs already have terrible fire chance: if anything you should buff it for 2 points, not nerf it for 3! 2) The Cleveland is smaller, handles much better, has a smaller concealment-radar range window to cross (300 m vs 600 m), and her HE is better tier-for-tier. What do I mean by that? Well, both Cleveland and Seattle pen 30 mm without IFHE, and that's a bigger advantage to the Cleveland, as she's more likely to face T6 and T7 enemies, with their 25-26 mm plating, while the Seattle is more likely to face T10s, where BBs have at least 32 mm. The Seattle gets...a heal, and better DPM. That's fine, but I'll stick with the Cleveland. The Wooster, on the other hand, is hilarious. To give you an idea: - stock Seattle has the same DPM as the Cleveland, +13.5% with the Reload Mod - stock Wooster has +41% more DPM than stock Seattle She's not the best T10 ship or anything, but after dozens of games grinding the Seattle, the first time you play the Wooster you're going to feel like A GOD. Trust me 3) Always go for accuracy, the Iowa is no exception. It helps connecting more shells with that first salvo, which might be the only one you get to fire at a given target for any number of reasons. A -11% smaller linear dispersion actually means -21% smaller area dispersion. That's a massive buff compared to only -12% reload, which comes with a penalty to turret traverse that will delay some of your shots every now and then, making it effectively less.

I forgot the Boise/Helena has 16 mm extremities...

What exactly am I "delusional" about, pray tell? Was the "Liquidator" achievement common? Was Devastator common below T7? How about AA Expert? Did it make sense that Solo Warrior gave as many signals as Flesh Wound, an achievement any yoloer could get quite often? Is it true or not that secondary flags were a lot easier to accumulate than most others? Fireproof is probably easier to get if you mismanage your dmgcon and/or are not specced for survivability, so below-average players probably have just as easy a time earning one as myself or my betters. Confederate, High Caliber, Kraken and Solo Warrior, generally the signs of a good/great game performance, gave minimal or no gameplay benefits.

That's true, but only to a point: - secondary flags were *very* easy to get, and often you'd get 20 or even 30 for 1 match. Imho they could've been 5 per achievement and the average player would've still gained enough to be able to always mount them. And sometimes you'd get the achievement without mounting the flag, because any BB can get it, and cruisers too, especially at mid tiers where DDs have shorter-range torps and are often reckless. - 1 Dreadnought every 10 games (with a heal) is more than doable - a less experienced player might've had an *easier* time getting Fireproof, as he might've not had Fire Prevention, Basics of Survivability or just good Dmg Con discipline Again, some achievements gave a bit too many flags imho, but most were too hard to get for their prize: Devastator and AA Expert at mid tiers, Liquidator in general, Solo Warrior, Kraken maybe, and Dev Strike should've given *something*... Just in general, they should bring signals back, but also tweak the numbers, or rework the achievements altogether. Achievements feel pointless without reward, and rare achievements doubly so.