tocqueville8

Imho the range mod should be removed on BBs and many high tier cruisers as well. It's either for potatoes or for trolls, and you ran into the second. Small digression... At mid tiers the BB vs cruisers meta is reasonable, imho: cruisers are more fragile, but there are lots of islands for cover if they play smartly. I'm regrinding the New Orleans (my first T7 cruiser) for the RB, and if I play well around cover, sort of like a radarless Baltimore/Des Moines, I can do about 100k in a good game and be a major nuisance even to T8s and T9s. But in the open, between the bad range and so-so armor, I'm fragile and weak: 1v1 vs a Gneisenau, a Colorado or a KGV, even if I kite well, it won't be pretty for me. Sure, I burn less and can dodge better, but BBs have heals: I'd say that's fair. At high tiers though, they're not. The maps are bigger but on many of them WG forgot to put islands close to the spawns: instead it's all open water and sniping/kiting galore. BBs have very little cover, and the one they have is often too oppressive (the icebergs are too tall, for instance). Meanwhile, the all the cruisers get a heal (meaning 4 to 5 heals), they can mount the rangemod and many a spotter plane as well (either, at least). That makes them almost as survivable as BBs. Imagine giving the New Orleans the range mod and 4 heals: wouldn't she be horribly overpowered? ...which brings me to my point: The Thunderer isn't a toxic battleship: she's a toxic cruiser, basically. Agility, concealment and gun handling are almost cruiser-like. Her fire chance is demented (seriously, 63% on her 457mm, but only 40% on the Shikishima's 510mm? come on, WG...). Her ability to strip off AA mounts (with or without Aux Arm mod1) is crazy, and honestly unfair, not to mention what she does to DDs. She has basically no counter. I didn't want to be part of the problem, so I got the Salem instead (plus she was actually built in steel...), but the last few days have been really annoying at T10. I had a game today in the Shiki where I kept dueling with this Thunderer at over 18km. Good captain, he (she?) kept dodging and changing speed. Fine. But I also kept wiggling the entire time, and I didn't take a single torp in the throughout the game..and I still earned a Dreadnought with only 1M potential! That's how efficient that thing is at dealing damage: no shatters, no bounces (obviously), basically nothing but pens: 12k per volley and at least one fire... I'm ok with the idea of an HE sniper, but the fire chance and HE damage both need to be nerfed quite a bit, imho. And I say that as someone with his own Conqueror... Cheers.

There's nothing more fun than running down a weak flank in a Georgia: citadels as the enemies turn away scared, secondaries blazing away, speed boost, fast heal...it's a riot! There's nothing less fun than bing sniped for 12k and a double fire by a Thunderer 19 km away.

I hated the Alsace. Unless you play her as a HE spammer and flanker (which is quite suited to the current meta, to be fair...), she's basically no better than the Richelieu, since you can't really use you rear turret without getting blapped hard, turtleback or no turtleback. And she gets worse matchmaking: in particular, she's far less likely to encounter BBs she can overmatch. At least the JB has a reload boost, which makes a great ambush predator. Also, some people used to build their Alsace for secondaries (she needs IFHE to pen BB superstructures, though). Unfortunately, that's out the window now that the high tiers are swarming with Thunderers... I'm really not interested in these copy-paste Pan Asian ships, but if I had to pick one it wouldn't be the Alsace clone.

Huh, no. German BBs have good armor, but the guns are inaccurate and not especially powerful, either. They can feel very frustrating. Their AA is competent, but they can get citadelled by AP bombers much more easily than those of other nations. Their main advantage is secondaries, but those have been nerfed considerably with the captain rework, both directly (the dispersion is worse) and indirectly (people play HE spammer-snipers like Conqueror and Thunderer, so pushing is often out of the question). USN BBs are mostly very slow. I like them all the same, esp. the Colorado, but they're just not flankers. Also, at high tiers they're very easy to citadel: the Iowa is one of the few BBs where I recall being Dev-Struck by enemy BBs more than once. From what you've written, I get the impression that French BBs could be the best pick for you. Just be patient with the Normandie: she's got terrible AA. The Lyon is basically a mini-Conqueror, very well-suited to the current meta. The Richi is the jewel of the line imho: the guns feel "right" for T8, she's got a speed boost and good armor as long as you keep your distance from HE spammers. Alsace is a Richi with more guns, although you should be careful about showing skirt to use your rear turret... She can be played as a good HE spammer as well. The République is weird, but powerful. The guns overmatch most cruisers and they reload quickly, though the turret arrangement is only good for flanking, not pushing. Very strong AA, and she's hard to citadel.

No line has all of those. The French have good AA from T7 onwards, good speed as well. The armor is good in that they're hard to citadel, but also bad in that they get melted by heavy cruisers or light cruisers and IJN gunboats with IFHE equipped. Also, their gun caliber is below average. USN fast BBs have good speed (from T8) and good AA. The guns are good on the NC and Iowa, but the Montana has comparatively less frontal firepower: same 6x16'' guns as the Iowa, which feel underwhelming at T10. She's also slower. Soviet BBs have so-so handling, but the guns are pretty big, the frontal and deck armor is great. However, they need to be played at mid range, which takes more skill.

Shot HE at DDs and cruisers with lots of torps (Hipper, Neptune, Mino...) Also, the occasional Tirpitz or Pommern.

I think for 3 spare points I'd go for - an extra fighter consumable, useful both for spotting and AA cover - 5% extra plane regen. Sure, it's only 1-2 planes per game, but that's not the point: you don't have to wait the same regen time as usual and then get an extra plane every 12 minutes or whatever. Instead, after the first few sorties and losses, you have about 1/20 chances of being able to go out with an extra plane (assuming you're circling your squadrons). That doesn't sound like much, but there are going to be further losses, so the benefit is marginally greater: if you can launch 6 dive bombers instead of 5 (or 9 instead of 8, but you pre-drop 3...), and let's say you lose 3 to AA on the way in, you'll be able to drop with 3 instead of 2, which is 50% better after all. It's still only a small gain, but it's a small gain for 1 point, not a small gain for 3 points...

How does a 10% buff make it "laser accuracy"? It's a bit better, but it also means you'll miss more if you don't lead perfectly, or the minimap bug messes with you, or the target maneuvers. And if you stay that far back (>20 km), the 10% will easily get canceled by the increase in the dispersion curve, so what you get, at best, is some extra survivability (good, but often pointless), less tanking for the team (bad) and above all less map control (terrible). Your winrate has increased because these few days lots of players have made your same reasoning and are camping more: it doesn't mean you, nor they, are onto something. And you've been lucky with the matchmaking, most likely.

If BBs get Dead Eye, I demand homing acoustic torps for my Asashio B!

Way too expensive for those little gains: it's not even an extra bomb per game, most likely.

Fine, I'll add a '/s' every time I'm being sarcastic, so you'll understand. And no, I don't pubstomp seals at T10: my WR is barely over 56%:

There. Either I'm selfish for playing to win, or for assuming other people will do the same, depending on what you mean by "one": myself or others. As it's a team game with different rewards based on winning and losing, playing poorly on purpose is selfish. It's one's idea of "fun" vs everyone else's. I don't play to win because I'm "obsessed with stats or status" (thanks, btw: how nice of you...), but because I don't want to be a burden on my team.

It's a PvP game. No, really. I usually play to win, and to make my team win. That's the opposite of being selfish. I'll often push and die, giving up Dreadnoughts and such, to ensure a win and better xp for my team. I have better stats than you because I play better, not because I'm selfish or narrow-minded.

And therein lies the problem. If you play Randoms like don't matter and you can just mess around at 22 km, expect to be reported. By me, for starters. ;)

Hmmm...I do it pretty much every game, and my stats are public. Granted, I haven't tried all the high tier BBs since the patch: only Conqueror, Shikishima with a derpy secondary build (including IFHE), some Iowa, some Minnesota...

Yeah, no. An angled Yamato is still one of the tankiest ships in this game. The cheek is only an issue against BBs and some Soviet balans cruisers, possibly other heavy cruisers at point-blank range. She's very resilient to HE spam from cruiser caliber guns, which are a big threat to French and British BBs, and she's got the best torpedo belt in the game. The poor handling doesn't matter all that much if you park her near an island and bow-tank That's way too far. No one's saying you should push to within your concealment radius as a general rule, but there's sniping from 16 km and there's sniping from 22 km. Sometimes the mere presence of a Yamato behind an island nearby, controlling a straight, can paralyze a push. The ability to overmatch is much more useful at mid-range, when people usually have the sense to go nose-in. Any Montana or Thunderer or Republique can snipe at range...

The Yamato has one of the smallest superstructures at T10, as well as great deck armor. Also, she basically beats everyone nose-in because of the overmatch, and nose-in situations are more common the closer you get. Sure, she has the famous "cheek" and a vulnerable citadel, but at least she won't melt to cruisers the way a Thunderer might, or a Bourgogne...

Are you sure you can tell a Dead Eye salvo from a regular one just by looking at the dispersion? When the bonus is so small (it does bear marginally greater results, but 10% is still not a very big increase...), are you sure it's not just some confirmation bias, i.e. you attribute the good salvoes to Dead Eye, but the bad ones to bad aim or enemy maneuvering...? I think one would have to compare many salvoes from about the same distance, and actually count the hit ribbons.

Well, yes, you don't ever want to go 1vs1 except against a DD you know to be on low hp. Imho it helps a great deal to have: 1) RPF, so you're less likely to have a knifefight forced opon you. It's easier to get cooperation from your team if you can confidently say: "I'm coming over and spot that DD, cover me" instead of just hoping they'll focus that DD when you accidentally bump into him; 2) the mod that tells you the hp each enemy was last seen at, which allows you to make better decisions (as long as it's not a Neustrashimy or an EU DD some while ago, enough to have healed twice). RPF will also help with avoiding torps, one of which is usually enough to make you too weak for any sort of gunfight.

Yeah but when you're in a knife-fight with an enemy DD it's you our him, and 0.2 second per shot can often make a difference in term of who lives and who dies. With torps, you can usually wait another 14 seconds, in fact you can probably use them to get to an even better position. It's better for spamming, but it doesn't really add any new capability. Much as we like to spam torps, the fact is that for long periods of time during a game one simple doesn't have a target: the enemies are sailing away, or they're camping behind an island, or they're still transiting behind the island and the torps (especially Halland torps) are too *fast* to catch them on the other side, so you simply have to wait as you reposition. If anything, I think the better choice is between gun reload and gun range: if you want to, you can play Halland and Smaland as gunboats (using terrain a lot, of course) and really keep shooting most of the game, while even with a full torpedo build there will be long periods of time when you're reloading anyway (76 seconds is quick for torps, but slow compared even to BB guns...) or you don't have a target. Plus the torpedo module makes it much easier for the launchers to be knocked out, especially by high caliber HE (the ever-so-common Thunderers and Conquerors), which means fewer torpedo hits over a number of games: if it's temporary, and they were reloading, it'll reset the reload progress; if it's permanent, you've just lost half of your firepower against those same targets, as you're simply not going to gunboat a Thunderer.

Imho that's was a bad idea to start with. 32 skills were much more manageable, including in terms of memorizing them, thinking about builds, etc. 96 skills are just too many, and the fact that some are the same makes it more confusing, as the benefits and cost sometimes vary with the ship type. Furthermore, they simply took away some skills from some classes where they were far from useless: - supercruisers can no longer take Fire Prevention - BBs can no longer take RPF (not that many would, and I never got around to it, but I imagine it would've been helpful if you were left without screening against a DD, particularly in the late game)

Good point, except the conversion is astronomical. It costs 900k credits to get a 10 point captain, and about another 90k to dismiss him for 9.2k free cpt xp. Let's round up, 1M credits for 10k free cpt xp. Since we need 1.2M free cpt xp (120 times as much) to go from 19 to 21 points, that's about 120M credits. For one captain. It's still enormous.

Unless you're desperate, it only makes sense to dismiss captains for weird premiums that required their own build, separate from the tech tree line (or without a tech tree line), as you can now use the alternate build of another captain. Example: the Viribus Unitis (EU battleship) doesn't have a tech tree equivalent, so now you can dismiss her captain and use the alternate build on what used to be your EU DD captain (say, on the Oland, or Halland or whatever). Or vice-versa, mind you. That way, you'll get some cpt xp back, you'll be able to play more ships with the same (good) captain, and you'll advance him more quickly. I'll do something similar with Yamamoto: from the Kitakaze, he'll go to the Shikishima (secondaries), the Yahagi (torps) or the Azuma (guns), maybe the Kaga in the future. That's a good thing. In general, this new setup is an incentive to buy weird premiums of different classes.

Yes they do, in fact they're often not enough: the same full survivability build for BBs that cost 19 points before, now costs 22 points. And you can't grind Free Cpt XP in any significant amoung without a maxed-out captain. I had many, now I have none. I might get a couple by dismissing some that are now superflous, but in terms of earning that currency, which is very useful to quickly put a decent captain on some mid-tier ship I might want to try again, or to retrain/respec one, I've been set back several months. It's not the end of the world, but it is annoying. Had they simply buffed some underused skills (Vigilance, Jack of all Trades, Massive AA Fire...) and added 2 points for a reasonable price (e.g. 350k and 450k xp), it would've been fine, but this is just a chore.

Other than the chaos of the new skills, and the outrageous cost of the additional points, and the fact that the most common builds have simply gotten more expensive, canceling out those extra points, there are several absurdities: - who would pay 3 points for a skill that improves BB AP damage by a mere 5%, and at the cost of increasing fires and floods by 30%? It cancels out Basics of Survivability and Dmg Con Mod 2 for...5% more damage? And not even in every salvo? That's just a stupid, terrible, no-good skill; - who would pay 3 points for a skill that increases cruiser HE and SAP damage by 10%, but worsens your detection range by 15%? I mean, most builds take CE, so we're talking about 7 points to get a 10% damage increase and a 5% worse detection. 7 points!!! - since the range of the secondaries was buffed across the board, my Montana has basically the same stock one as the Georgia. The guns are 127mm on both. But the Montana's have 9% fire chance, the Georgia's 5%. Same pen, same reload. Maybe the dispersion is different, but not enough to justify that difference in fire chance. It's not just that they've nerfed Manual Secondaries, it's that they've made secondary-focused BBs much less special, so why use them at all? A buff to the range was welcome, a buff to the accuracy on low tiers was welcome, but this way they've canceled much of the previous specialization. Why play different lines, when you can get the same long-range secondaries on any of them?