tocqueville8

I think it's the Smaland for me. With radar cruisers often taking position early near islands, many games become very stand-offish, and I find the Smaland does the job of farming those stationary ships while also spotting them. The extra range on the torps helps, and the AA keeps her from being harassed too much when in the open. Also, Vampire 2, but that thing can actually pull the smoke+hydro combo from time to time, and she can kind of go peek-a-boo from her own smoke. And again, I just need the extra range on the torps. I'm just not seeing a lot of Darings around. Lots of Shimas, though

I've got nothing against the idea of the MM splitting the radars 2-1 instead of 3-0, but I don't find it particularly decisive. I'm seeing a lot of Ranked games with 3 cruisers per team, 2 of them with radar, but only 1 DD. Radar is useful anyway, but at some point the cruisers players are just overdoing it. If it's just for spotting around the island they're camping, they could often do it with hydro (looking at that Salem...) or even the meme spotter plane (thinking of her sister). The Napoli is a fine choice for Ranked. As is the Hindenburg, at least in a game with 3 BBs. Maybe the issue is that they can be hard to coordinate, while both Salem and Stalingrad can just lock down a position by hugging an island each. Surprisingly, other than the Thunderer, it might be your Daring that's the least "meta" ship of this lineup, at least from what I'm seeing out there...

A different playstyle, bragging rights and some permanent economic bonuses. They both have their pros and cons, just like everything else here. Personally, I do better in the Montana than in the Ohio, in Randoms. And in Ranked, judging by my experience in the Rupprecht, I'd do better with the Schlieffen at Tier 10. I also do better with Daring than Druid, but Druid is more quirky, and I don't always like to play the strongest ships.

You won't get spanked from 13-14 km. Not by most ships, anyway. My point is, if you have spotting/support you can go closer and use those smokes to farm more damage from a better position. If you don't, at least you can do some damage from a safer distance, without having to engage the enemy DDs.

That's your minimum range. Your maximum range is 16.8 km, which is absurd. 14.5 with just the skill is very comfortable though. Not more so than a Soviet or French gunboat, but you get both a heal and a bunch of smokes to farm. You don't have to play the Druid like a DD hunter.

A promising start with the "Jean Bart at home" The highlight so far...

Slava is an excellent long-range BB: penetration, vertical dispersion and shell travel time are all crucial to get reliable damage at distance. The problem is that it's difficult to win games just sniping broadsides across the map: you might do good damage, but it's too spread out to have a good impact. I think the issue is more with the Smolensk's troll armor than with her smoke. Colbert has much higher DPM, but she gets citadelled by large cruisers quite easily. Still, for me she's the most fun ship in the game... Druid is different: she has to think of crossfires the way a Petro/Stalingrad/Jean Bart does, which is unique for a DD. Very minimap-oriented, You don't need a terribly good captain on the Vampire 2 to make her effective. Mine's last 4 points are for fire chance and consumable duration, which are only marginal improvements. We've all been

Why wouldn't you grind some FXP as you're doing Tier 7-9? It helps to research the B-hull or other modules and avoid playing the ship stock altogether.

Just yesterday I was in two high-tier games with no DDs or subs at all, just cruisers and BBs. I was also in a game with 5 DDs and 2 subs, which is obnoxious if you ask me, and I seem to recall they promised they had fixed. And this was at "normal" hours, not 3AM or anything... Some other examples that I screenshotted recently:

I don't have it and I hate having to face one, so my answer is yes and yes.

I can't buy tech-tree ships due to a bug...

Am I the only one who didn't have more than a few hundred camos?

I've never played one. How much does one lose, say with premium but without bonuses, playing decently? 100k per game? 200k? If so (more or less), you need to play the ship for hundreds of games before the maintenance equals the purchasing cost.

So...superships were supposed to be a credit sink, and now here's enough credits to buy them all courtesy of an economic rework! Makes sense...

Absolutely. Not to mention that sometimes you can hardly catch the sub even in a fast DD, so you end up exposing yourself even more, as he drags you away from where you thought you would drop him.

Cruisers are fine. It's DDs that have to deal with too many things at the same time: other DDs, subs, CVs, radar, capping, spotting, torping when everyone and their dog runs hydro...

Frankly, I think it's the opposite. In my experience, the islands/icebergs are too large and too tall at high tiers, so they encourage a static playstyle, especially from bow-tanking ships like Stalingrad, Petro, Moskva, DM, Yamato, Izumo, etc. If one team gets better spotting on that flank, they might reach those relatively safe spots next to islands before their opponents can, and then focus whomever wonders in the killing zone in front of them. That's what gives you a static playstyle. For instance, the C/D cap on North/Northern Lights is unplayable for DDs if there's an enemy radar cruiser behind the large island towards the center of the map. The whole area is designed to funnel ships into a narrow passage. Does it "encourage close combat"? No, it encourages people to say "fu** it, I'm out of here". This is also why I don't like the new Faroe Islands: it's too open in the spawns, so you get no islands to fall back to if the enemy team pushes, and too narrow in the middle. Stalingrad-type ships can just hug an island, shoot whomever tries to maneuver in front of them (as long as they're spotted) and reverse behind cover in case they get focused. There's no way to reach them over those islands with some HE: you have to go all the way around. Tall islands near the caps turn the game into a cover-based shooter, a bowtanking/sterntanking simulator that plays like Gears of War, basically: rush to cover, peek out, shoot, back behind cover. Rinse and repeat. I'd much rather have lower islands and long-range crossfires. I'm not saying I want to play Ocean on every game, but high-tier gameplay often looks like the SWAT team scene from "The Professional"...

Couldn't agree more. Also: Flint. And Sinop for the tech tree.

DD: Vampire 2, maybe Kléber BB: Ohio or Schlieffen, I guess... Cruiser: Colbert, Venezia and Napoli

I'm kind of hating the Regolo. She can farm very well at midrange...if she has spotting and the enemy team is distracted. But when I get 5 DDs/subs and 3 radars on the other side, which is fairly common, there's just too much screen I need to go through before I can put that SAP to good use. Tashkent, Mogador, Sherman, etc. at least have good range, so they can do some "safe" farming early and sort of ignore the enemy DDs for a while, but what am I supposed to do with 11.5 km? The shells are pretty slow: it's not like she'd be OP with a 12.5-13 km max range (before Sansonetti, whom I have on Venezia). The line was ok for me until the Cuniberti, but at higher tiers radars are a pain to deal with. I'm ok with not having a heal nor the saturation gimmick, but the range is just too bad for a gunboat.

So THAT's why no one can get their WR above 75% or so...

Catch you guys later, gotta change my IGN to Senpai_Blasdelezo_Pls_Nerf_My_Waifu_Sakura_Yukikaze_PrPr...

Finally finished all the mission in the Halsey campaign! Someone on Reddit asked about the one with "win + first place + 12 fires/floods in a USN T10 CV or DD". I guess I could've tried a bit harder back then with Gearing or Midway, but people suggested the Sherman, so I re-selected the mission after, I dunno, a year maybe, and gave it a go. I got lucky: Standard Battle, my team pushed their base but they did the same to us, and sank our CV defending it, so it was up to me to get almost 400 defense points.

I think there's some mistake

Did the actual HMCS Haida creep up to enemy DDs inside a smokescreen using her own smokescreen and using a hydroacoustic search that would detect surface ships at 3.5 km, to invisibly shoot them up, to contest "capture areas"? No. What the Haida does in this game is a creation of WG within the rules of the game they created. And it was never necessarily representative of all ships of her class or subclass that would be implemented in the future. As far as I understand, WG just copy-pasted the Haida to the Huron, changed the consumables to give her a different playstyle (Daring/Vampire, Halland/Smaland...), and are now testing a change in ballistics to better fit the new playstyle. The vast majority of the ship's stats are exactly the same. No more than they massacred the South Dakota class by introducing a second ship that's worse at sniping and better at brawling, or the Halland class by adding the Smaland.