BeauNidl3

I play a fairly large number of DD games at a variety of tiers, while the DD numbers are sometimes unequal it's not that common and hopefully with the next patch it will be less common. There's no skill bias to the Matchmaker and the answer to everyone that thinks it's biased is WHY WOULD IT BE? What purpose would it serve? As to killing DD's, you do realise that DD's sometimes kill DD's, quite often in fact, but it's actually better if the friendly DD has support fire to kill the enemy DD so that:- 1. Gunfighting a DD tends to leave you as a DD badly hurt 2. Gunfighting a DD means the gun bloom for 20s leaves you easy for anyone in your gun range to see you which screws the concealment that DD's rely on to live 3. Torpedoing DD's can and is often done, but DD's are twisty turny buggers and it's far from reliable unless the target is sat still. The net effect of all 3 is that it's better for the team if the friendly DD has support fire, massively so. If the support is farming damage on enemy BB's and ignoring spotted DD's then most of the spotting value is thrown away. If the DD numbers are unequal then support fire from friendlies is even more important. As to cyclones I've not found they're all that common, maybe just luck on my part or bad luck on yours, I suspect a slight exaggeration from you though. I had one disconnect mid battle today, only affected me, it's the first I've had other than getting bumped to login during game load in about 3 weeks. I don't recall mass disconnects other than a while back when the server wen't a bit wonky. After 9k games I'm rather surprised at your rant, what I've posted above is hardly secret information.

I've just had a strange game in my Kamikaze, bottom tier (no biggie) CV's in game (yuck in a no AA DD, but that's the breaks), but had a situation I've never seen before. I'm used to 2 CV's a side in lower tier games, but those are usually T4, 5 or 6, this game had 2 T7 CV's each side Kaga and Ranger vs Saipan and Hiryu. In my over 6,000 games I've never seen a match with 2x T7 CV's, is this just a really rare fluke or some MM brainfart? My assumption is fluke as it was a T6 as middle tier match, but the CV players will know the situation better than me, interested to know if it's "normal".

It takes an impressively stupid CV to feed that many planes into the AA aura of a ship that's already shot down loads, that or collusion.

Most I've ever shot down in one game is 33, no CV has been silly enough to feed me that many planes or any more. 40 is pretty unlikely, I can't see that achievement being obtained often by anyone, if ever.

That being said the AP bombs that were supposed to be a BB counter are awfully devastating to cruisers, if even a couple of dive bombers get through and are lucky it's an obliteration from near or at full HP, even on a Des Moines, had it happen to me.

To me anything T7 and upwards, taking a stock T8 or 9 into a game is just gimping the team and to a slightly lesser extent it applies to T7 as well. Obviously COOP it doesn't really matter, but Randoms....

Fair enough, just a fluke then of 4 T7 CV's in the queue long enough, thought it must be, thanks for confirming. Yes the Saipan did badly slap the other CV's, it smelled of pure seal clubbery (I was in Kamikaze, so I'm not preaching it's bad) as he had over 50 plane kills, several ships and his spotting shut the team down but his team dissolved with him having more XP than most of the winning team added up.

To be fair they aren't having a harder time economically, many clans won't have the buildings, only the active ones with playing members do and the benefits are small scale. The clan I'm in has all the beneficial buildings as a result of collective effort, but that's not the reason our members are members, in fact we wouldn't accept someone just wanting the economic benefits. Ours is for socialising and group play in many games. If you want the small economic benefits of clan membership there's a very simple answer...

I got on quite well with the Mahan, your mileage clearly varied from mine. Bizarrely I had a real mixed bag with Benson, either stellar games or utter trash, considering how it's a straight improvement over Mahan and Fletcher is like a Benson on steroids and a ship I really enjoy I can't explain why I didn't get better results with Benson overall. I never play T9's as stock, that's what Free XP is for, playing a gimped ship in T10 matchmaking is very unrewarding and bad for teams.

Straight copy and paste job, like the Nurnberg/Makarov. Sensible and simple. It can do that? I never knew, I assumed it would be German only. If the Azure Lane stuff is multi country as one would expect this could be very interesting!

1. Nope, some people have hidden stats, it's up to clan admin, nothing to do with the game. 2. Not needed 3. No, radars have a cooldown and short duration - inequality in radar distribution is a wider issue. 4. Indeed it would be useful, bit like the requesting assistance that can be targeted.

@Skye_Tank_Dog in his Tirpitz while I was sitting in epicentre middle in my Chung Mu, didn't get to torp him though and a clear win thrown away by our camping BB's. @AlmightyWalrus provided great cover in his Mino, but well the team threw it away.

Indeed, due to us being all working ages and having real lives we had many days when we couldn't field a Clan Wars team at only 7 required, even maxed out a Clan is limited to 50 members (which is why there are so many clans with sister clans) and they all have to be in the same tag to be in a team. With prime times and busy lives it would be a major challenge for many clans to field a team bigger than 7. Not forgetting a 7v7 format is a nice change from 12v12 ordinary randoms. I've had some great battles at stupid late/early times where the MM has thrown up randoms with 9, 7, 5 a side, it's a lot of fun or can be if people play as a team. Short answer: Why not?

@El2aZeR this one is for you methinks.

Is this speculation or are you privy to insider information? Until the changes are announced officially and tested on the PTS we won't know the truth of how the changes will look.

Not sure you're correct on that, in fact I'm sure you're not. If you select a premium consumable on a ship it defaults to Doubloons for the supply, or at least it does on my machine, both before and after I reinstalled the client from scratch recently. I have to manually set it to Silver with the little drop down arrow. If Auto resupply is enabled and the drop down hasn't been set from the default Doubloons, it carries on spending Doubloons. There is an argument that it should default to the Silver in game currency if that is possible to use for the item, at least 1 of the consumable camos is Doubloons only.

There's a strong case to be made for any of them, they all have advantages and some drawbacks. Yueyang DW torps are not useful in cap contesting, but her guns are good and has excellent smokes, Radar is debatable in what is a pickup format. Khaba is a relatively indifferent ship for cap contests, but well it's got other things going for it including durability and ludicrous guns. Z52 Hydro and torp reloads and OK guns. Gearing guns, AA and long range torps plus US smoke. Grozevoi good guns, torpedoes, speed and AA. Shima once the concealment is buffed could be good, until then it's likely to be more of a damage farmer due to loads of torps, but they reload slowly. If I can face doing Ranked to the point where I play T10's I'll probably pick Z52 for its flexibilty or if there are lots of CV's then Gearing or Groz.

Well a T9/10 division isn't a fail division, T9's are very frequently in T10 games, in fact I honestly can't remember a T10 game I've played without at least 1 T9. The real Fail divisions are T6/7 as a T6 in a T9 game is just a mess. The CV anchoring thing is unsporting at best and borderline exploitative as the enemy CV, if solo, gets royally screwed over. Maybe Division rules for CV's should have a tweak. If I had to be the fail in a fail division I'd pick my Kamikaze to be in, while very fragile it's a nasty little sod with wonderful torp reload, if unspotted it could mess up T8 BB's badly.

What a slacker, no dev strikes, double strikes and clear sky!

Walrus poking maybe?

I suppose some kind of hotkey to allow swapping to and fro between ship and planes may work, bit like the binoculars vision, but yes I think it would be a challenge to get right from coding, balance and player perspectives. People are keen to get ships like the Tone, but in truth are there enough to warrant the effort?

They however can be refunded in some way if the CV gameplay is changed radically.

I think a fair few would disagree with your view (especially the bit I bolded) which reads more than a little like you wanting to retain your excessive influence on the matches you're in. Until we see what they intend to do it's not possible to speculate and not sensible to get upset over maybes.

For me I go concealment torpedo boat with nice guns as a backup, but that's another matter of taste. Just finished a game where I admit I bullied a Udaloi with lousy concealment in my Grozevoi. I'm more of a torpedo centric DD driver than a gunboat expert.

True, I limited my comments to cruisers as the OP was talking about them specifically, but there are a few in DD's that stand out both plus and minus. Z46 to Z52 - Significant improvement in gun layout and hydro range. Yugumo to Shimakaze - This is a tricky one that some will disagree with and the upcoming detection improvement to Shima will change this. Currently I'd argue that Yugumo plays better than Shima in many circumstances as it has far better detection so cap contests much better and faster torpedo reload, Shima of course has a lot of very hard hitting torpedoes, it currently feels like a sidegrade. Fletcher to Gearing - Gearing has a better gun layout for knife fighting, but way slower torpedo reload (much longer range of course) and it handles a bit poorly by comparison and it's a big ship. Many feel it's a downgrade from Fletcher and I can see why. Udaloi to Grozevoi - It's plain better in my book, clear upgrade. Can't comment on Tashkent to Khaba, not played that line. PA DD's I'm only at Chung Mu (which plays really well, but it is the Fletcher after all) so not able to comment. BB's and CV's aren't really my thing although Conqueror feels better than Lion did.