RevanOTOE

Recently I unlocked Podvoisky (the RU Tier V DD) and... honestly... I feel like I'm mentally retarded or something.. I've played 10 games or so with it and I never lived longer than 3 min and in half of them, I died without hitting anything or doing any DMG. I'm by no means a good player or something (probably not even an average one), but that is just beyond pathetic... and no fun at all. While playing Izyaslav at tier IV I at least averaged some 20000 DMG (not good, I know, but more than zero alright) and sunk a ship or two now and then... Izyaslav has 5 cannons with range of ~10 km with upgrade. That was pretty average on Tier III-IV. Podvoisky has the same range, but now I'm regularly facing opponents up to Tier VII, so almost everyone far outranges me while I have to get as close as 8 km to hit anything reliably. Also, with Izys reload time of 5 secs I could rain fiery death on my enemies almost without pause... that is a lot harder with Podvoiskys reload time of almost 10 secs. In Izyaslav I was rarely hit doing the basic WASD thing... in Podvoisky I'm always killed with one or two well placed salvos as soon as I open fire. And while Podvoisky is almost 10 knots faster, it is also the size of a Tier III cruiser and has a bigger hitbox and gets spotted earlier. In Izyaslav I could fire away from inside smoke without beeing detected, and with Izys fast reload I could (with a bit of luck) kill an RN BB in the one and a half minutes smoke is active. Now smoke is almost useless since I get spotted (and quickly killed) most of the time regardless, not to mention that that now everyone torps smokescreens on sight (no surprise here, I do that too in my cruisers, but on Tier III-IV very few people do that). I even tried to be a torpedo boat ( I know RU DDs generally aren't, but still..) but sneaking on on someone who isn't an even bigger idiot than me in that cruiser sized thing is impossible.. I mean I need to get into secondary range to even have a chance to even hit anything with my torps... that all being said, I don't blame the ship or something... I'm pretty sure it's not the ship, so it has to be me... obviously there is something I'm doing wrong... I not only can't "make it work", it's not even remotely fun in any way... Please help me!

Thing is, I already played every class at least once precisely so I can pick the one that suits me most. Also I have 2 other Tier V Ships right now beside Podvoisky, Furutaka (a cruiser) and Kongo (a BB)... and I do pretty poor in both of them, to be honest (well, as I you can see from the statstic above I'm doing pretty poor in general...) I know it can take quite a long time to learn a ship class or even a specific ship... I needed way over a dozen games to get used to Kumas large glass citadel and learn proper angling, for example. All in all I think I'm just not ready for Tier V+ yet...

Wow how do you know about the other ships I play..? But many thanks for the offer! @mtm78: Thanks a lot for the clarification! Looks like I will have to put some money into the game after all...

Of Course. How else I would have a 6-Point commander in a DD I played for 10 games at most? Also, I would have picked BFT over SE as 3-point-skill, as I already said, but i didn't because Izyaslav had a pretty fast reload time already and the extra ~1400 HP seemed nice. But I am considering training a new captain from scratch... is certainly easier to get a captain from 0 to 6 than from 6 to 9. Many thanks, I didn't know that. Would you have any suggestions what 1-point and 2-point skills to pick on a new captain for a RU DD? I picked Preemptive Maintenance and Last Stand, because if you get hit and don't die, it's always the engine...

Thanks a lot for all the advice! Well, I already started the IJN DD line and I suck just as much in them... at Tier III. Maybe DDs are just not for me... Also I know about AFT but it's a 4-point-skill, I will need a lot of grinding to unlock it (in retrospect it would be wise to pick Basic Firing Training as the first 3-point-skill instead of Survivability Expert, but back in Izy reload time was no issue...) Or a lot of free XP, which I don't have (and if I had them, they would apparently be better invested elsewhere anyway). I guess will try IJN DDs some more (I only had about 5 games in them) and maybe buy back my Izy and grind XP for my captain..