FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor

Ha-hem. There's a few young ladies would like a word with you, sir.

Ceterum censeo my Missouri still does not feel any more accurate than my GK.

See this is one of the few times where the error is actually due to genuine incompetence on Wargaming's part, because they're too cheap to hire decent writers and translators. Usually it's actual malice though.

I don't think you have understood how dead eye works. You can't have any spotted hostiles within your own concealment radius, which is 12.7 km with a Missouri stealth build. So no need for border-hugging.

So as a next round in the Captain Skill rework bashing, I'd like to invite you all to help take a methodical look at some of the skills the developers actually think are good for the different ships, and some they think are not. Tl, dr WG think torpedo boats do not need SE but a bunch of cruisers do. Many of their skill recommendations have no rhyme and little reason. One of the most glaring examples has to be Survivability Expert which, for three skill points, gives the ship an extra 350 hit points for each tier, or even 400 with some unique commanders. Even to people who never played a game of WoWs in their lives, if they think about it for three seconds, it becomes obvious that since it is not a percentage boost but a fixed amount, the ships with the least base amount of hit points benefit the most from this. The widely accepted consensus among the playerbase used to be that you should take this skill on just about any DD, even the very tankiest ones like Klebér and Khabarovsk, and take it as soon as you can, as a part of the basic "10-point captain build", possibly with very rare exceptions, none of which I can remember right now (and I have been following most of the Flamu builds over the years, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UDqctb8pVpiyYBZZdgE7LzkwphdJ6hjUQpgRA_9CZpk/edit#gid=998251886 if not agreeing 100% with all of them.) But I digress. On the other hand, before the rework, most players used to think the three points are spent a lot better elsewhere for all other ship types, and in fact it was considered the mark of the true potato if the max hit point count on the team roster in battle shows they took it on a Cruiser or BB. (Still does if you do not take it on a DD.) WG recommend it for all EU DDs without a heal and for none of the ones that do have a heal. Initially, that led me to think that the having of a heal might have been their deciding criteria. But then they do recommend SE for all Royal Navy DDs regardless of their having or not having a heal. (Only looking at the 305 ships in my personal port here, I am missing a few low tier ships, some carriers, some premiums and specials.) Of the Japanese DDs, they only recommend it for the top three ships of the gunboat line with their magic little pop guns. And for Harekaze. Irrespective of which Harekaze hull you choose, the recommendation stays the same. (It gets a choice of three different hulls which all have very very different guns, and the B Hull actually has three Akizuki turrets with slightly nerfed range, which is why most people only ever use that one of course.) (None of these IJN boats has a heal.) Further, WG recommends SE for all of my US DDs, even Kidd which does have a heal. (I don't have a Somers.) They do recommend it for all of my Commonwealth, French, German and Russo-/Soviet DDs, even though on some of the Russians you can take smoke instead of a heal. (Don't have a Neustrashimy - that recommendation would be interesting to know due to its "Zombie heal".) As for the Pan-Asian DDs, they seem to recommend it for all the ones that have regular torpedoes but not for any of those that have deep-water torps - EDIT: with the exception of Siliwangi! Without that last exception, it could appear as though some doctrinal thought actually went into this, flawed as it may have been: regular torps can be construed to be the mark of a DD which is better at contesting caps, and therefore more prone to get spotted, getting into fights with other DDs and their support ships etc while the deep-water torp DDs may be viewed as torpedo boats that best avoid getting spotted - and shot at - altogether. Of course this line of thought is thwarted by a great many factors, which include CVs, and things never turning out in quite such a clear-cut manner in actual battles, and the fact that the Pan-Asian DDs are a complete hodge-podge of former American, British, Japanese, German and Soviet hand-me-downs, some of which are absolutely fierce gun boats even if their torps are useless against DDs. Like Gadja Mahda. Fushun, Anshan and Gnevny all have the same hulls and guns. And the 4 km Gnevny torps, arguably, are almost as useless against enemy DDs as those on Fushun, what with the super sluggish, awkward handling of the Soviet Tier VI DD. But hey. Let's get to what prompted me to start this endeavour in the first place: the fact that Wargaming do recommend you take SE on certain Cruisers. Here they are: American: Phoenix (I have no Anchorage), Soviet: Mikoyan, Kirov, Molotov, Makarov, Smolensk (I have no Ochakov or Bagration); German: Karlsruhe, Königsberg, Nürnberg; Italy - all of them except Eritrea? (I am missing the tech tree ones from II through V). Not recommended for any IJN, Royal Navy, Pan Asian, Commonwealth, French or Pan American cruisers (I have no Azuma and neither Belfast.) All of these choices frankly have me stumped. The one good thing is SE is no longer even available for BBs, apparently. Now someone else can do other recommendations if you want. Considering I had to actually recruit a lot of captains even to just take a look at them - after selling loads of low-skill deadbeats down the river just a few weeks ago to cannibalize some of their ECXP - this whole thing turned out to be a lot more work than anticipated, so I'm fed up for today.

Here's Wargaming's recommended Smaland build: Pure torpedo boat, with no RPF or SE, and exactly the same as the Halland recommendation.

Also I will demount all modules and then at least try to stay away from this game for a month. Except if WG admit to having messed up big time by granting another free reset period. Because playing with different captain builds is the opiate addiction kind of fun.

Geez, changed it already, give it a rest. If anything, you can bash WG for adding these "nonstandard" fonts to the forum but not me for using it as it is plainly intended.

Well that explains why they thought Deadeye would not change the meta in any way whatsoever. Nobody could have predicted players would actually deviate from their recommendations!!1

Flamu casually crapping out a 1000% better captain skill rework in ten minutes as an aside while carrying.

Today, my greatest achievement was to play the game as intended by tanking over 1.5 million potential damage in a destroyer and surviving the battle, in order to complete Mission 5 Task 4 of the Yamamoto campaign. In a carrier battle no less. And in fact it was almost 1.7 mill. After several unsuccessful attempts in Mogador and other ships, Tashkent finally did the trick. https://replayswows.com/replay/122147#stats EDIT: I am actually a bit flummoxed by getting lots of likes for this and not laughs. I thought the whole endeavour was absurd. The task is ridiculous and a mark of poor game design, and my team mates hated me for what I did.

Wargaming deserve to be crucified upside-down over a slow-burning fire for recommending Survivability Expert as a cruiser skill alone.

The question was purely rhetorical.

It would not have been impossible to make plane ammo scatter more widely. Frankly I can't even see it being very difficult.

Have WG even bothered to give a reason why the Dazzle DD skill doesn't work on plane rockets? Or indeed plane-launched ammo of any kind. And to Jingles, I have this to say: Stop making excuses for Wargaming, Jingles. You are advocating appeasement. "Peace in our time" did not get your country very far in WWII. And another thing, there are always other factors beside your own performance that you can change, if only in protest: stop buying Wargaming commercial products stop playing the game Do you-know-what that mustn't be mentioned on this forum persuade others to do the same. All of it will hurt WG's bottom line, which is the only thing that matters to them, which in turn makes this strategy the easiest one with a remote chance of changing things for the better. The other one would be to crowd-develop an alternative ship game without all the [edited] and with grass-roots democracy. But hey.

All joking aside, the most important factor may be the end of the Trump reign of terror, which meant my crippling depression has started to let up juuust a smidge.

Just out of curiosity, die WG even pretend to offer up some justification for the massive buff to CV damage output caused by the captain skill rework? Don't have to be plausible, just anything?

I really wonder if the dude is even aware the real Lord Mountbatten was one of the evilest edit* ever. Edit: sorry, not in here.. Watch the language please

Some of you might remember I have been trying to find a non-conspiratorial, more math-oriented explanation for certain AA-heavy DDs getting less than their tier-average of carrier battles. And the latest hypothesis I had come up with some time ago was that the nationality mirroring might be to blame since ships whose nations do not have CVs cannot be drafted in by the Matchmaker to make up the numbers. Sadly however, that does not explain the constant barrage of CVs I am getting in muh Mogador. I seem to remember grinding through that ship last autumn, didn't enjoy it much but recently picked it up again in an effort to finally complete that pesky task 4 from mission 5 of the Yamamoto campaign where you have to tank 1.5 million potential in a destroyer and survive, which incidentally has led to some tactics that must have puzzled my dear team mates quite a bit. Not to say annoyed or even trolled... But I digress. Anyway. I have 56 Mog battles, which is not too many in the greather scheme of things but it's at least 6.5% of all my Tier IX battles since I started recording these statistics. So it's not chicken feed either. And the Mog gets more than 48% of CV battles, roundabout 11% more than the tier average of 36.8%. When by the nationality mirroring hypothesis, it should be getting fewer than average. So there!

You know it would be really good if they did another version of this opt-in reset-all-captains page right before the next patch. Maybe add a demount-all-modules button, too, while we're at it. Cause the way things are going, that will in probability be the best time to drop out of the game for some time. What with the free commander skill point redistribution over (which is always a lot of fun) but the mess of the skill rework largely still in place, and them taking their usual sweet time and denying any mistakes and generally squeezing more profit out of the player sheeples and all. But if you're gonna do the reset all manually before hunkering down and getting ready for spring and going outside once more and, you know, live a life with the lockdowns increasingly being lifted, and having fun doing things that do not involve rotting away in front of your PC, well. Now it's gonna be really unfun, what with potentially three to four builds for every high skill commander to reset and you needing to transfer him to the ship type in question before being able to just see if you actually did bother to even build a build for that type, never mind resetting it.

No no no. Greed. They will introduce indicators only after the free redistribution is expired so players then have to pay for respeccing their captains.

Reporting has no tangible consequences at all because it is not sanctioned in any way that matters. There is only one exception, which is reporting for chat abuse, which can result in a chat ban, which most players will at least find mildly annoying. I seem to remember you get an automatic chat ban if you get reported a certain number of times over a period of time or something. However, the reports need to be sort-of kind-of valid. Like, there are some automatic checks involved, such as if the reported player said anything in chat at all. If they did not even use the chat, the reports are probably automatically disregarded. On the other hand, the definitely check for four-letter words. So if somebody drops an f-bomb, your report will then definitely bring them a step closer to their next chat ban.

So you experienced what any stock Monarch player experiences against any CV it may encounter, every g'dam day. Big deal. SCNR

It would mean players could test the rebalanced skills without being ripped off (quite as badly). It's evil and bad enough as it is to serve up such a shoddy, half-baked product to let your customers do the important part of the development. But making players actually pay for the privilege to do Wargaming's job for them - that would be downright trumpian.

Wargaming will then conveniently introduce indicators for those skills that can be activated by peculiar sets of circumstances - after the period of free retraining expires. So those people that will then discover how worthless their chosen skills actually are, will have to pay for any redistribution, be it in actual money or play time spent on WG's servers, both of which are equally valuable to WG's business model. Don't for a second blame this kind of thing on incompetence or coincidence.