FixCVs_Nautical_Metaphor

In all seriousness though, I'd like to congratulate the guys at WG on this postponement decision, which can't have been easy and imho shows a lot of poise. Keeping my fingers crossed you get the carrier rework right; in the end, that's what is in all of our interest.

I think that's just an impression you might have gotten from playing lower tier opponents. All BBs are more or less vulnerable to torps and Bayern is no exception. Torp damage reduction is 19% vs 22% on the Gneisenau. Bayern is a fair bit smaller with 200m less turning circle. I'd not necessarily call her "more agile" since the rudder shift is roughly in the same ball park, though I could see the argument you have an easier time avoiding torpedo hits in the first place. But 'take hit after hit and just repair' - neither my own experience nor the specifications seem to really bear that out. Action and cooldown times of damage control and repair party are the same, and the maximum amount of health recovered by the repair party is a bit higher on Gneisenau because as far as I recall, it's proportional to the total hitpoint pool, as is the damage over time inflicted by fire/flooding. The one thing that comes to my mind to possibly have created that impression is the matchmaking, which means you get pitched against lesser opponents on Tier VI than Tier VII, and some of their torpedoes just do less damage. Minekaze, Acasta and Monaghan have fairly wimpy torps and in the Tier VI operations, you also tend to meet even lower tier DDs whose fish do even less damage. But on the whole - better just not catch any in the first place. Resilience against torpedo hits only really goes up significantly in the high tiers.

One more week of clan battles, more time for achievements etc? I guess that's the first time carriers have proven useful for this game (c) @snufnu

You have really not understood that ship. It's an up-close-and-personal brawler extraordinaire. Sitting back and sniping is the worst thing you could ever do in a Gneisenau. Completely ineffectual, with the few main guns, horrible dispersion, super tanky armour and powerful secondaries.

You have really not understood that ship. It's an up-close-and-personal brawler extraordinaire. Sitting back and sniping is the worst thing you could ever do in a Gneisenau. Completely ineffectual, with the few main guns, horrible dispersion, super tanky armour and powerful secondaries.

SEALCLUBBING. I realise there are a lot of arguments against "skill-based matchmaking" or whatever you want to call it. But if we're keeping the sealclubbing, the Matchmaker should at least make an effort to spread clubbers and seals evenly on both teams. At least in the low tiers. Maybe based on a combination of battles played in the given ship and winrate in that ship. Or something. But this.. it is just wrong. Instead, the "mirrored matchmaking", where the MM strives to give both sides the same ships or at least the same nationality and type ships, should be abolished. All it achieves is you play your evil self from the mirror universe all the time. *edited*

Yes well but it didn't end today. it ended yesterday. Yesterday was the last day. The last day is when something ends. It's just plain English. The school holidays don't end on Monday. They end on Sunday when Monday is the first day of school.

And once again the very basics of writing a news bulletin in the western world: Getting start and end dates right. I mean I had my suspicions and should've known better than to expect the series to end on a Monday, but if you give the end date as the 14th, then it is customary to end the series on the 14th. Meaning including the 14th. Not the 13th. The 14th. It actually ended either on the 13th or just so few hours into the early morning of the 14th that technically it was still yesterday.

I don't see that a lot, not even in the low tiers. It's mostly negligent torping. Most players learn fairly quickly though that you better not torp from behind team mates because there are plenty more senior players even in the low tiers who tell them. Actual premeditated TK-ing and even griefing/trolling are far less common than in World of Tanks for example. It's annoying when it happens but it happens infrequently. I'd say there's one every other game or so. There is rarely one that doesn't wake up for the whole game. Some also get disconnected during the game. It has all happened to me as well. There is little you can do about it other than treat it as a fact of life (and buy a fast enough computer if that's your problem and you are the always-afk dude.) No disrespect but at your stage, you can not always be the judge if what they're doing is good or bad. And you wouldn't want others to judge your tactical expertise either, trust me. Yeah that gets better the higher you go, by and large. Cynical forum and chat bitching notwithstanding. Crew ressource management is a skill and a challenge. Just as with any other decision in the game, the unsubtle approach is not always the best. Try to find a way to get them to do good things when you're in the mood, and don't do it when you're not. It's usually best if you can make it so they think it was their own idea. At that stage you have hardly met any real players and mostly bots, friend. Protected matchmaking. The ones with the names in :colons: Up to account level 11 or something thereabouts. http://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Account_Level Even they are known to TK though, not kidding.

OK, I'll get right on it, let me just buy another batch of 20 Santa loot boxes real quick... Alabama, no. Kii... Le Terrible... Musashi. No, no no. Nueve... Asashio. What the hell do I want an Asashio for? I have to write a ticket to customer service about that. Aaaah there she is. Finally. I'll get back to you tomorrow or so because I'd like to rank out first though...

I should imagine Freddy has also become a lot better since the last buff, when they switched all the secondaries to HE shells.

such as that it is Tier 5 ;-))) I can tell you what's wrong with that ship: It suffers from a severe case of HE spammers. From what I gather, back in the ölden days, a fairly moderate secondary build used to be viable. But then ships happened. First, due to powercreep, you had to boost the secondaries more and more, to include DE and IFHE if you wanted them to still do anything, which obviously goes to the detriment of tankiness, which meant you had to time your pushes precisely and still died more often if you got the timing wrong. (And of course it didn't even help that much since many of the secondaries used to fire AP shells back then, and these of course bounced often and started no fires.) Then, Wargaming thought if was funny to introduce Worcester, and make Cleveland T 8, and introduce Helena and Seattle. And the best gag of all <bwaha ... muahaha> give a couple of stupid IJN gunboats a crap load of 152mm guns that fire faster than any other guns in the game, while calling them "100mm guns" for some mysterious reason. Which meant even more precise push timing was required and/or you died even more often or you just couldn't push. The only reason I kept playing the ship nearly every day, and indeed played it to the more or less accidental completion of the grind, was I had my top German commander on it, which I needed to generate Commander XP, and was loath to stick the power camos and special signals on the premium ships where I also used that captain, because that would just freeze the XP there. And then suddenly one day, I noticed the Kurfürst was unlocked. Which is a ship I never even wanted in the first place (never wanted freddy either, really), because of a lot of preconceived notions that turned out to be total bullcrap. Now I'm gad I have the thing because now I play clan battles and it is a total hoot, even though they don't let me play it often.

What really stumped me is that this rotation, the week already started out with terrible teams. Usually, it seems that each time the new Operation of the Week is rotated in, you get decent or even very good players for at least a couple days. Then the weekend kicks in, and the teams get worse, and after the weekend, the drop-off gets ever sharper. The effect seems to scale with the difficulty level of the specific operation. And external incentives can mitigate it a lot. For instance, last week's Dynamo is so easy, it's basically still the guaranteed win and giant XP pinata that many other Operations also used to be in the beginning. One team I was on, managed to five-star it with only British ships and a Minsk. No Sims, no American DD of any kind, no defensive AA whatsoever. This kept many skilled players interested the whole week long. From the look of it, they used it to farm credits, Free XP and/or Commander XP. of which you could get 30 to maybe 60k if you just slapped enough special signals on the ship and used a good power camo. Which, in turn, many players were drowning in, after the Santa loot box sale over the Holidays. My hypothesis is that this week of grinding Dynamo may have turned many of them off of Operations for a while now though. Combine that with the rapidly approaching end of Ranked Sprint, and possibly external demands on their time, with life returning to normal after the Holidays, and there you go.

Patience is the key skill you need to be the best you can be in this game. Also ships might very well grow on you. First example coming to my mind is Normandie, which initially was a real struggle but now is my absolute No. 1 no-brainer go-to pick for Ranked Sprint. I can remember four instances of skipping ships and came to regret nearly all of them. The ruling on the latest instance is still out; it was only yesterday, to skip (half of) a ship which I actually like very much. The reasons had nothing to do with me personally disliking the ships. I hadn't even tried them yet. In the first instance, Kawachi, it was pure hearsay because everybody on the forum, youtube etc said what an awful ship she was. A few months later, I re-bought her and played a few times. Then again after she recived another small buff. She was indeed awful but I still wouldn't want to miss the experience. Playing a ship yourself is the best way to get familiar with it, which is what you need to become a well-rounded player. The grind is so, so short in the low tiers. If I had done the same thing with Emerald or Valkyrie or other ships which many players and youtubers dislike, I would have missed out on some of my best experiences in the game. So that is probably the worst reason of all. The second instance was the first three or four Japanese destroyers if you can believe it. After extensively immersing in the hyper-aggressive German low tier front-torp DD experience for months, I wanted to tone it down a bit and get into the stealth-torping business. However, being a clueless noob and having heard some youtubers mention some nerf to the Isokaze led me to believe they just didn't have 'enough' spreads of torps and not 'enough' torps in their spreads while I wanted as much of the "wall of skill" experience I could get. Also I don't think the fact that low tiers have protected matchmaking had made it through to my depressed brain yet at that stage. So it was a combination of hearsay and superstition. Or Dunning-Kruger, whatever you want to call it. In any event, it made me skip right through to, Mutsuki I think it was. Possibly even Fubuki. Terrible, terrible mistake. Not the least because I also didn't understand commander skills very well back then and kept looking at technicalities as causes for my failures and shortcomings when at the root of it all, there was little else but my own impatience. And that of course was also the cause for skipping the König. Back then, I didn't only skip ships. I skipped many parts of the game that were not immediately related to sailing around and shooting other ships. I skipped reading the explanatory texts and/or videos that popped up when reaching a new account level. That, in turn, led to me skipping the whole deal with the containers for months on end, until I suddenly became curious about them one day and had, like, hundreds of them to open at once. Skipped campaigns, skipped events. Skipped signals and camos for quite some time. Skippped König because I wanted to try this Operations thing and Bayern was the closest one to get, I might even have converted doubloons to get enough free XP. What an idiotic thing to do. But hey, it's just a game, right? Still, that was what seems a long time ago in this age, though in fact it wasn't even a year and to the outside observer, I wasn't a naive kid back then, much the same way I'm not a wizened old man now but pretty much the same consumer I've always been. People don't change. Much. Yesterday, I did it again, against my better judgement, and trying to compensate for disappointments in my personal life may very well have played into it, too. Despite very little interest in high tier gameplay, I actually went and Free-XP'd a Tier X ship, and the reason is my new Clan. They took me and it is a quid pro quo. They are nice enough guys but mainly they need bodies to fill their team in Clan Battles and I play mostly every day. I myself, at least initially, only wanted to play one single CB per season in order to farm those two weeks of Redistribute-Your-Commander-Skill-Points-for-free. But it was a real hassle to get guys from my previous German slacker clan of solo players together for a session. They just weren't into it. Which is ok. So I'm there for the new guys and they are there for me. But initially I only had the three rental ships, which are swapped out three times per season. And I don't want to get too much into the details but let's just say, while I was able to find something I could make work from the first two batches, I wasn't really able with the third. Or rather, I am not willing to go on and try any further. Patience, you see.

Extra sources of containers that I hadn't exhausted before getting the Prinz are the old unfinished PEF event missions from the previous directives that you could only do with the Prinz, as well as the "Mighty Prinz" Campaign. The latter dropped a few more duplicates that let me finally buy the two missing pieces.

Roma isn't UP, she's just in the worst Tier with the suckiest Matchmaking is all.

Possibly fair enough. So what is the rationale for even toying with the idea to give this ship 20% to 40% better base concealment than all the other same tier cruisers? I'd say pure marketing, were it not for the sloppiness they otherwise display, and the bloody-minded way in which they tend to just go through with this kind of thing.

Why should that matter when smoke invalidates these other spotting mechanics and you only have 'assured acquisition' any more? Seems to be pretty much the same line they gave regarding Belfast, Giulio...

Well, 26.08 Euros for 6800 doubloons means you pay a bit over .38 Euro cents per doubloon, when the regular price for a medium chest is .34 and a large chest .33. Just sayin. And that Steel Monsters campaign... haven't really made up my mind but it looks like yet another predatory marketing tactic.

Could be worse. At least the dispersion starts getting better, at Tier III it's really a crap shoot... also OR at least has a good number of guns. Watch the Flamu New York (Texas?) video. Or there is even a Nassau one. Other than 'don't sail in straight lines', the key things are - When in doubt, don't stray too far from the center of the map, so you get to shoot things as often as possible. - Use the reload time to look around and think. - Pre-plan turret traverse, I usually use Ctrl-X to lock them in the new direction even before / while starting a turn.

Get closer.

The linguists call it "glottal stop". My 2 Euro cents - Damage Con becomes the Jingles Effect consumable - every time you repair something, it causes the closest other ship to mess up in some way (no matter if friend or foe). Self-torp or something. Jingles Landing could also be nice, not for CVs since that doesn't make sense any more (although by that time the rework has probably been revoked or rework² is in effect... who knows...) but I digress, anyway, it could be so that the player w/ Jingles captain and some team mate just randomly switch ships when the repair party is triggered.

Gneisenau is a miles better ship. Really not the slightest bit of contest at all. Incredibly tanky and fast, ok too few guns but the ones it does have, at least hit hard. Also torps for the lulz. The Prinz blows up if somebody looks at it funny, almost like a Nürnberg.

I just put a lot of tipps into this thread here:

That's not the hard part. It will be more difficult to then grind the four million. Harder still to then do the Nerves of Steel mission in time before it's over, which I'm assuming is the whole point of the exercise because the ship itself is definitely not worth it. . If I were to try this from an F2P account... hmm. Japan - grind out Minekaze and torp my way to the cash. At that level, there are still many BBabies sailing in straight lines waiting to be farmed, and only three radar ships in the whole matchmaking spread. Also best concealment on the tier which is always good. To gain a 10-pt Japanese commander - get some good players into a division and do Operation Defense of Naval Station Newport with at least four stars . (Better yet, five-star it to gain a day of Premium time.) Not easy but should be quicker than grinding out the commander XP the hard way. Germany - König the battleship, imho the best silver BB on that Tier. Königsberg the cruiser is also good but struggles harder when uptiered. T-22 would only be good for DD specialists. The main benefit would be that you have to swing by the low tier German DDs which are hilarious. Four-star Operation Killer Whale for a German 10-pt Commander, or better yet, buy one of the Jütland brothers straight out of the Arsenal (coal or doubloons). UK - Probably best to go for the BB as well, which is really not bad. Lots better than New York. Get one of the Dunkirk Brothers from the Arsenal. I would probably try to get Jack Dunkirk, from completing the Dunkirk collection, for which you have to buy maybe 15 to 20 Dunkirk containers. Even if it should cost you more coal than buying Bert Dunkirk outright, it will be worth it because the containers also give special signals. France - I don't suppose you have sufficient coal to buy the Jean Bart from the Arsenal, which would definitely be by far the best way to go here. Barring that, I'd go with the cruisers, Émile Bertin is still a bit OP even after the nerf. You can get one of the Honoré brothers as commander, either for 1,500 doubloons straight from the Arsenal if you have them, or buying Vive-la-France containers to complete that collection, giving power camos and signals. The bad news is you will probably need to buy even more containers than for the Dunkirk collection because you need to collect more items while the containers only contain one collectible item each. The good news is you get Revolutionary, gamescom and Ocean Soul camos, all of which give extra credits. Also these crates only contain the extra credit, reduced service cost or extra Commander XP signals, all of which will help with this economy grind. (Reduced service costs do nothing for the Treasury directive as such but they give you more credits to buy ships etc with.) If you can spare any actual real money to facilitate this grind, first on the list is obviously a bit of premium time, even though the Holiday discounts are over. Rather than buying the Prinz outright, or buying any one premium ship - based on my personal experience, I'd actually suggest going for the luck of the draw and getting a 20 batch of mega Santa loot boxes. On average, I got three to four premium ships out of any batch of 20s. Granted, some of them weren't very good ones, and if you don't already have a fairly substantial collection, chances are higher for you to get those slightly rubbish ones. BUT, if you should get one, you could start the credit grind mission right away. Also it will give you such a crap ton of special signals, New Year Streamer and other power camos that it might possibly last you some time beyond this grind.