Uglesett

As I said earlier, WG isn't going to lose that money if they follow this proposal though. It takes what, around 700k exp to take a line to T10? Even if you have enough boosters to buff the regular free exp that you get from games a bit (in addition to what you get from converting stored exp on a 5% ratio) we're probably talking about having to grind on the order of around 5 million exp on your premium ship of choice. Someone who doesn't have the patience to grind 700k exp on a regular ship line certainly doesn't have the patience to grind ~5 million exp on a single ship to get the same result. Those players are still going to pay to convert.

Soooo... IFHenri IV trades reduced fire chance for a very situational survivability buff?

I suspect he meant to write 15 cm. 8" guns will still have the 1/6 HE pen rule, so penetrates 33 mm without IFHE.

Directive 7 of the Puerto Rico grind (as it was on the PTS at least) has one task for Pan-Euro ships, the rest are for a limited selection of T10 ships. Might change before the patch is actually released, though.

What's interesting isn't how much noise those accounts create on the forums, but how large a percentage of the player base they actually make up. I'm not saying there aren't whales who play as little as possible, use stupid amounts of doubloons to convert free exp and then go straight to high tiers. But I suspect those are fewer and further between than you think, and they don't generate near enough total income as to be a significant source. And besides, do you think those players are going to be satisfied with a measly 5% conversion rate? They're still going to be spending doubloons anyway.

Here's the thread I started on the subject way back when, by the way.

That's not entirely correct, though. By making the exp stacked on premium ships less pointless, it would make premiums more attractive to buy. As for whether that's going to compensate for decreased income from sale of doubloons... well, that's a different matter. I don't know how popular it actually is to spend doubloons for converting free exp. Regarding the argument that it's going to make it too easy to skip lines... well, that depends entirely on the conversion rate. At a guess, I have about 1 mill exp rotting away on assorted premium ships. So if we convert at a rate of 5%, that's 50k free exp. Enough to get past a couple of particularly annoying stock modules, but nothing really major. There are other economic factors in this game that have a far greater impact on the rate of progression.

To be honest, it sounds... well, unnecessarily complicated for something that could be achieved in a simpler way. A long way back I proposed that you could convert elite/premium ship exp to free exp for "free" by losing most of it. E.g. you could convert 100% of elite ship exp to free exp by using doubloons as now, or convert it at a conversion rate of, for example, 5% for free (IE convert 100 000 elite ship exp to 5000 free exp without paying doubloons).

See @Klopirat's post three posts above yours.

The tier and ship requirements are tougher for the Yamamoto and Halsey campaigns, though. So if you do like me and play a lot of lines in parallel, it's easier to complete the Shinonome campaign first while still grinding mid-tier ships and then go on to the other campaigns when you have more high tier ships.

I'd say that Smolensk is likely to be the first of the three to be removed from the Armory, which is an argument for going for her first and holding off on the others.

I have mixed feelings about my potential first appearance on Jingles' channel being one that ends with me screwing up But I'd still love to see it, it was a pretty epic game and I'd love to see what happened on the other side of the map. I might as well send him mine in addition to show a bit of what happened on my end of the map. While I can't claim it's particularly epic (it's mostly this on my part), the last five minutes are pretty good, with a fair bit of WTF thrown in for good measure.

The second game mentioned in this post qualifies IMO. I could have just hung back and let the clock run out and we'd probably have won, but noooo

Bumped into @Mr_Tayto and @Bear_Necessities two games in a row, once on my team while I was sailing the Atago (in which I spent most of the game dropping torps and playing a delaying game with half the enemy team pushing up from the south, but got a decent result out of it) with Bear basically torping everyone in the Benham on the other flank. Second game, they were on the other team, and boy what a cluster that game turned into. I sailed the Z-46, and most of the game I didn't do anything except dodge planes and radars and drop the occasional set of torps, before ending up all the way back to our cap and having to defend it from an Atlanta, a Colorado (I think) and the enemy CV who was actually trying to cap (as well as to defend our cap. What happened on the other end of the map I didn't really pay attention to. At the end, it was @Bear_Necessities (again in the Benham) against three of us who were barely ahead on points. And I'm going to be kicking myself for what happened, because I was so hung up on spotting his torps for the Richelieu that I strayed too close, let him spot me and ended up getting killed. Which was just the points nudge they needed to win the game just as the time ran out Still, two good and intense games, GGs and thanks for the matches to both of you

Play DD and get on a team that consists of mostly potatoes. Everyone on the opposite flank to mine died early on, so that cap was never taken, and the bots even managed to take the cap closest to our spawn after most of the other players on my flank got themselves killed. So it just turned into a game of Ring-a-ring-a-roses as I sailed around getting all the caps, including taking the cap closest to the bot spawn twice. Meanwhile, the CV was happily just farming damage and everyone else was dead.

They're actually less naff than I expected. Feel a lot like the IJN 127s but with higher rate of fire, albeit not so punchy. They seem like fairly decent guns on an individual basis, if she'd had four of them it would probably be an actual hard choice. I'll stick with the 100s, though.

Hm. I have to give the USN guns a try in coop just to see what they're like.

So, this was a rather unexpected but certainly welcome result (First game trying to get capture ribbons as well)

Pretty sure that (as with gunnery) the angular spread is the same even if you change the max range.

Tbh, I usually don't fire my torps as soon as they're reloaded even without TAE. Improved reload isn't that important because I tend to be picky about when I shoot anyway. It's certainly a skill I'll pick up eventually, but it's not that high on my list of priorities. For the points cost, the (admittedly small) improvement in hit rate from TA is more valuable the way I play her. Well, yes. But it's a nice bonus if it works well with my tech three skippers as well.

For me it was the first skill I picked up after CE. The difference is noticeable enough to make it worthwhile taking early. I don't have the kind of patience to play one or a handful of ships that much to grind elite captain exp. Heck, if I did I probably would have had more 19 pointers by now. I mean, I enjoy playing Yamato/Musashi/Kii, but only for so long. Having premiums that I can use to (re)train skippers is nice just for the variety.

As someone who only has one 19 pt captain so far and not that much elite captain exp to throw around yet, I like to have premiums to retrain (and speed up training of) captains.

That's why, as I said earlier, Asashio isn't really a good captain trainer/general premium. She really works best with a dedicated captain. Harekaze can definitely benefit from IFHE, but since that's true for Aki/Kita/Haru as well, it's not problem using a skipper specialized for one of those. That said, she's not half bad without it, and I'll happily use her to train torp boat skippers without IFHE as well. You just have to rely more on torps and fires. Heck, I don't even have IFHE on my Akizuki captain yet, I'm short one skill point I think. IFHE on Asashio? Eeeeh. I guess it'll help against cruisers, but I'm not sure it's something I'd prioritize spending four skill points on.

Torpedo acceleration for Asashio. Otherwise standard DD skills are nice. Harekaze can take pretty much any IJN DD skipper, that's why she's such a nice captain trainer. Before the HE pen buff to the 100mm guns I would have said to switch to Kagero guns if training a torp boat skipper (ie if you didn't have IFHE), but now I don't really see the point in using anything but the 100mm guns regardless of captain skills.

The thing about Asashio is that you can pretty much just be in the match, never hit a single torp and still have a significant impact on the match just by virtue of scaring the enemy BBs even further away than usual. I've had plenty of games where I've basically just hung around somewhere in the vicinity of the center and kept enemy BBs well clear of at least two caps after they saw the first spread of Asashio torps. I'm not saying this is true in every match, but it's true enough that it has a significant effect on her statistical winrate. Harekaze is a generalist. She's a more well rounded design, and probably more effective in skilled hands. But her psychological effect just isn't the same.