The_Chiv

We should not be surprised by this. WG tends to punish dissent among the people who promote their game. Ichase, EarlGrey, and now Flamu. Imagine being so petty that rather then actually consider any sort of criticism you just punish people. *edit*

So today we got a wealth of info from the WOWS Dev blog. New ports, Skins, Ships, and an interesting piece of information that seems like a good thing, but could also be an indication of some other things. on the surface this sounds great right. Well. Each ship has 4 modules. Guns, hull, range finder, engine. If Wg is removing some of these modules upgrade without rebalancing the remaining module this will be a bit rough. In some cases this can be down right horrible. NC hull b gives 12k hp, reduces rudder shift by 25%, and increases aa by 17%. This represents a pretty substantial nerf to 21 ships. Now you are probably thinking no WAY WG would do this right? WRONG. WG has learned a few lessons from the players buying habbits. Players are less likely to buy an inferior stat ship or one that has match stat to a researchable line unless it has something pretty amazing. So if WG wanted to introduce say The South Dakota into the game they are left with a few paths. Make it better stated, or give it a cool gimmick. Well Alabama got the AA, Mass got the secondary's, NC has the accuracy, leaving not much for a possible South Dakota. Solution remove the HULL B from NC and then Stat the the South Dakota off hull b of the NC and then maybe buff up a little hull A. This opens up avenues for more premium ships for wargaming. 21 Fresh Carbon copies of ships we already have. Now I know what you are thinking. "There is no way this could work." "I would never buy them". Hate to shatter your reality but WG doesn't care about you, me, or any veteran of the game. As we have seen WG has been rather dismissive to its community concerns about the path they are taking in regards to content, balancing, and enjoyment. One could say the biggest problem WG has had to their plans to increase profits is the community. So why would they do this. Well folks WG like any F2p company knows that Retention is not the most important aspect of a f2p model. New player spending is. Ask yourself this. how much have you spent lately? I made a joke recently in another post about how WG hates losing money to informed consumers. Seems that was a less of a joke and more of a prediction. New players to this game will lack many things, but the one thing they have that WG is banking on is Ignorance. They can not be mad, if they never knew what was. Now while I would love to continue to highlight the nefarious logic WG applies to this game, I would be remiss if I did not provide at least some validation to this effort. There are many great ships that WG has not brought into this game. One of which I have begged for, for some time now. USS Johnston (DD-557). If you don not know the history of this ship then I suggest you google it. The sacrifice the Johnston, Samuel B Roberts, and the Hoel made not only saved 2 escort Carriers but turned the center force that could have easily thwarted the invasion of Leyte gulf. If WG was to brining in the Johnston they could also memorialize Ernest E. Evan as a commander in this game. I mean he is a far cry more deserving then Steven Segal. Now other ships could also be introduced as as well. New Jersey, Indiana, and Suzuya with little in regards to special gimmicks. It would also allow WG to do some more historical fantasy by giving even more surface ships to the Russian navy and other navies with again little no actually creative effort needed. In short it is recycling content in order to make more money. While I can find some value in this concept, I can not ignore the pretty basic fact that this will effectively be a nerf in terms of the individual ships. The only positive argument I can make about this nerf is that as a player you will not have to suffer it to long as you will no longer have to spend as much time grinding for that module and will be able to move on to the next ship in the line. While grinding to 10 is always the main goal one should not forget about ranked play or operations. These two modes will greatly be effected if Wg takes a no rebalancing of module a variants while removing B. WG has literally found a way to sell the same ship twice.

DDs cant even be bothered to spot or hunt other dds expecting them to do anything for subs is a pipe dream.

All ships should be subject to balancing, both buff and nerfs. There are several ships I can think of that are in dire need of it, however asking WG to rebalance some 300+ ships is never gonna happen. Even if they did it line by line it will never happen. This is by design. Why rebalance the old when they just make something new and hot get money for it?

simpler solution. End overmatch.

not all cruisers can shoot over islands.

their are not enough whales to overshadow the 10-50 per month spenders

Most f2p developers do not care about retention as most players will spend their money in the first 90-180 days and then that spending will fall off. Thus retention is not nearly as profitable as new player income. So making a class you are reworking and reintroducing super powerful is one hell of a lure for new players. Veteran players however are left with little to no recourse. Even if we leave nothing will change as we will be replaced by newer paying customers which is a win win for WG. Staying also is a win win for WG because we provide fodder for these new players playing cvs. The only way to make an actual impact would be to cause 40% or more of the player pool to stop playing. This of course would also have to be accompanied by a unified statement of boycott and demand for change. This will never happen because a community based on a game that pits players against each other tends to make them less likely to participate in a strategy for the greater good.

there is logic in your argument, however you and I both know that whatever accountant came up with this concept probably also listed that it would allow for more premium ships to be added to the game. Which thanks to @Pururut post makes me think many will be grind ships that will also be sold. Imagine every 2 months a new dockyard where the players need to spend Doubloons in order to unlock this new ship that is really an old ship with a new name. Just going off 8 and 9 as dock yards have only been used for 8 and 9 ships, you get 8 possible rebrands. Now does that sound like something WG would do?

Not Fantasizing. Just thinking of the worst possible outcome, as WG has not given any glimmer of salvation these past 3 years to make me think anything different about them. While they did what you are saying in the past, that was then. Then WG actually cared about the community and its health and happiness. The WG we have now is not run by gamers or people who play the game but by cooperate executives who only care about money. I have a very hard time believing WG would be altruistic in helping alleviate the grinding portion of their game as this mechanic incentivizes spending money to buy FXP to speed up the process. So I came up with a logical reason for this that falls in line with their more recent monetization policies and changes.

you would be better spending the 2 hrs reinstalling the game and then the mods again. If it was a hotfix that messed up your settings waiting for a new patch wont fixt the problem

Yeah they did some of that like 1 year after launch. In alpha I remember multiple gun upgrades, FC, engines. Going from 1 to 10 then was an actual grind.

And is everyone like you?

Mine works mind you I also uninstalled and reinstalled the game like 3 days ago.

Try clearing out the mods and reloading it. I had a problem like this not long ago did that and it worked.

I still remember when some ships had secondary's that were only ap. Trust me when I say sap wont mean anything to a bb or CA at those ranges with angling. DDs on the other hand will suffer a bit, but lets be honest secondaires stop being a factor for dds with the commander rework.

there is more to winning in wows then killing sir.

Many many years ago there was another naval game. It was called Navy Field. Im sure many of you have heard of it or played it. This was one of the first bbs I ever played in that game and I loved it. In that game it has the best range of any of the premium bbs and was relatively accurate. Now comparing a ship from NF to WOWS has many problems so I will not being doing that, even though NF had a community led balancing team that worked in tandem with the developers... I DIGRESS. So today I saw this post and it reminded me that I have not sailed the ship. Now I tend to test all ships in co op for a few matches to feel them out. Now I must say this is co-op and I am normally a cruiser player. I was able to land 9k+ sap hits and 12k ap shots at ranges of 16-12km and was able to get a max range kill of like 1k against an aoba. The accuracy is a pit problematic, but it is t6 after all. What was nice was the shells I was able to tank by angling which let me push in rather nicely to make use of my AP. The sap was...OK. All in all the ship is nothing to write home about, but it is not horrible either. In random play however as this can get tossed into a t8 match means that pretty much every bb with a 380 or greater can completely decimate the bow. This is important as the armor behind that bow is relatively weak and will be enough to arm most shells and ensure you will get frontally cited. If you can get to the flank of a push this thing is actually not to bad from 13-10km and scary as all hell up close.

more and more we hear from the cc the more and more we learn how toxic WG actually is.

So after watching the Flamu cv rework video I noticed in every single slide Cruisers were always at the bottom of the list yet they tend to make up 33% or more of the ship distribution in a random match, less so after deadeye. The only list they were not at the bottom was population. There is a very important reason for this. There are 168 cruisers listed on the wiki with many more being developed that are not on the wiki. Compared to 128 BBS, 139 DDs, and 27Cvs with one more being developed. Cruisers tend to be the most diverse class in the game having a range of playstyle that is greater then any other class, yet tend to have the least impact as a class to the game. Sure we could look at some examples like the Smolensk, Belfast, Petro and get some amazing performances but as a whole the class seems to meander below BBS in terms of performance. So what would a Cruiser rework look like? Commander Skill tree Lets be frank the commander rework has been less kind to cruisers and has made them less impactful and less engaging to play. Yes I am pointing to the meta effects of deadeye, but also the nerfs that were felt across the three distinct sub types of cruisers. A universal skill tree for all cruisers tends to fall flat on its face as each sub class tends to need a bit from other classes skill trees to be effective. I propose a change to the Cruiser tree as a built in class trait to add flexibility and build diversity. For every 10 points a cruiser captain has they are able to take a skill from another class of ship. This solution tends to be the most simple and elegant as it does not require a complete rebuild of the skill trees to have 2 extra skill trees. This concept would allow CLs to take DD skills to stay combat effective like MBAAS and MBAAE. It would also allow Super cruisers the ability to take BB survivability skills if they wanted or build for secondary . It would also allow cruisers wishing to play a more AA themed cruiser to get more aa and be a better deterrent to CVS as well as allow Hybrid CA's to take from the cv tree. This concept would allow a greater freedom of design choices for the player while require very little from the developers. The added bonus to this concept is many cruisers that are premium that no one wants will instantly get a nice boost and thus increase sales, THIS IS IMPORTANT. Survivability Probably the biggest thing that deadeye reinforced into the community was that BBs decimate cruisers. This has always been the case, but deadeye made it more obvious. Even with the skill going to be changed it still does not take away from the fact that overmatch and the proliferation of 457mm or greater bbs has made playing a cruiser nothing short of stressful. Every shot a cruiser takes is a gamble as it gives away position and trying to support ships like a DD becomes a near suicidal task. Trying to come up with a universal catch all for this problem also comes with some massive problems as it will do too much for some, and not enough for others. What i would suggest, as this is an opinion and should be taken as such, is the following. Spotting delay against cruisers. If a ship is over 10km from a cruiser that is spotted they will suffer a similar penalty to radar spotting. This would greatly increase cruiser survivability in the early stages(does not apply to Super cruisers) Light cruiser can no longer be citadel by bbs but instead take increased AP pen damage. (40%-50%) Testing needed. HE citadels still possible. Rebalancing of AA. Right now CVs have no counter play outside of grouping up. Cruisers historically were the outer most defense in a naval formation against Aircraft attacks. All cruiser get heals from t7-t10. How effective those heals are is where WG can apply their own brand of balancing based on national traits. I wanted to come up with a new balancing scheme where Cruiser did more damage to DDs and less to BBs but no matter how I tried to argue the merits of such a plan it became a bit too convoluted and complicated. While I do feel there needs to be a greater focus of effort against DDs, changes in survivability would probably make this more likely then rebalancing class specific damage interactions. There is also another matter in classification that needs to be addressed. What is a light cruiser, Heavy cruiser, and Super cruiser. Simple answer is to base it off of gun caliber. If the ship has less then 160mm guns and a cruiser it is a light cruiser. If it has 161mm -240mm it is a heavy cruiser, 241mm-380mm and a cruiser it is a super cruiser. Again this is an opinion piece and kind of a pie in the sky sorta dream. I am bias as I have loved playing cruisers since alpha and if I was to pick 10 of my favorite ships 5 would be cruisers. It is important to the games health and longevity as a whole that Cruisers get some QOL love from the Devs at WG. If Cruisers do not get any sort of QOL love what you will end up seeing is the population of cruiser play drop, we have already begun to see this in rank play thanks to Deadeye and even with a change to deadeye the likelihood this will instantly rebound is unlikely. If this continues then the meta will boil down to a BB/DD show down with the occasional CV getting yelled at constantly to hunt dds. Gun boat and hybrid DDs will become the mainstay for compositions and the age old problem of whoever loses their dds first will lose the match will become even more problematic. Now you may think I am being a bit dramatic but as more skilled veterans are leaving this game and being replaced by newer players with less skill the problems will only grow. A new player trying a cruiser for the first time and getting decimated over and over again by bb fire will quickly stop playing the class and will gravitate strongly to one of the other 3 classes. Now in the not so distant future we are going to have subs. This will add a whole new level of class interactions that frankly without cruisers will be extremely polarizing. Cruiser represent balance and stability in the meta, yet with every change we have seen from wg in the past 3 years this balance has been eroded and the shift in the meta has become ever more one sided. Something has to change if WG cares about sustaining their game. Now I know many of you are gonna respond with WG doesn't care. You are probably right.

There are 2 reason the change of the cc program in regards to test ships happened. One has to do with Ichase, and the other has to do with a slew of lack luster premium ships that many ccs advised not to waste the money on. WG tends to get really annoyed when it loses out on money due to the community being well informed.

The Kleber used to be amazing then WG nerfed it so if you want a fun light Calvary style ship look into the Marceau. Trying to fight against that ship as a cruiser is really annoying. It can max range you while going 50kts for most of the match and duck most of your shells and those that do hit over time tend to produce far less damage due to French dd traits. This makes it's fighting retreat tactics rather resilient in terms of survivability. Probably the biggest downside to this ship will always be the player not understanding what the ship was meant to be. I would suggest you go look up old Khaba game play from like 4 years ago to get an idea, but you will get better range, ROF, and speed, but no heal. The Marceau has the ability to damage farm, cap, speed tank, and cause the enemy to do stupid things and or make their proficiency be reduced. It also has the added benifit of being able to ambush and provide a nasty punch to pushing bbs and CA's

Think my record for gunboats is like 208k.

actually that was with an ideal build actually nice try though

So 180 degrees opposite side of the guns facing. Lets assume the cruiser is hyper vigilant and not tunnel vision on another target and notices the moment the dd shoots. Lets say the dd is at 10km. If we look at the Petro that would be 38 seconds before it could get guns to bare on the dd. IN that time a dd could easily get 3 salvos and return to concealment before the petro could return fire. This however is not what would happen. In game when this scenario happens as I have done this many times, The dd will keep shooting and while running away trying to get out of range of its own guns. Funnny thing about concealment is that you gun fire can only cause visual to things that are within the max range of your guns. So if you play on the border of this in a dd and use your speed and agility you can eaisly return to concealment while putting out 5 salvos where the cruiser gets no return fire. But lets look at other Heavy cruisers. Hindenberg 22.5, Nevsky 18.5, goliath 20.7. Realisticly the only ships who do not have this inability are light curisers like the Colbert, Worcester, Smolensk, and Minotaur. However if a dd was spotting them what would happen shortly there after is overmatching ap from bbs that would kill them in quick order. So outside of 8 ships from t8-10 a dd get on the opposite side of of a cruiser engage and disengage before a cruiser could ever return fire with guns. This is not a new thing, old-school Khaba players knew this back in the day and use to hug the border going fullspeed to get behind the enemy and cause absolute panic and chaos.