The Damage Farm [BB Plague III]

[dasCKD]

I am back here with my contentious opinions and weeby pics. Don't worry, this is a holiday diversion. I'm not actually back, this is a heatwave induced illusion.

Fixing a recurring problem

The idea of camping battleships has gone beyond the point of a meme now. The changes in game mechanic, the changes to battleships, and the release of battleship line after battleship line that are repetitively more and more immune to any type of instant destruction that many cruisers and destroyers risk. Ships like the Conqueror, which I will want to talk about later in detail, were given the improved regenerative abilities to dwarf all but the Minotaur in the list of her cruiser contemporaries despite being technically superior in armor and health to each and every one of her cruiser contemporaries with only one exception. I admit that I used to think that battleships were simply buffed over and over as a consequence of Wargaming attempting to wrongheadedly trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator to create a class that would be entirely damage proof yet at the same time far from game defining compared to their contemporaries. Looking at the changes that Wargaming has made however, I can't help but think that there is another goal beyond simply making battleships entirely immune to everything and that this is simply a consequence serving a larger and longer term goal.

 

Whilst many of you could probably still think that I have gone insane and that marinating my brain in random so long has turned me to the dark side, I would like to defend my position by citing a few ships. I think that it is easy to say that Wargaming's balancing team is actually entirely stupid and have no idea what they are doing or that they know exactly what they are doing and that they are indeed trying to create the ubership that squashes all competition and that everyone will eventually end up playing. I am not sure how serious people are when they say that they think that Wargaming does indeed hate every class but battleships and that they will take away everything that hurts them, but I think that there is something larger going on here. The Worcester and the changes to the Japanese 100 mm guns are the causes of my suspicions. WG's newest trophy ships the Conqueror and the Republique are incredibly vulnerable to these ships with their 32 mm plates which makes it such that the Worcester and upcoming Harugumo are and will be excessively effective against these battleships thanks to their insane DPM. They are also incredibly effective against just about every cruiser contemporary and precedent to them, but that is a part of the larger argument. For now, I think that we should discuss a long and recurring issue of battleship camping and the cruisers that camp with them.

 

Spoiler

I do not think that this is an issue that starts with just camping, or more precisely I don't think camping is an issue per se to Wargaming. The problem is static gameplay, and I think that every single change Wargaming has made from their apparent hatred of carriers and torpedo destroyers to their release of ships with more and more persistence and firepower but less and less armor is geared towards this. Just about every new ship is either designed to make sitting in one predictable but strong position either hellish for enemy ships or nigh impossible for said ship, artificially creating a game that forces players to keep moving and forcing the game circumstances to change with them. This may be a little difficult to agree with however, so let me start with a thesis: Wargaming has done and continues to do everything it can to force players to stop playing statically. To validate my point, I would like to take us all back to a foregone age where the Pacific factions were the only ones in the game and back when cruisers still dominated the numbers without the need of gimmicks like radar, speed boost, or smoke screens. It was the age of the Yamato and the Montana.

Yamato, as she was

2 Battleships

Of the two, the Yamato was considered far and away the superior battleship. She is naturally significantly more accurate, had a superior healing consumable, and a set of massive guns that overmatched the bow of any ship of this era. In the present, the ability for a Yamato to overmatch a Montana or an Iowa is merely annoying, doing 10k damage on average and many less disciplined and informed players can be convinced to shoot the belt armor of the Montana to negate the effectiveness of the shells altogether. In this age however, a salvo through the nose of a Montana will earn a Yamato anywhere from 20-40k of damage. If the two battleships were to start sailing towards each other, the Yamato would quickly be able to dispatch of the Montana long before they got close enough to begin trading broadsides. Neither the Yamato had notably good rear turret firing arcs which made the Yamato's gun format, despite technically having fewer guns, a far more effective one. Entirely submerged and variant citadel models have yet to be introduced to battleships, and so the battleship that sat in one place and area controlled worked far better even in the age when the Zao and Des Moines both still rained stealth fire down from the skies and the Shima's danger was still a present threat. This meant that the Montana, whilst more proficient at dispatching of cruisers, suffered far more in battleship duels as well as in general as the Yamato's bow on approached worked even near islands that the Yamato can retreat behind, drop a Conqueror heal to be back up to fighting standard, and also provided added protection from the Shimakaze's torpedoes. Nothing, save for a fleet carrier, could effectively dislodge a Yamato from a spot save for a coordinated enemy team but even with an enemy flank crawling with Zaos just two Yamatos and a destroyer to spot could hold off half the enemy team or better by just managing positions for the entire game.

Out of alpha, battleships were never truly maneuverable. They were large, they used to be easily spotted, and their citadels were massive. This had several implications to the way they played. Both the Yamato and the Montana are more vulnerable to torpedo and carrier attacks than destroyers and cruisers, especially back when AA meant very little and tier X carriers still carried jets. Most importantly of all however, both were extremely vulnerable to citadel hits by any battleship they faced on the oceans. This had some very specific implications. Generalized to a certain point and with several notable but relatively rare exceptions, ships are most vulnerable from the broadside and most persistent from their stern and especially their bows. If they gave away their broadside they would present a larger target for enemy fire and expose their citadels where it is usually most vulnerable. This rule carries for battleships, cruisers, and carriers alike and this created what soon became the standard tactic of the Yamato's bow on and reverse. Whilst in this format, you can either more towards the enemy, away from the enemy, or stay where you are. In many ways, it is a delaying tactic considering how effective kiting is as a tactic. That said, it slowed down the game and in a game where it took anywhere from a third to two thirds of a game to cross the map the fact that the ships were so effective at area control had to go. Wargaming needed to devise a way to make it such that the battle kept going without ever growing static.

 

So They Camped

Wargaming is quite obviously not an enemy to camping if the maps are anything to go by. The cluttered and messy island engagements of the Islands of Ice was quickly traded for the wide open killing fields in between large smatterings of islands that are reminiscent of Okinawa, Atlantic, and the former Tears of the Cruisers alike. Whilst these maps are new, they betray the game designer's philosophy. At the lower tiers, Wargaming seems to tolerate heavily cluttered maps with lots of islands and ambushes. Low tiered ships are easily detectable but slow with ineffective guns and only marginally effective torpedo suites which meant that far more empty and still not completely break the game. The smaller maps and more numerous islands breaks fights down to smaller engagements where personal skill and on the fly thinking can overwhelm and overcome the natural advantages and disadvantages of ships at close ranges which makes for short, brutal, but relatively speaking very fun engagements. The confusing thing is why Wargaming doesn't tolerate this at the higher tiers. At the higher tiers battleship and cruiser guns get exponentially more lethal with the ability to threaten across the map in some circumstances. One would therefore expect MORE islands and cover, taking the obvious natural increase in ship size, range, and maneuverability into account, rather than LESS island cover which we often see. Even maps with lots of islands like Haven or Seas of Fortune have massive swathes of open water where the islands farm long corridors as opposed to maps like Archipelago and New Dawn that create small engagement zones for players. In these small engagement zones, just a few ships 

Here's Archipelago (left) and New Dawn (right) for those who have forgotten what those maps look like. I certainly have.

The larger maps means that for maps like Islands of Ice and Atlantic, a battleship could effectively threaten up to a half of a map by just intelligent placement of their ships and conscientious use of their weapons. Where in lower tiered maps it would be easy to avoid most of the damage, to give the broadside to any of the five or six battleships occupying two or three nigh-diametric angles spelled either certain doom or significant damage to the cruiser in question. This means that if a certain ship was proving persistent and was halting the advance of the team, an ally from across the map could easily jump in and assist them which they would not have been able to do if the higher tiered maps had the similar design philosophy of lower tiered maps that stressed the need for island cover and multiple avenues of control and approach. Somewhere along the design process, Wargaming sacrificed the ability for a single or a few players to hold of the entirety of the enemy team with relatively little effort for game dynamism. A map with choke points means that it would be relatively simple for an appropriate ship or two to sit at the mouth of such an opening and then turn anything that tried to push through to mulch. The choke point between the caps on the Sea of Fortune is one such point. The far larger map with multiple avenues of incoming enemy fire means that a ship attempting to hold point could be quickly crushed by pure weight of numbers alone. Whereas in a map with plenty of choke points and skilled enemies often leads to a static match where no one really died and no one really did damage, a large force of ships in an open map always kept the game moving which always kept up momentum and minimized the time when ships are not shooting at each other.

 

In many ways, the goal to try to push for a more dynamic game is entirely laudable. Wide open maps kept the ships moving and the terms of the game changing which theoretically creates far more enjoyment for the majority. As a consequence however, more skilled players also suffered far more than less skilled ones and this is often attributed again to Wargaming wanting to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but this could just have easily been the consequence of catering to what is theoretically an entirely noble goal. Wargaming does not hate camping anywhere nearly as much as they hate static games. Not just stasis in the placement of ships, but also stasis in damage, kills, and caps. In high level games, many matches if not most often comes down to the teams holding position and slowly creeping their forces into a more advantageous position and hoping for the enemy to make a mistake. Large but nevertheless shallow islands that ships can shoot over to keep displacing enemy ships and large segments of land that can be used to lay ambushes next to large killing grounds that draw people in without revealing what threats await them. This means that battleships (yes, this article is still about them, don't worry) with good armor and good area control but that can easily be locked down by a single devastating salvo to the citadel. Way back then, it was trivial for even a North Carolina or an Amagi to land devastating strikes on Montanas which means that once entrenched ships did not want to move and therefore they slowed down the game as it forces enemies to personally risk themselves in a close ranged brawl. Torpedo armed cruisers hiding behind islands were in fact the impetus for Wargaming to introduce overmatching as a mechanic in the game. Now whilst it lasted battleships worked fine with massive citadels, a wholesale reversal probably would not work.The problem comes down to the fact that we are now late into 2018. People are now far more used to the game mechanics, far more experienced, and information for personal improvement is far more readily available than it had been when these battleships first sailed the oceans. The massive citadel hitboxes of the Yamato and Montana may have been a problem that promoted static gameplay in its era, but in the present era it is nearly an intractable problem. The Moskva, a ship that is considerably more maneuverable than battleships in a lot of respects including her rudder period and superior engine, still takes massive citadel damage from incoming enemy fire. If battleships had considerable vulnerability, they would almost always fall into deep entrenchment and refuse to move until withered down by enemy cruisers. This was perhaps why Wargaming decided to introduce the Grosser Kurfurst.

The Failed Experiment

The Kurfurst was something of a contentious ship when she was first released. There was the fact that she was large enough to have her own orbit and the armor to rival a Pacific Rim mech, this was to say nothing of her hydroacoustic search and her nearly invisible citadel. Back when she was first released, battleships without citadels were virtually unheard of and even the old Tirpitz could quite easily expose hers in close ranged brawling scenarios. The fact that she took 'only' 10-20k damage from incoming enemy fire was utterly unheard of. Sustaining a battleship broadside as a Yamato or a Montana at this age meant 40k damage if not instant death. This resilience, combined with her general immunity to the HE ammunition of every cruiser at the time as well as her ability to negate battleship AP to a large extent makes her incredibly strong at close ranged combat. This, combined with her secondary suite and her less than stellar main battery performance, made her the ideal ship to take into close combat. It didn't matter back then if half of her shells missed a broadsiding battleship 10 km away because it only took 2-3 citadel hits to irreparably cripple a battleship (the kinds of damage to outright kill a cruiser, but conversation for another day) which made things very simple. An American or Japanese battleship drawn into a closed range fight with a Kurfurst is dead. If they attempt to turn and run, they'll face 12 battleship caliber guns right into their broadside. If they tried to maintain their bow on position, they'll be roasted and shredded by the countless batteries of secondary guns. She could theoretically fix the problem with gameplay stasis. Whereas former battleships risked themselves far too much pushing in deeply to dislodge an enemy battleship, the Kurfurst will gain forewarning from torpedoes and her bow will protect her from incoming fire and when she opens up with her guns with admittedly poor angles, perhaps the only genuine mark of vulnerability that the battleship had, the enemy battleships would die right there.

Spoiler

The Kurfurst fundamentally is too strong of a brawling battleship to serve as a brawling battleship. This article, in fact, started off as a look into how the changing dynamics of in-game interacting has rendered the Kurfurst largely obsolete. She exists in a state that many full AA ships also exists in. No sane carrier would attack a ship known for the AA capabilities unless they have no other options and likewise no sane battleship or cruiser is willing to go anywhere near a Kurfurst if they can possibly help it. No one wants to brawl a brawling battleship and no one wants to snipe against a sniping battleship or cruiser. Perhaps this is most clearly illustrated in a ship that I WOULD consider inordinately good at brawling: the Minotaur. 

 

The Minotaur

The Minotaur is small, sneaky, and she can resist other cruisers exceptionally well when bow on. The fact that she is incredibly vulnerable is offset by her excellent turret angles and her maneuverability and her stealth which lets her get into places where the enemy really doesn't want her and inflict damage quickly and decisively before using either the smoke screen or her concealment to vanish. There are several important things about this. The Kurfurst is effective at brawling certainly, but the way in which she is effective at brawling makes her an ineffective ship. She is large and can crush just about every ship she can see, but therein lies her faults. The Minotaur, as fragile as she is, is able to sneak into an area quietly, do the damage quickly, and then vanish. The size of the Kurfurst may correspond to her massive health pool, but her approach is obvious and all of the health and armor won't mean a thing when the enemy team sees a massive ship bearing down on them and proceeds to turn every gun and torpedo at their disposal on the offending ship. A Minotaur is so effective at brawling because she has the means to get into a position where she wants to be without providing much forewarning and then get out again before most of the enemy team even has time to properly react. The Kurfurst is comical in this regard. She is a ship that depends on being able to get close to the enemy to do her best work, yet she will struggle with this more than just about any other ship due to her bulk making her visible and easy as a target with her sluggishness contributing to her struggling to navigate in small and tight areas needed to get into the optimum ambush areas. She is a ship that almost always depends on the enemy to chase her down instead of the other way round, putting her as a passive ship despite being designed as an aggressive one. In fact, the Kurfurst shares a problem with another ship that, unlike the Kurfurst, was obscenely powerful and has been hit with a nerf bat so hard that she is only beginning to shake off her limp and her bones are only beginning to set again. I'll leave that image in your mind for a moment.

 

The Old Shimakaze

The old Shimakaze had some egregious design issues, so much so that some [edited] wrote an article on it. The rub comes down to the fact that the Shimakaze is insanely effective at area control. At a point originating from the ship and extending out for the distance of 20 kilometers, some of the stealthiest, fastest, and most dangerous torpedoes would start travelling and would not stop until it just about dropped off the map. Whilst these traits makes the Shimakaze somewhat effective even whilst pursuing an aggressive role, her power is most clearly demonstrated in the defensive role. Not only is she able to farm an obscene amount of damage, the damage she inflicts is hard damage. Whilst Russian and the upcoming British destroyers (which I have much to say in regards to as well) will be able to farm large amounts of damage chaining fire from inside of smoke screens and zipping about and around enemy shells respective, the damage they are doing is soft damage and not especially useful in terms of hard advancement in gameplay and only forces a stasis to end through annoyance. Even a Russian destroyer like the Khabarovsk against an infamously large, unmanuverable, and inaccurate Kurfurst will likely die a long time before the Kurfurst does and only inflict superficial damage that could be healed right back. Alone, gunboat destroyers will struggle against just about anything that's not another destroyer at the higher tiers. They depend on irritating the enemy into making stupid decisions which is great for Wargaming as it means that these ships give an illusion of doing a lot whilst doing very little. More on this later.

 

I maintain that the Kurfurst is a failed experiment built to address the problem of game stasis. The problem was of course that a ship like the Kurfurst caused MORE static gameplay. She was static from a positioning perspective, as no one wanted to get close to one and it was static from an advancement perspective because everyone had trouble effectively killing her as she paired the best health pool with the best defensive capabilities (at the time, and arguably at present), making her a static inducing ship. Back when the Kurfurst was first released, I heard some actually making comments that it may be better to fire HE at the Kurfurst in ships like the Yamato. The resilience of the Kurfurst is legendary, but she fails to fulfill her role as brawler when compared to a Minotaur. Neither of course actually addresses the issues with gameplay stasis. A well positioned Yamato is just as unreachable as before. A kiting Zao will be just as resilient as always. The problem with gameplay stasis remained, which Wargaming has continued to try to address. Static games makes people bored and player boredom is bad for the bottom line as it makes players frustrated, then stupid and, as a consequence, angry. The Kurfurst took the brunt of this. Not only were the new battleships with virtually no citadel hitbox both something that aped one of her main strengths but also buffs to cruisers like the Roon and Hindenburg that laughs at her 50 mm armor plates. 

Less Stasis than Ever

I promised to talk about the Haragumo and the Worcester and how they interact with the Conqueror and the Republique. Both of these ships are perhaps the largest oddity that made me reconsider my initial assumption that Wargaming was simply aiming to persistently make battleships more and more dominant in every task imaginable. These two ships are exceptionally well designed to deal with battleships like the British and the French tree crowns which is somewhat against the conceit that Wargaming wants to create a master class of ships that would dominate everything. On the other hand, I believe that Wargaming has made good on their attempt to make battleships tank more which is a bold claim to be sure. That said, I believe that I could vindicate this claim.

Spoiler

If I could name one problem that arose, I would blame this number over here and these numbers over here.

That's the damage counter and ship burst damage tracker in case it's too small and also ignore the nav bar

These innocent seeming yet loathsome numbers contributes to far more of Wargaming's decisions than just about anything else. The problem perhaps comes down to the fact that the damage counter (the thing on the top right hand corner) doesn't distinguish the different types of damage, lumping them all in. 20k done to a Shimakaze is displayed as the same number as 20k of fire damage against a Conqueror. We may consciously understand that not all damage is equal, but the psychology that feeds the human mental reward system doesn't cater for that. We might consciously know that 3000 damage  on a destroyer is significant, but the brain is far happier as we hit a Republique or a Conqueror again and again for more and more damage whereas most of the shells falls around the destroyers. The very mechanics cater to empty damage farming over actually making tactical headway because though empty, damage farming is inherently satisfying to the lower, and hence more dominant, brain functions.

 

Whilst creating a non-static tactical shooter with moving tactics is theoretically possible, it takes an insane level of precision, testing, balancing, and the understanding of player psychology and player understanding along with the evolving game meta to create such a game. Even approaching it proves difficult in the non-symmetrical maps such as the ones seen in World of Warships and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. A truly dynamic game is a difficult if worthwhile goal as a perfectly informed team might be able to use and maximize the map in a dynamic way, this is not often a reality. This is actually seen quite often. The battle lines move and so a team with double the ships the enemy has ends up losing because they pushed themselves out of position or attempted to funnel down an area that the enemy controls. In places like the Sea of Fortune or the new Tears of the Desert, there are large open spaces around islands that provides convenient funnels for ships to push themselves down before facing the full brunt of enemy torpedoes and guns at compromising angles. This problem is further exacerbated by the difference in player skill that leads to even moderate players being unable to recognize traps or dangerous enemy concealing islands that aren't part of the engagement usually seen within the first few minutes of the game. As the ships move, the maps changes entirely and balance in World of Warships goes tipping out of the window, something which the Wargaming developers, assuming that they aren't the morons I am choosing to believe they aren't, must have realized at one point. It's something of a catch 22. Create static maps with only controlled angles of approach reminiscent of an elaborate tennis court, then you risk players getting bored VERY very quickly. Create a map that allows flanking opportunities, active adaption, and snap judgement, and the game collapses into a set of active traps that, whilst dynamic, is almost impossible to balance. This, in our timeline, leads to maps that are static and where massed firepower wins fights over mechanical knowledge or good gameplay judgement.

 

Wargaming, I believe, wants the maximum numbers of players to have fun. This, I think, is one of the reasons that they favor the needs of lower skilled players over higher skilled ones. Skilled players can extract their fun from tormenting low skilled players whereas lower skilled players will always struggle which is why Wargaming probably introduced the damage counter. People in our community, in my opinion, put an excessive amount of attention into damage numbers. This can be seen in the former World of Warships today and current Warship Numbers player rating system that rates the performance of a player off of their damage numbers more heavily than their average kills, average plane kills, (understandable), XP gained, and matches won (significantly less so). Wargaming probably eventually game to the conclusion that artificially creating an illusion of game play dynamism is significantly more important than actually creating gameplay dynamism. The large set of variables that I have outlined above are probably but a small fraction of the things that need considering. True gameplay dynamism presents its own problems for balancing. Wargaming, at one point, noticed that players values feeling as if they are actually advancing the game compared to actually advancing the game. This can be seen in the adversity against matches that were over in 10 minutes or under by players. Players who don't feel like they are making any progress get frustrated very quickly and they will spend most of their time doing other things. This, I think, is the impetus behind releasing monstrosities such as the Worcester, Haragumo, (to a lesser degree the Republique) and Conqueror.

Welcome to the Damage Farm

The upcoming tier X Japanese light cruiser, hogging a destroyer slot in her team

The new Japanese Harugumo is perhaps the worst destroyer at tier X, and not because she is necessarily a bad ship as much as that she is basically an undersized and low armored cruiser. If those were her only flaws, she may still be fine but she is unfortunately a new face of what I think Wargaming's intentions are. The Haragumo is very strong against battleships compared to contemporary gunships, but with proper positioning she is utterly brutal against even the tier X heavy cruisers (Moskva notwithstanding) being able to inflict insane levels of damage to cruisers much in the same way that the Worcester is able to. This change is in tandem with the introduction of ships like the Republique that can just straight up ignore the midplates of most tier X cruisers means that attempting to hold positions in either a cruiser or in one of the new battleship is a challenge that borders on tactically unfeasible.  Thinking back and looking at the changes that have been made, I can't help but think, more and more, that all of this is in service of a very wrongheaded but ultimately quite simple goal and it all comes down to a relatively tiny change to the game system that most people have barely remarked upon. The current setup forces cruisers and battleships alike far back, making it such that it is difficult to win strong positions and easy to inflict mostly meaningless damage that forces the enemy back so that they could heal up and have another goal.

 

Torpedo based destroyers and carriers, both decisive damage vectors capable of inflicting decisive damage, are constantly neutered by increases to radar and hydroacoustic ships and stronger and stronger AA suites respectively. The players as a whole might be able to inflict more damage overall, but most of the damage is close to illusionary and is easily recoverable. Wargaming's insistence on improving cruisers almost exclusively through buffs to their firepower, piling on more and more whilst neglecting survivability. Whilst the Moskva got the buffs to her armor scheme, this was first preceded by the ability to inflict more damage. The Stalingrad dropped her high accuracy AP playstyle for an incredibly powerful HE shell. The Republique and the Conqueror both have obscene fire chances. The Haragumo inflicts low impact HE damage mostly to cruisers and battleships, as trying to hunt down enemy destroyers with her bulk is like trying to use a net to catch a fish whilst hanging off a side of a destroyer doing maximum speed. This, I think, is why we are seeing the plethora of these thin skinned battleships with such high focus on survivability and these uber cruisers with battleship sized health pools and destroyers stepping into the size category of small cruisers. More and more, we see a push towards ships that do a lot of inane damage over strategic or tactical damage that wins games. We have all become addicted to damage and the high it provides and in turn this has turned the game into something unrecognizable in proper tactical approaches. Ships are designed to hurt each other so easily, yet ships that can outright kill other ships and win games are slowly being edged out by ships that instead hang back and ultimately survive longer or ships that cower behind island and cover to avoid damage whilst they farm their own.The large, open maps with islands near to the center exacerbates this. It provides long, open corridor maps where ships will always be in line of fire of each other but always far apart enough to force players out from the center of the map and towards the open spaces behind the islands where they can trade withering damage whilst lacking the decisive bursts that characterizes engagements in funneled or island laden maps as seen in the lower tiered maps. Just about everything is built around providing the illusion of progress and doing something over actually winning the match.

I personally see the existence of ships that exists basically solely to either farm damage or exists to have their health pool farmed at little actual strategic implications for themselves to be an escalating problem. This is unlikely to turn around however. The impending changes to carriers will dispose of yet another decisive tactical option in the game and the introduction of yet another destroyer line with a hydroacoustic suite will heavily neuter yet another. This is something that is arguably more insidious than simply catering to the lowest rungs of players in the battleship class. Already ships that inflict continuous and undeniable damage such as the Hindenburg are held in much higher competitive regard than strategically stronger ships such as the Zao or the Minotaur as the game, more and more, continues to make the easiest and most mindless options the inherently better one. This, unlike many issues in regards to interclass balance, is unlikely to change soon. I can't help but feel we are approaching an age where dealing damage against not just cruisers but also battleships will become easy, but making that damage actually matter will only become harder and harder. The class getting screwed over the most by this whole fiasco is the cruisers again of course, their thin skin and relative visibility stopping them from being able to avoid the likes of the close to unavoidable DPM of the Worcester and the Harugumo. The game is moving away from cleverly using armor and maneuverability to defeat the enemy towards just pumping as many shells into the enemy as possible until they die and I think that is a real shame.

[eliastion]

Maybe I'll read later, no time right now, but upvoted for the glorious picture

[Aragathor]

Sadly I think you're right, the only victims of the changes will be cruisers. Watched a Harugumo game by Flamu, he solo'ed a Hindenburg with ease.

WG thinks they know what to do but with what they are doing I have zero confidence in them. Having more dakka seems to be the solution for them. Just look at the reload consumable for French ships...

[dasCKD]

2 minutes ago, Aragathor said:

Sadly I think you're right, the only victims of the changes will be cruisers. Watched a Harugumo game by Flamu, he solo'ed a Hindenburg with ease.

WG thinks they know what to do but with what they are doing I have zero confidence in them. Having more dakka seems to be the solution for them. Just look at the reload consumable for French ships...

It's just that more and more, WG seems like it wants to move away from the game mechanic of utilizing armor correctly to one where all that matters is pure armor thickness as overmatch and HE pen dictates the damage rather than understanding of armor scheme and feints.

[creamgravy]

Tier 10 dakka has always outstripped survivability by a huge margin, that's what defines tier 10 game play. Snipe at max range or use islands as shields. Radar, huge 32mm BBs, OWSF removal, etc has just made it more extreme.

 

...and why does everyone always say "the only victims of the changes will be cruisers"????

 

[dasCKD]

1 minute ago, creamgravy said:

Tier 10 dakka has always outstripped survivability by a huge margin, that's what defines tier 10 game play. Snipe at max range or use islands as shields. Radar, huge 32mm BBs, OWSF removal, etc has just made it more extreme.

Yes, but previously AP, angling, and understanding armor scheme mattered. Now, whilst the Harugumo or Worceter is technically more effective with Ap, their HE DPM is so obscene that against the targets that their HE shells can penetrate, armor choice and angling become largely immaterial.

1 minute ago, creamgravy said:

...and why does everyone always say "the only victims of the changes will be cruisers"????

Because the biggest victims of ships like the Worceter and the Harugumo are other cruisers. Battleships either have the armor (Yamato, Montana, Kurfurst) to avoid a large chunk of the damage or other methods of getting out of the way or sustaining withering fire (Republique and Conqueror) and in all cases they have significantly more health than cruisers. Destroyers don't need to fear the Harugumo any more than, say, a Gearing, Yueyang, or the upcoming Daring. It's the moderately thin skilled but visible ships like the cruisers that get hit the hardest with this ship.

[Prospect_b]

Excellent post. In essence, Weegee keeps dumbing down the game more & more.

 

Congrats to you for writing all that.

Congrats to me for reading all that - I deserve a beer.

[Blixies]

After yesterday's Night of the short ranged Cruiser (19 games in DM with reload mod) this post spoke deeply to me.

I've been thinking about this lately, and although I'm a smart boy (my mommy told me so), the only "solution" I came up with was: If you can't beat them, join them.
The past months I haven't played any BBs with few exceptions - namely Missouri in which I average over 100k damage in the said period - it's absurdly powerful, just like ALL the BB's around that tier (and being baddie as I truly am, I used the radar maybe in one in 20 games for a great effect).

 

It is time to change that, it's time to stop gimping myself - French BBs here I come.

 

[howardxu_23]

Very good read, although I would like to say that Yamato is pretty much the only t10 bb left that has a easy to hit citadel if you manage to penetrate the armor, including the weakness under its cheek. Also, I would like to dispute on the part on the Kurry, it uses a incremental armor scheme which means while that more of the ships is protected from gunfire, but at the cost of raw armor thickness of the all or nothing system, thus while you cannot lolpen it or citadel it suffers worse from being perforated by focus fire, which is not exactly uncommon at sub 10km if it shows any amount of side, since more ap shells can pen, arm and detonate inside. It also actually has the thinnest belt armor in fact of all t10, at 380mm along the sides, but in return 50mm on the bow and stern.

 

The main problem i find with the kurry’s design is that only the kurry can actually brawl exceedingly well, Montana on its current state can somewhat do it, conquer has no secondarys and you’re better off spamming HE at it from long range, French bbs can use speed and Fast reload and Yamato is going banzai mode if she is entering brawling range, so it’s more of the lack of motivation to actually brawl with the kurry, since trying to do so with it is a death sentence for most bbs in most situations.

 

A balanced Map design as always been a problem since the dawn of time, Since it is hard to not design maps that can effectively render certain ships  useless/ineffective, e.g. a map which encourages close range battles as in large amounts of high islands, it will literally be a kurry’s, dds and more aggressive/high dpm cruisers’ wet dream and at the same time Yamato and RU crusiers’ worst nightmare

 

 improvements in survivability is always good in my opinion, but doing it to just one class is not gonna make it balanced, As I have found in cruisers while viewing the armour viewer, I noticed that pretty much all of them have a above waterline citadel, making them far easier to delete,even from the bow, but notable ones like Worcester and Des Moines can generate absurd amount of dpm in a glass cannon esq way, and relies on speed and mavuablity as defence In theory. In practice though, the slow shell speed makes it ineffective Against their intended counters aka other cruisers and dds, but the shell arcs means that farming damage on bbs with HE shells from the safely of islands is very easy. One suggestion i can make is to drop all above waterline citadel hitboxes to the waterline/ slightly above it, thus boosting survivability of all ships, encouraging aggressive plays more often + more open maps so less camping spots

 

as for the HE spam, WG’s idea that HE should be a reliable damage method is,pretty flawed, as in real life, you only shoot HE at shore installations, AP shell at anything that floats in general, only justication of using HE shells is early RN dreadnoughts, since they do have specially designed HE shells to basically do what HE shells do here, pound the opposition to dust by sheer volume of fire, while here a DDs can effectively pound a freaking Yamato to death using nothing but its guns. Sadly however I cannot think up a viable solution to shift the power Form HE spam back to thinking about where to hit with AP while still having a semi-reliable but trickle damage source to fall back apart from making ap hit even harder/nerfing HE pen damage( as in reducing the 33% listed HE shell dmg for pen to something like 20%) for ALL ships.

[BrigadierRosen]

Excellent post, i've noticed the increase usage of HE over AP and dumbing down of game mechanics. Mind you this reminds me of world of tanks with the jap super heavies that just slap you in face for around 500-750 damage per shell regardless of armour them also having high armour values themselves.

 

Map balance will almost be impossible to balance with more 'things' added to the equation due to the need to try and cater for every party not to mention sub-varients in each group.

[morgoroth]

1 hour ago, BrigadierRosen said:

Excellent post, i've noticed the increase usage of HE over AP and dumbing down of game mechanics. Mind you this reminds me of world of tanks with the jap super heavies that just slap you in face for around 500-750 damage per shell regardless of armour them also having high armour values themselves.

 

Map balance will almost be impossible to balance with more 'things' added to the equation due to the need to try and cater for every party not to mention sub-varients in each group.

This reminds me of WoT :  premium ammo for credits and the changes made to armour, ending in full retarded mode of premium ammo spam ... few months later left WoT forever :)

[HaachamaShipping]

Good post. I have one question though. If WG was trying to increase the amount of meaningless damage and decrease the potency of ships that deal crippling damage, what are we to make of the PA DDs? Their torpedoes are exceptionally well-suited to cripple larger ships after all.

[piritskenyer]

I tried to quote you and do a [snip], but it broke the editor temporarily, so i just reloaded the page. 

 

Great analisys, I wonder where you find the time to think this much about the whys and hows.

[ForlornSailor]

7 hours ago, Blixies said:

the only "solution" I came up with was: If you can't beat them, join them.

 

And that is exactly the entire essence behind all of it. Thats what WG wants us all to do - jump from new line to new line, to utilize all the new and better features. Thats whats keeping the players busy and a busy player will.. spend money. The ultimate goal of Freemium. Now, you can think this is normal, caplitalistic, bad, evil, justified - what ever. Doesnt chance the fact, that we are all part of this business model. I also came to the conclusion, thats why many ships during testing are a liiitle bit too powerful. Give it to the supertesters and the CCs, so they show those extra-strong upcoming ships on the servers, Youtube, Twitch etc. Everyone thinks "oh boy, look at this ship, if I only had this, I´d be finaly as good as *insert name of streamer here*". And in the end, they balance the ship down a little. But the impression and the Youtube-videos are here to stay. Just my five cents on top of the nice summary, that @dasCKD wrote.

[dasCKD]

8 hours ago, Riselotte said:

Good post. I have one question though. If WG was trying to increase the amount of meaningless damage and decrease the potency of ships that deal crippling damage, what are we to make of the PA DDs? Their torpedoes are exceptionally well-suited to cripple larger ships after all.

Well, the Pan Asian destroyers really aren't an escalation in arms. They have stealthier torpedoes than their American counterparts, but that doesn't matter much for a battleship and matters even less for the cruisers if they arm themselves with hydroacoustics. They very much are a holding pattern where the upcoming French and British DDs are a move towards delayed damage.

[Carry_me_Daddy]

Wargaming has been slowly, but surely, pushing the HE dakka dakka meta for a long time now. RN BB's were the first experiment in that. I wouldn't have issue with it, but lobbing  such shells with such high fire chances isn't skill, any idiot can aim decently in a game with a built in auto aim. Between that and RNG, is how Wargaming has decided to effectively neuter skill, and I personally think that is why the average numbers have dropped so far; about a year and a half, two years ago, average numbers during prime time were easily 40k on EU, these days I rarely see that go above 20k, and most days (even now during an event AND Clan Wars) I see it hover around 18-19,000. 

Myself and a fair number of other clan members have a special issue with the Worcester, in that, it can always control when and where it engages (due to radar+amazing concealment) and can melt a high tier CA in under a minute, or a Repub or Conq in two. It's fine for randoms, but in competitive it's just too much. 

[Ouzo11]

16 hours ago, dasCKD said:

The game is moving away from cleverly using armor and maneuverability to defeat the enemy towards just pumping as many shells into the enemy as possible until they die and I think that is a real shame.

This.

 

[veslingr]

they are numbing this game down....but on other hand implementation of radar on almost all new ships drastically increase classical DD game.....and solution is....dakka dakka dds.

 

it is all becoming FB style game where you will need to press 1 button, everybody will be able to do 50 k dmg....everybody happy.

 

and this community deserves that....anything that required skill or team play was under "nerf" attack, primarly CVs and IJN torpedos

 

now play idiotic 1 button game.

 

p.s.

i have seen "nerf" posts from guys (primary fro cvs) who now whine in this topic....you are also part of the problem not a solution

[KarmaQU_EU]

TL;DR

Design of game moves further away from strategy planning and tactical play, to a more brutal approach focused on damage and damage-dealing plays. The new ship designs emphasize this and the upcoming carrier influence nerf is foreboding of this trajectory. In hindsight, the favouring of Battleships and these design directions revolved around damage can be explained primarily by WG's (perceived) conclusion that psychologically these are the "best" game mechanics to please players with, and the type of mechanics they can best design and balance around.

[DodoDieHard]

Nice post which pretty much mirrors my thoughts. I just came back from a longer WoWs break. I left about when the RN BB came out and so at a time when WG obviously decided to take it down to HE-City where the grass is green and... I still remember when the RN CLs came out and WG, shortly before their release, decided to take away their HE shells since back then the player base was still on the edge over HE-spam. Too recent were the memories of stealth fire DDs setting BBs on fire...

I came back after the US CLs were released deciding to finally get the Yamato so am currently mostly playing the Japanese BB line. While playing the Izumo I became amazed about the amount of HE shells that is flying around these days.
Basically I am constantly on fire (not whining about that, as I can heal it away) and had to turn down the volume of my speakers because the taka-taka-taka started to annoy the missus. I have games where I tank 2-3 million points of possible damage and use up all my heals before I finally, after 10 minutes of being the damage dealt-pinata that the Izumo seems to be, grant someone the kill or win the game. However no ship other than a CV, which you rarely see these days, poses an instant threat anymore. I am just a small moving vulcano island that occasionally spits back a few rocks but mostly gets stoned with hot pebbles and happily fills the atmosphere with thick black smoke.
I still like the game, I have good rounds and I have bad rounds, but I don't like the current direction we are heading to. It's like WoWs almost wants to become a RPG with tanks, healers and damage dealers. But since there are no healers the damage dealers have to deal damage over time instead and the tanks have means to neglect that.

[Yedwy]

Idk i find sec build musashi with yammamoto on it hilarious of late 

[ForlornSailor]

4 hours ago, Reaper_JackGBR said:

Wargaming has been slowly, but surely, pushing the HE dakka dakka meta for a long time now. RN BB's were the first experiment in that.

 

True, I noticed that a few days ago myself. RN BBs --> US CLs --> now IJN gunboat DDs.

 

4 hours ago, Reaper_JackGBR said:

Myself and a fair number of other clan members have a special issue with the Worcester, in that, it can always control when and where it engages (due to radar+amazing concealment) and can melt a high tier CA in under a minute, or a Repub or Conq in two. It's fine for randoms, but in competitive it's just too much. 

 

I dont think its fine anywhere tbh. Atm, if you are an aggressive BB in high tiers (especially in the start), you are pretty much an idiot. Well fine, look for some other BB player then. Im neither going to change my style to be a back-camping BB in T8+ and I sure am not going to sit in range of an Island-Worcester watching at the BBQ he is having on my main deck. I simply wont play a BB in High Tiers anymore.

[Flavio1997]

you want to remove static gameplay? make the carrier great again

[loppantorkel]

I liked the picture

 

Could you perhaps formulate the issue in one sentence?

Is it this - "The game is moving away from cleverly using armor and maneuverability to defeat the enemy towards just pumping as many shells into the enemy as possible until they die and I think that is a real shame."?  ..and the cruisers are suffering, but not all of them..? So bbs are fine, dds are fine, some cruisers are fine. Which ones aren't good now?

Is it in high tier the issue is mostly occurring? I think at least tier 10 is fairly well balanced tbh.

[Oely001]

13 hours ago, ForlornSailor said:

 

And that is exactly the entire essence behind all of it. Thats what WG wants us all to do - jump from new line to new line, to utilize all the new and better features. Thats whats keeping the players busy and a busy player will.. spend money. The ultimate goal of Freemium. Now, you can think this is normal, caplitalistic, bad, evil, justified - what ever. Doesnt chance the fact, that we are all part of this business model. I also came to the conclusion, thats why many ships during testing are a liiitle bit too powerful. Give it to the supertesters and the CCs, so they show those extra-strong upcoming ships on the servers, Youtube, Twitch etc. Everyone thinks "oh boy, look at this ship, if I only had this, I´d be finaly as good as *insert name of streamer here*". And in the end, they balance the ship down a little. But the impression and the Youtube-videos are here to stay. Just my five cents on top of the nice summary, that @dasCKD wrote.

 

That's the very basic problem: Wargaming business model is around grinding and only around grinding. Maybe some what-if-scenario could enlighten this: What if WoWs would be F2P up to tier V, and premium-only at higher tiers? Nearly everything around the core mechanics would be different then, and IMHO it would be far better. And it could be profitable, don't know whether as profitable as current WoWs (which seems to be far away from being a cash cow anyway).

 

The other problem is that Wargaming wants this game to be a shooter game. The game mechanics are too complex for a shooter game, or a shooter game playerbase is too stupid for WoWs mechanics, or both. Maybe this grind-thing is the only way to make money with the actual playerbase, but it is no longer the game I want to play. This is why I stopped playing WoWs, while still following the development, but I don't see any news which would make me start this game again.