What Makes A Good Cruiser Good?

[Sir_Sinksalot]

Hi guys, 

 

still fapping about in the armory and STILL haven't bought a coal ship, they all just look bad for some reason. 

 

Ok, so I'm trying to dip my toe in the world of cruisers but what makes a good cruiser good? What attributes do you feel are most important? Gun range? Concealment ranting? DPS? Gun caliber? Reload speed? Armor? Agility? Speed? Gimmicks such as radar or hydro or torpedoes or smoke...?

 

Ok fine, a really obvious answer is the "The ability of the player using the cruiser makes the cruiser good or bad" yes indeed BUT, surely there's some attributes you guys that play them most would say are what stand out as being more important to a cruisers role or something that gives it the edge over other cruisers in the current meta and increases it's chances of winning compared to other cruisers?

[Bainsmit_steel]

Well for me DM is a good cruiser...it has all one cruiser should have...it is relatively stealthy, utility, high dpm and it can tank at least some of bbs...

[RuruushuVuiBuritania]

Preferably it should have strong armour, comfortable guns, a nice set of consumables, good concealment and decent agility. Metawise, having a radar/being tanky or being small and agile with a lot of DPM stand out. Although there are a lot of sub-classes and genres here. Napoli is tanky but has no radar (yet is still very competitive in CBs), Petro has both as well as good guns, Des Moines is a jack-of-all-trades, etc.

[Tanaka_15]

29 minutes ago, Sir_Sinksalot said:

Hi guys, 

 

still fapping about in the armory and STILL haven't bought a coal ship, they all just look bad for some reason. 

 

Ok, so I'm trying to dip my toe in the world of cruisers but what makes a good cruiser good? What attributes do you feel are most important? Gun range? Concealment ranting? DPS? Gun caliber? Reload speed? Armor? Agility? Speed? Gimmicks such as radar or hydro or torpedoes or smoke...?

 

Ok fine, a really obvious answer is the "The ability of the player using the cruiser makes the cruiser good or bad" yes indeed BUT, surely there's some attributes you guys that play them most would say are what stand out as being more important to a cruisers role or something that gives it the edge over other cruisers in the current meta and increases it's chances of winning compared to other cruisers?

If

{

(cruser=petro)

cout>>"good"

Else

Cout>>"trash use petro instead"

}

 

[invicta2012]

32 minutes ago, Sir_Sinksalot said:

Ok, so I'm trying to dip my toe in the world of cruisers but what makes a good cruiser good? What attributes do you feel are most important? Gun range? Concealment ranting? DPS? Gun caliber? Reload speed? Armor? Agility? Speed? Gimmicks such as radar or hydro or torpedoes or smoke...?

Serious DPM in one form of armament. Durable armour or self-concealment device. Low concealment, good speed. Radar / hydro. It really depends on whether you would enjoy playing a close-in, high-risk ambush playstyle, a long Range/concealed HE spammer or something which is more like a BB. 

 

Have you considered something from mid Tiers? Something like Weimar has good Ops farming potential, Mainz is good. 

[Saltface]

The player behind the keyboard

[Itwastuesday]

Radar, railguns with good HE or SAP, good conceal + maneuverability or smoke or best armor. 

 

So basically Petro or Nevsky. Everything else sucks.

[Karasu_Browarszky]

Smolensk?

[Panocek]

Question what defines "good" in your book. Infamous Petro is infamous due to her survivability - low citadel, generous amounts of 50mm plating, decent concealment as well "ermagad AP pen of a 380mm guns" everyone moan about, but fact she's god awful HE spammer and her limited ability to deal with DDs despite having radar is conveniently omitted. As if she's designed to be "anti BB" cruiser from ground up

 

Someone who enjoys long range gun duels will probably be biased towards *ba dum tsss* cruisers with good range and ballistics to make use of said range, while someone who likes to live on the edge will probably be biased towards Radar Minotaur and the likes, high risk, high reward ships. Someone might prefer heavy salvos to smash people with, other might want constant stream of shells o fulfil their dakka needs.

[Tordenskjold23]

A good player

[SV_Kompresor]

What makes it good? It has to fit your playstyle and do it well.

[Sir_Sinksalot]

11 minutes ago, invicta2012 said:

Serious DPM in one form of armament. Durable armour or self-concealment device. Low concealment, good speed. Radar / hydro. It really depends on whether you would enjoy playing a close-in, high-risk ambush playstyle, a long Range/concealed HE spammer or something which is more like a BB. 

 

Have you considered something from mid Tiers? Something like Weimar has good Ops farming potential, Mainz is good. 

 

 

Well, I'm trying to commit to PvP modes for the challenge and interest. I've played lots of great T6 cruiser in Ops and T7 too on Narai, along with a few T8's in Co-op but I've discovered that doesn't always transition into a cruiser still being potent force in a mostly bottom tier, 3 tier human player MM so I'm just trying to dial in on the most important aspects and attributes of what a player should hold as priority for a good strong cruiser in that sort of 3 tier PvP environment. 

[Sir_Sinksalot]

Ok guys, so take a look at these stats, they may be a bit mixed with older metas and commander skills and newer ships not yet having enough battles to truly reflect their actual potency once all the noobs get their hands on them(like me). I've trimmed away the premium ships and filtered it to just T8-T10 cruisers, both light and heavies mixed together, and split the results into order of win rate, highest to lowest, and damage dealing, highest to lowest.

 

Here's the order of T8-10 non-premium ships with the highest win rates(still including coal+steel ships I believe, just not "money only" options)

 

 

and here's the same cruisers based on their order of average damage dealing per battle.

 

 

What do you guys make of that? Is there anything to be read into in that regards? Ok, a T8 isn't going to have as much HP available to farm compared to a T10 obviously so we'd expect most T10 cruisers to average a bit more damage compared to a T9 and a T9 compared to a T8 etc BUT, if we were to look at the same tier ships, some deal high amounts of damage and yet don't win as much as the same tier alternatives with less average damage... interesting. So what does that mean? Well it means that some cruisers are winning by other means, but what? Just the ability to have radar or tank some shots? How can a ship that deals less damage per battle, win more battles and what is it doing that makes it win more battles than the higher damage dealer of the exact same tier? Really interesting and what's the higher damage dealing ships doing that loses them more battles compared to ships with lower damage dealing averages?

 

 

[Karasu_Browarszky]

15 minutes ago, Sir_Sinksalot said:

 

 

Well, I'm trying to commit to PvP modes for the challenge and interest. I've played lots of great T6 cruiser in Ops and T7 too on Narai, along with a few T8's in Co-op but I've discovered that doesn't always transition into a cruiser still being potent force in a mostly bottom tier, 3 tier human player MM so I'm just trying to dial in on the most important aspects and attributes of what a player should hold as priority for a good strong cruiser in that sort of 3 tier PvP environment. 

 

I'd say it depends on what you plan to do in PvP. The problem here is, that gameplay is so different compared to coop or ops (which is one of the reason why I almost entirely only play cruisers in those modes... except for a few select ones).

 

In case you want to ask me, what the few select ones are, for me they are the tankiest, heaviest ones, or alternatively, the ones that are able to engage at extreme ranges. For both sets, flat firing arcs are an absolute necessity. If you aren't an open water player like me, you may want the exact opposite...

 

(Historically, I also went for AA cruisers, but those are now anachronistic thanks to WG wrecking the meta.)

[NewHorizons_1]

1 hour ago, Tanaka_15 said:

If

{

(cruser=petro)

cout>>"good"

Else

Cout>>"trash use petro instead"

}

 

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Misplaced braces, assignment in conditional, no terminating semicolons.

 

Though, given how cruisers tend to explode in PvP this bit of code is probably more succinct

 

// May as well throw SIGABRT and return to port as quickly as possible if not Russian CA

assert(cruiser.navy == NAVY_RUSSIA && cruiser.tier >= 10 && cruiser.calibre > 200);

 

// If we got here, Moskva, Petro or Stalingrad. Well done Comrade!

 

[Gvozdika]

It has to be Russian. Preferably never built so none of that 'realism' malarkey gets in the way. 

 

/Thread 

 

NEXT! 

[Panocek]

31 minutes ago, Sir_Sinksalot said:

What do you guys make of that?

You can have "objectively overperforming" ship that you can absolutely detest playing with, or you might discover little gem in a ship widely considered to be an underdog.

 

And if you're not playing for fun, odds are, you might want to reconsider your approach. What goes for fun, is something only you can answer.

[invicta2012]

I would suggest you probably want to play with the Silver lines rather than dropping Coal or Doubloons on a Premium.

 

Minotaur goes up close, Des Moines or Venezia for Mid-Range, Hindenburg/Henri for the longer range HE and Riga for the Soviet experience. Drake and Goliath are quite sturdy. The Dutch ones can farm damage from cover and don't explode on being fired at. 

 

 If you absolutely have to drop some currencies then I'm told Salem is reliable and will be a good Des Moines showcase. 

 

 

[Hirohito]

I'm gonna say something that might be controversial here, but I think that cruisers, overall, are a bit too weak in this game.
They get utterly dumpstered by BBs (especially after the arms race that is 457mm and above), and generally (and this is a general statement) play a supporting role these days.
This is evident in clan battles, where WG had to artificially restrict the number of BBs allowed in order to encourage more cruisers.
And as for cruisers in clan battles, radar cruisers are king because of how extremely useful that consumable is.

The short answer in my opinion is: Radar.

[bobtherterrible]

1 hour ago, Saltface said:

The player behind the keyboard

This

[Miragetank90]

The things that make Wooster good aren't the same things that make Venezia good. 

[Itwastuesday]

1 hour ago, Hirohito said:

This is evident in clan battles, where WG had to artificially restrict the number of BBs allowed in order to encourage more cruisers.

Yeah, and then people started to skip cruisers in favour of Marceau/Kleber/Ragnar etc :D

 

Without BB restriction you'd see zero cruisers. You wouldn't see even Petro.

[Hirohito]

4 minutes ago, Itwastuesday said:

Without BB restriction you'd see zero cruisers. You wouldn't see even Petro.

100%.

And let's be honest here, the only reason why that is is because WGs main customer base are BB players.
Evidence: Any picture posted of the random queue.

[MoveZig]

There's a huge difference between a cruiser that gets citted by BBs basically at random no matter the angling (e.g. UK CL, USSR & German mid-tier CL) and one that can generally depend on its armor belt given sufficient angling, not too different from a BB (e.g. high-tier Dutch). When playing any of the former, your best armor really is made of rock. Also, you're playing the game on hardmode.

 

Having radar is a huge deal. On Domination especially, you will be expected to sit behind a rock near a cap and provide that radar coverage. Boring? Yes. Unrewarding? Yes, unless a DD actually wanders into it and you get spotting damage (don't peek behind the rock though, you'll be lit up like a Christmas tree, and rightly so). Game-changing? Oh yes.

 

Mind your HE-pen. Typically, high-tier CLs (150mm, with exceptions) need IFHE to be able to pen BB plating (and some other things). I don't like the skill, but it's kind-of expected to have it on lines like Worcester.

[Estaca_de_Bares]

5 hours ago, Tanaka_15 said:

If cruiser=="Petropavlovsk"

{

cout>>"good";

}

Else

{

Cout>>"trash use petro instead";

};

 

FIFY. Remember, double equal for comparison, single one for value assignment.

 

Salute.