smoke From the Dev Blog... Smoke!

[Gnomus]

First, this would make it even riskier and harder to play aggressively with British CL, Kutuzov or even with brawler BB. Not a good thing. It would only make sure people keep their distance and camp more.

 

Second, if it only affects ships in smoke it becomes pretty strange as ship behind smoke could be unseen (until 2km proxy), but some ships in side smoke and shooting could be seen even further than their normal spotting range. Also for example Belfast sitting in smoke and burning BB 7-8km away, could suddenly find itself slaughtered by Hipper that have sneaked to 5km range and "proxy spot" Belfast while Belfast could not see who is making all the citadels because he can only proxy 2km from the smoke. Proxy range should be effective to ship inside smoke shooting out and ship out of smoke shooting into smoke. Otherwise this will get really strange twists.

 

Third, cruiser in smoke could avoid BB from rushing in and proxying him (or not, but that is besides the point for this point). Now stop to think for a second what happens when CL in smoke is shooting at BB or group of ships at 10-12km. He know they can't spot him, but what happens when enemy happens to have a sneaky DD with <6km spot range that can easily get withing 7-8km from smoke and suddenly "proxy spot" CL in smoke while still being out of his own spotting range (if enemy ship emerges from the smoke or has fellow ships spotting from the side). Said CL would soon found that after all he was not so well hidden when that enemy group wipes him in seconds.

 

 

Idea might work, but it needs lot of extra thinking about how to deal with border of smoke, to both directions, and to set proxy ranges so that close by DD (or even Br/Jp cruiser, or new Br BB with 11km spot range for that matter) can't totally negate smoke. Just think about situation when you know there is enemy DD 5-10km from you spotting you to CA/BB's further out. You are taking hits and need to hide in smoke. That smoke would be proxied the moment you shoot, and with 20s shooting cooldown you can hardly test if that DD is there or not, because it would totally negate smoke for next 20s.

 

If smoke proxy comes in explained manner it will have very bad effect to any ship needing smoke other than DD. You can control range to your targets and bigger ships, but even slightest possibility of unseen "proxy spotter" in the neighbourhood would make smoking risky or inefficient.  

[Gudgeon]

I agree in principle on stopping BB's being smoked up and all the camping nonsense that goes with this tactic. Although, in random battles, how often do regular players have the thought to smoke someone except themselves?  

 

I cannot play as a camping BB, it just seems such a crap tactic in any case, so this change will not alter my play. I will be interested to see how my RN cruisers and Mikhael Kutz cope with this. Again it may not be a problem, as all most DD's are detected around 5.9KM and greater anyway, so they have to charge the smoke to detect you if you activate smoke when they are greater than 5.9km away.

 

I think the game is at a cross roads, and one bad balance change with this proposal could kill the game stone dead for a large percentage of the player base. I enjoy this game, so I really hope you get this one right, game developers.

 

I still think that buffing cruiser rudder speeds across the board and decreasing torpedo reload times on DD's by a small margin would help alleviate the BB camping and sniping of cruisers. We need balanced battles with DD's CA's, BB's and dare I say it, CV's too. 

 

If the smoke punishes RN cruisers, then please consider remodeling the gun philosophy of this line and adding some Armour.

 

So, DD's could actually lay a long smoke screen for ships to hide behind, not in. Clever DD players will assess the position of the enemy and lay a smoke in such a position to hide a ship/ships....multiple DD's could actually work as a team and lay smoke cleverly to screen the fleet and then go spot. I am interested how this change will affect game play.

[RUSSIANBlAS]

I man up RN Cruisers and use radar from T8 onwards anyway...

 

The way I see it is that anything that makes team play harder is a bad thing. Any smoke nerfs could end up making Cruisers like DDs since stealth fire being slapped down; you'll see far more camping cruisers who simply don't fire their guns a lot but meh we'll see.

 

At least RN BB are coming so it's a good time to play BBs.

[mtm78]

29 minutes ago, Gudgeon said:

So, DD's could actually lay a long smoke screen for ships to hide behind, not in. Clever DD players will assess the position of the enemy and lay a smoke in such a position to hide a ship/ships....multiple DD's could actually work as a team and lay smoke cleverly to screen the fleet and then go spot. I am interested how this change will affect game play.

 

I'm interested, will you be performing these feats off unrewarding team work yourself in a destroyer or will you be in something else waiting for the destroyers to do it for you? 

 

29 minutes ago, Gudgeon said:

I still think that buffing cruiser rudder speeds across the board and decreasing torpedo reload times on DD's by a small margin would help alleviate the BB camping and sniping of cruisers. We need balanced battles with DD's CA's, BB's and dare I say it, CV's too. 

 

How about nope.jpg? 

 

I don't like twitch shooters, let's not turn this into one. Faster moving ships fixes nothing, BB alpha doesn't care about your rudder shift when angling only influences how many citadels you take instead of if you take one. 

 

Talking about cross roads, you sound to be wanting to go off in the wrong direction, glad I stopped you there or you would have to double track all that way back. Thank me later, it's ok :)

 

 

[Namolis]

3 hours ago, Sub_Octavian said:

Okay, guys. A little update, as I see many similar questions everywhere.

1. No, ships won't be spotted from air this way, and we don't think they should - that would heavily nerf DDs, which is not the goal.

2. This works only for the ship that is shooting main guns when being inside the smoke.

3. This is not being added to any detection, this is your detection. E.g. Akizuki firing from smokes will be visible from any ship with LOS at 2,39 km (and of course it would be from 2 km anyways).

4. Other numbers for example are 2,75 km for Benson, 5,4 for Minotaur, 10,17 for Hindenburg, 17,28 for Montana, 19,27 for Yamato...you get the idea. DDs feel almost zero change, cruisers that are intended to smoke-camp, still can do it, but have to be more careful, cruisers that are not intended to smoke-camp almost cannot do it and BBs just cannot do it, because they are too big to be stealth-smoke-firing.

5. If you are behind a smoke, this does not work (but you can be spotted from air, from sides, etc)...we see there may be some issues here, but for now, we want to check that the whole idea is workable.

6. There is some more stuff to be tested, regarding Radar and IFHE, watch the Dev Blog for the news;)

Cheers!

I think the idea is good. The smoke heavy meta as we see it in ranked and competetive is not necessarily inherently evil, but it is quite boring (imho ofc.... ymmv) and it's certainly very immersion breaking.

 

Couple of thoughts:

 

1. Light vs heavy cruisers: If I understand you correctly, the penalty is based on caliber (like the old detection penalty was), however this does seem to push the meta away from heavy cruisers and towards IFHE specced light cruisers. Going from 5.4 (light cruiser - though perhaps special) to 10.17 (heavy cruiser) is the difference between "can" and "cannot" rely on smoke to conceal when firing. Heavy cruisers are already severly disadvantaged by the game mechanics; especially since the introduction of IFHE - exemplified well by the difference between Mogami's 155mm and 203mm guns (where there really is a "right" and a "wrong" choice).
    
2. Why should it make a difference whether you are inside the smoke blob or not? And how will smokes consisting of several blobs stacked behind each other (which in practice will be many or even most of them) interact in this way? Will a ship firing behind a smoke screen being placed by a friendly Gearing have complete LOS block (as it is today), until the Gearing (still with smoke running) suddenly passes by, at whcih point it is counted as being inside the screen and no longer benefits from the smoke in front?
   
   That would not make much sense imho. Therefore I have a suggestion: make it simply so that if a ship (say a Yamato) fires its guns, the server now checks for surface detection twice. The algorithm would be:
   
   All enemy ships with potential LOS to the ship would have a flag saying if this is LOS through smoke or not.
   
   1) Check for detection once with MAX_RANGE (26.6km) as parameter and allow both smokes and islands to break LOS normally (essentially as the game is now). if 'yes' then a clock is started for 20 seconds where at least this (26.6km) is his new detection range for the next 20 seconds - if 'no', then proceed to step 2)
   
   <This penalty, however, will not be applied against enemy ships with their LOS flagged as "through smoke".>
   
   2) Check for detection a second time with SMOKE_FIRING_DETECTION_RANGE (19.27km) as parameter, but this time ignoring any smoke screens on the map, allowing only islands to break LOS. If 'yes', then the clock is started for 20 seconds where at least this (19.27km) is his new detection range. If 'no', then your detection range (and any detection range penalty timer currently in effect) remains what it was before you fired.
   
   <This penalty will be applied to any ship whos LOS is not blocked by an island>
   
   The idea is that if the Yamato fires and is detected, moves into a smoke blob 5 seconds later and then emerges on the other side 10 seconds after that again; then he would experience the following: Fire, detection bloom to 26.6km for 5 seconds, effective detection shrinks to 19.27km for the next 10 seconds (which may or may not be shown on the minimap), and then bloom back to 26.6km for the last 5 seconds of the timer before going back to the default value.

[Lord_WC]

1) so, since you are directly nerfing premium ships (by assigning them separate spot distances that are different from the original one), I guess it will be refund city.

2) you seriously are nerfing the few and far between BBs that actually do objectives? That's rich...

[HotshotJimmy]

Tell you what just change the game for ranked and competitive and us normal folk can keep playing the game as is. Kapeesh? Ta 

 

I know it's my biast that is making me say that this only spells trouble for the RN ships and how good they work. Any changes need to be made across the game so any changes to smoke is of course going to affect the cruisers and I really am troubled by these notions of changing the way smoke works. US cruisers teamplay by having good AA and def fire. RN has its smoke. It feels like you are nerfing teamplay because its OP compared to everyone running around blasting willy nilly. I once again will say I am totally against this change in the strongest regard if it does get further down the thought process. IF and that's a big if it does start to change then you need to consider thinking about changing their armour. Just my two pennies worth and I for one do appreciate you creating a topic on this, it does feel that you are considering us in the debate and thought process 

[Haleos]

The changes do not provide the solution.

 

You want to stop BB's broadside spamming the entire horizon from within a smoke. Then solution is simple.

 

Limit these changes only for BB's and EXCLUDE DESTROYERS AND CRUISERS.

 

Otherwise no cruiser or BB will push into a cap with or without a smoke cover and all the matches will be decided from the get go, as was seen in the ranked season: Whose DD's die first, that team loses.

 

These changes, unless limited only to BB's, will end up serving only BB's. These changes are meant to erase the cruisers.

[EmilyFara]

Actually reasonable. Would like to see Bloom duration decreased as well for low calibres. But that is a different debate. 

 

Question. What is the boom duration when shooting from smoke? And if you leave the smoke while the Bloom is still active, does it then increase to maximum fun range? Or does it reset to Base concealment? 

[Kazomir]

6 hours ago, Tyrendian89 said:

sounds like a valid idea to me at first glance, and the numbers you provide also seem sensible. DDs dont seem to be affected much at all (although I do suspect the RU DDs will prove to be outliers a little, which isnt a bad thing...). An average of 6km for cruisers should still be workable depending on which ship you're in exactly (with it being based on concealment and caliber, RN CLs should still be the best off among their peers, going to be interesting to see how well exactly... but doesn't sound like an immediate death sentence). And BBs going to 13+km is hardly a bad thing - it's rather unlikely you'll find a smoke that far away from the enemy anyway^^

This does kind of take away the last real reason for the Gearing to exist at T10 though, its support role... it's just so inferior in every other regard, and now if the smoke wont be nearly as useful for the team, why would you take one...

 

Great guns and probably the best torps at tier 10...

[Kazomir]

1 hour ago, Lord_WC said:

1) so, since you are directly nerfing premium ships (by assigning them separate spot distances that are different from the original one), I guess it will be refund city.

2) you seriously are nerfing the few and far between BBs that actually do objectives? That's rich...

 

Yeeeeah....no. no refunds were issued when stealth firing was removed as it is a global change.

 

Sure your premium was nerfed. But so was literally everybody else. So its even.

 

Stating that such a change is a legit reason for refunds is locking the game down for future mechanics changes and possibly even some P2W shenanigans as premiums will not be affected by those changes if they do happen.

[GhostRiderMax123]

Cant say that I like this idea. It just seems to have more disadvanages than advantages to be honest. It also seems like a nerf to a certain tree and to other ships or are other changes going to be made to compensate?

[aquiles7389]

7 hours ago, Tuccy said:

As this was a big topic some time ago, let's restart the discussion... And since the old threads were dark and full of terriers, let's restart anew. There will be a new thing coming to tests - discuss! 

 

From DevBlog

 

 

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/discussion
" The action or process of talking about something in order to reach a decision or to exchange ideas. "

 

You will end up doing whatever thing you please and ignoring the comments, why discuss??

[159Hunter]

Honestly, to early to tell atm wheter I like the mechanic or not. I need more data ( example you gave the value of 10.7 for Hindenburg I'm actually interested in the Des Moines range value and that of the conqueror ).

Moreover 20 sec does seem like a long time, maybe reduce this to 15 ish for CA/CL and 10 for DDs? Still means they'll be spottable at longer ranges the entire time due to their faster ROF, but also helps them disengage faster than a BB in smoke.

[RenamedUser_92906789]

I support the change as long as it does not BREAK destroyers and SMOKE DEPENDENT cruisers.

Please take in consideration also the cruisers that that do not have own smoke, but DEPEND HEAVILY on smoke (a team smoke), such as DES MOINES.

 

You cannot compare DES MOINES with lets say DONSKOI (a long range spammer).

I enjoy being a support DD in division ... providing smoke for the team, dont completely wipe out this role.

 

But to be honest, smoke camping is not really that much of a problem at the moment.

People have generally learned how to deal with ships in smoke (lets say RN ships). Deleting a RN CL in smoke is not that hard anymore and usually you dont even need a spotter plane!

 

 

[JaiFoh]

I actually suggested something along these lines in the forums when the last discussion came up with the basis of calibre of gun and a multiplier of 40. 

So in my equations a 152 cruiser was detected at 4.5ish km whereas the yamato was detected at 11ish km. 

Which in my head that works as a destroyer should always be screening the fleet and in that window.

 

I think 5.4km for the minotaur might be a bit high tbh (and heaven help the neptune which is going to be pushing like 6km) 

This will need tweeking and testing especially for British cruisers.

 

Destroyers the values seem reasonable and if this is based on gun caliber wargaming can i please ask that the hockey stick effect on the graph for detection begins its jump at 153mm. 

 

I assume though that smoke will still function as blocking line of sight? Cause if it does (unless you introduce sector detection) then this will encourage flanking more in stealthy destroyers. 

[Mr_Snoww]

Thanks for ruining British cruisers... what's to stop a bad just rushing you in smoke even without hydro. This change is stupid

[cro_pwr]

And how do I know what is my "in smoke detectability"?
Now I need to learn 100 more values in this game for every ship once again?

[allufewig]

9 hours ago, Earl_of_Northesk said:

This isn't even in testing yet and you are complaining about specifics....usefullness: zero. If there are issues, they will be solved. If they are not solved, the idea will be scrapped just like the last one.

 

Youre one optimistic person I see. That faith in WG is almost disturbing.

[shamelesscreature]

5 minutes ago, cro_pwr said:

And how do I know what is my "in smoke detectability"?

 

Press H during the battle.

[MoveZig]

So if the Mino will have 5.4km bloom, that'll be just outside its hydro range. Is this intentional or is bloom going to be matched to hydro range for smoke cruisers?

[Bladezfist]

I feel like RN CLs should be completely exempt from these changes or it needs to be LoS based. They are already skill based ships and as they start firing quicker are very easy to delete with blind fire with no chance of the CL even being able to retaliate which means they tend to hug islands as a second line of defence at the higher teirs but now someone will just be able to sit on the other side of the island causing you to be detected on your next shot and killed by the 5 BBs that immediately target you before you can get out of the way.

 

It wont just be skilled players in accurate battleships one shotting these ships with impunity from outside the cruisers gun range anymore, now the noobs will shoot at you too as you will be detected.

 

I don't like how all of these changes as of late are turning detectability into a bunch of cheesy strategies. First stealth fire turned DD play into passive fleet cap spotting tools and now we seem to be bringing the same problem to smoke cruisers. Does anyone actually think stealth fire was worse than the super passive DD play we have now?

[shamelesscreature]

13 minutes ago, MoveZig said:

So if the Mino will have 5.4km bloom, that'll be just outside its hydro range. Is this intentional or is bloom going to be matched to hydro range for smoke cruisers?

 

Sub_Octavian wrote that the bloom will be based on surface detection range (without CE / concealment upgrade) and gun calibre. With that in mind, it will be further outside the hydro range of most other smoke cruisers except Perth, Leander (both have better concealment) and Flint (better concealment and smaller calibre). 

[Gudgeon]

7 hours ago, mtm78 said:

 

I'm interested, will you be performing these feats off unrewarding team work yourself in a destroyer or will you be in something else waiting for the destroyers to do it for you? 

 

 

How about nope.jpg? 

 

I don't like twitch shooters, let's not turn this into one. Faster moving ships fixes nothing, BB alpha doesn't care about your rudder shift when angling only influences how many citadels you take instead of if you take one. 

 

Talking about cross roads, you sound to be wanting to go off in the wrong direction, glad I stopped you there or you would have to double track all that way back. Thank me later, it's ok :)

 

 

 

Most of your posts involve arguing with people and being cocky. A meme will be the reply now I guess. You sound like a knowledgeable guy, how about using this thread to come up with suggestions/idea's, as hopefully the creator of the thread can feedback our thoughts back into wargaming (not that they will 100% listen)?

 

So, you don't like 'twitch shooters'. What is your suggestion for making cruisers more survivable against battleship RNG then? Kiting is the only option. Smoke on RN CL's was the other. Harder to hit cruisers mean that battleships may shoot battleships first, instead of wasting salvo's on harder to hit targets.

 

BTW this re-balance could potentially kill all cruiser play in this game and convert it to world of battleships and torpedo DD's. That will be a fun and interesting game. 

[Kazomir]

Still undecided on this...

 

On one hand reduces BB smoke capming. 

 

On the other, harms cruisers to an extent as well.

 

Reduces teamplay.

 

Gives even more incentive to kemp bush at the back of the map.

 

Makes game mechanics more complicated for noobs. (Which is WGs go to excuse for denying good if complicated suggestions)