World of Warships

[Drive Blind]

still playing WOW, playing more again during the covid situation.

looking back the royal navy cruisers have been the most fun for me. I've got a good win rate in Fiji and Edinburgh.

last year I had a good time and good fun brawling in a full secondary Bismark however the change in gameplay to cv's and longrange HE spam boats has ruined this. Now spend the whole game, spotted, on fire and getting dropped by the cv.

I play for free, I don't buy premium time so anything above T8 is uneconomical for me.

I recently dropped down the tiers and it was much more enjoyable. Currently working up through the US dd line.

[BrettMRC]

Totally agree that lower tiers are more fun.

I tend to only play T9 or T10 if I am grinding out a line, or in ranked.

[Mastodon2]

If you enjoy lower tiers then you're probably not in bad place to be honest. I heard tier 7 got shafted in the matchmaker rework and now faces tier 9 games a lot more, but higher tier gameplay is going to get a whole lot worse once the Petropavlovsk stomps gracelessly over the game balance at the laws of physics, which will be happening soon. Seriously, in these Soviet power fantasy ships, with their miniscule freeboard, exactly where is the engine? They'd have to be nuclear powered to have such power output, with such small Hull spaces.

I've been meaning to play more at lower tiers to work on my DD craft. I've got the Fujin (Kamikaze with a special paintjob) which I've played a few times but I think it has been seriously hit by power creep. With all the gunboat DDs in the game it struggles to take objectives and with BBs hanging back until so late in the game its hard to farm up big damage. Until they finally push in, the Fujin might as well be a banana boat, given how slow she is and how bad her guns are for figting other DDs.

[BrettMRC]

Mastodon2 said:

If you enjoy lower tiers then you're probably not in bad place to be honest. I heard tier 7 got shafted in the matchmaker rework and now faces tier 9 games a lot more, but higher tier gameplay is going to get a whole lot worse once the Petropavlovsk stomps gracelessly over the game balance at the laws of physics, which will be happening soon. Seriously, in these Soviet power fantasy ships, with their miniscule freeboard, exactly where is the engine? They'd have to be nuclear powered to have such power output, with such small Hull spaces.

I've been meaning to play more at lower tiers to work on my DD craft. I've got the Fujin (Kamikaze with a special paintjob) which I've played a few times but I think it has been seriously hit by power creep. With all the gunboat DDs in the game it struggles to take objectives and with BBs hanging back until so late in the game its hard to farm up big damage. Until they finally push in, the Fujin might as well be a banana boat, given how slow she is and how bad her guns are for figting other DDs.

Mutsuki can almost take her in a gun fight!

I love the Early/Mid Tier Japanese DD's

[Mastodon2]

Is anyone doing the ranked sprint? I've been dabbling with it this morning and got up to rank 7 using my Massachusetts with a full secondary build. On these smaller maps, with smaller teams it actually works quite well and makes it a lot easier to win 1 vs 1 stalemates with other battleships, not to mention chewing up DDs and CLs.

I doubt I'll have the patience to reach rank 1 but it has been decent so far.

[Drive Blind]

Mastodon2 said:

Is anyone doing the ranked sprint?

I've reached 6 playing the Cossack, it's 5.5km concealment might be the best at this tier. Its a boat I got for free a while back. I'm not usually a fan of the sneaky dd style play but its working for me in this ranked sprint.

My other fave T8 boat is the Bismarck however it's just a huge pile of firewood target now. Fun in a brawl but not very succesful at anything else now. Pretty much always get focused by the entire red team when playing her.

[Digger]

Hah! . . . I have literally just purchased Cossack along with some dubs & premium time. The plan being to try Ranked Sprint with Cossack, Tirpitz, Bismarck, Massa B & no doubt others . . .

[JustinF]

Having fun in ranked sprint with radar Edin, it's the Spanish Inquisition of ships

[BrettMRC]

I've been having good results with Atago & Hipper

[Gazzas86]

I'm up to Rank 3 with my Massa, Full Secondary build. i'm pretty much averaging 2/3 kills and 150k damage a game. The hardest bit was getting through Rank 5, i found the players in my team were not very good in understanding a plan, or using cover behind land, or going broadside to some of the heavy hitter BB's etc. But once i got through to Rank 3, people start paying attention alot more.

[Mastodon2]

Gazzas86 said:

I'm up to Rank 3 with my Massa, Full Secondary build. i'm pretty much averaging 2/3 kills and 150k damage a game. The hardest bit was getting through Rank 5, i found the players in my team were not very good in understanding a plan, or using cover behind land, or going broadside to some of the heavy hitter BB's etc. But once i got through to Rank 3, people start paying attention alot more.

Ranked sprint doesn't match you with other similar ranks like normal ranked mode does, so you play with utter potatoes all the way to the end.

I've been using a secondary spec Massachusetts too, though my captain for her is only 15 points, so its not a totally maxed out build. Still, she is tanky enough and the small maps mean her crappy main battery accuracy isn't felt so hard.

I had a go in Lenin too while I was ticking off the naval battles ribbons thing for a Russian BB this weekend and she felt nigh invincible in the right spots on the map, especially once she starts dumping shells on targets within 11km.

I might try Roma next to troll the enemy, but I may just end up trolling myself with that ship...

[BrettMRC]

I gave up on using BBs as the queue time has been horrendous.

[BrettMRC]

Finally hit Rank 1 last night... only the second time ever! (Never managed it in the normal Ranked series)

[Drive Blind]

made it up to rank 3 using the Cossack but then my premium time expired - now couldn't get a win if my life depended on it.

[Mastodon2]

New tech tree line being announced tonight on the official WOWS US live stream. My guess is Italian BBs with SAP and fuel smoke, based on the number of test Imperos I've seen recently. My guess is Impero will come as a premium (my credit card is ready!) and Vitortio Venetto will be the tech tree tier 8.

[Digger]

US BB line split I think.

[Mastodon2]

Digger said:

US BB line split I think.

Could well be, particularly that they're announcing in the US, where the game is vastly less popular than Europe and Russia. I hope it isn't, but the fact they've finally released the USS California suggests you may be right.

[JustinF]

Hope it's ITA BB

[dapprman]

We're still due the Soviet cruiser split - that's where my money is.

Hi BTW - been playing WoWS since beta. Still play most days, but not that much in reality.

[Mastodon2]

dapprman said:

We're still due the Soviet cruiser split - that's where my money is.

Hi BTW - been playing WoWS since beta. Still play most days, but not that much in reality.

The Soviet cruiser split was announced months ago. The announcement yesterday was, unfortunately, more US BBs. WG seem so desperate to get more players in the US, so I can see where they were coming from with this new line, but I don't think it will bring in any new players, even the existing Americans seem underwhelmed by the concept for the new line, even on the 4th of July weekend, with all the whoopin', hollerin' and general jingoism that accompanies the celebrations. Even finally releasing the USS California doesn't seem to have excited, because it's a floating turd and everyone knows it. Even when fairly mediocre ships like Puerto Rico and Odin go up for sale for vast sums of money, I see a lot of them in battle, but even for £20 people don't seem excited by the USS California.

The stream was pretty crap - the US community managers are pretty awful, not very engaging and didn't provide any particularly great gameplay. The new line, in case anyone missed it, is new tier VIII, IX and X battleships for America, carrying on the super dreadnought style from the New Mexico, Colorado etc. This has some historical roots, but the designs are new creations from WG's fantasy ships department. I don't care about whether the ships are real, paper designs or total fantasies but some people are upset that WG didn't use existing blueprint designs for the super dreadnoughts that were drawn up but never built.

From a gameplay perspective, the new ships look pretty bad. While the super dreadnoughts work at lower tiers, perhaps strongest at the USS Texas and Arizona, they start to move away from the meta at higher tiers. The new proposals, while obviously subject to change, are for absolutely enormous, super thicc ships with 23knts top speed, decent armour, big guns (12 x 457mm on the tier X Vermont) and 40 second reload. If these things get the standard US deck armour, god help them. I suspect they will get some special damage control perk or heals because they will be an HE spammer's dream. I'm already excited at the prospect of giant HP pinata ships to shoot with my Yoshino.

Amusing too, that despite their positioning as a sort of mobile bunker / moving gun turret line, similar to the Maus line in WOT, they're still not allowed to be better at anything than the Kremlin with perhaps the exception of AA defense, which is a fairly meaningless stat in the game these days anyway.