World of Warships

Mr Bismarck wrote:

I suspect that's purely down to the mission though as there's practically no drama in it... just stroll up to the targets, press fire and then move on to the next target.

I think the problem is that enemy destroyers only show up at the very end. They are actually quite dangerous because they have the turret traverse to hit you easily, can drop torpedoes that hit shallow subs, and drop depth charges behind them that can one-shot subs. I learned that last bit the hard way when I tried to dive under them. If they had added 2-3 destroyers to every enemy spawn that would mix up the gameplay tremendously. Hopefully the upcoming hard mode on the 14th will do something about that.

The subs appear to be based on real ones though I don't recognize most of them. The Seelowe is obviously a german Elektroboot, it has the exact same hull pattern and the double AA turrets. The Killer Whale looks like a Gato and the Zipper is obviously a midget sub of some kind. Other than that I can't tell as the rest are plastered with steampunk gubbins.

Tamren wrote:

Other than that I can't tell as the rest are plastered with steampunk gubbins.

I thought the clock on the outside of the Seelowe was silly, but then I noticed the Zipper is wearing a monocle.

The Urashima has wings.

The subs are indeed based on real subs, like the ships. The Seelowe is a Type XXI U-boat and the Killer Whale is a Gato-class. The Zipper is based on the Soviet M-401, the Gerfalcon is a Type XXVI U-boat, and the Barracuda is based on the British X1.

Got rank 1 again, this time it took me 32 battles instead of 26. I think the trick to playing ranked is to do all of your battles in the first week because good players naturally rise to the top and advance. The moment they hit rank 1 they are removed from the pool, but all of the terrible players stay between rank 1 and the last irrevocable rank because all they do is drag the team down and only advance by luck. I made the mistake of leaving it to the last weekend and the queue is full of these people, you can toss a coin at the start of the match and see if your team loses the game in the first 5 minutes.

There are plenty of clueless players at high tiers too, but tier 5 dramatically lowers the bar for entry and you see a lot of people who don't understand the most basic of tactics. Like destroyers that hide behind islands, THEN pop smoke, THEN fire torpedoes blindly in all directions just in case an enemy ship might suddenly appear. It also baffles me that ranked mode doesn't exclude teamkillers.

Anyone else having trouble logging in? Normally the wargaming launcher app does that automatically, but now it stops me on the in-game login screen and tells me to input my password again because there was a server connection error. I'm not banned and if I login again it works just fine, this has only been an issue since they updated to 7.11.

Working for me right now!

Do you use the Wargaming Center application or do you just have the standalone launcher for WOWS? I tried a bunch of troubleshooting steps, I redid firewall permissions, excluded it from the antivirus etc. Nothing worked so I'm forced to assume that the problem isn't on my end.

From what I can tell this problem usually happens if the servers are down, either unintentionally or because of a scheduled update. But the server isn't down, it just fails to connect automatically and makes me log in. Baffling.

I use the standalone launcher. Make sure it says NA at the top maybe it is trying to log into a different region server?

It's definitely the right region, I've submitted a support ticket and will see what they have to say.

So announcement came out today for the pre-beta closed sign up for, ' World of Warships: Legends' for the consoles. Anyone signing up for this?

P.s. Oh yea, I saw this over on the World of Tanks news page:
https://console.worldoftanks.com/en/...

I wasn't looking forward to the 6*4 million credit grind for the last part of the event. But I just opened a supercontainer and got a month of premium, how convenient!

Congrats!

I knocked off Japan, France and the UK quickly with Musashi, Jean Bart and Cossack... Germany took a little longer with the Scharnhorst and so now I have two to go. I don't have enough Pan-Asian ships, so it's going to have to be Russian and US navies and for Russia that probably means the Oktober and the Murmansk.

The PEF isn't even supposed to be all that good, but I can't resist a free ship. Plus the other free ships, (really just free Camos), in the PEF Campaign.

I knocked off the USN portion of the PEF campaign just by playing ranked tonight in the Farragut.

I only lost one game all the way from rank ten to the cusp of rank one and then randomly ran into my clan leader in the round where I could rank out.

Not only did I win, but I sank his Fuso. So that final round ranked me out, put me over the 4,000,000 credit mark for the US and probably got me kicked out of my clan.

I finished ranked a few days ago, did almost all of it with Fuso or Warspite, with a bit of New Mexico on the side.

And yeah, the P.E. isn't amazing from what I've seen, but I like battleships and it's free. I certainly won't be trying to get 4 million credits with that one ship for the retroactive directive tasks though.

A few patches ago they changed the AP penetration mechanics for DDs. Now you are capped at 10% (overpen) damage except for two specific high tier DD targets.

Does anyone remember the max gun calibre affected? I think it was 300mm but I can't remember or find the patch notes it was in.

Tamren wrote:

A few patches ago they changed the AP penetration mechanics for DDs. Now you are capped at 10% (overpen) damage except for two specific high tier DD targets.

Does anyone remember the max gun calibre affected? I think it was 300mm but I can't remember or find the patch notes it was in.

IIRC it is all AP all DDs except the Khabarosvk and the Haragumo.

I believe the affected calibre was 280mm, because I remember Scharnhorst Captains complaining about the change and she has 283mm.

I found the patch note and it is 280mm.

IMAGE(https://frm-wows-eu.wgcdn.co/wows_forum_eu/monthly_2018_11/ad181eb8-dcf6-11e8-b82e-ac162d8bc1e4.jpg.06e956419fbed7ae158cb65d5c016ac1.jpg)

I've been struggling through the Eitel event. In a word the Prinz Eitel is... mediocre.

It's a german BB, but doesn't have a turtleback. She has german guns with high sigma, but they are only 14 inch instead of 15. She doesn't have a spotter plane and her secondaries are okay but T6 meaning manual fire control only does so much. And on top of that she has the most (?) AA DPS of any t6 battleship. Oh and she turns like a brick because the ship is super long. The sh*tty guns alone are a dealbreaker, if you can't kill anything what's the point? Every other T6 BB outguns her, and while you can get around the weak guns by fighting up close she can't brawl because of the poor turn radius and slow turret rotation.

If I had known she was like this I probably would have skipped the event.

Russian bias confirmed.

FYI - from today until February 8th, all commander respecs are free due to the CV rework. If you had a build you wanted to try out, now is the time.

Also, a word of warning from Notser - if you want to sell your CVs, do so from the Inventory screen, not the main screen (right-click Sell). Inventory will give you full price, including doubloons for premium ships.

Edit: full commander retraining is also currently free, so if you wanted to reassign some commanders now is also the time to do so.

Overall, I like the CV rework quite a bit - been mostly playing my Shima and loving it. But ... the live testing did turn up a few fun things:

I've been subjected to this and it's pretty crazy - torpedoes just start appearing out of nowhere in large numbers. Fighters can help counter it, as can unexpected AA (AA-specced destroyer), but at the moment it's pretty viable.

For those in New England, there's a WoWS event happening in Fall River, Massachusetts next weekend:

https://worldofwarships.com/en/news/...

It's $25 for adults, with various discounts for different groups (veterans, locals, etc).

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/world-w...

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/4KktoRj.jpg)

On Saturday I had the rather unique experience of playing the Massachusetts while sitting in the wardroom of the real Massachusetts. The event was a lot of fun and I came out of it with a Marblehead, a Haida, a thousand doubloons, and some swag. I also spent about half my time exploring the Massachusetts, which was amazing, and the other ships there - the Joseph P. Kennedy, a Gearing-class destroyer, and the Lionfish, a Balao-class sub. Sadly, the Hiddensee, a Tarantul-class corvette, was closed for restoration work. Definitely worth it if they have one of these events close to you.

Amazingly, I dislike having CVs in game even more after the rework.

Agreed.

As demonstrated by my games-per-month cliff post-rework.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/gOAFEX5.png?2)

That Feb chart also includes ~25 rounds of CV play just to see what the new gameplay was like.

I'm loving it, both playing as the CV and against them. As a DD, I don't feel completely helpless any more. I have tools to fight back and aircraft can't just loiter over me as long as they want. Most importantly, they can no longer see my torpedoes - I actually reconfigured my Shima with the 20km torps for the first time in years and sniped a couple lazy carrier players. The new CVs add an additional level of chaos that helps keep the game moving and reduces island camping, and definitely puts a dent in the "concealment expert is a requirement for nearly everyone" thing that had taken hold over the last year or so.

I think the main gameplay issue right now is when the carrier is the only one left and they drive into a corner somewhere. It takes ages to get to them and kill them and it's no fun for anyone.

Aetius wrote:

I think the main gameplay issue right now is when the carrier is the only one left and they drive into a corner somewhere. It takes ages to get to them and kill them and it's no fun for anyone.

At the same time that's the only real viable tactic now because spent planes make a beeline back to the carrier and constantly reveal it's position. So hiding or positioning yourself closer to the front line is impossible/pointless, they have no incentive not to run to the nearest corner. It still feels a little janky overall, I've heard rumours that WG ignored the feedback the testers were giving them and released it in it's current state anyway.

Tamren wrote:

So hiding or positioning yourself closer to the front line is impossible/pointless, they have no incentive not to run to the nearest corner.

My experience has been the opposite. Especially in the low tiers, it's very valuable to get as close as possible to the fight. The reason is that in the early game, your aircraft squadrons are only good for one pass - the stacked multi-ship continuous AA makes sure of that, even in its attenuated form. Being close lets you cycle your squadrons much faster, get in more attacks, "heal" more damage, and lose fewer aircraft - which increases your overall damage and effectiveness. In fact, being up front is so useful and the aircraft captain/module bonuses are so mediocre that I've specced my Hakuryu for secondaries, and I've gotten I think four CQE badges in 30 or so games, including two in one fight (which was a loss, sadly).

With the new AA changes and free captain respec I actually went and redid ALL of my t7+ battleships to full secondary builds. Not all of them can pen 32mm but almost all of them can pen 20mm which is good enough for all DDs and british cruisers. None of the AA skills make much of a difference and reinforcing AA sectors is counter productive in my experience.