This is probably the single best balance change this game had so far.
Im having a blast playing all the cruisers i never touched, whilst actually being able to take risks, play agressive and also recover from it.
This is how it's always shold have been and im so happy that low tier cruisers are finally competetive now.
Peak update tbh
As one of the Top 10 Sicilia players on EU, i was visiting Copenhagen again, since i got tired of the main gun build, since lets be real, i can just play Cocklombo for that.
So yeah, i get that the conclusion isn't anything new, but holy hell are Sicilias secondaries bad.
They combine the 4 unholy traits of suck into one
-The range sucks
-the gun angles suck
-the reload sucks
-the accuracy sucks
And if that wouldn't be bad enough, the secondaries are also SAP, so you can't set fires, your shells can bounce and since automatic secondary targeting is dumb AF those shells also often hit the most armored parts of ships, resulting in zero damage, again, you still can't set fires, meaning the secondaries do absolutely nothing against angled and/or armored targets.
So i was playing 3 games with that build in total and at most these secondaries did like 35k damage.
One game was particularly egregious, since two DDs just taunted me that game, by gunning me within my secondary range for a solid 2 or 3 minutes, the didn't kill me, but in return my SAP secondaries did 2000 and 3000 damage per DD in return lmao, give they where at 8+ kilometers, but seriously, wtf.
After that i said fuck it, played a Libertad game, W-keyed into a friendly Somers smoke, caught a St Vincent bow-in and killed it within a minute. So that was 100k secondary/fire damage right there and after that i killed a Worcester and a DD with mostly secondaries before i died.
Seriously, playing Sicilia secondary build and then Libertad just shows how underpowered Sicilias secondaries are.
They hit for Similar damage, but Libertad actually hits, pens more, sets a shitton of fires, doesn't care about angling and gets further boosted by the F-key.
Even if youd copy the accuracy and F-Key onto Sicilias secondaries, they would still would suck in comparison.
Meanwhile Libertad also gets decent guns, has no freeboard, citadel or superstructure and improved heals with a faster cooldown.
Yes, obviously Libertad is overpowered, whilst Sicilia is mid, but holy discrepancy bois.
Seriously, i would be totally fine, if they gave Sicilia like 40 seconds of main battery reload, but gave the secondaries manual targeting only, with Battlecruiser dispersion or something. Keep the range and reload, but make the secondaries unique and potent.
They need better accuracy/hitting DPM and manual targeting, so you can at least hit shipparts you actually can damage.
At the moment Sicilia is just tragic, since it's expensive, but a cool concept in theory. It just doesn't work and gets outperformed by Cocklombo for Main Guns and by Libtard for Secondaries.
After playing a few Soyuz and Lenin games, after not touching them in like 2 years, i can safely say, that these ships feel incredibly obsolete.
2 Heals and 3 DCPs base is an absolute joke and considering how much you can buff the accuracy on the average BB, the whole russian BB gimmick of better close range dispersion becomes redundant, whilst the worse long range dispersion becomes an absolute liability.
Yeah, you can run Galler and get the accuracy perks too, but that means being stuck on 2 heals with ships that are supposed to play on the front line.
I don't think that there is a commander who has all 3 perks at the same time, but the Russian BBs essentially need Firefighter, Master Mechanic and the extra DCP skills to be playable as agressively as they are supposed to.
Especially against all the airplane based stuff, these ships suffer insanely hard, arguably even worse than the German, or Italian BBs.
Speaking of Italian BBs, they are superior to Russian BBs in almost every metric, which doesn't mean that they are OP, it means that the Russian ones are just underpowered and don't work in Legends.
I would argue, that they should get 4 base heals like the Italians (after all many russian ships, especially Vladi and Soyuz are based on the Littorio Class BBs) and either infinite fast DCPs, or at least like 5 charges base.
If they are supposed to be tanks, you need to make them actually able to tank.
First things first, this is genuinly an awful ranked seasons and it shows the flaws of low tier balancing extremely well.
DDs and BBs rule, whilst cruisers are essentially irrelvant, unless played perfectly (and lets be real, the average player doesn't do that)
T5 in particular has some of the worst balancing of all tiers and this season in particular, with the ship restrictions, makes the issue so much worse.
It's essentially T61 and Warspite Battles.
T61 shits on all other DDs, whilst Warspite shits on all other BBs and Cruisers in return.
BB Engagements are purely an overmatch fight, making ships like
Dunkerque pretty irrelvant and with the lazer accuracy BB builds a cruiser becomes a one-click adventure every time you catch one. I devstruck my fair share of fully angled Nürnbergs this season.
Furthermore cruisers don't even get a heal, which is stupid, when a BB gets to have 5. Last but not least, cruisers don't get radars either, so they don't even have that Utility going for them.
This in return makes DDs even more opressive and with the Elefant in the room, which is T61, DD fights are essentially decided by which Team gets one and which one doesn't.
So yeah, all cruisers in this game should have a heal, to at least be viable for their tier.
This being said, even though the season isn't fun at all, the rewards (2,5k steel) should always be like that.
If i recall correctly, usually it's less than half of that and that's just not rewarding enough.
Suffering through a season like this 10 times should be enough to earn you a T8 steel ship of your choice, since it's already an insane commitment in both time and mental health.
And that's not even mentioning the time gate it's behind, we are talking about like half a year of playing through every single ranked sprint.
One aprint seasons for an Epic ship mod is also fair IMO.
And im saying this as a unicum player, who has an easier time winning in ranked, than the average players.
If ranked rewards would always be like that (and if ranked would finally count for campaigns) I would play it way more.
Grade bin ich kurz rüber zu meiner Mutter, als Lanz lief, und da saß Winfried Kretschman mit seinen jungen 77 Jahren und hofiert dasselbe scheiß Narrativ von wegen "wir müssen "ALLE" mehr schaffen um "unseren" Wohlstand zu erhalten"
Als Argument kam dann, dass sogar die Schweizer sogar 200 Stunden mehr pro jahr arbeiten, als der faule Deutsche, wobei er sich wieder auf diese dumme Propaganda Statistik bezogen hat, wo die Arbeitsstunden hoch gehen würden, wenn man die Leute, die in Teilzeit haben rausrechnet"
Lanz hat seinen Job als Moderator natürlich NICHT gemacht und diese scheiß Aussage von diesem dummen, konservativen B*omer, auf einem HP, nicht eingeordnet.
Opa, du hast noch 5 bis 10 Jahre auf der Uhr und hast deinen Zenith lange überschritten. Außerdem bist du n überpreviligierter, weißer, alter Sack und so ziemlich die letzte Person, die dem deutschen Volk wieder vorschwurbeln sollte, dass wir alle unsere Probleme und versäumnisse, der letzten Jahrzente mit noch mehr totarbeiten raus reißen.
Derselbe verfickte, konservative Doppeldenk hat uns doch erst in die Lage gebracht, in der wir heute sind.
Das schlimmste davon ist, dass meine Bürgi Mutter, komplett auf dieses Narrativ abgeschmiert ist.
Ich hab versucht ihr zu erklären, dass er sich auf diese propagandistische Scheiß Statistik bezieht und als Antwort kam nur "aBeR deR sOzIaLiSmUs iSt kEinE lÖsUnG".
Wir sind doch einfach nur noch gefickt und haben uns kollektiv, aus faktenbasierter Berichterstattung ausgeloggt.
Selbst in jedem abgewichsten Fickformat im ÖRR kann jeder komplett uneingeordnet seine propagandistische Scheiße in den Äther böllern und unsere 50+ "wir sind die fleißigsten, ihr jungen Leute seit alle verblendet und faul" Eltern schlucken diese menschenfeindlichen Lügen als wäre fließend Wasser.
Das ist doch einfach nur noch Gift für den politischen Diskurs und es ist so obvious, so billig, aber keinen Schwanz juckt des.
Es ist literarisch das Pendant, zu KI Bildern von hübschen jungen Frauen, wo alte Leute drauf abschmieren, weil sie nicht begreifen (wollen) was da für n bullshit gelabert wird.
Ja Mama, du wirst das bestimmt geil finden, wenn wir (schon wieder) auf konservative Narrative reingefallen sind und jetzt 12 Stunden a 6 Tage arbeiten dürfen. Danke dafür.
Ehrlich, wenn 67 das Renteneintritsalter ist, hat kein Schwanz ab dieser Altersgrenze mehr in der P*litik stattzufinden.
Das hier ist das Paradebeispiel, wie Leute von vorgestern, das Narrativ für die Zukunft vergiften und uns damit, als letztes "Fuck you, got mine", nochmal so richtig schön fisten
Also komm Opa, pack die Fritten ein und mach dich aus der P*litik raus.
Genieß doch einfach deinen scheiß Lebensabend mit Gärtnern, Schach, Modelleisenbahn oder irgendwas was dich glücklich macht, aber hör doch auf den Diskurs, als Grüner, aktiv mit rechten Scheißtakes zu vergiften.
Ganz ehrlich, wenn wir so weiter machen und sowas der normale Diskurs ist, können wir die AxD gleich an die Macht bringen und hier wieder n paar Arbeitslager für richtiges Wirtschaftswachstum hochziehen.
Geht euch ehrlich ficken.
So i was playing Dunkerque and had a random Teammate who was quite competent in his T5 dutch cruiser, we cleared 3 ships together, and in the end it was down to a 4v3 in our favor.
The cruiser and I capped the B cap, using rocks for cover. So i had a dutch cruiser sitting right on top of me. That's about as good of an AA support as i could get and i still saw the CV first killing me in two consecutive torp drops and once i was dead he killed the cruiser with ease too.
Seriously wtf is this dogshit game balance, where one class, that doesn't need to risk anything at all, gets to do this for absolutely free. Both of us couldnt have played this any better and yet we still absolutely got cucked by one single carrier.
It's honestly just annoying and frustrating to fight against.
With the new fighter changes and the Bearn fighters you can catch enemy squadrons pretty consistently and wipe them out.
Unless they have fast planes and boost out of the fighters, most squadrons can be caught and it's extremely hillarious.
Even if you don't catch them, you can launch the other squadron and either try again, or drop the fighters over whatever the enemy CV is going to drop.
Like finally there is some counterplay to CVs and it's glorious. I just played this for two games , one with double CV and i made sure that their CVs where at the bottom of the scoreboard.
I don't know if this build is effective against good CV players, but it for sure is probably obnoxious to deal with, so i can finally return some misery to players who play this braindead class.
So yeah, fuck CVs.
This community sometimes really baffles me. Just saying that onesided interactions, like fighting ships, that you virtually have almost zero counterplay against in certain classes, sucks, lands no sympathy whatsoever.
#Preface
Whatever sloppy interaction you criticize summons a lot of people just trash talking you, calling out a skill issue, that just isn't there.
Ive played 13k battles on PC with a 63% winrate and am sitting at a 65% solo winrate in Legends and yes, i can back those numbers up, if you insist.
Im not saying this, to jerk off to my stats, or say that i am perfect, but unless everyone on this sub, happens to be a top 0.5% player, chances are that you guys are probably not better than me at the game, so calling every critiscism about the (often onesided) gameplay interactions a skill issue on my part, is just wrong.
And no, im not victimizing myself here, but the discourse about constructive critiscism on this subreddit suck in particular (not just on my posts), in my opinion.
#What do i mean by onesided slop gameplay?
Im glad you are asking. By onesided slop gameplay i mean certain interactions, like getting literally cucked, by CVs, Hybrid/Airstrike ships, or Destroyes with such a stupidly low concealment, that you virtually can't even spot them, unless you are in a radar ship, or can run them down (which often leads to your own death, IF you can even catch them)
And yes, getting cucked is the correct term here, as you often just get to watch, without being able to do anything about it.
#Do you guys actually enjoy that kind of gameplay/interaction?
I mean, as you can probably tell, i absolutely despise these interactions and nowadays Legends has a lot of them.
Now, i do love the core gameplay of the game and wows certainly can be Peak naval combat arcade game and a lot of fun.
I only bother, writing this shit, since i am actually passionate about this game, but interactions like these (especially whilst playing solo) ruin the game for me.
The past days, i really wanted to play, but i only can handle so much onesided slop interactions.
So currently i am in that weird state, where i want to play said peak naval combat game, but it feels like a unfavorable dice roll, of being able to play the game, vs being someones damage pinata. And this just turns me away from getting myself to play the game, even if i want to.
Now, i do mainly play cruisers and BBs and i know that it affects those classes more than others, since those actually need to risk dying in order to achieve anything.
CVs can just play the game from the Homeoffice and most DDs play with the max concealment builds and have smoke as a backup, making them essentially the Legends version of PC submarines.
Im not saying that BBs, or cruisers don't get their fair share of broken builds (looking at you, lazer builds, especially AL Nelson) but against those you can fight back at least.
So i genuinly don't believe, that i am the only one, who feels this way.
#Not every critiscism about the game is a skill issue
I don't even know, how i have to explain this, but apparently, i do.
Having so many onesided interactions in a PVP game sucks and maybe people, playing Wargaming titles are just used to it at that point, whilst im still coping for them to actually trying to balance their games.
Still, having a PvP game balanced like that (like the whole implementation of carriers, or submarine build DDs) just is dogshit balancing and ultimately kills games like this.
Maybe WG games are too niche and too big to fail at this point, but i guess most players don't find that kind of gameplay desireable, or fun.
Or at least i don't. I would like to be able to at least fight back in a PvP game in some degree. If i want to just sit there, getting tortured, not being able to do anything, this whacky, niche naval combat game, isn't the place im going for that experience.
I don't know, if you remember Dreadnought (which was a WOWS like game with space ships), but that game was fucking peak in the beginning too, but what ultimately killed it, was the developers refusal to adjust overpowered/onsided/frustrating slop gameplay.
In that game you had healing ships, that essentially could outheal a battleships DPS, which was stupid on it's own, but people just figured out, that they could park in a Canyon, jerking off a battleship ontop of them, making both essentially invincible. This quickly became the Meta and was so unfun that many people just dropped the game and AFAIK it never got nerfed, till they shut down the game.
So for a large part, the milking table Meta killed Dreadnought and whilst it doesn't compare 1 to 1 to Legends balancing, it feels very similar.
An invincible Star Dreadnought on a Rock isn't so different from a Dutch cruiser sitting on one, being able to drop Airtsrike, after Airtsrike, without you being able to physically shoot it back, or a destroyer being essentially invisible, unless you happen to have a radar.
Either examples are horrendous balancing for a PvP game and ultimately will just drive players away, if not getting adjusted.
So yeah, smothering almost every discussion about horrible game design, by trash talking people (regardless of their stats) calling out such things is extremely narrow minded and short sighted.
This game certainly isn't without flaw and things like Airtsrikes, CVs, or submarine build DDs absolutely should get the nerf hammer in some way, shape, or form, since they are problematic, not simply just overpowered/overperforming.
It honestly grinds my gears how it's basically suicide to rush a DD in a Battleship, or non radar/hydro cruiser.
I was just playing Veneto, our DDs just both imploded after 2 minutes and i choose to rush a Tashkent, which just whiffed it's first torpedoes one me.
He was about 5km away from me, so i decided it's now, or never to get him. So i used my own smoke to close the gap, but of course he reloaded his torps in the 60 ish seconds it took me to drive into his detection range.
Since Legends secondaries never got the aiming at DDs fix, which PC got ages ago, all my secondary shells landed behind the tashkent and he just torp rushed me. I died, he lived and the whole engagement was completely onesided
There is so many issues with this kind of interaction.
First, you never gonna see a DD with the full concealment build anyways, unless you have a radar, or just drive right into his ridiculous low detection range. Even if you manage to do that, the DD can just smoke and either just shotgun you, since you need to get into guaranteed detection range, to even deal with the DD.
So when one Teams DDs are dead, that's all you really can do, if you don't happen to have a radar.
I mean torp rushes are frustrating on PC already, but the best DD conceal there is 5.4, not way below 5.0km.
So i really have two options when my DDs blow up, either i try to somehow catch theirs, which is a completely unfavorable engagement for me, or i just try to run, whilst their DDs can play the game uncontested, generating a huge amount of game impact, whilst being opressive AF.
The above experience is especially egregious, since DDs theoretically should just melt to SAP secondaries, but in Legends those just don't lead properly and so DDs can even rush ships, that should be deadly to them, without much issues.
If you need to drive right into a DDs ass, to even get the chance to kill him, they shouldn't be able to insta delete you at ranges below 3kms.
On PC submarines had the same issue, where they could just surface next to you, devstriking your ships with torps and in Legends DDs feel extremely similar to that.
In both cases you have a ship, which you basically can't catch and even if you do, it can just dive, or smoke to be immune, or concealed again, just so it can pop up in your broadside in the next best scenario.
To fix the issue submarine torps now only deal 10% of their damage below 3km and i honestly think this change would be good for the game balance of Legends DDs.
It will not make DDs unplayable and would make them more fair to fight for non radar ships.