u/boofbamboo

We all talk about power creep but that mostly seems to apply to every class but cruisers, because I can't really tell what these new cruisers are even meant to be used for

This is for the tier 10 Vanadis specifically, if there's something special about the lower tiers I'm not
aware of I guess you can mention it but the tier 10 is probably the most important

First looking at the guns, I kid you not, they're weirdly similar to those found on Yodo of all things

The HE DPM is 258k which is barely more than Yodo's 246k, shell ballistics are nearly identical, but at least Yodo has way more range (18km vs 14.7km), and has a much heavier salvo weight (51,300 vs 19,800 HE salvo alpha) which is important for things like shooting destroyers who might only be vulnerable for one shot, which is to say Yodo has better guns than this thing

I mean the AP DPM is quite a bit better than Yodo, but it's not improved in any way, pen is quite bad, and it's more to do with Yodo having really bad AP than Vanadis having actually good AP, it's probably not worth using most of the time

Next, the ship seems to be marketed as kind of a torpedo cruiser, but the torpedoes are actually pretty bad. You basically get 10 Halland torps on each side with a pretty long reload time, which is not especially good for a torpedo cruiser, when things like Jinan or Brisbane just have much better torps in general, sure the Halland style torps are fast but their reaction time is actually quite mediocre and damage is just very bad

Yet again I'm going to compare to Yodo because we all know Yodo isn't very good, Yodo torps do more than double the damage per hit, reloads in 100 seconds base instead of 125 seconds, and have the same range, only downside is that they're gonna be quite a bit slower but the difference in damage output is so massive with the slower reload for some reason makes it a hard sell

https://preview.redd.it/vec370arpdth1.jpg?width=2560&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=953e237674b6a5c3e93e9de0047a6f077323885b

And the ship's hull isn't anything special either, as you can see it's just a ton of 30mm side and deck, 25mm extremities, very long exposed citadel, and the short unprotected bow and stern means it's easy to get overmatch citadelled by anything 380mm+, even Yodo doesn't have that problem, but I guess it's weirdly extremely tanky against destroyer caliber HE with the thin superstructure so maybe it's kind of a Hawaii counter lmao idk?

The ship is pretty thick too so it's not even like Jinan or Svea where you can go flat and get overpenned, in fact the ship has a wider beam than Yodo for some reason so that's pretty funny

But the most heinous part has to be the consumables, or the lack thereof

You get a slightly improved heal with 4 charges and 18.5% repair (no reduced cooldown) (no improved full pen repair percentage) (doesn't matter because look at the hull)

And a toggleable 30% speed boost with 180 seconds total use time, sounds great but in reality there's a few problems with that

First off the slot 2 engine boost module normally increases your engine boost duration by 30% but for some reason if it's time based then it's only by a pitiful 5%, also goes for superintendent not helping as much, so really it's worse than something like Svea's more normal 30% speed boost

And also because it's just not very useful at all, sure you go pretty fast with it, but your rudder shift is still worse than Yodo, the ship has unusually slow acceleration for a light cruiser, and your range is still only 14.7km, meaning any decent player will still be able to nuke you if you try to open water farm them with it, so I guess it's for repositioning, but repositioning to do what, not like you have a radar

And there's the problem, that's all you get, no smoke, no hydro, no radar. That's the most offensive part, WHY THE FUCK DOES THE BATTLESHIP THOR GET A RADAR BUT THE CRUISER LINE OF THE SAME NATION NOT GET ONE, WHAT THE FUCK WG

There you go you're a zero utility cruiser with below average firepower and shitty low damage torps, low range, and bad armor, they should probably rip the radar off Thor and give it to this line and give the line the same torps as the Thor which actually do decent damage

Hey maybe the real moral of the story isn't that Vanadis is bad, but that Yodo is actually overpowered after all

I'm going to break down container drops on average so that you don't have to do the math, and compare each of the odd options compared to the supercontainers, which I think is a good standard to compare to, making it a convenient would you rather comparison, as well as some other commentary about how the items may be distributed in the future, think about it like are you willing to spend the cost that is the average supercontainer drops in exchange for the other thing

I'm using my poi calculator to determine the average number of containers needed to complete collection items as well as pity adjusted drop chance for containers, keep in mind that WG will give you 3 free red titan containers and 3 free santiago de cuba containers, which I will account into the cost

If you have such a large collection that you're free to just buy everything, then you can ignore this and get everything if you want, this is mostly for I guess common players who might get around 10000-20000 tokens total, you can visit the whaling site to see how many tokens you'll be able to get

These are averages and your luck may vary but this is probably good for making decisions, if you want you can just ignore my extra commentary and make your own decisions because free will yay

here we go

Kurama - 11,000 tokens VS 88 supercontainers

Kurama (uncommon tier 11 Japanese cruiser)

VS

1.02 premium ships
1318 steel
1318 RB points
87 blue boosters
615 green boosters
1318 signals
3514.4 doubloons
33.2 days of premium
142771 FXP
428314 ECXP
65894 coal

Kurama will become available in 2 patches to just buy for credits, probably 47,500,000 based on other super cruisers, or 39,950,000 with the clan discount, so I don't really advise buying it for the tokens

84.7 Red Steel Titan containers - 8046 tokens VS 64.37 supercontainers (average amount needed to obtain the ship)

Sov. Rossiya (rare tier 9 Soviet battleship)
1423 green boosters
211750 ECXP
67760 FXP
4235000 credits

VS

0.743 premium ships
964 steel
964 RB points
63.6 blue boosters
450 green boosters
964 signals
2570 doubloons
24.3 days of premium
104434 FXP
313302 ECXP
48200 coal

This isn't a bad deal if the ship interests you, but it reminds of of the Somme which is also obtained through a container collection, meaning it's possible the containers will later be sold in the armory for coal, and also I think it's unlikely to be added into supercontainers/satan crates, so if you're not interested in the ship I wouldn't advise getting it to fill out the collection as it probably wouldn't be in the drop pool anyway, but I don't know that for sure it's just a prediction

84.7 Santiago de Cuba containers - 12705 tokens VS 101.64 supercontainers (average amount needed to obtain the commander)

Pascual Cervera y Topete (Spanish unique commander)

VS

1.17 premium ships
1522 steel
1522 RB points
100.5 blue boosters
710 green boosters
1522 signals
4059 doubloons
38.4 days of premium
164900 FXP
494702 ECXP
76108 coal

The price on this one is absolutely brutal. The cost is extremely high and you don't even get other smaller rewards like you do from the other collection. Every other limited time unique commander ended up being offered in the armory for coal a few months later, so I doubt this will be any different. They will probably be sold for 2000 coal each, meaning you could be giving up 1.17 premium ships, tons or resources, boosters, or some of the other offerings in the event for a commander that would be worth only 169,400 coal later. Yes the commander is extremely powerful on the Alvaro de Bazan specifically, but this is just not a good deal to buy right now

50 Blue booster packs - 6250 tokens VS 50 supercontainers

200x Blue boosters

VS

0.577 premium ships
749 steel
749 RB points
49.4 blue boosters
349.4 green boosters
749 signals
1997 doubloons
18.9 days of premium
81120 FXP
243360 ECXP
37440 coal

This is okay value if you specifically really want a lot of blue boosters, but I think supercontainers are generally a better pick here as they also give some blue boosters and a lot of green boosters and all the other stuff, but if you've already maxed out all 130 supercontainers and just want more boosts for basic resources, this isn't a bad deal

If you need to quickly determine the average contents of any other quantity of supercontainer, you can use this supercontainer spreadsheet I made just type in the number of supercontainers in the top left box, it's what I used to calculate all that

Me personally I think I'm going to get the enemy destruction effects containers because they're so cool I mean have you seen "Pink Explosion" 🥺

Every ship in the new pan american destroyer line below tier 10 for some reason has a terrible 0.03 second fuse time on their AP which is their only ammunition, if you are in a destroyer and fight them just sit flat broadside and they will only be able to overpen and their DPM will become about 3 times worse than if you're slightly angled where they will full pen you with their improved ricochet angles

Everyone seems to be trying to slightly angle to these lower tier ships and keeps getting destroyed when they shouldn't be so please stop doing that

This only works if you're in a destroyer and does not work for dealing with the tier 10 the 20 de julio this only works for the lower tiers, to deal with the 20 de julio you want to angle perfectly bow in, and he can still do a bit of damage into your turrets and superstructure, but make it not worth to him to use the reload booster and create a stalemate between the two of you so your teammates can shoot him if you have any, or smoke and retreat if you don't have the means to deal with him as he doesn't have a radar or hydro to catch you, and he might still be spotted for you to get a few free shots on him, and you should never sit in a vulnerable angle for long enough for the funny button to kick in unless you're really stupid

Or just not get spotted if you're like a torp boat or something, these things have 6.2 conceal and are pretty slow even with the speed boost, if you're in a gunboat/hybrid just angle accordingly to the ship and he won't be able to do much

I think the new destroyers are pretty good against battleships and cruisers but their anti DD abilities are only overpowered against very bad DD players with poor knowledge, against good DD players they'll become mediocre at best

You might have thought that the only fire durations were 30 seconds and 60 seconds, but that's not actually the case, there are actually ships with 45 second fires, but most of them are aircraft carriers, but there's ONE surface ship that has 45 second fires, the original large cruiser Graf Spee, and I think there's a good argument to be made to give that to other large cruisers in the game

Graf Spee 💗

For some reason, every other large cruiser (cruiser with 280mm+ main guns) in the game has 60 second fires, you might think this is because Graf Spee has 283mm main guns where most large cruisers are about 305mm+, but that's not entirely true, because Gouden Leeuw, Schill, Admiral Scheer, and Deutschland all have 283mm guns and still 60 second fires, and for some reason smaller caliber cruisers like, Regele Carol I, Johan De Witt, and even Haarlem with its little 203mm guns suffer from 60 second fires (and also Hawaii but fuck Hawaii in particular that ship can keep its 60 second fires)

The problem is that compared to battleships, these ships are pretty large, aren't even more maneuverable than some of the newer battleships, they have less armor and take more damage from the HE straight up before fires, have less HP, usually have less base heal charges, have very short duration DCPs, and worst of all can't even take fire prevention for no reason, and despite all that they keep the exact same 60 second fire duration as full battleships, which means they actually suffer more to fires than the class that's meant to suffer the most to fires

It appears that the fire duration in this game is associated with the ship's size and gun caliber, but guess what, large cruisers are HALFWAY BETWEEN normal cruisers and battleships in terms of those, but for some reason they get the full 60 second fires and not, I dunno, HALFWAY BETWEEN the fire duration of normal cruisers and battleships at 45 seconds? idk, can't have CROOZERS have any reason to be played instead of a battleship, I guess, thanks WG

Battleships tend to have very tough armor and kind of need the long fire duration to give them some vulnerability, whereas even the "tanky" large cruisers still always have overmatchable extremities and often vulnerable citadels (except for Hawaii, once again fuck Hawaii), so it's not like they were impossible to kill if not for the long fires, but instead it just makes them incredibly vulnerable to especially the large amounts of airstrike ships in the game, and also submarines homing torps because battleships are magically given protection from good submarine torpedo homing but these large cruisers with the same maneuverability aren't, so you often need to use your DCP on the ping to not eat the torps, which leaves you open to 60 second perma fires afterwards, probably from a carrier or something, how fun and engaging

There's no logical reason large cruisers should still have 60 second fires, there should be a global buff to all cruisers that currently have 60 second fires to only have 45 second fires, except for Hawaii (fuck Hawaii)

It's definitely a good thing that almost all the mid tier cruisers have some heals now, and it improves the balance of the classes, but what about the individual cruisers that already possessed heals and were balanced around having a consumable that most ships in its class didn't have access to? Some are still pretty decent and only need a small buff, but what about ships like Prinz Eugen whose whole gimmick was being a Hipper with a heal and slightly less DPM and concealment to make up for it, except now Hipper has a heal, right

Not saying that we should go nerf all the cruisers that got heals as that would just put them back to being total punching bags for battleships, I think they're fairly balanced where they are, but some of these other cruisers that didn't get anything out of that update should get at least a small improvement to something to catch them up right

Yes I know the ones that recently got heals only get 2 base charges not 3 but with superintendent 3 vs 4 on a cruiser isn't a huge difference compared to 0 vs 3 which is a massive buff to all the ships that got it

Here's some of my ideas just throwing them out, maybe you have better ideas but the goal is to give the ship some identity of its own again without just turning it into another existing ship

Atago: maybe it can have its torpedoes upgraded to the 12km type93 torpedoes or even just the 10km ones you have on Ibuki that are slightly faster and harder hitting

Prinz Eugen: just give the ship 4 heal charges base like Roon and Hindenburg get instead of 3

Pyotr Bagration: this ship is kind of just a shitty Tallinn without radar now, it was always weak but now even more irrelevant, maybe give it a hefty concealment buff or the Sevastopol heal or all things to make it worth playing at all

San Diego: just ungimp its reload boost to be 50% instead of 33%

Auckland, Harbin, Cataluna, Edinburgh: these are just tech tree ships so they don't need an overhaul but even a small DPM buff to all of them or something wouldn't hurt

There's probably a few more but I'm not all that familiar with all the ships so you can discuss whatever I missed

It appears that not a lot of people seem to know about what this ship even is, probably because it's not a new ship and was only released in gambling lootboxes and it appears to have been overshadowed by some of the other selections, but I think people deserve to know what the ship actually is

I thought the Messina was just an ordinary light cruiser with SAP but looking into it a bit the ship actually has some pretty unique characteristics I didn't expect

First off you actually get both the Italian exhaust smoke but also the German-style 6km hydro, which means you can probably make a lot of interesting plays by combining them, like maybe diving into a cap to deal with a destroyer, but its a very unique combination of consumables and unlike the Kushiro it actually gets them at full strength and not butchered (for some reason Kushiro's exhaust smoke only runs for 30 seconds instead of 40, plus Messina's hydro is 6km)

Also the torpedoes actually deal over 20k alpha damage unlike the pitiful 13k ones the tech tree Italian cruisers get, which means you can actually do some funny yolo plays with the smoke and hydro, only 4 per side isn't the best but enough to deal with most BBs at her tier if they're at least slightly damaged and the angles are usable, the ship also has a base speed of 37 knots which is pretty fast and works well with that kind of occasionally very aggressive playstyle I think

The biggest downside compared to the SAP heavy cruisers is probably the loss of salvo alpha strike, but the DPM is better and the flight time isn't really noticeably worse despite being a smaller caliber, but you do only pen 42mm instead of 54mm which is kind of a problem for a few battleships but you're still good against most T9 BBs and nearly all cruisers

Note that the ship only has SAP as an ammo type, no HE or AP, but the base penetration on the SAP is high enough that this shouldn't come up as a problem too often but it is kind of a weakness of the ship

If you're wondering about the hull, it's basically a standard cruiser hull for her tier, mostly 27 with 25 extremities and a bit of 30 side plating, the citadel is pretty exposed but at least it's 150mm which means you don't get SAP citadeled by anything, and the maneuverability is pretty decent and the HP is respectable enough for a light cruiser

The ship costs 84,000 convoy tokens or 280,000 coal if you're converting that, which is quite a lot cheaper than the T10 ships and only a bit more than the T8 Bismarck 41, but importantly there just aren't a lot of good T9 premium cruisers available in the game right now, and it helps to have a decent pick for ranked or something should it be at T9, as most other T9 premium cruisers tend to be unobtainable, garbage, or both

I would still wait to see what the Rodina is about before making any final decisions, but I hope this helps your considerations

Overview

There's one ship in the game that's been here since the very start, the overall most played ship in the game for many updates. and somehow one that's never received a true premium sidegrade version of itself, everyone's (BBabies excluded) favorite, the Shimakaze!

https://preview.redd.it/0n8mpj3ucmjh1.png?width=250&format=png&auto=webp&s=af8898d287915a51814215240f71a8089ed45f64

This ship will be a tier 10 destroyer based on the 1944 refit of the Japanese destroyer Shimakaze (島風), where the ship was given an improved AA armaments

In terms of gameplay this should function as a sort of tier 10 Asashio to combat the battleship meta without also disrupting cruisers and destroyers

Characteristics

Most of the characteristics will be identical to the base Shimakaze, which includes the 17,900 base HP and concealment and speed and main guns, but the following will be different

Torpedoes

Shimakaze '44 will have the same 15 torpedo tubes as Shimakaze and a base reload time of 150 seconds, but access to 2 kinds of torpedoes it can switch between in combat sort of like the Minegumo to add gameplay depth, with long range standard torpedoes and very short range aggressive torpedoes

Standard torpedoes
Range 20km
Damage 20,967
Speed 67 knots
Detectability 0.9km
Hits BB/CV

Alternative torpedoes
Range 6.5km
Damage 23,767
Speed 77 knots
Detectability 0.7km
Hits BB/CV

AA and ASW

Thanks to the refit, this version of the ship has slightly better AA and ASW armaments, meaning it gets 3 flaks instead of 2 and a bit of midrange AA and 18 depth charges instead of 16, which doesn't do very much but what do you expect

Consumables

Like Asashio, Shimakaze '44 will be able to equip both a smoke generator and torpedo reload booster in separate slots, the TRB has the standard characteristics of 3 charges and 240 cooldown time, as well as a submarine surveillance with a 20 second duration and 7km range, making her the first destroyer to pose any threat to subs whatsoever

Justification for existing

As you can tell, the ship is hyper-specialized at obliterating battleships and kind of awful at everything else, but that's kind of the point. Cruisers are an endangered species, and we don't need more ships that are toxic against them. In addition, the current Holiday Convoy event only brought along one destroyer and it's not a new one, and the only 2 tier 10 premium torpedo boats are Somers and Chateaurenault, neither of which are very good and one hasn't been available in forever, not to mention Shimakaze has never gotten a premium variant (AL Shimakaze doesn't count) despite it being the most popular ship in the game, so if WG wanted to make an attractive ship that steers the balance in the right direction, something like this would be very welcome.

https://preview.redd.it/oi1oxy1njmjh1.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=d421667f999a8ca8666d65bb8c675a94c4f54cda

https://preview.redd.it/23mha2tjhnhh1.png?width=514&format=png&auto=webp&s=c63e363622e124832d2b0078c622190e2df20635

It appears most people just read past it like "oh it's just a support BB probably not that great" but do you fucking SEE this funny button

This is also one of the easiest funny buttons to charge, you don't need to land any shots or anything, all you need to do is use the support consumables TWO times which is just clicking the fucking map

Keep in mind you get THREE of those consumables and they reload in only 180 seconds and you have 8 charges of them in total, you just click and drop it next to ANY allied ship within 15km which means it's extraordinarily unlikely you won't have anyone to use it on

Oh, did I say TWO times I lied I meant ONE time because these can be applied to multiple ships at once and charge your funny button twice too, which fucking means you have access to a funny button with a 50 second uptime that can be reactivated every 60 seconds given 3 consumables that each reload in 180 seconds, it doesn't inconvenience you at all to charge it, and the effect has got to be one of the most demented in the game too

33% increase to shell damage basically makes up for your only 9 guns, because now you have the same effective alpha as a Montana, except with 35% improved dispersion while you can still take the slot 6 American accuracy mod, gives you what is extremely close to DESTROYER DISPERSON on your MONTANA WEIGHT SALVO on a 25 SECOND BASE RELOAD

Keep in mind because this boat has a 25 second reload so with a tiny bit of AR or furious or Halsey confederate or whatever you can basically get 3 whole salvos off with this because the fucking funny button runs for an obscene 50 SECONDS for no reason

And once it runs out you just drop another fucking click box on some random 2 teammates and your demented funny button is INSTANTLY back

All of this on your fucking 37 knot battleship with speed flag that still has improved heal and DCP and it still has better fucking concealment than 8 tier 10 cruisers because fuck you apparently

Oh yeah the support consumables also like, support your team in case you forgot that

But hey it has low HP for its tier and a BIG SUPERSTRUCTURE so it's totally not broken at all right wargaming

https://preview.redd.it/q86kxua5mnhh1.png?width=220&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ac3b1a82cdc673ada0e17aa3125ce3f0954fd97

https://preview.redd.it/8huuccco5jgh1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=7f4d0c9e94a3c34b415f593bf306ef0400023e3c

Why do they stand together like that ahhh 😭🥺

For some reason, some tech tree lines will cost a lot more total XP and credits than others, it seems related to the ship class where battleships will cost slightly more and destroyers will slightly cost less, whether this is WG's terrible excuse to make BBs overpowered I don't know, but they already standardized costs for ships in the armory so I find it strange that this seemingly outdated price set wasn't updated yet

If they change this then you would actually be able to grind literally any line that isn't Harugumo without screwing yourself when doing RB so that would be nice and it would just make more sense to be consistent with how the armory standardized prices across ship classes