Any World of Warships players here?

[Riceball]

Just wanted to see if anyone else here is playing World of Warships besides me? I'm currently playing on the US servers in an Omaha class cruiser, I've played with Japanese destroyers and the South Carolina and so far I'm liking cruisers the best. I find that destroyers are too fragile for my taste and I always seem to run into the middle of the opposing team in them too. So far, having only played the SC, I find battleships way too slow in every aspect for my likings; of course it doesn't help that the SC has really short ranged guns (for a battleship) taking away one of the prime advantages of a battleship which is its long range guns.

So far, my best games have been 3 kills, typically a destroyer and a cruiser and/or battleship. My last game I only got one kill but I survived the match and I also managed to shoot down 8 planes, I normally only manage 1 or 2 in a game, and the best part of it was that my one kill was one of the enemy carriers. If there's one thing that I really enjoy killing in this game it's carriers although I've only managed to sink 2 in my ~month of playing. What normally happens is if I actually manage to spot the enemy carrier I'm too far to reach it to even get a single shot in before my teammates sink it.

Anybody else play? If you want to team up let me know, I'm on as Riceball01 and I'd love to go in as a division with anybody here. I'm not the best of players but I do have my days and if we were to team up I'd do my best to stick with you. That's actually my preferred play style, I like staying close other cruisers and esp. like staying near battleships, I do my best when I'm around other teammates, I almost always get sunk when I'm out there by myself.

 

[SpyderDan]

I've been playing since open beta. I'm a BB captain, myself, currently running an Iowa-class. It was a long grind to get to the Iowa, but well worth it. Higher tiers play fairly differently, so you really can't judge by the performance of the ships in the early tiers. You certainly can't judge USN BBs by the South Carolina. It's a completely different ballgame by the time you get to the New Mexico class, at tier VI.

The highest tiers can get very expensive, even with a premium account. The game is designed to make it nearly impossible to play at the highest tiers without premium. A bad game in my Iowa can cost 150k+ silver for the repair bill. I'm happy if I can just break even. I only run my Iowa for a few matches each night, but play my Tirpitz and Warspite (lower tiers) to make money to support my Iowa.

I could run with you in my Warspite. My handle is DeltaEchoBravo.

 

[karmajay]

I've been playing for a short while. Just started to get into Tier 5. Yeah the D. Carolina is a horrible ship. Guns shoot everywhere and it takes half the time to get to a battle! Fun game but I'm sure (like SpyderDan said) they make you pay in the upper tiers.

 

[Riceball]

I'm only at Tier 5 right now and I'm not too sure that I want to progress much beyond it since I'm pretty happy with the Omaha right now, I might go up to Tier 6 and get the Cleveland but that's later on down the line for now. What I might do is experiment with DDs a bit more, I've had only limited success with DDs so far but I might grind my way up to Tier 4 and get the Isokaze, which I hear is a great DD.

 

[Riceball]

I had another good game last night, I decided to dust off my Wakakaze having been playing my Omaha exclusively since I got it and the Phoenix before it, and got 3 kills. Not that impressive I realize but for me 3 kills in a game is good and something that I've only done 3 times so far, I just don't have my aim down well enough to consistently get those citadel hits and kill other ships off fast. Anyhow, 2 of the kills were Wyomings(?) or whatever the Tier V US battleship is and surprisingly, a destroyer. What's surprising about the destroyer kill was that it, along with the BBs, was that it was with a torpedo, if you've ever played a DD you know how fast and maneuverable they are and how easy it is to dodge torpedoes in them. I must have caught him unaware, looking the wrong way or something because I just fired it off thinking that it wouldn't hit, I meant it more as distraction than anything else since, being in a Japanese DD with terrible guns, I don't like engaging in gun duels with other DDs, or any other ship for that matter, it's torps or nothing for me.

 

[SpyderDan]

The tier V USN BB is New York class. Wyoming is tier IV.

IJN DDs are all about torps. At high tiers, they are very dangerous opponents. The Tier X Shimakaze is highly feared for the "torp walls" they unleash. DDs are all about stealth, so really the only time you should ever be using your guns is if you know you are already spotted (nearby ship or plane, and there is a commander skill that will notify you of this), you don't have torps ready to fire, and you want to set some decks on fire with some HE rounds. The strategy there is to get your opponent to pop his repair so it is on cooldown when you torp him, causing him to get more flooding damage.

 

[Riceball]

The tier V USN BB is New York class. Wyoming is tier IV.

IJN DDs are all about torps. At high tiers, they are very dangerous opponents. The Tier X Shimakaze is highly feared for the "torp walls" they unleash. DDs are all about stealth, so really the only time you should ever be using your guns is if you know you are already spotted (nearby ship or plane, and there is a commander skill that will notify you of this), you don't have torps ready to fire, and you want to set some decks on fire with some HE rounds. The strategy there is to get your opponent to pop his repair so it is on cooldown when you torp him, causing him to get more flooding damage.

It was a Wyoming that I managed to sink, for some reason I thought it was Tier V. Still, any time I can sink a BB in my tin can I'm a happy gamer.

I know about the no shooting in a DD unless absolutely necessary or in special circumstances, a friend of mine who introduced me to the game gave me that same bit of advice. I take it to the extreme and pretty much never use my guns in my DDs, mainly because the Tier II & III Japanese DD's guns are so slow they're almost never in place when I need them and it takes too long for them to get into place, I swear Japanese DD guns move about as fast as a South Carolina's turret. At any rate, what I prefer to do is to launch torps from just outside of detection range and then turn tail and run to make sure that I stay outside of detection range, it's tricky though since there's only a .9km buffer between max torpedo range and detection range in the Wakatake and I think it's the same in the Isokaze. That's one of the reasons I prefer to avoid enemy DDs as much as possible, they detect me which in turn allows their big friends to see me and they start shooting at me. Alternately, they (the DD) start shooting at me and when up against some of those spamamatic gun armed DDs it's not much fun.

I think that my next goal in the game is to eventually get a CV kill in a destroyer, I've done it like 2 or 3 times in my cruisers so far but no such luck in my DD. For some reason, I just like going after CVs, almost to the point that I'll ignore everything else. Luckily, I'm not that stupid and if a CV has a CA/CL or BB escorting it or just nearby I'll forget about the carrier and target the escort or try find another way around since I know I'm going to get pounded if I ignore the CV's escorts.

One thing that I find that I'm getting a little better at now is hitting DDs in my Omaha, I'm still not great at it but I'm having more success at it now. Although I hate going against destroyers because they're nimble little buggers and their torpedoes always make me nervous, I know that they're death to BBs since a BBs guns are typically too slow to keep up with them. That's why I'll always target a DD whenever I see on skulking around near a BB on my team, gotta be a team player and help out my teammates.

 

[SpyderDan]

Wow, you are actually seeing CVs with escorts? I never see that, at least in the higher tiers. CVs always seem to be off by themselves, near a corner of the map, or hiding behind an island, but almost always alone. Then again, I'm hardly ever seeing CVs at all in higher tiers these days. They did a bunch of balancing in recent patches that upset the CV captains, but I think it was justified. The "sky cancer" did get pretty bad at the highest tiers, and that totally might have been historically realistic, but it doesn't make for good game balance.

Sneaking up on BBs and CVs is totally your job as a DD. I get get killed by torps more often than anything else. It used to be air-dropped torps from the CVs more often, but these days it's that Shimakaze torp wall that comes out of nowhere, and I can never seem to avoid all of them. CVs are easy kills for BBs, of course, if you can catch them. That's one of the few times I will switch from AP to HE rounds, and get that flight deck burning so they can't launch planes.

Screening BBs is more of the cruiser role, but good on you for doing it. I think it is totally a viable tactic for a DD to screen for BBs. A good BB captain can "tank" for friendlies that are screening him, being the big slow-moving target, soaking up the damage, and allowing you to get in to an advantageous position to launch a torpedo spread.

 

[Riceball]

I kind or sort of screen for cruisers and BBs in my DD, I like sneaking up on the enemy while they're engaged with other members of my time to launch my torps. But that's not always an ideal tactic because I'm still new to DDs and the timing of my torp launches are still off at times so I've had friendlies run into my tops at times. My worst was last night where I accidentally hit a friendly with all 4 of my torps, I fired the first two and by the time that I realized that they were going to hit I had already just launched my second pair, I felt really bad and that guy probably thought I was a total idiot for firing on him. I did apologize for it and other accidents like rammings although I don't know if the other player actually sees it or know that it was addressed to them.

Your comment on sneaking up on CVs has inspired me to try doing that the next time I play. I think I'm going to go full speed hug the sides of the maps and go deep into enemy territory to look for CVs. Point value aside, I just have this thing for hunting CVs and I can be on the losing team and get sunk first in the game but will come out of it happy if I managed to sink a CV first.

On the subject of torps, the torp walls that I seem to run into these days are from bombers, they have a nasty habit of launching a wall of torps at close range before I have time to react. I haven't run into that too much, fortunately, but I've been sunk 2 or 3 times because of that. But I know what you mean about ship launched torpedo walls, I've seen some DDs practically spam torps and I can't wait until I can move up enough tiers to get a DD that can do something like that. The Iso isn't bad at 6 torps but I'm sure that the higher tiers probably have more and/or faster loading launchers although the speed on the Iso's torps does seem like they're pretty nasty.

 

[SpyderDan]

The thing with the air-dropped torpedoes is that 1) they are much smaller, and do about half the damage of DD torps, 2) you can always see the torpedo bombers coming from miles out, and 3) good AA can dramatically mitigate the planes by either destroying them before they drop or causing them to be inaccurate.

The Shimakaze, on the other hand, can sneak up, hide behind smoke, and has three launchers with 5 torps each. It starts off with the 67kt Type 93 torpedoes w/ 15km range, and the upgrade is 20km. The detect range is 2.1km, and the reload is really slow, but used strategically they are like super deadly torpedo snipers. Especially with less (or zero) CV players around in the higher tiers lately, the DDs have a much easier time sneaking around without getting spotted from the air.

They very much designed this game to be easy to get into, and easy to progress, AT FIRST. Above tier V, it starts to get harder quickly, and at the highest tiers mistakes become very costly. It's exciting, though!

Here's a short and sweet video of a Shimakaze single-handedly sinking a Yamato, without getting a scratch:

 

[karmajay]

Yes, I've just started to level up the non US stuff. At the beginning I was wondering how people were firing torpedoes with out me seeing them since the US range is like 5.5 - 6 km. I had no idea other countries' DDs had a longer range!

 

[Riceball]

Yes, I've just started to level up the non US stuff. At the beginning I was wondering how people were firing torpedoes with out me seeing them since the US range is like 5.5 - 6 km. I had no idea other countries' DDs had a longer range!

Just be grateful that they're at least actually reliable unlike real US torpedoes for good part of WW II, if they modeled them like the real thing then at the lower tiers you'd be launching your torps from close range only to watch them bounce off of your intended target because they failed to detonate.

If you like DDs and torpedoes then I highly recommend playing Japanese DDs, their guns suck because they're slow to turn and reload but their torpedoes are pretty nasty. At Tier III & IV they only have a 7km range but your own detection range is 6.1km and from what I understand it only gets better from there. I'm still trying to get the hang of playing DDs myself but I just love how you take out a massive BB in a lowly tin can, it's also nice that you don't really have to worry about the tier system too much since everything can take you out and you in turn can just as easily take everything out regardless of tier.

On the subject of DDs, I've started to actually use my guns a little more on my Waka, I've been paying more attention to what the other DDs in a match are like and I realized that, in most cases, I'm not actually outgunned and I don't need to worry about enemy DDs as much as I though I did. Apparently, at the lower Tiers gatling DDs aren't around and my Waka actually has a better arty rating than most other DDs I'm up against. I still rely primarily on my torps but if I'm spotted by an enemy DD I'm not so afraid of shooting with my guns as I was before, just last night I actually sunk another DD with my guns as well as a St. Louis. The St. Louis was pretty much on its last legs and it was the last enemy ship left in the game so I figured I had nothing to lose, so I shot a salvo of HE and hit and sunk it, winning the game for my team. In hindsight, it probably wasn't as much of a gamble as I thought it was since at 9.something km range on my guns I probably outranged the St. Louis or would at least be out of his gun range quickly enough since I think I was heading away from it at the time.

 

[karmajay]

Yeah, I actually play multiple ships because as we all know it isn't typical for you to make it through a whole game every time. So I play other ships while some are locked in other battles.

 

[Riceball]

Yeah, I actually play multiple ships because as we all know it isn't typical for you to make it through a whole game every time. So I play other ships while some are locked in other battles.

I do the same, I'm usually alternating between my Omaha and the Wakatake, soon to be replaced by the Isokaze, but I'm primarily a cruiser player but I am starting to really like playing (IJN) destroyers. I'm very meh so far on BBs since the first US BB is the POS South Carolina, a ship that I can actually out range in my Phoenix and Omaha, match in a St. Louis and come close in a Wakatake. I'm not sure that I have the patience to grind through the SoCar to get the better US BBs, if I do decide to get serious about BBs I might try hand at going through the Japanese line although some of their BBs are really battlecruisers and on the squishy side when compared to a proper BB.

 

[Blackbirdcd]

I'm addicted! Blackbirdcd there myself.

So far I'm enjoying the Japanese and US Destroyers the most, and I've had my best games (by far) in the Tier IV Isokaze.

Also running up the battleship and cruiser lines too. I don't play a lot of games but when I find one that clicks (like World of Warships) they kind of eat my brain for a while.

 

[Blackbirdcd]

A few thoughts on Japanese destroyers:

- The guns aren't nearly as good as the US destroyers but they're not that bad on a few of them. The Isokaze and Minikaze have good guns, but their reload time and rotation speed isn't great. However I've sunk a lot of other ships just with the guns on these. Further up the guns are less appealing (Mutsuki and Hashedate just aren't as effective as they're on two turrets). But the Fubuki has three turrets with two guns each, unless you get the final upgrade hull where they pull an entire turret for more AA guns (WTF? who would take that upgrade??). So my Fubuki runs with the "B" hull and the guns are good.

The Isokaze and Minikaze have 7km torpedo ranges but their torps are faster than the 10Km + options higher up. This makes a BIG difference, slow torps are far to easy to spot and dodge. Even if you take the new ship commander "faster torpedo" skill, giving up 20% of their range, they're still not that fast.

When you pop smoke to hide after being spotted, STOP quickly and reverse direction. The bad guys usually fire into your last seen path and direction.

You can be too close to your target for torpedoes to work. The arming distance isn't as long as air-launched torpedoes but a few times I've gone right next to an enemy and had the torpedoes pass them right by without exploding. Annoying!

For the US Destroyers, the Farragut is their best offering until the Benson. I thought I'd like the Mahan but it's just nerfed enough in the right ways to be less effective compared to the others.

I'd like to go up the RUS line next.

 

[Riceball]

I just had one of my best games so far last night, not in terms of kills, only sunk 2 ships, but total XP. I managed to survive the game, despite being on the wrong side of the map, I was on the Straits map (I think) with 3 cap points and I was on the south western side of the map and the majority of the enemy team was there too while the majority of my team was in the east. I actually managed to survive the initial encounter with the bulk of the enemy team, despite being in an Omaha and outgunned by everything but the DDs and the CVs, until reinforcements arrived. By the end of the game I had managed to sink one of the enemy CVs, and a DD with one volley (I'm sure he was wounded from before, I might even had gotten a few shots in on him earlier, because I didn't get a Kraken(?) award) and capturing 2 of the 3 bases as well. That single volley kill against that DD was so lucky for me, I'm pretty sure he was trying to line up for a torpedo run but being an American DD (Clemson I think) he was probably too far away but I wasn't thinking about that at the time, just that it was close to end of the game and that he was one of the last enemy ships still afloat and if I didn't sink him soon I was going to get some torpedoes coming my way.

In the end after it was all said and done, I got several thousand in XP (much more than I usually get), 2 caps, 1 citadel hit, something like 63 hits overall, shot down 4 planes, and had the second highest score on my team. Best of all, I survived the match with about ~50% health, most of the damage was from a dive bomber I think, I was lucky in that I didn't get pounded as badly by the enemy ships as I thought I was since all but one of their cruisers outgunned me. That and I sunk a CV, I do love sinking CVs above pretty much every other class of ship in the game, there's something that I just find very fun about sinking a fat target that can barely shoot back.

 

[Blackbirdcd]

Great job! I always seem to flame-out in my Omaha.

You get a LOT of points for capping, more if you do it solo. Which is nice because a lot of teams seem to be allergic to grabbing the flags. I've had some of my best games by capping, no kills, and often I end up in the top three for my team.

 

[Riceball]

I think I capped solo both times, which probably accounts for my score. I normally don't go for the cap, at least not in my cruisers because I'm too afraid of getting outgunned since I still haven't quite mastered gunnery techniques that allow me to do max damage with each hit. I go for the cap in my DDs occasionally but only if it looks safe to do so, I tend to tend to run in large clusters of the enemy team with a DD out in front whenever I go rushing out in front of the rest of my team, it almost never fails to happen. When that happens it usually results in a short game for me. In short, I'm not averse to going for the cap, I'm just very selective about when I do so.

 

[SpyderDan]

Congrats on the CV kill Riceball. Those are tasty!

I was having a good night myself, in my Iowa:



No CVs in the game, but good match making, with 4 BBs each side. Even caps the whole game. Everybody stayed pretty much together on both sides (no sky cancer!), and it was a great slug fest. I sunk a North Carolina, an Atago, and an Admiral Hipper. Tanked for a Fletcher, who killed a Kagero that was coming after me, and he torped a Nagato that I softened up while I drew his fire. Also shot down the North Carolina's spotter plane. Would have had another kill on a Colorado, had the match lasted 2 seconds longer. He lost his situational awareness (probably in the artillery view too long) and ran into a sinking ship, stopping him dead while I had 6 16" AP shells in the air, with tight dispersion, dropping straight on his citadel, but the match ended just before they would have surely would have sunk him.

We won, I survived with 50% health (after a few damage control parties), and came out 150k credits in the black on the Iowa for once!