Avian's complaint on Naval and its progression/balancing

Hey all, Avian here. This thought has been dripping off the side of my brain for a while now, I’m not really the type of guy to spread out full video essays-worth of balancing ideas for a game in one go but now would be probably be a good time to discuss it.

I’ve rather quickly realized that the general balancing for it is WEIRD when you inspect it for a minute or 2 in-game. The problem? You’ll probably take around 5 years (minutes) to even get into a match so you can have your jaw drop from the barrage of incoming shells, perhaps winning the match by the skin of your teeth and snatching victory from those level 100’s. So you check the various trees for Naval, let’s say Japan (the one I’ve been grinding as of now)

Destroyers…then Light Cruisers…ok…then, heavier Cruis- hey no wait a second- is that a Fletcher-Class Destroyer from the 1960’s in the SAME BR as the Hatsuharu?? A ship that was ordered in 1931??? That’s a 30 year difference!

While we’re lucky that Naval is the only gamemode to have such a noticeable mix’n’match of ships from various eras (as of now, they are drastic but…somewhat manageable) this brings into the question: Is it realistic…and, is it balanced!?

Well, it is, technically balanced, but for how long? when they start adding newer, more advanced ships will these ships have to be stuffed into 4.7 and such because “their destroyers”? Now is the time to improve and fix upon it before we start getting copypaste ships and such, so with all that rambling aside…let’s go onto it.
oh and uh, yeah it ain’t too realistic, mimimi muh realism mimimi

Alright, Ships are lazily placed in BR’s (and therefore Era’s) they shouldn’t be in and without any good reason, how do we solve this?

This is a very easily solution.

STEP ONE!: FIX THESE BR’S!..But not by adding new ones! ;)
nono we’re not adding more BR’s for Naval! Calm down

Naval’s problems are currently deep in the roots, the system. One of these issues is the unorthodox progression system it has made up on its own. You’ll start with small ships such as Destroyers, you’ll grind them out and then go to Cruisers, and then you’ll get to Battleships (ditto for Coastal, tiny toy boats to more impresive Sub-Chasers to Frigates).

…Do you grind fighters, for medium aircraft like CAS, to tactical bombers, to strategic bombers? Nope, we don’t! So why is it like this for Naval? Why do we need this railroaded tree? This is what I mean by root problems, it’s a very fundamental thing that the trees in this game are seperated by what kind of vehicles your looking to grind, Naval however forces you on a set path.

So, the simple fix is just, making the Naval tree normal. Instead of this “bigger is better” mentality, simply split battleships away from Destroyers, and of course Cruisers too, have them be seperate lines- and then don’t forget Coastal! Of course we have to split Gunboats from Frigates and other such smaller tugs too.


A very basic example for seperate ship lines, keeping Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships and other such things would make the grind much smoother too, being able to choose what you’d wanna play today…y’know, for fun. (and of course, “le realism” which I’ll probably repeat at nauseum.)

And uh, that’s kind of it really. Assuming I grow a pair and get confident on suggesting stuff, I’ve got other, more wacky ideas but I don’t wanna induce any fainting in the audience, so that’s gonna be it for now, thanks for reading.

p.s: one of those less wacky ideas would just be fleshing out this seperate line idea, feel free to dicuss how balancing things such as battleships or cruisers in earlier tiers for this idea here, i do feel as if dreadnoughts could be a little quirky if they were able to be unlocked pretty early and played in earlier tiers, i have a bit of a solution but that’d be on well, wackier side, but yeah yadayada i’m done here

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The BR compression in Naval is also bonkers.

The power spikes you get from even 0.3 increases is insane, I remember going from whatever it was straight to Atlanta, and the level of power of that cruiser was mind blowing.

In both air and ground, you can expect some sort of competitiveness even up to -2.0 BRs below at most BRs (below jets at least). Not the case in Naval, the difference between a 4.0 and a 5.0 is insane.

Also, top tier coastal. Frigates and stuff are running god damn SAMs and stuff while fighting mid WW2 aircraft and early war bluewater destroyers. Its really dumb.

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You playing US Bluewater and Germany Coastal or you screwed even more.
My general advice - avoid Naval, it will never be fixed (just like the rest of the game)

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So to put this simply for every time this gets brought up: Because Naval tree isn’t easily balanced and the heaviest hitter will almost always determine the match in terms of combat. Unlike Air Battles, where bombers have their job to do (even if they get clapped by everything else), Attackers can either ground pound or act as heavy fighters, and fighters being a jack of all trades; or in Ground Battles where a light tank can be viable fighting against medium or even heavy tanks with the right positioning, Naval has no such nuance. You are a battleship and your guns absolutely can - and will! - slap cruisers and destroyers out of the water and your secondaries/tertiaries will turn any coastal boat into a Swiss cheese with none of the pleasure of eating it. So, therefore, Naval has the incentive to arrange their BR from the weakest firepower to the strongest. IRL gets around this situation by the way of limiting the type of ships present per battle and teamwork; both of which won’t happen in WT in any meaningful way, especially if you get multiple spawn.

That being said, yes, it is a common complaint for us Naval players that the BR compression we have right now is the worst in the game and it would go a long way if Gaijin took the time to decompress it and spread out aircraft BRs too so we won’t be facing Cold War+ Jets anytime soon.

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true, i do see how silly it’d be to have battleships in the same tiers as smaller ships around their time, since there wouldn’t be any limitation to how many could be on a team other than “you wouldn’t club a poor seal, would you!?!?!?”, i would, and well, probably could expand on this idea, but it probably wouldn’t be wise to ramble about it here.

Buuuut yeah, the easiest solution is just solving the compression lmao (anything stated after that from me is a pipedream), curse Gaijin and the overwhelming urge to not do decently easy improvements >:v

The compression issue can be summ upped as next loop:

  • poorly designed gamemode results in = low Naval player count
  • low Naval player count = forces to have as least 0.3 BRs spread as possible (to have less queue time)
  • compression (too tight BRs) = even worse Naval experience
  • “the loop has looped”
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