The unsinkability changes yes, which is why I wasn’t quoting that part; they need major revisions or to not be implemented.
The HE kinetic pen addition, torpedo damage change, and accuracy buffs are all amazing though, and together with a bunch of ships I’ve been hoping for, this patch is shaping up to be one of my favourites in ages, especially for Naval. (Again, aside from the unsinkability stuff, which needs major work.)
No way! Accuracy fixes, at last? YAY!
It was comically tiring to only land 2-3 shells per salvo because the rest fell on a 300m radius around the enemy ship because they have worse accuracy than a funfair shotgun.
Yep, I’m excited for being able to hit what I’m aiming at
This is one of the main reasons why I left Naval, alongside with the low rewards, hahah.
Spending 6 minutes firing salvos at a ship with impeccable precision at near point-blank only to get 2-3 hits per salvo, most of which hit the superstructure/hollow areas of the hull, ended up getting tiring.
This major update addresses those two issues, so I am looking forward to Naval now. Shame that Strasbourg’s event came BEFORE that update, and not after… I would have grinded for it if it had been the other way around!
2 or 3 hits per salvo? What hacks are you using? At any kind range my average is like 1. 🤣
But yes, puts me off playing much too
And yeah, I would have grinded it if it was after alongside the Warspite grind
The low accuracy wouldn’t bother me in and of itself if we didn’t have such insanely fast repair times. But if we’re going to be able to repair massive holes in the hull or exploded turrets faster than some guns can reload, then we absolutely need the very best accuracy possible.
I have mixed feelings about repairs, hahah.
It is very often that for some reason the entire enemy team decides to gang-focus on me, and I spend the whole match doing nothing but repair till I die, so it’s extremely frustrating already.
And I am not exaggerating, observe; this was my last match, a few days ago.
(And yes, I know, Scharnhorst bad and all, but that’s besides the point, since this happens to me when I am playing America and Japan as well.)
Hmm, if it’s happening to you “very often” then there are probably a number of things you could do/change to reduce this (I don’t tend to encounter this much, even on the open sea maps).
Switch AI gunners to AA-only. Most players tend to (rather reasonably) focus on and/or switch focus to enemies who attack them, so having your AI battleship/cruiser secondaries land one or two useless hits is effectively just drawing aggro for no reason. This goes for manual shooting too; sometimes it’s better to leave enemies alone.
Try to target enemies already engaged with a teammate. Goes for all modes (especially Air RB), and most definitely applies in Naval too.
Never spawn on the initial countdown. Players and bots tend to go for the first appealing target they see, and then tunnel vision focus on it pretty much exclusively (the way we’re basically forced to live in bino view doesn’t help with this). See where your team spawns, then choose a spawn accordingly.
Never be the closest to the enemy team and/or away from your “cluster” on your own. “Obvious” targets always draw an order of magnitude more fire, so sticking around your team in a way that makes you “uninteresting” or “less appealing” does wonders. It’s amazing how any time I sail out away from my team, I will suddenly get massively targetted within half a minute at most, even if I’d basically received no attention previously.
I do all of those, but still. :/
It doesn’t happen from the start; it happens 2-3 minutes after I spawn, and I already spawn last, etc. Also have AI AA gunners only, remain far past the cluster and stay behind, etc, but still…
Yeah, sometimes it just happens anyway. :P
It would definitely be nice if, especially in situations like this, the return damage you dealt was a bit more “permanent”, as at least then your last stand would more tangibly benefit your team by leaving the enemies that kill you vulnerable to your other teammates. It’s one of the things I love most about Air RB, the lack of in-combat repairs (and lack of respawns) that makes any damage dealt meaningful and worthwhile.
You need to look at the numbers in the datamine, it’s beyond a fix and pretty excessive. The old 12” vertical dispersion modifier was .38, which made for an accurate gun, while the 15” and 16” were .4, which was fairly inaccurate. Guns between those sizes tended to be a .39 with a few exceptions, which was nothing amazing but was fairly reliable. That very small 0.02 had massive implications for accuracy. The new large gun modifier is 0.34, twice the old difference between a 12” and 16”, while 14” guns generally now get a vertical dispersion of 0.28 but sometimes as low as 0.26 in the case of the 14”/50. It’s well beyond an accuracy fix and is going to be a massive survivability nerf to all top tier ships that will enforce an even harder meta, giving the 6.0-6.7 br ships even less of a chance against the top line monsters than they have currently, even without the new breach mechanic.
Sounds good to me, given (as was just talked about) the current repair mechanics are rather insane and the accuracy buff should help mitigate that to a degree. And repairs aside, better precision is more appealing anyway.
This is a huge part of why I prefer fights between 4-to-7-ish kilometres, as you’re close enough to actually land hits where you want to land them, instead of just hoping to maybe hit a random part of the ship, have half your shells miss, and whatever damage you did be repaired before you can meaningfully hit it again.
This is a terrible mechanic in its current form! The meaning of armor is completely lost. Also, ships with a high rate of fire will become even better against ships with a low rate of fire and good armor. I will be able to sink any battleship with HE shells from a cruiser by shooting at it ABOVE the armor belt! In this case, it may not even lose its crew, but it will still be destroyed
Scharnhorst will become even more effective because it has the best rate of fire. It will simply destroy enemy compartments before its opponents
It’s going far beyond letting you hit your shots, it’s going to give a lot of battleships survivability comparable to destroyers even without the breach mechanic. You are going to be able to heavily abuse the crew module mechanic with these accuracy values by using single ranging shot and walking shells down a ship. I doubt it will take more than a couple salvos worth of shells to kill most ships.
I just realised something.
What recently changed in naval? More bots.
What do those bots fire? HE largely.
That plink plink as a bot cruiser fires on you endlessly is gonna get deadly very quickly with these changes.
I already do this very often (with full-turret ranging shots), though due to the poor accuracy it’s not nearly as effective as it really should be.
One of WT’s best and most distinctive gameplay features is the module-based damage system, but between the poor accuracy and fast repairs, it doesn’t really factor into Naval as much as it should, at present.
I got a chance to look at the damage mechanics in test drive and I have to say I definitely dislike them. Being able to automatically sink a ship by destroying two compartments is very arbitrary. I’m still not a huge fan of unrepairable breaches but they’re better than this. It would be nice to have changes to the unrepairable breaches mechanic though so they’re not as much of a slow death sentence on some ships, talking generally here. But perhaps make them more consistent, and possibly deadlier flooding with sustained fire.
Every time I’ve tried turret ranging I’ve found it to be a worst of both worlds approach that doesn’t get many of the strengths of salvo or single but keeps most of the weaknesses. Single ranging however has been the strongest way of shooting for years with the exception of the occasional bug like when barbette armor wasn’t working and you could splash the magazine with external HE hits, and is the last thing in the game that needs a buff. If this update goes live in anything resembling its current form it will be deeply unpopular just like every other update that has nuked ship survivability. It will make the game less fun to play while making the highest dpm ships even more oppressive to the less capable ones that have to fight them.
Also with the exception of the handful of ships with both a high RoF and many turrets, such as Atlanta, which won’t actually fire every gun with the single-gun ranging option lol.
A faster TTK objectively shrinks the gap between things with different DPS, and makes DPS itself less of a factor; this is simply inherent due to math, and is true across every single video game ever.
The slower a game’s TTK, the more DPS matters.
If you think Atlanta is bad with single ranging I don’t know what to tell you. It’s the best way to play it, you just hold down left mouse once the first guns reload giving you an uninterrupted stream of shells with a larger half salvo every few seconds. It’s extraordinarily oppressive and I have no idea why it was allowed to be 5.3 for so long.
The new breach system is turning every ship into a glass cannon by more or less giving them Rodney’s hull durability and breach issue. Apparently the least popular modeling decision of last patch was actually a prototype for a new game system, who knew. This system isn’t going to help any of the off meta ships, as they are generally off meta due to poor killing power. US destroyers are going to be even more powerful with the HE change, as they effectively gain a SAP shell with 3.2kg of filler. Spammy light cruisers will be back to invalidating slower heavy cruisers and probably a large number of battleships. The current 7.0 monsters are getting a massive relative buff against lower br battleships, with the main difference being every peer fight might now be a guaranteed trade while they might have to start fearing uptiered 6.0 cruisers like it’s 2022 again. AP on many ships is likely to become useless if the breach mechanic goes live as is even with the dispersion changes since I’m not sure magazine fishing will be worth it when you can guarantee a kill through hull breaching inside two minutes. They’re making a series of bad changes that are going to compound with each other to be worse than the sum of their parts.
