HMS Lion - A brief review

Machinery of War Discussion Navy
1

I only have this ship about half spaded, so that’s my only caveat here.

Guns:

Remember all the posts about British guns being way less accurate than they were in reality? You won’t need them here. These are the most accurate guns in naval at the moment. You will hit what you aim for. Great for sniping shell rooms and magazines. Turret rotation is slow even fully upgraded, so plan your targeting and turns ahead of time.

The shells are rather slow, so you’ll be going through a lot of deck armor. The explosive filler is good, and does a lot of post pen damage. It’s no Soviet fantasy shell, but it does good work. The short fuse delay (.025 seconds) and high sensitivity (26mm) make for very few overpens, and work well against even light cruisers and destroyers.

The secondaries are standard 8x5.25 inch per side and get HE as standard with SAP and HEVT as upgrades. The HEVT proximity fuse gives you a great counter to planes. Almost 3kg of explosive mass makes short work of anything not getting the broken bomber damage model.

Short range AA consists of 6 octuple 40mm guns. These are some of the best in the game for anything getting close.

Armor:

All or nothing armor with a thick 381mm belt makes angling very effective. Turrets and barbettes are well armored with the same 381mm thickness on the turret faces.

As a nice bonus, the shell room is below the waterline and the magazine is deep below the waterline, so magazine detonations from direct hits are rare. They also benefit from being surrounded by fuel tanks on the sides and 254mm to 304mm bulkheads on the fore and aft sections.

Speed and maneuverability:

A 31 knot (57kph/35mph) top speed makes this an extremely fast battleship. It’s turning (currently unupgraded for me) is slow, but should be adequate when spaded. Acceleration and deceleration are good, and allows for you to throttle juke shots effectively at moderate to long ranges.

Crew:

At 1,680 souls, it is lower than most ships except the Soyuz and the Clemenceau at top tier. This is mostly due to the fewer AA mounts. It hurts survivability somewhat, so constantly repairing secondary and AA damage might not be in your best interest.

Overall, the HMS Lion is a great addition, and one that British mains will be quite happy with. It’s not an Iowa or Soyuz, but will probably stay at 8.7 when those two move up in BR eventually. It’s definitely competitive at top tier. You don’t have the DPM of those ships, but you can make the most of your guns with extremely accurate shots, and survive the battle with careful angling.

5 Likes
2

If you don’t mind me snooping around your stats, both your K/D and K/B in the Lion seem to be either better or roughly on par with the Soyuz/Iowa, which is certainly encouraging

1 Like
3

I don’t mind at all. A few of those deaths are just me J’ing out to get in a different ship or another match, but it does hold up well. Higher DPM would be nice, but it’s certainly nothing to complain about.

4

So far, with my brief playtime with her; she loses sections way too fast.

Turrets are sluggish even with the upgrade and her armor does little to actually protect her magazines and shellrooms.

However, I have yet to actually die to a magazine detonation. So that’s a plus.

Edit

Like, any sort of fire from an enemy battleship just causes you to almost immediately start losing sections.

1 Like
5

Sounds like she has the same issue as Rodney in that regard. I really hate that system and how random it is

6

It’s even worse when you look at how Lion is sectioned. There’s two non tip bow sections before the turrets.

…

7

Think we had that on Rodney when she was new and you could be easily sunk by destroyers

8

I’d be fine with Lion being glass if she had 40.6cm super charged but she doesn’t.

Her AA doesn’t seem to lead properly either (need to test more).

As it is, there’s not much point to go past 6.0 Britain - or even 5.3 - unless you really care about the ships and/or want to flex.

Nagato is straight up better at .4 BR lower.

9

I’ve had some really big issues recently on other ships like Renown for that too in NEC

So it might not be ship specific issue

I’ve been enjoying Barham/Renown recently and picking at spading the 6.3/6.7s.

But yeah, 7.7+ is doa and it’s a shame they added a premium KGV that is DOA instead of a premium heavy cruiser like HMS Exeter

10

You know it’s bad when your top tier line up is a 7.7, 8.3 and 8.7 and two of them are overBRed against actually good ships (Nagato class, Tosa)