First of all there’s no example in this game to artificially nerf a great part of a vehicle’s armour due to balancing needs. Second, as Steilhandgrenate had pointed out, there’s no point to do anything regarding AP shells to counter Scharnhorst. Theoretically the 320mm belt plus the 105mm turtle back equals to over 1000mm protection which is impenetrable at point blank even for Yamato’s 460mm guns. There’re many other ways to adjust the DM to reduce Scharnhorst’s effectiveness, but buffing AP shells is certainly not the answer.
IMO there are several different aspects why the Scharnhorst feels OP and I would argue that some of them are making it truly OP.
I would say that it really isn’t as unkillable as it was before but still is very much stomping most of the games.
- The turtle back armor layout is insanely meta right now making Scharnhorst basically immune to AP. @HK_Reporter I have question would the armor be penetrable from let’s say from 20-30km by Hood/Alaska/Kron/Idea?
- Many players unlearned to use HE shell and don’t know that the Scharnhorst is so “weak” against it. And they also learned that fighting Scharnhorst is futile so many teams will ignore Scharnhorst and just hope it won’t target them.
- The BR compression the lower BR battleships have basically no way how to effectively deal with Scharnhorst since their HE is weak and doesn’t deal that much damage. But this also applies to some other top tier ships which are well armoured. But for example the Kron, Alaska have much weaker armor so at least close ranges they are penetrable by lower BR battleships.
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Just for the record - I added the aforementioned note about HE to the Wiki (pending approval by the wiki mods at the time of writing).
If they introduced the ship that had no counter and kept it in that situation for 2 years now then perhaps it’s the time to reconsider.
Spot how no other ship was added to the game that has “theoretically 1000mm protection”. Most peak at ~half that. A fundamental balancing failure on Gaijin’s side.
We should be moving towards resolution rather than making up excuses. It’s been 2 years of excuses.
Sure. And while balancing swivels back and forth, the ship remains to be an issue in the top tier. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best, if their more subtle balancing isn’t working and the thing is still absolutely ruling the top-tier games.
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Something like the Lexington class or Amagi class BC’s would be excellent counters to Scharnhorst, Scharn may even be better as she could reliably pen those two but at least their 16 inch shells should be able to get through. Still Scharn’s turtleback seems to be overperforming compared to IRL
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So just an odd thing to throw in here.
The 14" APCBC the Japanese Have doesn’t exactly struggle to get through the Twin’s armor.
Whether or not their magazine elects to explode is another thing entirely. Or their shell rooms for that matter (like what happens to a variety of US Battleships).
Not saying the Battlecruisers aren’t an issue (they are), it’s likely more to do with some internal (read: coding) factor that is preventing them from being destroyed like battleships.
It is a viable option but not so practically effective. Scharnhorst does have rather weak deck protection, and theoretically her magazine can be penetrated by many 15" and 14" shells beyond 15000m. However such range is rare unless in EC, and it won’t give you a high chance of hitting small parts like the magazine. I would rather count on diving shells at range between 9000-12000m, where the hit chance is much more credible.
Scharn’s turtleback isn’t really “overperforming” compare to real life. The combination of belt and thick turtleback was designed to render its citadel invincible at short distances. However, IRL such scheme has a fundamental flaw: the citadel itself doesn’t contain sufficient reserve buoyancy to keep the ship afloat. While the ship’s vital modules can be immune to enemy gunfire, the penetration of the 320mm main belt may still lead to fatal flooding, which is exactly what happened during the last battle of Bismarck. Before the introduction of unrepairable breach in WT, flooding was rarely an issue, and one has to penetrate both the belt and turtleback to deliver damage to the internal modules, and that’s the reason why it used to be so brokenly OP.
It should be noted that currently there’s a bug causing AP shells not to create breaches after penetration. If this bug gets fixed, Scharnhorst will be easier to kill for more battleships, as the 320mm belt isn’t quite impossible to penetrate. One will no longer have to penetrate both belt and turtleback to deliver a fatal blow to Scharnhorst.
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You cant be serious though. Thats my point, getting thrown into games like that because of horrible BR compression. You act like that was some poor “skill issue” choice I made. You cant be that dense to assume such a thing.
This guy had 10 kills because of the naval BR system. Thats my point, thats the problem, of course its a problem to fight a scharn or krons at that range, but even still, the des moines has massive pen with AP, and firing 300 shells onto him at close range, and then me dying in 3 salvos, something is absurdly wrong. Then add hes in a fake ship, murdering our very real ships, spawn camping us, and then Im in the wrong or have a skill issue?
Come off it man.
Next time ill just leave the game because thats apparently what youre asking me to do
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Definitely bummed I didn’t get the SKR before its cost increase, but of course like all things russian, its BR is still comically too low. It was built in a different time era, and plays like a cracked DD more than a coastal
Maybe one day when i get competitive coastal. Its an extremely painful tree to grind due to the terrible map design and compression, and of course SKRs…
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Both teams top kilers were SKR-7 players. Its like this every game. They kill more than their whole team combined. At the end one ended the match with 16 kills.
SKR-7’s are broken, so op, so unfair. They lock up targets in the boat area literally at match start and hit and kill over many kms with laser like precision. They even gun down DDs and once they’re inside the brawling area the^y get undefeatable thanks to their RBU-6000 missiles, which even sink cruisers.
SKR-7 even tanking several HE broadsides from my Scharnhorst.
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“There is no Russian bias in Ba Sing Se”
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What the naval needs is a completely different damage model that doesn’t require blowing up someone’s magazine to kill them… War On The Sea for instance has a pretty good compartment-based damage model, and it’s much simpler than War Thunder’s. It allows slow progression of fires and floodings if a ship is hit repeatedly that eventually sink it. In this game however, fires and floodings can be put out very quickly (unless the game decides it’s an unrepairable breech) so the damage model just doesn’t work imo.
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Scharn’s turtleback isn’t really “overperforming” compare to real life.
Proceeds to explain why turtleback is overperforming compared to real life
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Using Mississippi with AP to ammo rack Scharnhorst is perfectly viable and makes the sinking through HE-induced flooding approach unnecessary.
^This
We don’t need artificial nerf of armour, but a damage model more focused on flooding rather than oneshot kills to balance Scharnhorst. The unrepairable breach is still a rather raw mechanic with lots of flaws and bugs, yet it already makes a big punch to Scharn’s effectiveness. Without new mechanics like this, moving Scharn to 8.0 or more neither would balance it because even Iowa or Yamato in the future would have had a hard time against it, meanwhile with proper simulation of flooding damage, even WW1 capital ships shall be able to deal with it effectively.
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Honestly - you gave excellent arguments overall and you got me convinced.
Now two questions remain:
- Do you know when the bug with shells not causing permanent breaches will be fixed? (As I understand it - developers are well aware of the issue).
- Do you know if such changes to the weapon balancing are planned?
(BTW, you know what happen to your Improved underwater-travel physics for naval shells suggestion?)
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Yes it is acknowledged, but no ETA for fix yet
I don’t quite get what do you mean about “weapon balancing”. All weapons in game work under a unified system calculated with historical data wherever possible. If you are talking about DM design or specifically about unrepairable breaches, developers had promised to discuss about improvement of this mechanic in the future.
Part of this suggestion had been already implemented, for example we have ricochets on water and simulation of velocity loss of projectiles in water. The simulations aren’t very realistic atm but maybe we will see more improvements in the future as the game design evolves.
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Great, thanks for all the answers :)
Yes, that’s what I meant. It would be most interesting to see how it develops!
lol
lmao even
I felt like this would be the best place to ask: does anyone have advice for killing ships with turtleback’s.
Currently using the British HMS Colossus/Dreadnought and also the Glorious and i’ve noticed that the one ships I can never pen through to the ammoracks are usually German ones (things like Nassau give my 13.5’s a lot of trouble), literally I can never get through no matter how many times I accurately hit the same armour plate.
Obviously Colossus herself is quite well protected what with a good belt and then the secondary armoured deck which is usually almost parallel to the angle of shell fall but regardless my question is more about how the hell I kill these (usually German) ships. Particularly Nassau as she’s spammed out to hell.
HE. There isn’t much point in trying to use AP against a lot of these ships. The new flooding mechanic allows ships with shells that have a lot of HE filler to sink ships they normally can’t pen. SAP is sometimes the best of both worlds as it usually has a lot of HE filler and acts as AP if it pens and HE if it doesn’t.
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