More than 3 years have passed and this ship is still single-handledly strangling the life out of top tier naval, and the only times it has been even remotely balanced were always thanks to bugs such as nuclear SAP, nuclear HE, recent schrodingers barbette armor and etc. which obviously affected every ship too and which get patched pretty quickly.
Only now, 3 years after its introduction, does Scharn have a rival in overall power-level with Nagato. Three fucking years for one nation to get one ship of comparable strength.
With this kind of precedent I dread the inevitable additon of the Bismarck class. You just know, you just fucking know, one of the two will be a premium and will get spammed relentlessly and will be even more overpowered and will probably not even lose any crew to bombs like 2000 pounders or the 5 tonner. Why even bother grinding any naval tree beyond 5.7 when germany exists?
Your NorCals and Iowas and Yamatos will blow up in 2 volleys from one of the ten invulnerable Bismarcks rampaging in your spawn or 30 seconds after spawning on African Gulf 10km away from the enemy BB blob with no cover anywhere nearby. We’ve already seen what for example air RB looks like with constant pushing of the capability boundaries with no meaningful changes to the gamemode itself, past BR ¬11.0 one team gets wiped out after the first merge 4 minutes after spawning, it’s gonna be the exact same stupid shit in naval too.
I see this community has “upgraded” from yelling about actual issues (though usually louder than appropriate) to just… making things up to be mad about.
Using the one obvious low-hanging fruit doesn’t really do your rant any favours either…
Apples to steaks comparison, really. High-tier Air and Ground are generally the way they are due to the high-tech/modern weapon types found there, such as fire-and-forget missiles, especially BVR, or APFSDS shells, etc.
Naval doesn’t compare because we’re still talking about better versions of what we already have, that being battleships. Once we start to see missile ships (and similar) at higher tiers, that’s when we should be worried.
The Bismarck class is such an odd example to freak out over, because… they’re not especially great ships. If people think the Tiger has a lot of hyped up myth around it, well it’s got nothing on the Bismarcks.
(Though the increasing number of contrarians on the internet who like to swing these “myth busting” sorts of things too far in the opposite direction are also obnoxious.)
Put simply, the Bismarcks are… adequate. Not terrible, but also outclassed by most other battleships of the era, often significantly so.
The Bismarck, like many vehicles in-game, is painfully mid as far as military equipment goes. However, like most mid vehicles irl, the issues it had aren’t a factor in-game. She has a high on-paper RoF, a turtleback almost as good as Scharnhorsts, much stronger main guns, and more secondary guns. Those are the only factors that will actually end up mattering in the game and they’re all good-to-very good. The Scharnhorst class, for example, are also not very good ships and yet Scharnhorst is still a bit of a menace.
Bismarck and Tirpitz are going to end up being Scharnhorst, but with guns that can match (almost) every other battleship. H-39 is going to be even stronger, if Gaijin goes that far.
H-39 is definitely not needed for Germany to compete if their armor layouts continue to overperform massively. They’ll have broadside potatoes in their Tirpitz (premium, ofc) roll up to Yamatos and Iowas point blank, taking zero damage from salvo after salvo. And due to gaijin making gun accuracy arbitrarily depend on barrel length, their dispersion will be some of the best in the game for 380mm guns. Much to the chagrin of UK players, with their 381mm/L42 being horribly inaccurate.
You know whats funny, ever since this thing was introduced everyone been going crazy about how this ships armor has no weaknesses, me included, just yesterday I found out this thing does have a weakness, its just well hidden on the armor viewer What you see here is the citadel/turtleback roof, and as you can see, theres a bit of a bump. Below that bump are the boilers. the bump is only 80mm thick. A direct hit with APHE will cause several boilers to be destroyed or damaged (depending on placement).
Hits on the boiler tend to be severe for the ship as its crew compartments are on the outside of its citadel, meaning the loss of crew from a boiler hit tends to lead to sinking via crew loss quickly.
Funny enough this same weakness was exploited in real life.
So if the ship is giving broadside at range, perhaps instead of aiming for those turret barbettes, perhaps just aim center mass and get some engine room hits?
We all know. Just you don’t know that exist. Though that point is too small to be aimed and pointless to aim there. Also engine is not an critical weakness like magazine or shell room in this game.
My apologies, I didn’t realize I was speaking to The Speaker of All Naval Players.
Also, ya its small, but its not that small, in almost all of the engagements I’ve had vs Scharnhorsts since I’ve found out about this weakness I’ve gotten boiler room and even transmission hits from shrapnel. And this is in a Tennessee mind you, which has subpar HE filler.
Its pretty easy to do, If a Scharnhorst is showing broadside (which they almost always do) just aim center mass right above the water line. If the shells go slight high, you get compartment hits, if it goes low you pick at his underwater armor, which will lead to diving shells sooner or later. if you hit it just right, you get a boiler room hit with massive crew loss.
And as I stated in my last post, Scharnhorst gets fucked if its internal modules take crew loss, shaving 15-25% off is basically a death sentence for a Scharnhorst due to its crew compartments not having much armor.
There’s a reason the cheater douchebag squadrons love it. Absolutely nerf it. Or better still, decompress all naval to 10.0 and make it 9.3, Tennessee & Hood 8.0
Just for festive leisure I did a funny experiment in user mission: I created a gun that fires 406mm shells in orbital velocity (7.9km/s) and made the shells not to take air drag. I shot several hundreds of shells with this gun on Scharnhorst and this is what I got:
Despite having nearly 20,000 mm of pen the shell still cannot pass through Scharnhorst’s turtleback.
I believe the only possible reason leading to this is the shape of the turtleback: near the waterline, the inclination angle of the turtleback is beyond the ricochet angle of nearly all shells in the game, and due to its thickness (105mm) no shell in game can overmatch it. Since the game checks ricochet first before calculating penetration vs thickness, the shell will be bounced off regardless how much penetration it has:
This again verified my evaluation made earlier in this thread: raising BR or introducing famous ships like Iowa/Yamato is not likely going to solve the Scharnhorst problem. This ship has a very specific strength that can be only offset by introducing other weaknesses such as barbette shots and flooding.
Wouldn’t the shell going that fast mess up the results a bit, since there would effectively be no angle of fall? I’d been under the impression that something like the 16”/45 might have a better chance of getting through since the pen calculator I’ve used gives it consistently good penetration and the game seems to exaggerate angle of fall a bit, possibly bypassing the ricochet issue. Not to say I disagree with your points of course, I’m starting to come to the position that it was a bad idea to put as much of the crew into the citadel as they have recently, and a move back to closer to older distribution might be better for gameplay overall. Not completely to the level of 2021/22 where a good light cruiser bullied most battleship, but maybe closer to 50/50 behind armor and outside it to give uptiered ships a chance and make the decision on when to repair more impactful. While I don’t think light shell spam should be the be all end all of killing a ship, I’d also say that there were a good number of battleships absolutely crippled by lower caliber hits to the superstructure, Scharnhorst and South Dakota for example, and I don’t think the current way the game handles crew represents that the best. Scharnhorst was always very strong but didn’t become this massive game warping issue until those crew distribution changes came in La Royale.
Actually ricochet mechanism is not a problem. It is quite near to real life. Problem is, there are still no counterpart battleship against Scharnhorst for most of nations, and some nations doesn’t have any candiate on game environment.
Also, her firepower characteristic compared to big caliber ship is currently exaggerated. Both in penetration and after-penetration damage.
In my opinion the easiest way to “fix” scharns immortality would just be to make it so that all the crew compartments above the citadel actually held 100% of the crew. It’s the engines being a requirement for a crew kill that make it impossible to crewkill scharn.
What you see here is the citadel/turtleback roof, and as you can see, theres a bit of a bump. Below that bump are the boilers. the bump is only 80mm thick. A direct hit with APHE will cause several boilers to be destroyed or damaged (depending on placement).
