Nerf Scharnhorst Armor or make it 8.0

Naval mode is currently Scharnhorst mode. Matches should not be predetermined by the team with the most broken ship in the game.

This ship requires so much additional or modified mechanics to simply stop it from being a stomping machine. Waterline needs to be dynamic so that near waterline hits can cause flooding, ricochet check needs to be removed so that shells can pierce her turtleback and large caliber guns needs their dispersion nerf rolled way the hell back so that they can hit the damn thing. This is ridiculous!

When famous ships are added Germany is going to be a wehraboos wet dream. Invincible Bismarks and Scharnhorst going to close range and magazine sniping King Georges, Iowas and Yamatos, all thanks to unrealistic mechanics that favors turtlebacks.

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Putting things into perspective this would be like saying a T-34 should be invincible if you add a vertical layer of armor.

Which granted the real one is almost there without it but still

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there are armaments both Iowa and KGV can get to reliably destroy Bismarck and Scarnhorst

yamato is already there

HMS Rodneys 16" barely scratch the Scharnhorst.

Though half the problem there is the massive dispersal nerfs, you rarely hit with more than 1 or 2 shells

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what about supercharged 15"?

Maybe, but you need something like 2000mm of pen to reliably pen a Scharnhorst.

is there a calculator for TNT equivalent to pen?

Didn’t HK reporter’s tests above have an order of magnitude above that and still failed to penetrate the citadel?

I think Scharnhorst’s armor layout is just inherently broken and needs an outright game mechanic change to be balanced. If 16" ammo with velocity high enough to actually escape earth’s gravity well can’t penetrate the ship, clearly the problem goes deeper than shell power.

Maybe adding armor destruction to the turtleback would help? Exclusively a mechanic for Scharnhorst. Nobody else really needs their already bad armor getting destroyed further.

Flooding changes would be more historical and realistic, but those are harder to get right. Making the turtleback become weaker after heavy shelling is a faster, simpler* fix.

*in theory.

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They can’t. Even when they can pen main belt armor of 320 mm, turtleback is different problem.

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We’ve literally just seen HKs post about Scharnhorsts turtleback shrugging off shells with 20,000mm of penetration. The game is not even bothering to calculate if a shell can penetrate the turtleback, it just marks the angle hit as a automatic ricochet.

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20 meters of armor huh. Maybe my case for the Iowa class W23 20 kiloton nuclear shells is less unreasonable than I thought

Now that’s interesting. So even if we would get Yamato tomorrow, it still would struggle against Scharnhorst, and I’m not talking about Bismark or H39. I wonder how that compares to real life effectiveness of the turretback.

I bet Yamato would lose at 1v1 against Scharnhorst, at least i current damage model of naval. 460mm guns would be most inaccurate, plus exaggerated flooding mechanic… Scharnhorst would just sink it by hitting unarmoured parts.

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That’s why you use HE or SAP. If SAP doesn’t pen, it acts like HE. Start firing the 75kg - 88kg filler HE/SAP shells at the Scharnhorst to cause flooding. It’s the quickest and most reliable way to sink her. Torpedoes also work well.

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Yeah, but you have to hit the bow and stern to do it. Which is a ridiculously hard target to hit if your using 14" guns and larger. Too far foward and you hit water, too far backwards and you hit the main armor belt.

Its just not reliable espesially when the Scharnhorst can magazine snipe you in two salvos.

It’s more reliable than anything else. I can’t fix the Scharnhorst. I can only tell you the most reliable method of dealing with it. There are many people who don’t understand how SAP works.

To better hit in the right place, just aim slightly in front of or behind the reticle, and adjust as necessary. It’s not the easiest shot, but it’s certainly not impossible.

Alternatively, just take the Hood, and you have a better than even chance of winning a 1v1 with a Scharnhorst.

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The two options to sink Scharnhorst (barbette shots & flooding) both require you hit a very specific area, and this is very much luck based because most of high calibre guns are now handicapped by terrible spreads. Yesterday I sank the same Scharnhorst twice with Hood, first time via barbette shot, where I was lucky that it only took me a few salvo to hit the right spot, but second time it spent me over ten minutes to slowly flood him to death because my shots were constantly spread like a trench gun. Had the guns having their historical accuracy I would have finished him within a few minutes.

I agree Hood is probably the best Scharnhorst hunter you can get at this moment, Amagi is a good option too but it requires you to be much more careful with your plan of manoeuvres because she doesn’t have the same level of reliable survivability. After all, fixing the accuracy for high calibre guns is something I would really love to see in the future updates.

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Totally agree. After all there would be absolutely no reason to put those big caliber guns on ships irl or in game if all you need to do is to get one of the shells into one of the enemies magazines. and (considering the ships the scharnhorst faces all have worse armor) that is no less likely with its smaller caliber shells than any big caliber cannon. i don’t see why it should be necessary after already having a longer reload to also nerf the accuracy of high caliber guns ahistorically?

Never gets old observing salvo after salvo with half the shots falling short and the other half just passing above the enemy ship on sub 10 km shots. and if you hit there’s this weird sensation of a lot of the shells seemingly just creating he-like explosions on the hull without any damage with the mutsu’s or the amagi’s aphe shells. Always wondered what that is about, didn’t experience that with any other ship or shell so far, maybe because of the extremely short fuze time?

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The big explosion effect is literally just an visual effect, it has nothing related to how the shell performs which is defined by the codes. All 16" shells in game uses “large calibre hit FX” preset so they all create big explosion visual effect whenever they hit something even if the shell didn’t explode at all. Speaking of fuze delay, the Japanese 41cm AP shells have the longest delay time in the game.

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Also, what will moving it to 8.0 even do? There are no other battleships that are 8.0.

I see that’s where this big explosion is coming from. thx for clarifying