Once I realise I’m shooting at a Scharnhorst I usually look for another target. Don’t want to spend all game hitting and looking at 94% crew the entire time and then finding at the end I get next to zero reward due to doing ‘no damage.’
Locked onto a target in a murky, misty game a few days ago; fired a salvo based on estimated relative speed, then another once I’d got the lead marker; was about to fire a third when the first salvo landed, revealing a Scharnhorst. As I was in an 8” cruiser (Mogami, w/ AP round) I started looking for a better target, but before I found one the second salvo landed and detonated the Scharnhorst’s ammo. You don’t see that every day. Couldn’t believe it; that has to be a 1-in-10,000 shot - and by ‘shot’ I mean the entire salvo.
Yesterday I killed 2 in one game, but that was on an open ocean map and they happened to sail into long lance salvoes. ‘Can be killed by long lance’ =/= ‘not OP.’
Been playing cruisers recently, so not really had chance to try the BB calibre HE ‘exploit.’
True though mk 1 15 inch naval gun was one of if not proven very reliable, warspite proved it, throughout her wartime, career, and it was very effective when used at Jutland with QE class.
I take it you happened to hit it head on, as far as i can tell the Scharnhorst only really weakness at close range to hit its bow so that your rounds go right into it forward magazine, other wise you need to be far enough away to allow your rounds to plunge onto and through the deck, anything else just gets eaten up or does almost no damage at all.
Its just a pity that whenever i encounter them they are always either side on or camping behind islands, and i struggle to get the hoods torps on target no matter how many times i actually get the odd chance of a CQC match up with the beast, but by that point im normally down to half crew, my ships wrecked and my reload is more or less doubled, so its not hard to work out who always wins
If theres a half decent BB captain on the enemy team, theres a good chance you die a lot quicker than normal, since the scharn is unusually weak to BB caliber HE as previously pointed out by a mod
That being said, a good scharn captain neither yolo rushes or camps 100% of the time. You gotta know when to hang back a bit and when its time to push into their spawn and duke it out with an entire panicked team that didnt notice a 235m long, 38000t battleship rip into their spawn guns blazing
That was actually me who pointed out by me 3 days before the mod mentioned it.
It does work. However, it’s still not easy, and most players still seem unaware of it. I frequently still YOLO into a group of cruisers and battleships, especially if they have no or bad torpedoes. Being able to solo 3 to 5 ships is an ability that only the Scharnhorst has at the moment, so I suspect it is on the top of the list to move up when new BR’s are introduced (as it should).
I lol’ed at your scenario of an entire team missing a giant battleship sneaking into their area.
If you find me ever hiding behind an island in this thing, you know it will be a cry for help. I’ve been kidnapped, so send the police.
Trust me, if they weren’t all bots they did see it, there was just f***-all they could do about it!
I thought it was roughly beam on actually, but it was murky and there were low islands between us - and a few weeks ago now (and damage cam is always from a beam view point, which might influence my recollection.). I’ve not one-shot a Scharn’ since whether firing 8” cruiser shells or 15” Kongo shells. Mostly salvo after salvo of no discernible damage.
5 minutes of two Bayern and one Hyuga throwing their SAP on me, no imrepairable breach appeared. Bayern and Hyuga killed by me, other Bayern killed by our team’s battleship.
Really easy to make breach and kill Scharnhorst, isn’t it? XD
the scharnhorst is gonna make me kill myself, i swear. SO tired of these things speeding across the map and parking 5km away from our spawn and singlehandledly destroying the entire team. Doesn’t have to manouver, doesn’t have to do anything. Somehow the AA never goes down so you can’t get close with bombs or torpedo boats. Shells can’t do anything at that range, I can throw salvos of 14" AP into the #2 barbette for 5 minutes straight and it doesn’t do anything. 17 second reload rate, disgusting traverse speed, impenetrable armor unless by some miracle torpedos land below the belt and roll it over. All the other cancer ships in the game were usually killable. I have managed to kill one scharnhorst in the last month. The Krohn and Paris Commune were bad in their day, but you could at least stand a chance to kill them if you were smart. Aiming well on a scharn only rewards you with death.
Unfortunately there isn’t much that can be done about Scharnhorst aside from moving her up in BR, or somehow making turtleback armor less effective.
And as annoying as Scharnhorst is, with generally thicker armor all around, Bismarck is probably going to be worse. Doubly so if they take the theoretical 3rpm figure for her 15-inch guns.
Actually, Japan may join the party before that since Nagato happens to have an unusually thick turtleback as well, only one inch thicker than what anything other than Scharnhorst has, but that might be enough to make her just as annoying to fight against.
Bismark class are also an incredibly stable gun plateform and have very strong upper belts (145mm compared to scharns 45mm), eliminating scharns primary weakness.
That being said, the North Carolina and Iowa class are likely coming soon, and those have ungodly amounts of pen with their 16" superheavy shells, and good arcs for defeating turtlebacks, so we’ll see what happens.
BR’s will also go up, and jet bombers will become common in naval, and Bismark class AA has pretty trash AA, though the Tirpitz improves it a decent bit, it still wont be anywhere near the other nations AA level
Iowa and North Carolina are certainly not coming soon. Maybe North Carolina by the end of the year, but since we probably wont be seeing 16-inch gun battleships until at least the second patch of the year, its hard to come to the conclusion that we’ll be seeing North Carolina “soon”. Regardless of adding them next patch or next year, in-game ranges are currently just a little too short to take real advantage of plunging fire. Especially on some of the smaller maps.
And saying jet bombers will be more common isn’t really a good thing either. All that means is the handful of WW1 ships that get moved up again are just going to be even worse off. (and once you get to the transonic region even ships with a lot of AA start to have trouble, and that’s not fun either).
The fact that many players aren’t aware of it is the main issue here. I was grinding the event yesterday and witnessed many times where unexperienced players helplessly threw AP shells against a Scharnhorst at point blank, while they didn’t even know to aim at its turrets. Scharnhorst is just appear to be a ship that particularly frightens the rookies lacking of comprehensive understanding of the damage system in this game.
By the way, I finished the latest star with Hood last night, killed 5 Scharnhorsts: one by depleting its crew, 2 by long range ammorack, and 2 by flooding, while didn’t die a single time to them. Also got a few assists against Scharnhorst and all of which died from flooding caused by my teammates.
Another thing is that many Scharnhorst players aren’t good by themselves. Ppl just heard this ship being “brokenly OP” and scrum in to play it (especially during an event). From my experience over the past few days many Scharnhorst players I encountered were at best mediocre, at worst not quite qualified for the top tier battles.
Edit: Got the 5th sailor’s star, 8 Scharnhorsts killed in 4 battles:
I still love playing the Scharnhorst, but playing it has made it easier to kill as well. I’m finishing the Hood at the moment, but using the Marlborough with it’s 88kg HE shells, has allowed me to sink several of them during the event as well.
I am grinding the event mostly with UK and US 7.0 lineups, I did played a few a battles in Scharnhorst too but I have to admit I am kind of starting to lose interest on her. After continuous playing of 15" and 14" guns the 283mm guns just feel too unimpressive to me. Survivability wise she’s not really better than Arizona or Hood under the current damage system (I would say Hood is better, given she’s basically immune to HE, Arizona has similar issue to Scharnhorst), the old playing style where one in Scharnhorst can singlehandedly tank the rain of fire from the entire enemy team and wiped out enemy ships one by one is no longer viable. It neither helps when the hordes of bots are now gone, and during an event most of your opponents are battleships so there’s far less easy targets against which Scharnhorst is more effective than most of other battleships.
Had a krons with 10 kills yesterday that single handedly won the enemies game tell me I just had skill issues and US ships just suck and the nerfs/buffs I was mentioning was just “crying”
After he one shotted me twice I put the hurt on him and got within 4km, Dude ate 3-4 minutes of 8in des moines gun fire and just stopped losing crew after he got under 30% crew. I started that engagement with like 70% crew. Eventually i couldn’t out module kill his guns and he killed me. Dude was spawn camping behind an island about 6-8km from spawn.
It was absolutely disgusting. This game is so stupid
Getting bullied and taunted by fake ships using your nerfed or overtiered ship that was very real is just frustrating and infuriating.
Gaijin doesnt seem to care at all about realism or balance in this game and in literally every vehicle type we see this “game-ified” unrealism.
They claim its a realistic game, the only thing realistic are the graphics
