AP will remain king against heavy Armour largely due to Gaijin very low bar regarding one shot magazine explosions. But that’s a different disaster zone. Also you won’t need to outright kill a ship anymore as just keep it on an eternal state of repair so they can’t shoot back.
I can already HE spam kill many larger ships with DDs, especially using the very underrated Japanese 4.3-5.0 range, but this threatens to multiply the effect. Basically any ship that traditionally relied on brute force attacks on armoured Behomoths will get a substantial boost by the back door by forcing them in to a pause loop.
This could be up there with the Fragmentation changes that made HE nukes for several weeks. The methodology may be different but the result will be the same as BRs will be chaos. It took an age for those issues to be ironed out, and that was far less of a fundamental gameplay change than a new DC model.
Maybe there r are tweaks to the system they have yet to announce, as often happens with updates. Not counting in it though.
Hey everyone. We’d like to thank you for leaving your feedback on this new mechanic. We have read and passed everything and discussed it together as a team and would like to tell you about the changes we’ll be making.
Based on your feedback, we’ll be making the new Damage Control mechanic optional. You’ll now have the option to toggle between the old and new system in the hangar.
The new Damage Control mechanic will be on by default, and any player who wishes to use the old mechanic will be able to use it through a toggle under Menu > Options > Naval Battle Settings.
We’re readying the major update for release now, and we’re working to implement this as an option ready for the update. We aim to implement this change either with the Spearhead major update or shortly after.
Once again, thank you for leaving your feedback on this new mechanic, we always appreciate your responses. See you soon!
Thank you so much for reconsidering on how to introduce this mechanic. Now that it is optional people that at first were against its introduction as it was on the dev server can keep playing with the old mechanic that people are used to (and that gives experienced players more control on how to deal with damage) but might still test out your new implementation (i know i will) and then give feedback on how to refine it, so in the end it might be possible to get to a solution that is very good for experienced players but still makes it possible for newcomers to be able to handle damage adequately (and automated) while focussing on movement and shooting.
IMO this is the way to go to get actual feedback of players while not offending players that just want to keep playing with the current system as is (because it is not bad, it just needs explanation on how it works for players that are not used to it). And then even experienced players can try out the new system on how it works and come to an understanding of what the devs intention is with it so in the end, players can give feedback on what could be refined and that can be worked on in the new system.
I understand what you’re trying to do, and I suppose it is nice for us regular players to be able to use the old system, but this has a massive problem.
You’re hiding the ability to stay alive for longer under an option menu. This is going to increase the power disparity between players even more. Of course, everyone that sees this message and that are part of naval communities will learn of the option and will switch to the old system. New players won’t know about this, same for players who might come back after not having played in a long time and haven’t kept up with the patch notes.
This is somewhat similar to when airfield spawns were set as default for matches in bad weather, only for it to be an opt out option weeks later (and one that you cannot see during a match).
There are still people who do not know that you can set distance correction using the mouse wheel and so they drag they screen when they want to lead, all that because distance correction isn’t set as a default, and it has never been explained. This will be yet another case of bad defaults and unexplained systems giving a disadvantage.
At least with the old repair system, a player could still come to the conclusion not to always repair even without talking to the rest of the naval community. Having it implemented like this adds yet another barrier.
This is not leveling the playing field, it is making it even more lopsided against new players.
Seriously, delay this mechanic and rework it (possibly while consulting naval players).
At the very least, make it opt in, not opt out, so off by default.
Immediate problems with changing course on this issue:
New players will be at an inherent disadvantage due to forced auto-repair, just like they are with scroll wheel ranging in RB. If you want to see the effect of this, observe how much quicker AI ships sink on the live server because they have always had automatic repairs turned on.
The “survival leadership” crew skill appears to no longer apply with the new system on dev. So that would have to be reworked if you plan to keep both systems, or it will only apply to one of them.
Are the repair multipliers still going to be calculated on a per-ship basis? (tonnage, crew, modernity of the damacon system) This is a big change to the old system in and of itself.
The new coefficients described are only for the new mechanic.
Nothing changes in the old system, you can cancel or leave it as normal.
It is not considered an exploit. It’s more of a gameplay tactic, and a consequence of the old system like we spoke about in the original post, which is one of the main reasons we implemented the new mechanic.
Very rare. I doubt most of the devs care to grind naval esp when 80% of the playerbase is “NAVAL DOVBLEG? BORING!!”
We, who actually have to slog through naval research, even with premium, understand how atrocious it would be to have your crew bled out from you as you get sniped by bots and HE spammed by wallet warriors.
In my opinion, keeping two separate systems makes proper balance impossible. It would inevitably give an advantage to the group of players using the more effective system. What about bugs or future changes that could affect one system more than the other?
I still don’t understand why you don’t want to simply combine both systems.
For example, you could keep the old damage control system in battles (press 6 for fire extinguishing, 7 for repairs, 8 for flood control, or set them to automatic), but allow players to set their own action priorities outside of battle - just like in the new system.
Let’s say someone sets their priorities to Fire (action multiplier 1.0) -› Flooding (second action multiplier 1.45) -› Repairs (third action multiplier 1.95). That would mean during the battle:
If someone uses the fire extinguisher only, it applies the 1.0 multiplier.
If someone performs repairs only, it applies the 1.0 multiplier.
If someone fights fire and repairs at the same time, fire uses the 1.0 multiplier and repairs use the 1.45 multiplier (second action multiplier).
If someone fights fire, flooding, and repairs all at once, fire uses 1.0, flooding 1.45, and repairs 1.95 multipliers.
If someone still has 10 seconds of repairs remaining and activates fire fighting, the repair multiplier changes from 1.0 to 1.45 (because its priority is lower than fire fighting), so the remaining time increases to 14.5 seconds.
If someone still has 10 seconds of repairs remaining, but the fire just got extinguished, the repair multiplier changes from 1.45 to 1.0, so the remaining time drops to about 7 seconds.
It would be a very simple system, easy to understand and control, and very similar to how it works now - just more forgiving for players who run several damage control actions at the same time. This kind of system would be an improvement for all Naval players, but it would especially help new players, who often leave everything on automatic (which is completely ineffective in the old system). And most importantly - we wouldn’t need two separate systems.
PS. Multipliers should also depend on the crew’s damage control skill, and cancelling a damage control action should require about 1.5 seconds of holding the key (from what I remember, it’s currently about 3 seconds, which is way too long).