vak_

Maybe crawling smoke at 1/2 speed

While that sounds pretty bad, the poor sod might have had the radar on cooldown.

You don't have enough games in either ship to make the ship win rate meaningful. That's the reason. 35 Nikolai games, 31.43% 9 London games, 88.89%

Torps AND guns. Neustra is a hybrid, and gun fights make your super heal shine that much more. I love that moment of "Surprise, @^%$^%$, I can print an additional half of a ship right as you're shooting at me!"

Being OP doesn't mean "having no counters", all ship types in game have counters (well, except for one, but let's not open that can of worms). Smaland is probably one of the most broken DDs in this game, perhaps the most broken DD we've ever had. Does it mean that Smaland has no counters? Hardly. If a DM suddenly catches you out with radar, while your bow faces the DM -- you'll have a very, very bad time. It's just that Smaland is a much better DD than anything in the same hybrid niche.

Radar is dangerous for any DD that wishes to stay hidden, Vampire II is no different.

Was there ever a worse tech tree ship than Z-31? Karlsruhe, maybe?

Exactly. 1.5 caps and .5 cap reset. That's enough to give decent enough XP if you damage some things also.

Our opinion doesn't matter.

Well, it's not really surprising, given the meta. Playing torpedo DDs well means setting up cross-drops as close to the enemy as possible. If a carrier finds you in such an exposed position (and BBs that shriek about torpedoes coming from a seemingly empty section of the map often draw the CVs attention to your location), then you're hosed, the CV will keep returning and spotting/damaging you until you die or are chased off into irrelevance. Carrier rework basically killed Shima for me, I never play her anymore. Shame too, used to be my favorite DD. The only torpedo DD that can function in such environment is Halland, and she's is a hybrid anyway, the guns are really strong.

Whenever there is a heroic achievement mission, Conqueror is my prime choice. The things prints Dreadnoughts

Decent secondaries games are still possible, but they're just so much harder to achieve now. Massachusetts in particular can't hit DDs for crap now, the secondary nerf ruined my favorite cap contesting BB :(

Hm, I'm curious, which ones? Vampire II? Something else? Smaland is so OP in part because she's relatively safe from CVs due to strong AA, she would be a complete package even without radar, and with radar she's just stupidly broken. Best DD in the game by far. I'm assuming she'll get nerfed before the year is out. My guess -- lower torpedo and/or gun DPM, maybe shorter radar duration.

Same. Even if it does mean that at some point my beloved OP-as-all-hell Smaland might get smashed with a nerf hammer :)

Your latter statement is true, but unfortunately for you it actually describes the MM conspiracy theorists. You see, an existence of a patent doesn't actually prove that this patent is implemented. You might or might not know this, but there is a myriad patents out there that have never been implemented in real life, including perpetual motion patents and such. In order to convincingly demonstrate that the matchmaker is indeed "rigged", a person with critical thinking would examine the actual game instead. Even if we don't know the details of matchmaker implementation, we can still record team compositions and match outcomes -- this becomes just another "black box" problem, the kind that science has become very adept at dealing with. You'd need to define a null hypothesis, and then reject that hypothesis with a convincing enough p-value, based on the statistical analysis of evidence, i.e. a dataset of matches that they've collected. That is what critical thinking would look like in this scenario.