FlakKnight

I'm all for this if the ships are different enough. More options are better. I would perhaps like the captain respec thing to be looked at, though. It's kind of silly I can 't play for example a T6 tech tree again because I don't have a suitable captain there, so I'm forced to use premium ships only.

Not no, but reduced. Ultimately the AI/RNG AA means the gameplay against carriers is unsatisfying. Every other ship that tries to bully you, you can just shoot and sink. Airplanes are like never ending gnats. It's simply not fun.

The problem is it doesn't do anything different than Baltimore. I'm appreciative it isn't flat broken like it was on test initially (at least pre-cv-rework), but that in and of itself doesn't make it an interesting addition to the game. The initial formulation of premiums was odd ducks and unique ships with alternate play styles. Wichita really doesn't seem to accomplish that.

Don't talk about the A10 like that OP.

Wocats, hoooooooo! Yes, currently you are playing an NPC target ship for CVs who get to play their special game.

Basically, Des Moines and any of the slot 6 choices that give you better effective dpm are still good like they were before. The slot 5 ones are now actually usable in some cases if they affect dpm or survivability, because the meta shift to always-plane-spotted reduces the utility of small amounts of concealment lost. Montana and Hindy will become more useful following flooding changes for tanky builds. The rest that are just dubious utility (Worcester) or ones with extreme drawbacks (Repub) will likely stay mediocre or poor choices because meta can't save terrible.

Why would you want the design philosophy to turn the game into tennis? The blob game is not fun. AA is not fun. 80% of the ships that rely on vision are not fun. CVs attacking piles of AA are not fun. The whole fundamental concept of the CV rework is flawed as a game mechanic. WG usually skips historicity for the sake of intelligible gameplay choices, but for some reason not with CVs. It's skipping it to destroy the core gameplay, which is vision and positioning.

You can't always get what you want. You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes... You just might find... You can't balance a class that is functionally immune to damage in a tactical shooter game.

The problem is airplanes and captain skills scale a lot better at tier ten. If they reduce flak damage by 80% like they did in other tiers, CV planes will become unkillable again. Hopefully they don't just keep the pendulum swinging.

I don't think that the dev side does this on purpose necessarily, but I do think it happens incidentally. At some point you end up with some rare desirable ships (that are mostly too strong) which then the marketing team uses to sell crates, bundles, specials, etc. So how can the company, as a whole, square that circle? This is like those ads from cigarette companies where they say nudge nudge wink wink smoking is bad for you. I mean, OK, but you're still making cigarettes, I'm not giving you gold stars for that. We're not talking ancient history, I mean it was like two weeks ago...

It was used doctrinally as a fast battleship on the third battleship division before it sank. It's a battleship.

Then there's no reason to use the term battlecruiser that it originally was called by the same logic.

So you she she was classified as a fast battleship by the IJN. Thanks for agreeing.

No it is not. The Kongos were rebuilt and reclassified as battleships. Hiei was sunk as a battleship.

I don't think that's what was effectively communicated though, Radar. You guys seem to be aware that this represents a major policy (or at least perceived policy) change to the players, but you are only discussing it as if it is like an aberration or a natural disaster. This is why it seems duplicitous, it was just advertised as a "special" loot crate prize less than a month ago.