RainbowFartingUnicorn

Champagne is actually really satisfying to play to me. If you're bottom tier, you can sling accurate HE at long range. But you also have stupidly good AP penetration, so you can get citadels at 21 km as well.

By running Marceau, for the most part.

I really don't get the idea that the Benham grind was insane. If I recall correctly, you could get enough fuel tokens to get the ship entirely for free if you did all the daily combat missions for the month without missing more than maybe two days today? It was a while ago, I don't remember. Yes, that's a lot of playing, but if Benham was a marathon it was A) entirely doable for free vs. Puerto Rico being 'doable' for free and B) of a completely different scale than the Puerto Rico grind, which had both more tasks and much harder ones - for the daily combat missions I did most of them in just a couple hours by div'ing and running Narai. Plus for Benham you were able to buy relatively inexpensive bundles with guaranteed fuel token drops in small quantities to make up any deficiency you had in earned daily fuel tokens without having to buy like 50 to make up a five-token deficiency like you often do now. I think I ended up paying like $10 for mine or something like that. With Puerto Rico we saw the end of the free high-tier ship - to have any chance of completing it that didn't involve being a reclusive basement dweller wearing adult diapers and living off Rip-Its and Little Caesar's for a month and a half you had to buy boosters, just like how the dockyards now are basically not free ships but limited-availability Tier VIII-IX ships at steep discounts if you do the whole grind.

You get 200 more steel for Rank 1 in Silver than you do for Rank 1 in Bronze. If you only do Silver for the 18 wins, then the rewards are the same as ranking out in Bronze in terms of steel.

I don't do Clan Battle at all, but I do Silver League to Rank 1 very reliably. Don't forget daily steel and if you have a full port, you can be racking up two Ranked Seasons' worth of steel every Christmas, as well. I am getting about two steel ships a year with zero Clan Battle participation. Plus if you do the Christmas dockyard even just at the minimum to get the ship, there's usually a 1,500 steel stage there as well.

I think so far stuff had only rotated out. I really want them to rotate permacamo, though.

Not yet, they haven't.

I remember when the Gothic camo came out I was wondering why the heck they keep releasing cosmetic permacamo for the same few ships over and over again. I'm back up to 15,000 CT but I have all the ships and permacamo, and none of the other options are worth the expenditure for what you get.

For Newport I find which ship you select to be less important than picking ships as a team. A CV for dedicated spotting, preferably Ryujo, and mainly smoke cruisers and Aigles five-stars it pretty easily.

Basically this, although I would caution that some ships are objectively bad and will handicap you in Ranked even at Tier VI-VII. Will that stop you winning in them? No, but it will make it harder and more painful. Unless you're actively grinding a tech tree ship that is subpar, there's not much point in deliberately taking a worse-than-average ship.

I legit went to the post office Monday trying to mail a package. It's what happens when you go 20 years with no holidays between New Year's Day and Memorial Day... you start forgetting about other federal holidays!

I think the biggest mistake Hayate players make is trying to make her a gunboat or a torpedo boat. She is IMO a hybrid generalist more like a Japanese Gearing than like Shimakaze or Harugumo. Plays to me like a combination of Neustrashimy and Gearing, with a bunch of tradeoffs. Her guns have a very high alpha potential, as do her torpedoes, but neither is good enough to focus entirely on. You need to know how to pick good fights. Don't build only into guns or only into torpedoes, since you are not as good a gunship as Harugumo nor as good a torpedo boat as Shimakaze. Use whichever is appropriate. Ideally the fights you pick are short and you have the element of surprise. You can be a serious ambush predator against other destroyers if you can land the first volley while they're looking in the other direction. Suddenly getting chunked for 6k damage will rattle a lot of opponents. She does well if you can predict where a wounded enemy is going to be retreating to and then be there first to greet them. I do like to save a rack of torpedoes to defend myself against a rush in smoke or for the opportunity to hit somebody coming around a corner. The reload is so long that always having one set ready is beneficial.

I think Canarias in Aegis from my experience so far. Dido maybe for Killer Whale and Raptor Rescue and Newport, but I'm not sold on it still because its alpha and DPS is so poor.

For straight co-op, but I think it becomes a lot more arguable if you're thinking you'll do it for Scenarios more than straight co-op.

If you want my guess they discovered a suspicious amount of BXP based on sync dropping collusion and trading defended and cap ribbons, didn't think of that before they announced the contest, and now can't figure out a non-arbitrary way to sort out cheaters after the fact.