Incomitatus

Three family members in hospital this last week and I'm in the middle of moving. I think it's been a week since I logged in to WoWS. I'll be back, but right now all I fantasize about is a full night's sleep.

Updated with Albany. Next up, Tachibana and Tachibana Lima. It's going to be awhile.

Got Chester to 100 battles. Last battle was... both disappointing and not. A Sampson got into our base and I went back to deal with it (successfully) but that put me exposed to a Bellerophon and a Konig Albert. I didn't last long, though I got a fire going on the K. Albert before I went down. So... I saved the team from an early embarrassing defeat, but I was out of the fight before I could do much else.

I would normally be out hiking but my ladyfriend I go with picked up a shift at her work. So I'm cleaning, and taking breaks to sink ships.

Oh don't worry, it'll be more than that! I'm going to be filling out the tech trees as I go, I hope. I'm sure you're excited to learn this, but try to contain yourself.

My first two matches of the day had 'friendly' DDs torpedoing teammates as soon as the match began. Unsurprisingly, my first two matches today were losses.

I might be insane, but... I'm trying to play each of my ships in 100 Random Battles. I'm starting at Tier II and working my way up. I have 68 ships at the moment, topping out at Tier IX with Benham. This is going to take... awhile. I'm thinking to use this thread to track my progress and offer short thoughts on the ships as I go. Thoughts so Far... USS Sampson - 100 battles, 64% wins, best game got me 52k damage and a Kraken. My favorite Tier II ship, I clicked with her from the first match I played. Not the best at anything (except maybe smoke), but solid all around. Reliable. Can bully other DDs with guns, lay good ambushes with islands, and can "just" stealth torp oncoming ships with care. USS Smith - 104 battles, 48% wins, best game 43.8k damage and 4 kills. This is a high skill floor ship that takes a lot of work. At around 60 battles my win rate was 37%. My last 20-30 games were much better as I got better at keeping the guns and torpedoes constantly cycling, but I wasn't able to claw my win rate up to 50%. I'll come back around sometime to do that. This is a fun ship, but very frustrating for new players despite the ultra-cheap price in the shop. Be warned. Really, really benefits from a captain with Concealment Expert and absolutely needs Suvivability Expert despite being just a Tier II. USS Chester - 100 battles, 60% wins, best game 53k damage and 4 ships sunk. I feel like Chester gets a bad rap. Angled properly, it can bounce quite a few shells in its MM spread and with AR and DE, it can reliably pump out the fires. It's AP is nothing to sneeze at either, in close. I respect a lot of other ships when I'm in Chester, but there isn't much I fear. Other than a competent DD captain, that is... low tier DDs dominate low tier cruisers (with only a few exceptions). USS Albany - 100 battles, 55% wins, best games 37k damage and 3 ships sunk. Oh Albany... I want to like you. But you've given me too many glorious defeats. You're just too slow to get into the fast paced fights of Tier II. The team melts and then you have to deal with being outnumbered and alone... and sure, you give as well or better than you take, but it's almost never enough. You have no armor. Sure, that protected citadel means AP isn't that dangerous to you, but HE just chews you up. And everyone shoots HE in the low tiers. Even the BBs. I want to like you, but Chester has my US Tier II Cruiser love.

Knowing when to be defensive and when to be aggressive is a hard thing to learn a sense for. There's always a lot to try to keep in mind. Yep. Tier IV CVs can't drop fighters on the map, but they launch their own combat air patrol around the carrier.

So, oddly enough, this works best if you are spotted, and your maneuvers can make the DD waste his torps. If you aren't spotted, and you charge smoke, his torps will be ready to unload at point blank range once you get proximity detected. That's a trickier situation. I would never attempt that in Charleston, too big, too slow, too lumbering - it has a slower rudder shift than St. Louis. Yes. I believe you should have kept yourself between the DD and the carriers. If there was time for the rest of your team to swing south and win, then there was no immediate pressure to cap. A lot of decisions in this game are dictated by the time remaining on the clock as much as the tactical situation. It doesn't sound like you were under a cap-or-lose time constraint. A good DD captain can dodge CV attacks reliably, especially Tier IV CVs. I do it all the time. Dodging the floating machine gun that is Charleston/St Louis on the other hand is more difficult... and trying to dodge both the gunfire and the attention from two CVs would be nearly impossible. Also, if the red CVs are any good at all, you will never successfully solo cap, especially in a ship with little or no AA and no smoke to hide in. They'll just keep hitting you and resetting the cap progress until you sink. So going to cap was predictable suicide. In an ideal play, ie. with rare-as-unicorns teamwork, you'd have hung back and defended the CVs until the DD was dealt with, then all three of you would have moved forward together to the cap. Two CVs with overlapping AA bubbles and fighter consumables could keep the enemy planes from resetting the cap progress. And it would put the CVs in a position to get attack flights on target faster. Of course, convincing CVs that it's time to move forward is often like pulling teeth.

I wasn't going to go for Benham, but I ended up only having to buy 3 containers to make it happen, so I figured it'd be silly not to grab it. I also got talked into it by my clan leader, who got it first and said it was a lot of fun in co-op, and he was right... lol. Friant is my favorite T3 cruiser, for sure, with Caledon taking a close second. I don't have Tenryu or Bogatyr yet to compare those. St Louis/Charleston (which everyone seems to love) just doesn't click well with me. I do okay in those ships, but they aren't fun to me.

Yeah, they come fully kitted out. At least the T6 did, so I assume that's representative. But as a general rule, so far, I'm more interested in lower tier DD play than high tier. I'm keen to push my BBs and cruisers to high tier in the next few months, but... watching the CCs and other 'pros' videos on high tier DD play I, at the moment, think, "That's not really what I'm looking for in a game I play to 'relax.'" It's too cerebral. And when I'm feeling like thinking that hard, I practice my French, my German, or my math (to go back to college next spring). I mean, I try not to be a potato or a window-licker, so there's really nothing in this game that I find truly relaxing, and that's fine, but high tier DD play seems to cross into the 'too much stress' column, for me. At the moment Tier V is the limit of my comfort zone for DDs, and I do so like both Nicholas and Hill, and Okhotnik, but I don't have any desire to go higher up any of the DD lines... for the moment (despite having Sims, Benham, Aigle, and now Guepard in port). Besides which, I sort of like grinding out stock ships and upgrading them piecemeal and adapting to the changes. This early access feels like cheating! :-P Also, I think I'd be more keen on this event if I hadn't gone all-in on Rogue Wave. I have Directive burn-out. (Oh, and Jurien de la Graviere may be my favorite T2 cruiser, I've played it a fair bit, and have 55k+ XP sitting on it... think I'll be okay for researching Enseigne Gabolde when it comes out!)

I think I've decided this event just isn't for me. The rewards aren't worth dedicating effort and time away from other goals. That said, I got early access unlocks for the T5 and T6 by the time I completed Directive I. I have the T6 in port, I have yet to complete the mission for the T5. But since they're going to be in the tech tree soon anyway, I find that... underwhelming. I also just completed my acquisition of all available T2 ships, including premiums, and I want to play 100 matches in each of them. I'd rather take my time working on that than grinding for early access French DDs. Not that I'm complaining about all the coal from the symbols, mind you.

Got another mission out of the daily reward crate. So that's two so far.

I have a Subaru Forester 2003. It rides smooth, does what I want it to, and rarely complains. In that regard, it has some advantages over the women I've dated...

Playing at Tier V isn't seal clubbing. Matchmaking means you can see up to Tier VII, and that happens far more often than being top tier. Playing Tiers I-IV, on the other hand, you can call seal clubbing, but... so what? New players have to learn sometime. It only really gets unfair when seal clubbers division up... that I frown on. If you're going to go seal hunting, go solo.