The Reset Experience - my first time.

[Ensign_Cthulhu]

So I finished the Kitakaze grind last night, and my mouse hovered briefly over the "Buy" button for the Harugumo before I went ahead and did what I'd been planning to do since just before the commander rework dropped.

The experience was a pleasant one. I think I counted THREE potential gateways at which I could have chosen not to proceed/changed my mind and turned back, which is a good thing - it should stop someone who's accidentally mouse-clicked the reset button on the tech tree from throwing away all their hard work, and it does. It tells you exactly how many credits you are going to get from selling your ships, what it's going to do with the upgrade-slot modules, and how many RP are going to accumulate on each of the ships you're giving up.

The only thing that wasn't made clear in my case is exactly how far back in the tech tree it reaches, and that's because I had neither the Chikuma nor the Hashidate in port for it to sell. I could have bought both to try it out, but I couldn't be bothered; I'd have had to buy them back anyway. However, all the DD icons back to the Umikaze were greyed out, and those for the Chikuma and Hashidate were not... so I wonder. 

I'm fortunate enough to have done this during an event week in which IJN tech-tree ships are on discount; in fact, the ones I've bought back so far (Chikuma, Umikaze, Wakatake) have been half price, which means they should make their purchase price back when I dump them again in a little over three months. The goal for the next week is to get as far up the tech tree as I reasonably can while the ships are still discounted; the goal for the weekend is to get at least as far as the Minekaze so I'm getting Dailies missions done.

My Wakatake currently only has a five-point captain (what I call a port captain), so I'll probably finish that off in co-op, but once I get the Isokaze back I'll be in better shape. Just before the rework dropped, I made sure everything in the gunboat line from T4 up had a 10 point captain or better, and then when the rework dropped they were all trained to their ships for free (as WG had promised to do).

Something else the rework seems to do is to disengage the commander from its ship. The commander still remains specialized to it, but the ship seems to have no memory of its previous commander; you have to assign him/her/it manually (I say 'it' here because some of my commanders are event-related space monsters). But that's a minor quibble. 

 

All in all, the future's looking good. Replaying these ships with a higher degree of skill and a broader set of enemies to fight against than I had last time should be an interesting experience. A year ago, I would have said that the Research Bureau was for players who'd been here since beta, ground out all lines and had nothing left to do, but I'm starting to change my mind on that one. 700,000 XP (ballpark figure) and 100 days to do it before the NEXT Research Bureau season ends is just 7K XP a night; get at least that done, and then I can either keep on going if I feel like it or move on to current events.

[Nevermore135]

10 minutes ago, Ensign_Cthulhu said:

However, all the DD icons back to the Umikaze were greyed out, and those for the Chikuma and Hashidate were not... so I wonder. 

 

All the XP sitting on the ships you reset was transferred to the Hashidate, so you immediately had access to Chikuma. When you reset a line, you have to start again from scratch, so resets even replace ships of a different class that you have to progress through. For example, when I reset my IJN BBs I had to grind through Chikuma and Tenryu again.

[Lord_Zath]

Glad you're enjoying it. Reminds me I need to reset that line again soon!

[SeaborneSumo]

I've reset 4 lines thus far.   Completed 2.  Had just got to Bizmarck when the Captain Skills rework hit and secondaries were nerfed to near uselessness.  I've tried to play her since,,,, but its just not what it once was.  So she'll sit for a while.    My big take away from the experience was, I forgot just how incredibly long it takes to grind from Tier 8 to Tier 10 without a LOT of flags.

I don't play as much anymore due to how WG keeps screwing up all the good aspects of the game,,,, so it may take a while to finish the last reset.  Not sure if I'll do again.

[Ensign_Cthulhu]

15 minutes ago, Lord_Zath said:

reset that line again soon!

Well, I guess how soon depends on what else you've done in the last 80 days!  

8 minutes ago, SeaborneSumo said:

the Captain Skills rework hit and secondaries were nerfed to near uselessness. 

It's not like your ship doesn't still have its primary armament.

 

[Princess_Daystar]

Ive reset two lines so far, both during this period.

The vermont line, for the double points.

And the Hindenburg line due to being given the Admiral Hipper fron a drop i skipped the entire line to T8 and the gap bothered me.

In 12 more days ill reset the Montana line and free exp both the Vermont and Montana lines at the same time, Montana all the way and the Vermont Line up to at least the Minnesota.

This will give me the points to obtain Ohio and i cannot wait.

[Lord_Zath]

13 minutes ago, Ensign_Cthulhu said:

Well, I guess how soon depends on what else you've done in the last 80 days!  

It's not like your ship doesn't still have its primary armament.

 

I reset that gunboat line every time the double comes up. 12 days from now, I get to regrind it. Though with the layout of the next Ranked Sprint, I may just leave it at 6 and grind through 6-10 in Ranked only.

[SeaborneSumo]

7 minutes ago, Ensign_Cthulhu said:

It's not like your ship doesn't still have its primary armament.

 

German BB main gun accuracy is atrocious.  This was always offset by awesome secondary range and accuracy.  This made the brawlers and fun to play if you like that style.  Following the horrific captain skills rework, any ship which needs secondaries to be worth play is @#$%@.  No longer fun or worth playing.

Why would I get in a Bizmarck when I could get in a North Carolina with MUCH better guns and accuracy?

Was in a match with the Biz last week.  Was in perfect brawling conditions, DD within 7 km for ever.  Cruiser within 10km for ever.  Other ships in secondary range for 5-10 min.   For this WHOLE encounter I had 23 secondary hits total.

Previously, this would've been in the hundreds.

So yea,,, still have horrible primary mains,,,,, but these ships as a whole are worthless to me now.  No fun.

[Utt_Buggly]

So, you’ve just started your first reset grind, it sounds like, rather than finishing it?

I started with the IJN gunboat line, like you. I chose it, in part because it was cheap in terms of XP, but in large part also because I have 18, 19, and 19-point captains to cap off the top three ships of the line.

It went fairly quickly, because I ended up spending about 450,000-475,000 FXP in the process, I think.

For my second reset, I did the British battleships. Decided to be an FXP minimalist and grind it all. Started in fun, ended in miserable boredom and drudgery. Kept my 60% win rate in Monarch. Was keeping my 57% winrate in Lion going until a 10-game losing streak put an end to that. Was out of special flags, so the grind got reeeeaaaaallyyyy llloooonnnnnnnggg.

I was grinding tiers 8-10 of the RN CAs at the same time so it was “RN this, RN that,” all day, every day. For a loooonnnnnngggg time.

By the time I was in the T9s, the final line to the song “Richard Cory” was on infinite loop in my head. (You can google the lines of a poem by the same name. The poem and the song differ a bit, but the idea is all the same.)

Take it from me, for the FXP skinflint, long-term exposure to the RB is like being dragged from the bumper of a pickup truck down a long gravel road.

So, I’m sitting here with Conqueror unlocked for three weeks now, reluctant to pull the trigger, even though I have 307,000,000 credits. Maybe I’ll do a stacked reset (as far as the T10 is concerned) and save the 14M silver it costs to get in the front door of Conqueror. Maybe I’ll FXP the whole stinking thing. Maybe I’ll just chuck the whole shabang.

The only thing that’ll get me to pull the RB trigger again is that the RN BB line through T7 is good, clean, pyromaniacal fun. And I even like the Monarch.

The biggest killer of enthusiasm for the RB is the RB. Progressing through the RB can be characterized by a succession of drinking songs:

Weeks 1-3 of RB: “...why don’t we get drunk, AND SCRE*!!!...”

Weeks 4-6: “...I got friends in low places, where the whiskey flows and the beer chases my blues away...”

Weeks 7-10: “...I drink alone, yeeeaaaaaaaah, with nobody else...”

Weeks 11 and out: “... this is The End, my only friend, The End...”

 

 

Really, don’t anybody worry about me...(it’s the Internet, and no one probably is, anyway, but just in case)... I have more to live for than WoWs and the RB. I like to exaggerate and give some dramatic and humorous flair to life’s minor nuisances.

 

[Ensign_Cthulhu]

5 minutes ago, MannyD_of_The_Sea said:

So, you’ve just started your first reset grind, it sounds like, rather than finishing it?

Yep.

I'm being an FXP skinflint because I don't know what's on the horizon. Specifically, I don't know what resource WG wants for Druid, and until I do, I'm sitting very firmly on my FXP. 

The last time I decided not to spend FXP on getting a Research Bureau ship, I was well rewarded for my hesitation.

I have got this plotted out to the point where it's bearable to do it even in co-op. But my black little heart is set on the Vamp 2. The things I do for the sake of sentimentality...

8 minutes ago, MannyD_of_The_Sea said:

The biggest killer of enthusiasm for the RB is the RB. Progressing through the RB can be characterized by a succession of drinking songs:

Weeks 1-3 of RB: “...why don’t we get drunk, AND SCRE*!!!...”

Weeks 4-6: “...I got friends in low places, where the whiskey flows and the beer chases my blues away...”

Weeks 7-10: “...I drink alone, yeeeaaaaaaaah, with nobody else...”

Weeks 11 and out: “... this is The End, my only friend, The End...”

"I hurt myself today... to see if I still feel..."

Oh no wait, that's Ranked Battles... 

[VeatherVitch]

RB is what you make of it, I reset a line or two on occasion and have fun working back up to T10. The biggest thing with RB is don't reset your favourite lines at the same time, so you always have high tier ships that you enjoy playing. 

[Nevermore135]

32 minutes ago, SeaborneSumo said:

German BB main gun accuracy is atrocious. 

German BBs have the same dispersion curve as UK/US BBs now, and comparable sigma values. The worst that can be truthfully said about them is that they have fewer barrels than their contemporaries, but the increased rate of fire compensates for that to a large degree.

That being said, I share your sentiments on the current state of high tier secondaries.

[Skpstr]

49 minutes ago, Princess_Daystar said:

 

And the Hindenburg line due to being given the Admiral Hipper fron a drop i skipped the entire line to T8 and the gap bothered me..

That's the line I did too.

I figured that, since I kept and regularly played all the ships from T5 up, (except Roon) and they all have good captains, (with a 12-pointer on KBerg, progressing up to a 19 for Hindenburg, I might as well get RPs for what I'm doing anyway.

[Ensign_Cthulhu]

5 minutes ago, VeatherVitch said:

The biggest thing with RB is don't reset your favourite lines at the same time

On a more general note, "Always have a ready substitute." I have enough premiums in various nations and ship types that I could reset a whole bunch of lines and not have too many holes in my capabilities for the things I want to do.

Obviously this changes from player to player, and how fast you can grind back up with what ease of effort is going to combine with what you use the most to determine what gets reset and what doesn't. To each their own, add spice to taste, etc.

[Warped_1]

1 hour ago, Ensign_Cthulhu said:

Well, I guess how soon depends on what else you've done in the last 80 days!  

It's not like your ship doesn't still have its primary armament.

 

Just shows why BBs are the easiest class, even a cook can hit a submarine 

[Ensign_Cthulhu]

1 minute ago, Warped_1 said:

Just shows why BBs are the easiest class, even a cook can hit a submarine 

Well then you shouldn't have any problems when they finally come into the game! 

[Estimated_Prophet]

Personally in the ‘Not going to bother club.’

If I have some long term goal at the moment, it’s to reach 1bil credits. (I’m at about 900mil.)

A personal fantasy(?) would be some WG wonk pulling their hair out because I’m not accessing the RB; except I doubt they care.

[warheart1992]

RB is intriguing because of Vampire II and Yolo Emilio, but to be honest I don't wanna drain my resources (cause let's face it, that's what it mostly is) for a ship. 

And yes, if you want to you can grind fully or with a bit of FXP help, but to me it falls in the category of "FXP ship with extra steps".

[Ensign_Cthulhu]

7 minutes ago, Estimated_Prophet said:

Personally in the ‘Not going to bother club.’

It's not everyone's piece of cake. Just as they admitted (eventually) that a free PR grind was more or less calibrated against the guys for whom this game is their entire life, they made it clear early on that the RB was really designed for those with everything done and nothing else to do, who wanted to do it all over again without wanting to start a separate account. 

The fact that people who don't fall into that designated population jumped on the RB bandwagon is a happy bonus for them. 

3 minutes ago, warheart1992 said:

but to be honest I don't wanna drain my resources (cause let's face it, that's what it mostly is) for a ship.

Fair enough, but if you're going to take that attitude, you need to have sorted out in your head exactly what you ARE going to use them on. Otherwise you're just grinding them for the sake of having more and more, which seems somewhat pointless to me. Yes, you should have a good stockpile in case a sudden need arises, but resources are useless unless they're spent.

This is especially the case in a game like this one, where the resource pool is effectively unlimited and your hoarding of resource X can't be used as a weapon to deprive opponents of it or gain diplomatic/grand strategic leverage.

[Estimated_Prophet]

12 minutes ago, Ensign_Cthulhu said:

This is especially the case in a game like this one, where the resource pool is effectively unlimited and your hoarding of resource X can't be used as a weapon to deprive opponents of it or gain diplomatic/grand strategic leverage.

True.

Sometimes the hoarding is forced on you?

Recently went through and dismissed all the doubled and trebled and quadrupled and maybe quintupled or more captains they kept pilling up on us in the PTS.

Helped that I had 4, 5 billion credits? (More resources piled on each PTS.)

Wound up with around 56 million elite xp. (Have since used some on a few captains, and am down to 54mil.)

Just PTS, but the amount of resources that have piled up there is amusing, if nothing else.

[Ensign_Cthulhu]

One of the things I find myself having to bear in mind playing at very low tiers is that n00b teams screw things up massively BECAUSE THEY ACTUALLY ARE NEWBS. Protected matchmaking dissolves at 200 battles or your first Tier 5 fight, and it's actually not that hard to get to Tier 5 in a particular line long before that count is reached and find yourself out of the kiddie pool. So yeah, we must keep in mind that the Longjiang player who just tried to torpedo an Umikaze doesn't deserve the same level of scorn and derision as the Yueyang player trying to torp a Shima (and even then, if the YY player is nearly dead, he might be justified in dumping those torps in the general direction of the enemy before he checks out).

[Ensign_Cthulhu]

Up to Minekaze now, which is an important milestone because at last this regrind is in the bracket for earning Base XP toward Dailies - and that means an extra 500 XP every day. Over 90 days (i.e. until just before the end of the next X2 bonus season), that's 45,000 XP I won't have to grind directly.

Should have no problem reaching Hatsuharu before the Golden Week ship discounts end. 

[dashtardly]

3 hours ago, Ensign_Cthulhu said:

Should have no problem reaching Hatsuharu before the Golden Week ship discounts end. 

The credit sink of RB is something. The discounts help a little bit but costs are still high (helps especially if you have kept the ships at each tier since that gives you 50% of purchase price back). It helps too if you've kept the ships before the reset and have ready captains at each level to put back on them.

I did the RB once for the Siegfried but nothing else in RB has caught my desire so strongly to do it again.

[Ensign_Cthulhu]

1 hour ago, Vader_Sama said:

Harugumo life

Ew. Grossly inappropriate.

I know the point you're trying to make, but this is probably the worst way you could have chosen to make it.