Aiming Question

[Lt_Alanson]

Just a quick question, and please do not get all violent with me if this has been asked a million times before.  I am new and looking for help.

 

Has anyone written or is there a link to a site that explains the mechanics of accurate aiming?

 

I know that it takes tons of practice to learn how to aim "correctly", but knowing the basics to build on is better than just learning by trial and error.

 

Thank you all for the help and sorry again if I start a rage campaign because of a frequently asked question.   Remember, you learn by asking and no question is silly.  That is how we learn.  Thank you.

[Macabe]

The basics are aim at the waterline and fire a ranging shot before firing the rest of your turrets until you develop an instinct for aiming. I would start by  firing your ranging shot at the amount of reticle ticks equal to flight time.

[Higgle]

Aim at the waterline under the smokestack. That's aiming with AP in a nutshell. For HE, you can expect damage no matter where you hit.

 

For more details, check out Tedster's guide here: http://forum.worldofwarships.com/index.php?/topic/32522-tedsters-updated-and-expanded-where-to-shoot-guide/

 

EDIT: However, learning to lead is almost completely trial and error. Pressing Alt for the shell flight time might help.

[Rotary_Rocket]

You are really just leading the target once the target is locked.  That happen automatically when you hover over a new target,  you will see bracket around the target name or you can hit the X key to manually select it.   Auto ranging corrects for being off vertically on the screen for locked targets.  In other words aiming for the waterline of the superstructure makes no difference at all, it's in the hand of RNG at that point. It is useful as a guide with the sights though.  

 

If the target is not locked auto ranging is not in play but your dispersion goes way up.

 

[NefariousK]

To fire that initial ranging shot I often hold down the ALT key, while in the Bino view.  That will tell you how many seconds travel time your shells will take to reach the spot under your cursor.  

 

Then I use the numbered horizontal scale to aim, using the spot on the number scale for lead.  I believe it works for a ship traveling at around 20kts perpendicular to you, so you will have to use a bit more or less depending on how fast the target is moving.  I tend to use about double the value on a full speed Destroyer, and nearly that much for a Cruiser.

 

When they're coming toward or going away, adjust inward toward the center sight the more you have to elevate up or down. 

 

That's enough to get first shot on target or pretty close, and you can adjust using the reference on the scale (you didn't move the aim point after your last shot so that it keeps tracking, right?) 

 

As with everything, experience and practice is the final word.

[Cowcharge]

This is long, but aiming is complicated to describe in any way that you would find useful.

 

The principle is to calculate where the target will be after the same amount of time as your shell flight time, and aim at that spot on the water. There's really only two ways to do that. This is gonna sound like I'm being a wiseguy, but I'm not. Method one is just math, is probably the reverse of how the game figures out if you're hitting or not, and is probably impossible to do quickly enough unless you're a math genius and can slow down time, but here it is (and I'm really not being a wise guy, there really are only two ways to do it): Hold the aiming reticle scale line on the target's waterline, and hold "alt" to display your shell flight time at that range. Then calculate how much the target will move in that amount of time, and aim that far ahead of it. You know how fast every ship is by the specs, and can tell what throttle setting it is using by its smoke and wake. Of course, if the target isn't traveling perfectly perpendicular to your sights, you have to also calculate the angle it is traveling off perpendicular either towards you or away from you, calculate what that looks like at the angle at which you are viewing this 2d representation, and adjust your aim further back or closer to you. And since distance is compressed in this game, you also have to translate that compression into screen distance. I don't think that's possible to do quickly enough without a super computer and a time machine, but if you could, it would be the most accurate.

 

Method two is athletic, it relies on your hand-to-eye coordination, and I'm sure it's what virtually every player does. It's the exact same method as that used to pass a ball to a running teammate or shoot a bird out of the sky, you just aim where they're gonna be when the ball gets there. It's instinctive as well as learned, and you "just do it". And like those sports, either you use innate talent or trial-and-error to learn to do it well, most of us use some combination of both. And as in sports, some people will be good right away with little effort, and some will never get it. Tom Brady isn't sitting there in the pocket saying to himself "Ok, Gronk is running at 15 mph at an angle of thirteen degrees away from me 15 yards downfield and my throw will be doing 50 mph, so the cosine of thirteen degrees is yada yada yada", he just does it well because of his talent for 3d visualization and ballistics, and he's thrown 5 million passes to get it right.

 

There's no "secret" to it that anyone can explain to you that makes it easy or foolproof. But there are a couple of things that can help conceptualize it, and with practice they can become part of the unthinking skill that the best aimers have, and get you accusations of "aimbot!" One such tip to help you with learning how to handle non-perpendicular angles is to think of viewing your target from directly above. Take a piece of paper, and draw a point representing the current position of a target. Then draw a circle around it, the size is irrelevant for this exercise, but it represents the possible travel distance of the target at a particular speed. The bigger the circle, the easier this exercise will be to visualize, so draw the biggest circle that will fit on the paper. The size of the "real" circle in a particular instance in-game would be determined by the target's speed and your range (flight time of your shells has to equal travel time of the ship to score a hit). Now draw "spokes" out from the center point to the circle, every few degrees, again the specific spacing is irrelevant for this illustration, but the more spokes, the better the visualization. Let's say every ten degrees, which would make 36 lines, representing 36 different courses the target could be sailing from the center of the circle to the rim (no need to measure the angles either, just draw a bunch of spokes that are distinct from each other so you can see them). Each point on the circle where a spoke hits would be your aiming point for that course and speed to score a hit.

 

Now push the paper to the opposite side of the table (representing the range from your ship to the target), and put your chin on the edge of the table so that you're looking at your circle from a very low angle, as if your eyes were the sun at sunset, shining at a low angle on your circle. Again, the specific height of your eyes above the table is irrelevant for this exercise, but it represents the height of the fire control station on your ship (or whatever WG uses for that height in the code). The circle will now appear as an ellipse, or "squished" circle. The two spokes at 3 and 9 o'clock will appear the same size as they do from directly above, but as you go spoke-by-spoke away from perpendicular towards 12 o'clock (target sailing straight away from you) and 6 o'clock (sailing straight towards you), they will look shorter and shorter. You can see that the further from perpendicular the target's course gets, the more compressed the spoke length (target's travel distance) looks to your eyes, and the harder it will be to aim exactly on the circle. That's why it's so much easier to hit a target that's sailing perpendicular to your view, because of this visual compression at more acute angles. But looking at it this way gives you an idea how much you have to shift your aiming point closer to the target as its course changes away from perpendicular. It's more than you think.

 

Since a ship isn't a single point though, if we were to make this more useful, we would have to draw two center points in two circles, for both bow and stern, to represent the possible positions of both bow and stern at that speed, and connect both center points with a ship-length stick. As the ship changed course, the bow circle would drag the stern circle around like a boat dragging a water skier.

 

Now I didn't just think of this one day because I'm even remotely smart, or even ever draw it on paper. What made me visualize it this way was using the old aim assist mod for the one day I tried it, back when the uproar over it was heated up and I wanted to see for myself how much it affected the game (got me an extra 7 or 8% hit rate, that's it). The big advantage of that mod was that it constantly put the spoke/ellipse intersection for the current speed and course of the target right on the screen for you (although it seemed to make me land shots farther aft than I hoped, so I don't know what it used for a center point, or maybe that was desynch). Even though I only used it for one day, it trained my mind to draw that ellipse and those spoke points in my head when I aim. I'm certainly not perfect at it, but it did make me much better at hitting at other angles with fewer wasted ranging shots, and hugely better at hitting a ship during a turn, because I can see in my head the end of the spoke moving around the ellipse. I absolutely love it (huge grin) when a DD is doing wild turns but not quite often enough, and I manage to plop a salvo right on the spot where his turn ends right when he gets there, and see him blown to smithereens. Best moment in the game, IMO.

 

Now all of that was objective geometry, and is the same for everyone. But there are also subjective factors that alter how much damage you do with the hits you do get, factors for which I know very few specifics with any certainty, and for which there are varying opinions on how to do it right. Like where on the ship to hit to do the most damage. Wherever you aim fore-and aft, as far as height goes, most people on here say to aim at the waterline, but in my experience I do better bumping it up above the waterline a little, it seems to give me more citadel hits and critical hits, and just plain hits. I don't have access to the "rules" used by the game code, so I have no idea how people can come on here and state with authority that it works one way or another (I've wondered how these people do this in every game with a forum that I've ever played. Where the hell do they get inside info like that?). Some say hitting below the turrets gives you more mag explosions, some say hitting between the smokestacks gives you engine crits. How anyone knows for sure which way is "better" is beyond me, unless they've decompiled the code or have inside info from a coder. Like someone above said that something called "auto-ranging" automatically adjusts the height of your fire, which seems completely not the way it works in my game. If I'm not carefully putting my aiming point high on a ship angling away or low on a ship angling towards me, on the extension of the waterline of the ship and there fore it's projected course (if not turning, of course), I miss short or long all the time. So i would ask where this auto-ranging info came from?

 

Something else that makes this less than a precise science is the very large (for me at least) issue of desynchronization, which makes the drawn ship you can see on the screen be in a different position than the actual mathematical position of the ship, as calculated in the code that is used to score hits. I don't know if that is a function of your connection quality, or computer speed, or something with the server, or with the code, or what. No idea what causes it, but it's like the real ship is invisible, and it's towing a hologram of itself behind it to make you aim too far aft so that all your shots land in its wake. When your shells appear to go right through the ship without a single hit, it's desynch and you need to aim farther ahead. I actually have to miss the visible ship by a good half-ship's length most of the time to get hits. The faster the target ship, the more extra lead you need to add. And with a small fast ship at close range, it becomes so bad that you can't fit the ship and the aim point in your binocs at the same time without backing off the zoom. It's very frustrating, and I get it a lot. It makes me waste a lot of ranging shots because I can't trust my eyes, and it hurts my hit rate tremendously (and is another reason why stats are useless, as desynch varies for different people, and even for the same person at different times in the same battle. You can't have a stellar hit rate unless you experience no desynch). One thing that tells you that you have desynch (and where to aim) is seeing your enemy's shells being launched from the water ahead of their ship. For some reason the shells aren't de-synched, so just like a cloaked Klingon, when they fire they give their real position away. Aim to hit where the shells are appearing, not where the ship is. You can also see your hits exploding in the empty space ahead of the target instead of on it. Because I get desynch so often, I tend to almost always aim to hit around the bow of my target, in order to get hits whether there is desynch or not. If there is desynch, hits you see on the bow are actually hitting closer to the stern of the "real"  target. Aiming at the bow maximizes my basic hit rate, but makes it pretty much impossible to choose a specific spot on the ship to hit. All you can do is hope to just get hits, because even when you see hits, they're not really hitting the place on the ship where you see them, they're actually landing farther aft somewhere. It all ends up as a huge guess-fest. The people who go on about choosing aiming spots like it's as easy as picking specific ducks in a shooting gallery clearly don't have desynch, and because I do, I can never get hit rates up there with the best players because their worlds line up and mine doesn't. Nor can i hope to get as many crits or cits or as much damage per battle.

 

Anyway, that's all I've got, hope it helps.

[Blondie_the_Good]

 

Here is a link to a youtube basic gunnery tutorial video posted by ichasegaming.

 

He has quite a few good tutorial/guide videos. He also live streams World of warships on TwitchTV.

 

I would also check out some of Tedster59's and BaronVonGamerz videos... (Sorry if I left out anyone. I remember these off the top of my head.)

 

Though there is no substitute for firsthand experience, watching tutorials/gameplay videos and livestreams is an effective way to learn some skills without getting smashed in-game. I also watch them just to get a different perspective and opinion from those I may have formed on my own.

[Ray_P]

Aim at the waterline under the smokestack. That's aiming with AP in a nutshell. For HE, you can expect damage no matter where you hit.

 

For more details, check out Tedster's guide here: http://forum.worldofwarships.com/index.php?/topic/32522-tedsters-updated-and-expanded-where-to-shoot-guide/

 

EDIT: However, learning to lead is almost completely trial and error. Pressing Alt for the shell flight time might help.

 

I don't think you meant that?   If you aim at that point your shells will fall far astern unless they are right on top of you.  I think basically if they are at the normal fighting range unless you are closer, the last mark on your reticle is a good starting point.   Add more lead if they are CA's or DD's and subtract a few if they are a BB.   That assumes a straight course and no angle.  In a short time you will either pick it up or not.   If you can't aim in this game your dead meat.

[Higgle]

I don't think you meant that?   If you aim at that point your shells will fall far astern unless they are right on top of you.  I think basically if they are at the normal fighting range unless you are closer, the last mark on your reticle is a good starting point.   Add more lead if they are CA's or DD's and subtract a few if they are a BB.   That assumes a straight course and no angle.  In a short time you will either pick it up or not.   If you can't aim in this game your dead meat.

 

My bad. What I meant was, aim to hit the waterline under the smokestack. Leading is not the same as aiming.

[Lt_Alanson]

Thank you all for the help.  This discussion has been very worthwhile to me and now all I need to do is , how does that old joke go?  "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"...Practice, practice, practice.

 

 

Thanks again all.