Repost: Opinions on Russian Cruisers

[TenguBlade]

 

Because the forum editor sank my original post, they can deal with the extra space that a repost takes up.

 

Almost to the Shchors now on the live server, and now that I'm almost through what is purportedly the most overpowered of the Russian CAs, I thought I would share some personal reflections.  For the record, I've played the line in its entirety on PT more than a few times, and my brother, who ground his way to the Moskva on live, has his insights present in this thread too.  They're too numerous to all cite, so a general acknowledgement will have to do.

 

Damage Output

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Beyond T5 and until T10, the Russians are far behind in DPM.  Every other cruiser gets much more reliable damage output: not the highest on paper necessarily, but more reliable.  8" AP doesn't require something to be completely broadside to accumulate damage, and 8" HE has enough penetration to continue causing damage even after a section has had its HP completely depleted.  Not to mention that fire chances jump ahead.  Without Demolition Expert, forget about competing with a Cleveland or Aoba in fires, Budyonny simple can not set that many.  The Russian 152mm excels at wrecking idiots that broadside even against T10 targets, yes, but short of a near-perfect broadside your damage output falls off severely.

 

While I think the firestarting potential becomes about even again at Shchors (discounting DE, at least), the Shchors and especially Chapayev are even more dependent upon the victim's defensive posturing because of the improved armor as you go up tiers.  While the HE can probably still penetrate BB superstructures, saturation is a thing, so, as an example of what I mean, if a saturated BB goes bow-on to a Russian CA, the latter has to either pray to get enough fires to force him to break off (which can be countered by repair party or damage control), or use AP and hope it pens.  While the 152's penetration is very impressive for such a light-caliber gun, the light caliber ultimately means that its penetration damage is lower and the likelihood of penetration period is lower than for an 8" gun at the same range.  Below 10km, in my experience, that's largely inconsequential, but being 10km from a battleship or CA in a Russian cruiser is asking to get demolished.

 

However, there is a tradeoff.  The ballistics.  Russian guns can hit reliably at even their maximum ranges; thus, while their damage output is much more victim-dependent (i.e. based on their behavior), it's much less range-dependent, while the opposite is true of almost all cruisers.  I never had issues leading even maneuvering targets in my Budyonny until I was firing at ranges where only the spotter plane could grant me access.  That being said, I seem to be better at aiming than normal (not bragging, but my higher average damages have to come from somewhere); on the flip side, I've been able to dodge Russian CA volleys in battleships with just rudimentary WASD.

 

Of course, it only takes a few shots to finish off a damaged ship; I'll get to why that's important later.

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Ship Characteristics and Matchups

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There are no two ways about this: Russian CAs suck at taking hits.  Only the Japanese even have citadels of comparable size, and even then the IJN CA citadels are relatively low, while the Russians' virtually all ride above the waterline.  Making this picture worse is that, once turtleback is counted, even German CAs have thicker citadel armor.  Budyonny gets away from having to wear this crown of shame with her 140mm belt, but you will be hard-pressed to find any use in it, because even in a Random battle, there are very few people stupid enough to both use AP and fire at the belt when you're angled at degrees where it will bounce.  And if they hit even a little bit above, it, you take damage.  A lot of it.  The giant upperworks of Russian CAs also are prime targets for HE spam: combined with their gigantic, poorly-armored hulls, it's unsurprising that hits from contemporary-tier cruiser HE can cause module damage and even the occasional cit.  And while you can - and should - stand off at ranges where enemy fire is less effective because of dispersion, you have absolutely no ability to deal with the results of someone making their monthly sacrifices to RNGesus.  Moskva doesn't suffer from this as badly as other representatives of the line, but as she plays more like a battleship (think Scharnhorst, but taken to an even greater extreme) than a proper cruiser, I'll be making an exception.  That's going to be happening a few more times.

 

When it comes to secondary armament, the Russians lose out.  The torpedoes have absurdly short range, there are generally very few of them, and you will very likely die attempting to use them.  Dmitri Donskoi does get 8km fish, but her huge size, bad detection, and poor armor, along with the traditional mediocre Russian torpedo arcs, mean that the extra range is only barely a net reduction of risk.  The secondaries on every ship, again, barring Moskva, are short-ranged and just generally not worth giving a [edited] about like they are with every other cruiser.  When it comes to AA, up until T8 it might as well not exist: without DF, you are not driving even a bottom-tier carrier away.  The high-tier ones do have decent AA, but most of the damage comes from small-caliber AA guns that are both easy to knock out with hits and short-ranged.  Again, with the boost from DF, adequate to prevent you from being wiped off the map with one strike, but combined with the Russians' poor handling it's highly unlikely you'll get away without taking a hit, and if your DF is out, forget about dodging against a smart CV; none of them can access a catapult fighter either.  Kirov has very strong AA for her tier, yes, but both her giant size and lack of DF end up with her in no better a position than the other T5 CAs to deal with air attack - they can at least maneuver to dodge a drop while she has to pray to RNGesus to shoot planes down.

 

Speaking of maneuverability, I think it's pretty obvious that it's bad for every representative of the line.  In addition to the slow rudder and large turning circle, though, is the fact that while the Russians have good straight-line speed, their response to throttle inputs is medicore.  Thus, while I could use "W" and "S" repeatedly in a ship like the Pensacola to augment my rudder inputs, if I do so in a Russian cruiser, I bleed off too much speed with each use of this tactic to recover before the next salvo comes at me.  That will either lead to me falling behind in a chase, or, more importantly getting run down faster if I'm the one being chased.  While the Japanese have similar handling quirks with their ships, they have one key feature the Russian's don't: stealth.

 

Which is arguably the second-biggest joke about the line after their torpedoes.  The concealment ranges from okay in ships like the Budyonny, Shchors, and Chapayev to let's-join-Pensacola-in-therapy bad for others like Kirov and Dmitri Donskoi.  While this isn't a problem against individual ships, if even two ships are working together, then it is.  But, reasons why it isn't a concern in a 1v1 first.  BBs will usually be out of effective main gun range if you're kiting them right, as will most CAs, and Russian DDs will - Khabarovsk aside - have to expose themselves to a faceful of Stalin-Flavored Shells if they attack you, while USN DDs can't hope to hit you from within their invisi-firing window if you're moving and maneuvering.

 

Well, then, why is it so much worse when people coordinate against you, then?  Because your ship is barely agile enough to dodge fire from one angle aimed at one spot.  As an example, USN DDs may not be able to hit you reliably, but the stream of shells is still going to cut off some options to you.  That leaves fewer options for an enemy battleship or cruiser to cover when they aim at you as well: the end result is you're choosing between which shells to eat.  Obviously, most of you would take the DD's, but in choosing to dodge those shells, you did what any smart DD captain would think you were doing, and you'll take a large number of hits if he reads you like he should.  The other prospect is that you get cut in half by the enemy capital ship.

 

While I'm discussing matchups, IJN gunboat DDs are a very nasty surprise to run into as a VMF CA, especially Budyonny or Shchors, which don't have radar.  Between their ability to invisi-fire from single-digit ranges and good ballistics, along with top-grade HE damage and fire chance as icing on the cake, IJN gunboat DDs will absolutely ruin your day if they get the drop on you while you're alone.  If they're working with a larger ship, then you might as well disconnect, because it doesn't matter how you turn, you will take hits from one source or another if both captains know what they're doing.  While this isn't too much of a problem for Budyonny, Shchors sees the Kagero, Fubuki, and especially Hatsuharu often.  Gunboat Hatsu isn't great, but the fundamental reasons why it counters Russian CAs are still there.  I'm anticipating that the Akizuki in particular will rip the floor out from under Shchors and Budyonny once she arrives, but that's neither here nor there.

 

In general, this leaves me rather disappointed with the Russian line.  They reward aiming, but literally anyone can do that with how easy their ballistics make it, and a skilled marksman can hit targets at range in any ship except maybe Baltimore.  They pay for that with absolutely no reward for any sort of defensive strategy: at most, your WASD will preserve you for a half minute, while at worst it will cause you to get instantly killed by something else.  These are the only warships in which I insist being a second- or third-line fighter: I have more confidence in advancing with a Pensacola than any Russian cruiser.

 

I will acknowledge that they do reward situational awareness and tactical thinking, but only in a carrot-and-stick manner: if you don't possess the aforementioned attributes, you will die, quickly.  Any Russian cruiser exposes have  itself to almost a full minute's worth of potential massive-damage salvos when it tries to turn around, and their terrible stealth means that they can't exploit the cover of invisibility to make these key repositioning maneuvers like the Japanese can (using the IJN here because they're also known for long cruisers with huge cits).  And while they do have some unique tactical value - I will elaborate on this later - almost any warship with a skilled enough marksman on the trigger will be able to do fill the same niche, just not always as effectively.  At the end of the day, it's only enough to make up for what I mentioned at the top of this paragraph.

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How the Current Meta Favors the Russian CAs

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If the deck is so stacked against Russian CAs, then why are they doing so well?

 

In playing the line myself, I've noticed several reasons why this happens.  Chief among them is target prioritization.  A Russian cruiser sitting in the back lobbing shells is far less threatening at first glance than a battleship charging your line, and players judge as such without fully understanding the threat an unbridled Russian CA represents, especially on the tactical level.

 

Before I get into why, I'll point out that whenever I see one (or any fire-support ship, but it's usually a Russian cruiser), I always both fire on it myself, regardless of range, and ask it to be focused.  The end result is usually that it either dies, retreats for a little bit, or limps away badly injured and plays a minimal role for the rest of the battle.  Any of those outcomes are good: at their max range, despite the good ballistics, shells still take seconds to fall, seconds that any smart player can utilize to get out of the way.

 

This leaves the enemy team without any fire support, and thus the remaining ships will have to decide between aiming at my team's own second line or at the wedge I will most likely be leading straight at them.  In a situation where you're trying to shove the opposing team out of the way, whoever takes less damage relative to the total HP their fleet has wins.  Now that the enemy's second line is riddled, the best-case scenario for them is that they focus on one while the other pounds them to scrap; the worst-case scenario is that they can't make up their mind and everyone fires on a different target resulting in a complete steamrollering.

 

Now, if the Russian (again, for the sake of your tactical planning, you can substitute the name of any warship sniping from the second line, I'm just using the Russian CAs here because it's their specialty) is ignored, then, most dangerously, it has the ability to snipe injured warships falling back to the second line and potentially finish them off.  This leaves much less room for error on the part of players on the other team: their margin of error for determining their point of no return (i.e. when they won't make it away) goes down by a lot when the safe zone gets pushed further away from the battle line.  If that's not relevant, then at the end of the day, the Russian is heaping damage onto your team.  This isn't too much of a problem itself, but when you consider how little coordination goes on between Random teams, it becomes one.  

 

Simply put, the Russian cruisers are favored by the current meta because their tactical value is perfect for Random battles: sniping that one ship that's taken a beating takes it out of action permanently whereas it could have still impacted the match if it lived.  Not to mention that the majority of players are not aware of the tactical danger they pose and thus don't exploit their terrible defensive ability - not that they should be expected to.

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Overall Opinions

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Are the Russian cruisers OP?  I don't think so.  Kirov and below are on fairly even ground with the rest, and though the others perform well, save Moskva I think this is more the result of the meta than anything else.  As for Moskva herself, as I've said before, she plays like a battleship, so I compare her to the other BBs.  Damage-wise, she's pretty much where she should be - at the bottom - and while her win rate is inflated, I should mention that Grosser Kurfurst had more battles than she did in the past two weeks, which seems to indicate that that particular stat is inflated.

 

Frankly, this line is just different from the others much like the IJN DD line is different.  Both lines exist to exclusively punish mistakes: the Russian CAs on a tactical level, and the IJN DDs on the individual level.  Yes, the IJN DDs are "in-line" with the others and the Russians are not, but look how much it took to make it that way.  If players didn't sail in straight lines, then the IJN DDs wouldn't be as big a problem that they were made out to be - I still think 5 Shimakazes in a single match is beyond excessive, so I'm not entirely opposed to seeing reduction in torpedo soup.  But instead, to balance them, we saw them get their primary weapons shafted.

 

It's not a good idea for the Russian CAs to go that way too.  They're so bad in almost every other way that without their main guns being as good as they are, nerfs would make them miserable.  But the way to kill them right now is teamwork, or extreme luck.  Well, we can't all be lucky when we need it, that would ruin the point of the game.  Teamwork exists, and I think that any number of forumites here would also agree with my reasonings for targeting Russian CAs first if not my strategy, but at the end of the day we are a small percentage of the playerbase.  And while there are other "educated," if you will, players that don't frequent the forums, they still aren't the average player, and the average player still has no idea why a Russian CA is dangerous because they don't think on a tactical level.  Why would they if it's an internet game they play for fun?  And let's be honest: how many people are going to willingly take orders from someone they don't know if they don't make a logical deduction of why that they also agree with?

 

Thus, the problem isn't that the ships are OP, it's that people don't exhibit behavior that WG expected would rein them in.

 

Sorry about the deletion of the original, I pieced it back together as much as I could.

 

[HKRevolutionOfOurTime]

Russian CAs also tend to perform better when uptiered as they don't suffer from the same range and ballistics deficiencies competing ships do. This is especially apparent at tiers 5-6.

[YukikazeFortunateBeaver]

CL=light cruiser CA= heavy cruiser

[poeticmotion]

Budyonny is deadly enough that she's a keeper in my port, and I win 60% of my games with her, my best win rate of any ship over 100 games. The rest of line was pretty meh for me; unlocked Chapeyev but didn't buy her.

[TenguBlade]

Russian CAs also tend to perform better when uptiered as they don't suffer from the same range and ballistics deficiencies competing ships do. This is especially apparent at tiers 5-6.

That's irrelevant in this discussion, though, yes, it does explain why their performances haven't dropped as badly as those the other T5s and T6s with the new MM system.  These observations of mine go back to when the line was first released.

[HazeGrayUnderway]

Seeing something like Schors, Kutuzov sitting in the back behind enemy Battleships?  You know it's going to be a fun time!

[Eisennagel]

 

There are real historical justifications to why the Russian cruisers are what they are in the game.

 

The visibility of the ship depends on the mast height and the length of the ship.  These ships do have high masts, but in return of the high masts, it gives better range for their main rangefinders.  Visible signature and GFCS range are produced by different sides of the same coin.

 

They got high weight, long hulls, and smallish rudders.  That makes them sluggish to turn.   

 

Navweaps have described the Soviet 152mm as a good, if not outstanding, weapon.  

[TenguBlade]

There are real historical justifications to why the Russian cruisers are what they are in the game.

 

The visibility of the ship depends on the mast height and the length of the ship.  These ships do have high masts, but in return of the high masts, it gives better range for their main rangefinders.  Visible signature and GFCS range are produced by different sides of the same coin.

 

They got high weight, long hulls, and smallish rudders.  That makes them sluggish to turn.   

 

Navweaps have described the Soviet 152mm as a good, if not outstanding, weapon.  

I'm well aware.  In fact, it's part of why I don't think the Russian CAs should be nerfed: a lot of this is pretty close to history, however upsetting that seems to people.  The entire point of this thread was to float some ideas about why they seem to be consistently overperforming while WG apparently will do nothing.