Source: SkillSawTheSecond (Reddit)
This’ll be short since I’ve only played a few games in the Warspite, but here are a few things I’ve noticed about this fat beast:
- It’s extremely maneuverable. With a turn radius of only 550m you can turn on a dime. While the standard 20s rudder shift time is average for BB’s, putting the rudder shift upgrade on it drops that down to 16s, and I was able to weave in and around the islands on several maps. It’ll be hard to hit this ship with torpedoes as long as the player is even halfway paying attention to his surroundings
- The guns are mediocre, to be completely honest. While they do have good damage, they have abysmal range (16.3km) and even worse traverse speed (72s!). This makes the secondary battery accuracy upgrade pretty much mandatory, because you’ll never be able to shoot any DD’s or even some CA’s that get close to you. Something else that’s misleading about the guns: while they have 226m dispersion, that dispersion is at 16.3km. The Fuso, by comparison, has 280m dispersion at 21.3km which realistically means it’s going to be more accurate than the Warspite.
- The Warspite is actually quite a short ship, even shorter than many cruisers. While it does have more superstructure than most other ships, it has the same amount of hull above the surface as the Nagato. Easy to hit by BB’s, certainly, but i don’t foresee high damage rolls due to the citadel being below the waterline.
- Speaking of the waterline, the spaced torpedo armor runs nearly the entire length of the ship. This is going to make getting solid torpedo hits on this ship even more difficult, I believe, though I have yet to test the actual effectiveness of the spaced armor. Update I’ve noticed that the spaced armor is very effective. Having taken torpedoes from a total broadside it seems damage from torpedoes is reduced roughly 10-15%, and this percentage reduction is increased if your are further angled. At a roughly 30 degree angle a tier 6 DD’s torpedo was reduced to ~5000 damage.
- Update The AA on this ship is surprisingly good. In the 4 TB runs that were made on me last game I killed roughly a dozen aircraft. Most of that was due to the 4×8 40mm Vickers AA which has a range of 2.5km and 112dps. If you were to put the AA range upgrade on the Warspite, I have no doubt it’d be extremely costly to attack with aircraft.
At the moment I think the ship is underpowered for a tier 6 Battleship. It’s inevitably going to see all the IJN and USN BB’s which will likely out-range it and out-speed it. It’s guns make it ineffective against enemy BB’s and even worse against anything else. While it’s maneuverability makes CA’s wish they could keep up, and it’s armor is better than it’s comparable opponent the Fuso, inevitably it’s just going to get killed from range. If you’re at knife-fight ranges with enemy BB’s, you might have the advantage, but that depends heavily on whoever gets the first hits.
