WoWS News – 19 March 2019

Graf Zeppelin and Soviet battleships changes
The total damage output of Graf Zeppelin is still very high. To keep the special features of GZ’s attack planes and dive bombers and balance the total amount of damage this CV can inflict, the damage of torpedoes is lowered from 5500 to 4533. This change will be live at 14:00 UTC on 13.03.19
It’s not planned to make further changes to the parameters of Graf Zeppelin, Saipan, Kaga and Enterprise. We consider their balancing finished. We also would like to remind you that you can exchange your CVs in the Inventory section before the time to do this expires with 0.8.2.

– Accuracy settings are changed for Lenin and all researchable tier III – X soviet battleships;
– Damage Control Party duration is lowered to 10 seconds for for Lenin and all researchable soviet battleships.
The accuracy settings for the Soviet battleships were very “unnatural” and the change of the spread at long range increases sharply. Also such settings gave too large of an accuracy bonus at distances of mid to close range fights. Therefore, the values of the vertical and horizontal spread were adjusted so that accuracy depending on the distance changes more smoothly. This will slightly reduce the accuracy on the range up to 12 km.
The Soviet battleships were too effective in “tanking” cruisers’ damage thanks to their good armor, high HP pool and the special settings of the Damage Control Party. Therefore, to balance the interaction of the Soviet BBs and cruisers, but keep other traits intact, the duration of the DCP is reduced. This will increase the total damage Soviet BBs receive from fires.
[PSA] Giulio Cesare testing and premium ships status

Dear players,
Following your feedback and test results, we decided to stop live testing of Giulio Cesare at tier VI and abandon the initiative to individually re-balance premium ships, which were purchased in or directly marketed through our Premium store. Here is the reasoning:

1. While many of you did support the idea of promoting more balance and fair play, most of you were not willing to support this if it means making changes to purchased premium ships.
2. Many of you let us know that the perfect balance in each ship group is not as critical for you as we assumed; however, the confidence that the stats of purchased premium ships are not to be nerfed is much more important. It was not the only opinion voiced, but it was the most frequent in all discussions on all platforms.
3. According to the majority of your opinions, having several over performing premium ships in the game is not an issue for you, given the fact that they are not sold directly and that they can be countered under the right circumstances;
4. Testing Giulio Cesare on tier VI has shown that it can indeed be a balanced tier VI battleship, however, her gameplay experience changed dramatically. The same is true for alternative rebalance options (e.g. nerf on tier V).
As the proposed initiative was initially based on community feedback, and achieving absolutely perfect balance in each ship group is not a purpose in itself (and it is not really possible anyway, because ships have vastly different play styles, pros and cons, and players have vastly different skill levels), we decided to cancel it. There are not many ships like Giulio Cesare in the game, and most of them are quite old; our balancing process has significantly improved since release, and there is no indication that we will have many such ships in the game. However, if they do appear, we will take appropriate action. For example, as we do now, stop direct sales and limit their distribution to very special occasions, so that their presence in battles is minimal.
Despite the fact that we never had a rule which stated “premium ships are not nerfed individually”, we indeed did not do it before and we understand why many of you assumed that there is such a rule.
It should be noted that even the ships purchased in or marketed through Premium store are a part of a big game we all play. That means our decision does not isolate any ship from systematic changes applied to a group of ships on common basis or to the whole game. For example, a change to the Radar mechanics affects all ships equipped with Radar, a Smoke mechanics change affects all ships with smoke, etc.
We sincerely thank you for your opinions and feedback.
Good luck and fair seas!
Public Test, changes to Furious, Azuma AA
British CV Furious, tier VI
Stock bombers changed:
Number of bombers in one attacking flight increased from 1 to 2;
Plane regain time is lowered from 142 to 96 seconds;
Size of the aiming ellipse is increased by 22%
Top researchable bombers changed:
Count of bombers in one attacking flight increased from 1 to 2;
Size of the aiming ellipse is increased by 30%
Top researchable torpedo bombers’ torpedoes replaced by that of the stock ones:
The damage is lowered from 5930 to 5200
The flooding chance is lowered from 51% to 45%
Instead of 4 bomber attack runs you can make only 2, but each of them will be more effective and the squadron will spend less time under the AA fire. The size of the aiming ellipse was increased to take into account the addition of the second plane and the increased number of bombs being dropped.

The torpedoes of the top torpedo-bombers were replaced as they demonstrated higher efficiency in comparison with other CVs. In addition, such a change compensates the increased bombers’ damage.
Azuma’s AA was updated in 0.8.1, it was tested and we are ready to show you the final state of the ship’s AA defense:
AA defense short-range: continuous damage per second – 519, hit probability – 83%, action zone 0.1-1.9 km;
AA defense long-range: number of explosions in a salvo – 8, damage within an explosion – 1470, continuous damage per second – 260, hit probability – 88%, action zone 1.9-5.8 km;
AA sector reinforcement – 25%, sector reinforcement and reinforcement shift time – 10 s.
Azuma’s AA has high continuous damage in the short ranges and dangerous explosions from the 1.9 km range.
Source: WoWS Dev FB page