Answered by Sub_Octavian on Reddit.
Kirosawa
Thanks for doing your usual Q&A. Question for you:
HE was removed from RN CLs because apparently devs and feedback was they didn’t like invisible flamethrowers. Historically RN CLs carried both HE and CPBC. If fire was the issue, then why wasn’t HE implemented with a 0% fire chance or even 1-2% fire chance. This could have still made them viable against angled targets which make the “special” AP useless but still make the AP much better to use when the enemy ship moved back into a suitable angle. At this time a RN cruiser has no means to force a ship to turn broadside and thus the gimmick of the special AP is rendered pretty useless. Torpedoes on RN CL are neither long enough range or viable due to the fact getting to a suitable range for them to be effective is basically sucide. Is this going to be addressed, as if the enemy has more BBs left over mid to late game and your team has less BBs but more RN CLs its effectively a auto win for the enemy team since the enemy BBs can just angle and delete the RN CLs one after another. I and others are not asking for RN cruisers to be overpowered, just viable, which means conforming to the current meta and actually having HE on a cruiser, even if its a 0% chance to set a fire HE round put on RN CLs.
Hello. You are welcome!
With RN CLs we would like to introduce gameplay different from other CLs. No line could be released without later adjustments, but for now, we consider the new ships viable. They don’t need fully broadside target; if main armor penetration is not possible, they can deal decent damage to superstructure. We also don’t think their torpedoes are obsolete. On the contrary, it is safe to say they have important place in RN CLs offensive capabilities. According to last week stats, RN CL deal significantly more torpedo damage than other cruisers with torpedoes, while having one of the best average total damage stats.
They also have good maneuvrability and, of course, smoke screen – fighting BB solo is not a good idea, but they can evade it. So, answering your suggestion – no, we are not going to make global changes to these ships right now, and not going to add HE shells for them. We will monitor their performance carefully, especially when the audience is stable (right now, low tiers are overpopulated, and high level British cruisers are mostly hardcore players or free xp users). If there are problems with these ships, we will solve them.
HM_Bert
Why have you made the first line of one of the most important, effective and anticipated navies in the world into a gimmicky, ineffective and difficult to play group of vessels, with the lower tier (2-6) ships especially being downright awful, and completely outclassed by same or even lower tier ships of other nations? Do you plan to do anything to correct this?
Furthermore, how can you justify making a premium ship, Belfast, clearly so much superior to her tech tree counterparts? Finally, why do the Russian cruiser guns of the same 152mm calibre so vastly outperform those you have given the British, especially in terms of shell travel time? (not even to mention the fire chance they can use)
Thank you.
They may be difficult to play, but with all respect to your game experience, I cannot agree with “ineffective” or “awful”. For now they look quite good. Probably RN battleships would make more easy-to-play line, but we wanted to refresh cruiser class and at the same time, cruisers are less expensive in terms of production (I mean both development and IRL reference available) – we would not be able to introduce RN BBs that soon, for example. However, other RN lines are being developed gradually, so they are coming, too.
Continue reading “WoWS Q&A – 28th October 2016”
