However ranking is not binary, “rank 1” vs “potato”, there are exactly 23 ranks available. Each rank has rewards. Not even bad ones, like big stacks of premium consumables, credits, signals or even gold currency. However the best is the “Flag of the First League”, a special flag granting -10% service costs to all of your ships (you have to mount first). You get it for reaching rank 10. Its smaller version is giving -5% at rank 15.
Below rank 10, you can play with Tier 8 ships. I don’t even have Tier 9 ships, I’m so new to the game, yet I could reach rank 10. Why? Because it’s easy. No, I’m not being smug, I don’t mean “easy for a natural born captain like me, come and adore me”, I mean easier than random battles. Literally. Look at the following stat pages! I played ranked battles exclusively with one ship and I have better winrate, damage, XP, survival and everything on ranked than on random! (and thee WoWS stats page now calls me unicum hahaha!)
Why? Because in ranked you play exclusively against Tier 8 ships, while on random you can be the only Tier 8 facing Tier 10 ships. Also, there are less players (7 v 7 instead of 11 v 11), so your influence is larger and there are no botters and AFK-ers (except slow loaders) and open throwers that make the game one-sided and hopeless.
There is another thing to help you at low ranks, “irrevocable ranks”. Normally, you gain a star for a win and lose it for a loss, unless you are the top player of the losing team. If you have enough stars, you gain a rank, if you lose enough, you lose a rank. However if you reach an irrevocable rank, you don’t lose a star if it would mean losing that rank. Ergo you just need persistence to progress, not even skill. I mean if you need 3 stars to progress, you just need a period of plays when you have 3 more wins than losses. Over time, you must have that, even if your winrate is below 50% (which is mediocre by definition and if you do some preparation, you can be better than that):
There is no reason not to play ranked if you haven’t done it already. You can’t lose anything and you can win awful lot of rewards. So if you have a Tier 8 ship, queue ranked now! The season is almost over, hurry! Unless you are the worst player ever, you will reach rank 15, due to irrevocable ranks. If you are above average, you’ll reach rank 10, with all its rewards.
You did so well in Ranked because everybody better than you have already gone to rank 10 and above.
It makes a huge difference when you play them. Rank 13 games on day one are harder than rank 2 games on day 15 (all the Rank 1 players start at rank 13 the following season).
Nevertheless, Ranked games are much more rewarding than Randoms. Smaller teams mean actual strategies can be employed and every ship matters.
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@Stawek: that’s a really interesting idea, doing ranked at the end of the season. However it doesn’t explain why it’s easier than random. It assumes that either the late-season contenders are below-average, or that the random matchmaker is rigged and purposefully gives good players horrible teammates that can only be carried with 50% chance.
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Ranked get easier as the season progresses because better players get to rank one and are then eliminated from the player pool for 2-5/6-10/11-15/etc battles.
Maybe it makes a difference that in ranked you can expect your team to play to win and players pay more attention to teamplay as opposed to randoms playing ‘for fun’ so you know teampay will not be rewarded anyway.
Kagero has the best concealment at T8 so it is excellent at spotting enemies that your team then can shoot. It also has pretty decent torps. So it is pretty good at the core DD role. Slightly less useful for contesting caps because it lacks gun power to go 1 vs 1 vs other DD’s.
You have good damage yourself, you did a huge amount of spotting for your team and you have 64% winrate. My guess is you carried your team in quite a few games and ended up in the top 3 XP earners fairly often.
I was at rank 5 within 50 games or so. Now I am at 222 games played and still only rank 4. WR around 55%. 62% since I switched from Shimakaze to Gearing 16 battles ago.
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