At first I was very happy. Yugumo is by far my favorite ship but she sees action rarely, due to no competitive ways to play it and it’s not optimal for coal producing either. I look forward using it.
However the past ranked sprints gave me suspicions:
- In Sprint 3 (Tier 6) the top 5 winrate ships were T-61, Shinonome, Leander, Perth, Graf Spee. Only the Leander is tech tree ship.
- In Sprint 2 (Tier 5), the top 5 winrate ships were Kamikaze, Gremyashchy, Kamikaze R, Fūjin and Giulio Cesare, none of them from the tech tree.
- Sprint 1 has the same ships as 2 in the top 5
While some non-tech-tree ships are available for complicated in-game tasks or events and can drop in containers, the normal way of getting them is paying in the shop. Also, doing the tasks needed for ships is much easier if you pay royally for economic signals and paints, you can’t just grind in your own time when the event is limited. I don’t think many people will actually gain Ethel Fredrick in-game. I sure won’t, check out the last step demands.
As you can see, they are absolutely better than their tech tree counterparts. Sure, many players, including myself ranked out tech-tree ships, but it’s clear pay-to-win. The ship you can buy for money is flat out stronger than the ship your opponents are using.
Tier 10 is free of such P2W ships and that’s why this tier is used for clan wars and ranked. But let’s see what ships are (or were) available in Tier 9 for the wallet warriors:
- Battleships: Missouri, Jean Bart
- Cruisers: Alaska, Kronshtadt
- Destroyers: Black, Neustrashimy
Too bad there are 6 of them, so one of them can’t make it to the top 5 of Season 11. You can guess which one. I can already tell that radar battleship Missouri will be the best ship of the season.
I really don’t like this turn of events. I’d prefer ranked battles be free of pay to win.
At tier 9 it might be a bit diluted by the all Musashis out there. There’s quite a lot of them out there, and there’s no direct competition for it among the cash ships.
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You know nothing, Jon snow.
It literally hurts how you make up things and being terribly informed. And thus creating a very flawed view and making conspiracy out of everything.
1. Community raged in shitstorm over t10 only skilled modes (CWs and ranked). WG admitted that they balanced T10 best for competitive play but will listen to the community.
2. Most of the ships you mentioned are not able to purchase. They are rewards for playing. Either grind or skill based. So it’s clearly pay to progress to get these ships faster. But you don’t have to pay to get them. If you would have ranked out in your first try, too you would have been closer to the black than I am.
3. None of them is OP but very situational. Missouri is OP not for the stats and radar (which is just gimmicky on a BB) but for the credit making. Black it’s just a repasted Fletcher. Every ship in your list has a tough weakness you can exploit.
4. WG has a good track record of identifying op premiums. They simply remove them forever. Like Belfast, kutuzov, saipan, GZ etc. None has been applied here. While some ships aren’t available anymore, the aren’t due to popularity and not due to OP.
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@Chewiecide: stop denying facts. Only 1 out of 14 top ships of the past ranked sprints were tech tree. Tech tree ships are inferior, period.
“Admitting to listen to the community” = “going P2W and blame it on a handful of whiners”. I’ve seen more whining on Graf Zepellin than on the whole ranking system. Also, if they’d listen to ranked community, they’d remove star saving.
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T6:
T-61 – may be slightly OP, it’s new and people don’t know about the hydro. Will murder noobs until they learn.
Shinonome – free reward for campaign
Leander – free
Perth – very rare and unusual premium, requires great skills to play it. There are no noobs playing Perth.
Graf Spee – a free reward for campaign some 2 years ago. Meaning, a lot of people who have it are veteran players.
T5:
Kamikaze, Gremyashchy, Kamikaze R, Fūjin: all slightly OP ships that can’t be bought nor acquired in any way other than a random drop from a box. Not available since before I started playing and thus ALL their drivers are veteran players with at least 2 years experience. Didn’t prevent me from owning them in a Minekaze which is literally a nerfed version of Kamikaze.
Giulio Cesare is op but has been removed from the premium shop for this reason shortly after introduction.
T9:
Of all the premium you listed only Jean Bart can be bought for money. It’s nor considered OP by any serious player. I predict mediocre win rate, both because the ship has weak 380mm guns and because there will be idiots who buy it for ranked while not having enough games played to own a tech-tree T9. Others are either XP, coal or steel rewards.
Missouri is an Iowa with a radar. It’s strong and could be bought for 750k XP. Not in the shop anymore for at least 6 months.
Alaska and Neustrashiny are not in the shop yet, at all. Alaska is not considered OP by the CCs who tried it.
Black is Fletcher that trades torpedo speed for radar. Very strong. It’s a reward for 3 Ranked Seasons finished in R1 or recently for steel. Almost all Black drivers are multiple R1 winners so the score will be good. A lot of them specialize in DDs, otherwise, they’d spent their steel on Stalingrad. It will be the highest WR ship of the season, no question about it. Mostly because of the quality of drivers, though.
Kronstadt is not OP. It has a massive problem with armour that gets overpenetrated everywhere by all BB guns and is too large and unwieldy to dodge. It is a reasonably good ship in a tier that lacks good cruisers so it may do well.
My predictions for the season are Missouri and maybe Alsace (mostly because all the other T9 BBs are simply weak), very few cruisers with maybe Buffalo and Roon on top, then Black. Fletcher and ChungMu are good enough to compete, Yugumo will be probably hard pressed by the lack of cruisers to help her against DD hunters. Also driven down by the masses of noobs in IJN DD line.
So, of all the ships you listed, WG can’t earn money on any but a few. Some are only available to older players and as such will have better stats. Predictably.
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Gevlon. The premium ships are better due to different distribution of users. While in T5 there are indeed op ships like julio and kamikaze, in T9 you don’t havr these big differences.
But good players tend to have more ships and more Experience on them so they pick the perfectly meta-fine ship. One extreme example: why would you ever compare the black to any other ship? You earn it with rank 1 or good CW results. Thus players of black are inherently better than randoms.
Same applies to some extent to kamikaze: it’s brilliant, thus excluded forever, true. But the huge gap to other dds comes from skill differences of player Pools, not ship stats.
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@Stawek: “free reward for campaign” or “available for free XP” means “buy lots of signals”. I got a Sinonome after like 2000 games and burning 20000 gold on signals.
@Stawek and Chewiecide: the “ships have better winrate due to being played by veterans” is nonsense. These players could have picked another ship. I have a Sinonome and didn’t play it, played a Ryujo. These veterans CHOOSE to play these ships, exactly due to their superior stats.
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WG may consider “Ranked” their competitive mode but it is hardly that, especially at T10 when the power of the ships is more balanced and “good” players are less able to exploit weaker ships and opponents. Ranked nothing more than a “guarantee same tier MM” random battle mode. Play enough games and you will rank out, its a grind. Better players may rank out faster, but is that really “winning” when even a 42% win rate player can achieve the same result on the summary screen? Are objectively better premium ships pay to win or pay to grind faster?
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I never bought any signal. I have a premium account and a few premium ships. I’ve never heard of ANYBODY I know to ever buy signals. Premium camos are different – they are useful to skip T9 grind on new lines by playing one’s favourite ships.
You buying signals was just you trying to be tricky and losing money for no reason instead of enjoying the game.
Sure, I could have gotten my Missouri earlier than others without a premium account, but they still could anyway. Unless they neither spent money nor played enough to earn it, at which point it is only to be expected that those who play less than me are worse in skill than me due to lack of experience.
It is true that veterans will pick the right ship for meta (or just any ship they like the most, they can succeed in anything). However, if the “meta” ship happens to be tech tree then everybody plays it and the stats remain reasonable. If it’s a rare ship, like Kamikaze or Black, then all the noobs and idiots are excluded from having it, thus the effect of a good ship is amplified by unusually good captains.
The same is true about particularly bad ships. Mutsuki being a prime example. It’s a poor ship and everybody with any sense knows it. Therefore, all the players who picked it had the double effect of playing a weak ship and having no clue. 46% win rate in T5 ranked.
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WG is making money on removed premiums by selling Christmas crates and even a 500 euro armada pack containing most other premiums before the sale of Christmas crates.
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@Stawek: papa papa signal increases free XP by 300!!! % I get over a million free XP now.
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@RockJock: that’s completely retarded. You need to have about 50% win rate to get to R1, even if only at the end when better players are gone. If you aren’t at least average you will never get to R1, no matter the number of games played. The R2-5 bracket are mostly good and very good players, too.
This is just morons and slackers calling better players “nolifers”.
Sprint Ranked does not apply, though, play level is worse than Random it seems and R1 achievable for any idiot.
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@stawek: yes you can, because of star saving. If you save stars at every 5 losses, then you advance even with 46% winrate (45% win, 44% loss, 11% star save)
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People with 46% winrate do not save stars at an above average level. If you’re good enough to save stars every 5 matches in 7 men team, you are not below 50% win rate.
Besides, at 46% you earn 1 star every 100 games, on average, that takes 5000 games to rank out. There isn’t a single player with a number like that and very few above 600 or so anyway.
The very few people with R1 and low win rates simply stayed losing and stagnant for 500 games and then had their 50% at the end of the season and ranked out.
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@Stawek: I did statistics back on season 9 and found 327 players who ranked out with below-49% winrate: https://greedygoblinblog.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/world-of-warships-the-myth-of-the-star-savers/
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As I said, about 50%. They most likely kept at 47% or so most season and stayed in place thanks to irrevocable ranks, then when better players left they got their 50+% and ranked out.
Even at just 50% win rate it takes 600 games or so which is more than most of those. Therefore we know for a fact their winrate wasn’t stable all season long.
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Maybe I am an exception but I had a horrifying 36% winrate in my T-61 that I used last sprint season to progress from rank 4-1. (58% WR in Eitel that I used to get to R4 but I don’t like the ship and only played it to complete missions).
Despite the 20% difference in WR the other stats are pretty similar at around 40k average damage, 1.3 K:D, 1500 xp.
And yes I blame my teams for that horrible WR because I ended at the top of my team in the majority of games played so didn’t actually lose a star that often. Irrevocable ranks made no significant difference and I am all in favor of removing those.
For T9 sprint I think the most popular BB’s will be Missouri, Musashi and maybe the new Jean Bart. No idea on cruisers since I skipped each and every one of them.
I will probably play Kitakaze as main DD, but Fletcher, Z-46, Neustrashimy, Jutland, Chung Mu will all be valid choices.
Yugumo is an option but it only only has a very slight/negligable concealment advantage (which is mostly negated by radar) and lacks the health/gunpower to really contest caps against the other DD’s.
Of the 6 ships you mention Black will definately not be in the top 5.
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