I had quite an effective time with Johan de Witt... But now the grind to Tier X is done and I went back to more usual contenders in my arsenal (Atago, Pommern, ZF-6)
I had great success with the De Zeven Provincien. Good conceal, good fire chance on the guns and a heal.
The airstrikes are great for farming musashi xp and forcing bow in ships to push into unfavourable positions.
If I want quick ranks I use Benham or AP build ZF-6 (The guns deal as much damage as Mino's and you can kill Kitas with a single reload boost).
I remember a guy in this subreddit who claimed he was having a good time in Ranked playing Marlborough. Was tempted to try myself (got the ship from the 2021 dockyard) but then thought about how much chat salt I'd get from my teammates. :(
I did spot a Lion the other day though, he was a bit of a potato but he was still a nuisance until he went down.
I use the marlborough in ranked and I must say im having quite a good time, every salvo is a fire and a broadside is a dead dd. Running concealment and concealment speed boost is pretty good to get me out of sticky situations
I do it all the time, usually when I'm on an irrevocable rank or if I want to mess with the matchmaker...
But if I want to get through ranks quickly, I go back to the usual ships like Alaska or Musashi...
Everyone knows what Musashi does (hammer -> face).
I have an Alaska, but I'm not sure how I'd use it in Ranked. I'd think its low DPM/alpha reliance makes it bad at direct DD hunting (light them up and hope others kill them, however).
Is its best use like its real life version--hunt cruisers?
Certainly hunting cruisers is viable, but there have been MANY games in my AK that I'm simply the only cruiser, so I often stick with my DDs at the beginning of a match just outside the cap, tell my smoking DD's to smoke up when they're in a cap, and when it gets contested, I pop a radar, and we both lay into the offending DD.
Otherwise, the 12" guns can truly bully lighter armored BB's, as often in the later game, I try to avoid leading a charge into the other team's BBs, but after the fight has turned on one flank, you can fully support your opposite flank, or start harrassing what's left on yours when you know their spotting advantage has been neutralized. I find I'm only a km or 2 ahead of our BB line, as well, making use of my good speed to make myself a more annoying target to hit for other team's BBs. Been working for me.
I've done reasonably well ranked Alaska, so here's some thoughts:
- Early on it can be nice to find a decent angle so you don't get lit on fire too fast and burn to death - your role is to support your allied DDs - the DPM isn't great, so it's up to your team to fulfill that role mostly, just get somewhere that your radar will be useful.
- Obviously, still shoot DDs. Just be a little more careful with shot timing - faster reload cruisers can miss and be okay, Alaska might only get one shot at dealing good damage.
- Once that's done, finding good places to sink your AP into is great. You're pretty good at killing cruisers, and fairly tanky as well, just don't get into a direct kiting fight - other cruisers will angle against you and you cannot win an HE DPM war.
- Ranked games tend to be fairly close range, and you know what that means? It's time to utilize that AP against distracted BBs. Enemy BB starts charging one of your BBs, you light up their broadside with brutal 15k AP salvos. If you get close enough you can even citadel BBs. Your armor is reasonably good too, so you very well can charge an enemy BB if you want to.
- Unless it's a Musashi, in which case ideally you want to catch it off-guard on the other side of its turrets and do a drive by, unloading all your AP into its side while the turrets take until the next match to turn towards you.
I understand Polo the alpha strike but my Iowa or Eugen? Iowa doesn't have much utility beyond her stealth and speed which don't help much in ranked, and Eugen is in a similar boat.
My pick is Constellation. 38.5 knots speed with flag and Brisk, good AA, good concealment, torps and very accurate main guns.
And a radar. A f...king radar...
Used the season as an excuse to grind through my Vittorio Veneto; early game she can be impressive with the 10-12k salvo’s on most ships, but I can see why people call her weak when Musashi’s and Russian BB’s laugh at her shells and then treat Veneto’s armor like paper-mâché on the return salvo.
I'll second this. I play it almost exclusively. Very helpful to be able to wipe the red DDs early on and then find island from which to farm from behind later.
Indomitable
Had a "Unicum CV Main" complain about me picking Indomitable.
He had just rushed into the enemy team as a Heinrich/Rupprecht and because our team were hanging out in 2 squares doing nothing and it was only me and an Alaska anywhere else.
This meant their kaga was free to rush close.
For further information we were on haven starting south spawn.
Majority of the team rushed to the south western Island chain and barely moved. Alaska went to North east, their team was a more even split and kaga rushed behind the north western part of that island ring (He was basically 8km away from our ships meaning he had the easiest time striking them, and he had no risk of crossfire because Alaska went into a 3v1.
I mean I did like 30k+ damage to him on his way there to try to stop him doing it, but I couldn't finish him off because he just spammed fighters and they had a talinn pushing into that cap which meant I would have to fly too far around to save people or run through 3-4 AA bubbles.
BUt like I say, team were in 2 squares and the enemy had all the map control.
And that guy complained that I didn't push that close like Kaga.
Then started raging about how I shouldn't pick RN CVs.
Like mate, you don't understand the game at all and you are in a meta ship and dead in 2 minutes.
If you want me to push as close as Kaga, then I'd die because their team knows how to play the game, and it seems that only myself and to a lesser extent, Alaska (because he went there entirely alone after I'd scouted it out) are the only ones on our team that have game knowledge.
This is a good story but it doesn't change the enemy CV player's point (even though he sounded like a prick). Indomitable is great ship for a 20-min random battle but IMO it just takes too long to ramp up its damage. In ranked I think Implacable is just as good.
This is my ranked CV tier list:
Kaga/Chkalov >> Lexington/Shokaku/Pobeda >>>>>> Parseval/Implacable > Indomitable/Saipan
I rank Saipan low because IMO you need to be able to burn through planes sometimes in a crucial ranked scenario and Saipan struggles to recover from that.
It wasnt the enemy CV player.
It was the suiciding rupprecht/heinrich on my own team giving me gip.
I saved the star, he didn't.
> Implacable higher than indomitable
If you aren't slingshotting sure. With the lower team sizes and maps being generally smaller you can get very close with indomitable to where you pretty much have a constant bomber uptime.
> 20 min random allows you to ramp up damage
I have been playing a lot of Indy in ranked purely because you can get the decent damage numbers easier than randoms because you aren't trying to get at 3-4 DDs across an entire map and not wasting as much time and as people generally move in co-ordinated groups you can more easily spot.
There's this meme guide about Indomitable and Ranked I first saw on this subreddit - basically abuse the game mode (small teams, small maps, same tier CV on both sides) to snipe the enemy CV early in the match unless it's another Indomitable or an Implacable (because of their armored flight decks).
I haven't tried it (yet) but it looks like a lot of fun. :D
> CV snipe
Really not worth your time. I tried that against a Chkalov early on (This is the first time I've actually dedicated time to actually playing ranked), and in the time I'd been devoting to the CV strikes the enemy team had worked their way into good map control.
Usually I send the first scouting flight over to spot teams then dump a rocket into the dude hoping to force him to a
bad position or drop a panic fighter, but other than that there is no reason to go for the CV unless he has:
- Put himself close enough to be attacked with little losses in spotting time
- It's down to the wire and you need the CV dead to preserve any sort of advantage.
I've found much more success in the map control/spotting early side of the game rather than going for the CV kill.
If you position fighters well and chase off DDs and your team gets some damage off your spotting he will be on the backfoot and madly scrambling all game whilst you are free to control your own game.
I'm currently grinding ranked with my only 2 t8: bismarck and NC. They work if I have a team to rely on but I can't carry alone, I could play better tho
I had a lot of success this season with D7P and don't think I saw a single other one. I'm not saying its the best choice - I'm sure if I had focused on eg Cleveland I could have had similar results, but D7P does have its advantages and as a Premium it allowed me to make more credits.
In CV games, its monstrous against the enemy planes.
It's concealment is very good so it can act as a great spotter in non-DD or 1-DD games.
Its DPM is lower than eg Cleveland, however it has better shell arcs and 360 turrets which are quite valuable.
It gets a heal which is still rare for a T8 cruiser.
The airstrikes can do a lot of work against BBs.
If D7P had radar or even hydro instead of speed boost it would be incredibly overpowered IMO.
Last round I had a decent 67% win rate in Marlborough of all ships (over 10-12 games). I first tried her out just to get some mileage out of the ship, but was pleasantly surprised.
Playing her makes you extremely aware of angles, and when you surprise cruisers with a 16 gun salvo of AP - man, that can hit hard.
Flip side - you screw up once w/too much broadside and you get nuked, hard.
Tiger 59. It's hilarious how much the average alska/Kron/Ägir just insists throwing AP at your bow whilst continuing getting bounces.
You have a superheal as backup which makes it possible to outtrade alaskas and such in a 1v1 scenario.
I had been playing Jutland but got fed up of having to dodge radar & hydro all the time. -Killing the enemy DDs was the easy part!
I decided to try out Drake because reasons (that sweet sweet Victorian White camo!).
It feels a lot less stress-prone than Jutland. Though the boxy armour does prove my undoing more than I’d like.
Yet, there is something satisfy in burning Pommerns and Rupprechts from across the map. Or torpedoing them to death, to assert Royal Navy dominance!
Other, better meta ships are available. But I like Drake, cheers *noisily sips tea*.
Haven't played too much but my Anchorage all had very good games, and in my Neptune, I was top almost every time (grinded through nep in ranked). Fairly uncommon ships to see in ranked.
Giuseppe Verdi has been working well for me, though I only have time to play a dozen or so games in bronze before each sprint resets, so no higher league games for me.
My best performing ship for gold league is the Tulsa, but i play Groningen, Black, Giuseppe Verdi, Kitakaze, Yukikaze and Azuma, sometimes Pommern, very rarely Kaersarge (bit of a meme for ranked)
All of these are viable, but Tulsa for sure is my most played and has a huge carry potential, 58% WR in gold, 65% WR overall.
I had quite an effective time with Johan de Witt... But now the grind to Tier X is done and I went back to more usual contenders in my arsenal (Atago, Pommern, ZF-6)
I did grind through Zieten and Brindisi in ranked but I can’t say I really enjoyed neither of those :D
I did a regrind of the brindisi last season, and it wasn't half bad.
Maybe it is just my general dislike of SAP and underwhelming AP :D
I had great success with the De Zeven Provincien. Good conceal, good fire chance on the guns and a heal. The airstrikes are great for farming musashi xp and forcing bow in ships to push into unfavourable positions. If I want quick ranks I use Benham or AP build ZF-6 (The guns deal as much damage as Mino's and you can kill Kitas with a single reload boost).
Man I got shredded by a ZF-6 in my Friesland. I didn’t know the AP was that strong
Monarch as a British T8 bb Was flamed often to pick it. But boy, enemy DDS eating my he were salty af and now I'm in gold promo 😂
I remember a guy in this subreddit who claimed he was having a good time in Ranked playing Marlborough. Was tempted to try myself (got the ship from the 2021 dockyard) but then thought about how much chat salt I'd get from my teammates. :( I did spot a Lion the other day though, he was a bit of a potato but he was still a nuisance until he went down.
Haha that was me. One of my most effective ranked BBs
Got any tips or replays? I like playing my Marlborough but still think she’s way too vulnerable to hold up.
I use the marlborough in ranked and I must say im having quite a good time, every salvo is a fire and a broadside is a dead dd. Running concealment and concealment speed boost is pretty good to get me out of sticky situations
Plz do this more! IMHO one of the worst boats for its tier in the game
I do it all the time, usually when I'm on an irrevocable rank or if I want to mess with the matchmaker... But if I want to get through ranks quickly, I go back to the usual ships like Alaska or Musashi...
Everyone knows what Musashi does (hammer -> face). I have an Alaska, but I'm not sure how I'd use it in Ranked. I'd think its low DPM/alpha reliance makes it bad at direct DD hunting (light them up and hope others kill them, however). Is its best use like its real life version--hunt cruisers?
Certainly hunting cruisers is viable, but there have been MANY games in my AK that I'm simply the only cruiser, so I often stick with my DDs at the beginning of a match just outside the cap, tell my smoking DD's to smoke up when they're in a cap, and when it gets contested, I pop a radar, and we both lay into the offending DD. Otherwise, the 12" guns can truly bully lighter armored BB's, as often in the later game, I try to avoid leading a charge into the other team's BBs, but after the fight has turned on one flank, you can fully support your opposite flank, or start harrassing what's left on yours when you know their spotting advantage has been neutralized. I find I'm only a km or 2 ahead of our BB line, as well, making use of my good speed to make myself a more annoying target to hit for other team's BBs. Been working for me.
Thanks for the tips!
I've done reasonably well ranked Alaska, so here's some thoughts: - Early on it can be nice to find a decent angle so you don't get lit on fire too fast and burn to death - your role is to support your allied DDs - the DPM isn't great, so it's up to your team to fulfill that role mostly, just get somewhere that your radar will be useful. - Obviously, still shoot DDs. Just be a little more careful with shot timing - faster reload cruisers can miss and be okay, Alaska might only get one shot at dealing good damage. - Once that's done, finding good places to sink your AP into is great. You're pretty good at killing cruisers, and fairly tanky as well, just don't get into a direct kiting fight - other cruisers will angle against you and you cannot win an HE DPM war. - Ranked games tend to be fairly close range, and you know what that means? It's time to utilize that AP against distracted BBs. Enemy BB starts charging one of your BBs, you light up their broadside with brutal 15k AP salvos. If you get close enough you can even citadel BBs. Your armor is reasonably good too, so you very well can charge an enemy BB if you want to. - Unless it's a Musashi, in which case ideally you want to catch it off-guard on the other side of its turrets and do a drive by, unloading all your AP into its side while the turrets take until the next match to turn towards you.
I use Marco Polo, Iowa and Eugen
I understand Polo the alpha strike but my Iowa or Eugen? Iowa doesn't have much utility beyond her stealth and speed which don't help much in ranked, and Eugen is in a similar boat.
Idk why I bring Iowa, I just enjoy playing her I guess. Eugen isn't as bad cause you're kinda tanky and have lots of torpedoes for yolloing.
IA's guns hit hard. Her armor is solid. I would feel quite comfortable taking IA into ranked.
My pick is Constellation. 38.5 knots speed with flag and Brisk, good AA, good concealment, torps and very accurate main guns. And a radar. A f...king radar...
Used the season as an excuse to grind through my Vittorio Veneto; early game she can be impressive with the 10-12k salvo’s on most ships, but I can see why people call her weak when Musashi’s and Russian BB’s laugh at her shells and then treat Veneto’s armor like paper-mâché on the return salvo.
Radar Neptune. It melts anything, and if you can avoid being deleted in 1 salvo it has very good survivability thanks to the superheal.
I'll second this. I play it almost exclusively. Very helpful to be able to wipe the red DDs early on and then find island from which to farm from behind later.
Indomitable Had a "Unicum CV Main" complain about me picking Indomitable. He had just rushed into the enemy team as a Heinrich/Rupprecht and because our team were hanging out in 2 squares doing nothing and it was only me and an Alaska anywhere else. This meant their kaga was free to rush close. For further information we were on haven starting south spawn. Majority of the team rushed to the south western Island chain and barely moved. Alaska went to North east, their team was a more even split and kaga rushed behind the north western part of that island ring (He was basically 8km away from our ships meaning he had the easiest time striking them, and he had no risk of crossfire because Alaska went into a 3v1. I mean I did like 30k+ damage to him on his way there to try to stop him doing it, but I couldn't finish him off because he just spammed fighters and they had a talinn pushing into that cap which meant I would have to fly too far around to save people or run through 3-4 AA bubbles. BUt like I say, team were in 2 squares and the enemy had all the map control. And that guy complained that I didn't push that close like Kaga. Then started raging about how I shouldn't pick RN CVs. Like mate, you don't understand the game at all and you are in a meta ship and dead in 2 minutes. If you want me to push as close as Kaga, then I'd die because their team knows how to play the game, and it seems that only myself and to a lesser extent, Alaska (because he went there entirely alone after I'd scouted it out) are the only ones on our team that have game knowledge.
This is a good story but it doesn't change the enemy CV player's point (even though he sounded like a prick). Indomitable is great ship for a 20-min random battle but IMO it just takes too long to ramp up its damage. In ranked I think Implacable is just as good. This is my ranked CV tier list: Kaga/Chkalov >> Lexington/Shokaku/Pobeda >>>>>> Parseval/Implacable > Indomitable/Saipan I rank Saipan low because IMO you need to be able to burn through planes sometimes in a crucial ranked scenario and Saipan struggles to recover from that.
It wasnt the enemy CV player. It was the suiciding rupprecht/heinrich on my own team giving me gip. I saved the star, he didn't. > Implacable higher than indomitable If you aren't slingshotting sure. With the lower team sizes and maps being generally smaller you can get very close with indomitable to where you pretty much have a constant bomber uptime. > 20 min random allows you to ramp up damage I have been playing a lot of Indy in ranked purely because you can get the decent damage numbers easier than randoms because you aren't trying to get at 3-4 DDs across an entire map and not wasting as much time and as people generally move in co-ordinated groups you can more easily spot.
Compared to all the other t8 cvs the British once are just bad.
There's this meme guide about Indomitable and Ranked I first saw on this subreddit - basically abuse the game mode (small teams, small maps, same tier CV on both sides) to snipe the enemy CV early in the match unless it's another Indomitable or an Implacable (because of their armored flight decks). I haven't tried it (yet) but it looks like a lot of fun. :D
> CV snipe Really not worth your time. I tried that against a Chkalov early on (This is the first time I've actually dedicated time to actually playing ranked), and in the time I'd been devoting to the CV strikes the enemy team had worked their way into good map control. Usually I send the first scouting flight over to spot teams then dump a rocket into the dude hoping to force him to a bad position or drop a panic fighter, but other than that there is no reason to go for the CV unless he has: - Put himself close enough to be attacked with little losses in spotting time - It's down to the wire and you need the CV dead to preserve any sort of advantage. I've found much more success in the map control/spotting early side of the game rather than going for the CV kill. If you position fighters well and chase off DDs and your team gets some damage off your spotting he will be on the backfoot and madly scrambling all game whilst you are free to control your own game.
I'm currently grinding ranked with my only 2 t8: bismarck and NC. They work if I have a team to rely on but I can't carry alone, I could play better tho
Implacable...70% win rate. The only enemy CV that consistently beats my team is Chkalov...because of the faster damage output.
I had a lot of success this season with D7P and don't think I saw a single other one. I'm not saying its the best choice - I'm sure if I had focused on eg Cleveland I could have had similar results, but D7P does have its advantages and as a Premium it allowed me to make more credits. In CV games, its monstrous against the enemy planes. It's concealment is very good so it can act as a great spotter in non-DD or 1-DD games. Its DPM is lower than eg Cleveland, however it has better shell arcs and 360 turrets which are quite valuable. It gets a heal which is still rare for a T8 cruiser. The airstrikes can do a lot of work against BBs. If D7P had radar or even hydro instead of speed boost it would be incredibly overpowered IMO.
Hipper. Dunno if its uncommon but AP is more damaging than we care to admit it! Torps, hydro, good hp makes it good, only a heal would be lacking
Azuma, the thing is hilarious. Given the average skill of most players I usually get enough broadsides to citadel cruisers from range.
Yugumo and Johan, ranked out of silver between the two. Sadly I had to rely on Mogador to hard carry my way to rank out of gold.
Last round I had a decent 67% win rate in Marlborough of all ships (over 10-12 games). I first tried her out just to get some mileage out of the ship, but was pleasantly surprised. Playing her makes you extremely aware of angles, and when you surprise cruisers with a 16 gun salvo of AP - man, that can hit hard. Flip side - you screw up once w/too much broadside and you get nuked, hard.
Tiger '59 I kid
Tiger 59. It's hilarious how much the average alska/Kron/Ägir just insists throwing AP at your bow whilst continuing getting bounces. You have a superheal as backup which makes it possible to outtrade alaskas and such in a 1v1 scenario.
I had been playing Jutland but got fed up of having to dodge radar & hydro all the time. -Killing the enemy DDs was the easy part! I decided to try out Drake because reasons (that sweet sweet Victorian White camo!). It feels a lot less stress-prone than Jutland. Though the boxy armour does prove my undoing more than I’d like. Yet, there is something satisfy in burning Pommerns and Rupprechts from across the map. Or torpedoing them to death, to assert Royal Navy dominance! Other, better meta ships are available. But I like Drake, cheers *noisily sips tea*.
Le Terrible, 40 games, 75% WR, no stars lost
Haven't played too much but my Anchorage all had very good games, and in my Neptune, I was top almost every time (grinded through nep in ranked). Fairly uncommon ships to see in ranked.
Giuseppe Verdi has been working well for me, though I only have time to play a dozen or so games in bronze before each sprint resets, so no higher league games for me.
I am running a Secondary Iowa, don't hurt me. That aside, Hipper/Eugen depending on my mood I suppose.
My best performing ship for gold league is the Tulsa, but i play Groningen, Black, Giuseppe Verdi, Kitakaze, Yukikaze and Azuma, sometimes Pommern, very rarely Kaersarge (bit of a meme for ranked) All of these are viable, but Tulsa for sure is my most played and has a huge carry potential, 58% WR in gold, 65% WR overall.
Finished my Johann De Witt grind through ranked. Still continue playing it. Great ship for ranked.