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Balance Overdue!
TLDR:
- Concealment mod for more battleships
- Kidd gets DefAA Fire
- Nagato gets buffed
- Azuma gets buffed
- Several Italian battleships get buffed
- Italian Premium cruisers get SAP shells as a test
- Weimar moves a tier up
All that in a couple of months, read on for details!
We haven’t had balance changes in a hot minute, and the set you’re about to see is only to be introduced in a couple of months. However, knowing that these changes are fairly dramatic, we wanted to tell everyone in advance, so buckle up!
Before getting to particular ships, there's news for high-tier battleship owners! A concealment mod will now be available for all Tier VI to Legendary Tier battleships! We don't expect the meta to shift much, but perhaps you'll come up with more creative builds, who knows!
Starting light, we have an extra consumable for Kidd—Defensive AA Fire, which can be used in place of Engine Boost. The number of aircraft carriers at higher tiers is slowly growing, and Kidd is one of the ships that may benefit significantly from such a consumable.
Moving on, Nagato, the ever-controversial Japanese battleship that deleted enemies with one salvo and missed entirely with the next, started showing some cracks in her potential. We’re addressing it indirectly, by boosting her damage-per-minute numbers—namely, she gets 29 seconds of main gun reload, down from 32 seconds, as well as AP shell max damage boosted to 12,600, up from 12,100. This may actually look more effective than it actually is, but we’re sure the ship should now fall in line better with her immediate rivals.
Staying with Japan, there’s a ship that unfortunately didn’t quite live up to our hopes in more ways than one, and that is Azuma. We’re giving her the deluxe treatment: 7.5% better shell grouping; 24 second main gun reload (down from 26); HE shell damage boosted to 5,100 (600 more); and AP damage up to 8,650 (500 more). However, as these buffs are quite significant, we're also making her AP shells start ricocheting at a 45-degree angle, down from 50 they used to.
Continuing the battleship fiesta, we’re also touching up the Italians. Conte di Cavour’s main gun reload improves to 27 seconds from the regular 30, and so does this stat for her big sister—Andrea Doria. The top dog, Vittorio Veneto, receives a quicker gun reload as well—31 seconds instead of 34. And if you thought we forgot Roma, we didn’t! While she isn’t losing to anyone significantly, a small overhaul was due. Roma gets some of the Vittorio Veneto perks, including HE shells with maximum damage of 5,800 instead of 5,100, as well as her Smoke Generator in the 3rd slot! The plane and Enhanced Secondary Targeting consumables are moving to the 4th slot.
The overarching theme for Italian battleships is that we wanted them to dish out a bit more damage, as their other vitals look quite healthy.
It doesn’t stop there for the Regia Marina, and this here is perhaps the best slice of (pizza) pie so far: We’re ready to begin the SAP public test of sorts by adding SAP modules to the following Premium cruisers:
- Gorizia
- Duca d’Aosta
- Genova
- Duca degli Abruzzi
As we have no experience with SAP shell main batteries, we reserve the right to tweak these shells either way. The modules with SAP shells are optional and replace HE shells when installed, so you will still have a choice between SAP and AP armament.
Finally, the biggest and most controversial news item we have is that we plan to move the infamous Weimar a tier up. It’s true that the cruiser turned out to be significantly stronger than we imagined she would, and while she started going down in her winrate and damage numbers due to players adapting to her, it seems that there’s no way around the need to cull her power. As it stands, she fits nearly perfectly at Tier VII, and the only thing to change would be her economics. Understandably, you will have questions and comments about whether you can exchange the ship, and we will reveal our strategy for dealing with any Weimars that become unwanted as we move closer to the fact. Obviously, if she is suddenly too weak at the new tier, we’ll be ready to apply the good old buffing wax, as this isn’t something we’ve ever done before.
Thanks for reading, happy theorycrafting, and turn the tide!
