Loading...Hello guys, today we take a look at the Italian Battleship techline and discuss why I think it is the most painful line to grind. Enjoy!
Discord: https://discord.gg/P5aR2PzVXB
Music:
Ross Rowley:
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/ross-rowley/1524460114
https://www.rossrowley.com
Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio
Outro Music: Stranger Think- C418
Have a replay?
Music: Stranger Think- C418
Ross Rowley: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/ross-rowley/1524460114
https://music.apple.com/us/album/radon/1553896834?
Music: Stranger Think- C418
Music: GET AWAY by tubebackr is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…
Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio
The line as a whole just needs so many changes, I needs something like the German BB’s got that will bring it out of obsolescence, despite being such a new BB line, its probably the worst one in the game thanks to how the meta plays and also how WG decided to half heartedly balance these ships.
i guess they don’t test it before release, they never do..
I think they should buff the secondary guns, either give them more pen or SAP
SAP and a range bump would be nice. It doesn’t have to be a much range as the Germans but more than 5km or 6KM would be good.
Apart from Dutch CCs I found American BBs until the tier 8 a pain in the butt. Slow lumbering beasts with reloads that take forever and dispersion that makes you want to eat your fists out of rage. British light CCs… giant Citadel hitboxes with only half decent AP, slow torps and not a lot of them, not too much fun there until tier 7 (Fiji).
Leander can be good. Vulnerable, but fine
Colorado is defo in the worst spot, guns are pretty good but the lack of armour combined with lack of speed is what makes this ship god awful. Most HE shells pen you, 406’s which become common around tier VII-VIII overmatch you everywhere and you can’t dodge any of these.
I liked Emerald. Okay firepower with insane torpedos when top tier. Leander is also really nice.
For the USN BBs i disliked Wyoming for the accuracy, NY was excellent after that. New Mexico was also quite good. Colorado feels a bit week, because other ships get much better speed at the same tier.
Dutch cruisers were a mixed bag. The T7 was one of my favorite T7 ships. T8 is one of the worst ships i played, only topped by Veneto. T9 was brutal, especially in ranked and the T10 is not bad, but lackluster and disappointing.
@James Henderson Had a 7 kill game with Leander
Gonna have to disagree with Veneto being ‘okay’. That ship is awful, one of the worst ships in the game imo, which is saying something when T8 is full of absolute garbage like Hipper and Albemarle.
For me Italian BB line was good for me. It depends how you play them but let me tell you can’t really push with these ships especially with bb line I know smoke comes in handy to knite away but still I would not recommend to rush with Italian bbs. I highly recommended to use them to snipe because saps hits hard just maintain your range and snipe. I always have 100k+ damage with Colombo. If you grinding cruisers then it might be painful but once you get used to it then it will be easy and fun.
Lower the reload and slightly improve the sigma. Reload mod and still almost 33secs is very frustrating to play at T10. You are not Vermont, you can’t sit back and throw lead from 24km away – you’ve got to get closer and take some hits and dish it out fast. You can get decent chunk dmg when RNG allows but sometimes it just doesn’t work.
Gneisenau is pretty painful as the vast majority of people getting her for the first time aren’t going to have a fully specc’d secondary commander so they’re more or less going to be stuck as a 6-main gun battleship.
I had this exact experience! Though Mountbatten recently mentioned going a main battery build on the Preussen line is now somewhat viable given the recent changes and even that the Gneisenau is better as a result. Really interested to see how it plays because while the guns were always so troll, Gneisenau always did have some good feeling with how damn tanky and fast it was for the tier. Will add it to my list to try and see how it goes!
Yeah, Gneisenau was the first ship I ever free-exp’d. An even worse experience than the colorado, and it was especially bad since I really loved the Scharnhorst which is just better in every way. Granted this was all way back in the day before the german battleships got their accuracy buff, so you’d consider yourself lucky to land a single shell in a Gneisenau salvo
trick is, don’t play secondary german mainline.
i had a blast in my Gneisenau, the first ship i was thinking about to keep. My Commander was arround lvl 10-12 and i played her on secondary and it was fun, the guns where still great.
Funny, I loved my New Mexico and Colorado, but I gave up on the german BBs at Tier 5. Italian BB’s are on a whole different level of suffering though.
The Caracciolo on tier 7 is an absolute pain, I was just grinding the line a week ago and transitioned from Andrea Doria at tier 6 which I liked very much because it had 10 guns and just like the Lepanto or Colombo, at tier 6 where you often get downtiered to tier 5, 10 guns with sap is more than enough to cause absolute destruction. The Caracciolo has 4 turrets with 2 guns each and the shell spread makes me want to quit playing it altogether every time. At least I know it gets better.
Switch to AP, almost every broadside got citadel hits. Italian 380 are incredible.
@pumanr12 They are very good, just assuming they hit…which most times they don’t. Sap is less of a gamble, because even if some of the ap shells hit, it’s at a weird angle because of the spread, and sap can enter at weird angles while normal ap can not. I will experiment though, I haven’t played it in a while now.
I feel like this Line needs some changes. Maybe something like the Vermont got with really good stealth so you can get to a range where your dispersion will kinda let u hit shit. Dont know if you could increase the Sigma as 16 guns with SAP is pretty strong. Maybe get the CC up to Lepanto Sigma. So you could get clos in and annihilate enemies that dont pay attention
I found the T8 garbage. T7 and below when I started prioritising AP actually worked well. The T7 AP really hurts most ships, especially when top tier
I never found any sticking points in USN DDs. At low tiers they absolutely *shit* out torps (which can win you caps even if you can’t stealth torp) and there aren’t as many gimmick gunboats so they can gunboat more effectively, and then they *get* the ability to stealth torp at higher tiers as the guns fall off a bit.
IMO the Italian DD line was pretty painful. I had some good matches in those DDs but they were far in between. Slow firing guns, short range guns and short range, slow torpedoes, etc. I loaded up heavily on the XP boosts to get through them.
agreed… although it is fun at times being the mafia but the SAP has reduced dmg which makes 0 sense.
@Takumi Fujiwara T5-6-7-8 imo the line is broken AF, the amount of dd kills i got with those was insane.i played them as dd hunters not taking the gun upgrade so i nerfed my range.low range=undetected after getting red dd killed, and the sap alpha was crazy even when uptiered. at T9 when you got a base of 10ish km range and a sluggish pos taskent you need to change captain skills and playstyle mentality, you can`t go after dds anymore unless they overextend, then the line gets kinda shit imo again
I had to re think my game play style and invest in commander skills to crack the code on this line.
Idk, I actually enjoyed the Italian BBs. While I do Understand the slower reload due to the higher alpha potential, I feel a slight dispersion and/or sigma buff would make this line more competitively viable. If they can balance the German BBs into practicality, they can do it for the Italian BBs!
Cristopho Columbo can be really fun thanks to the turret arrangement, that being the XY turrets having 360 degree turning!
The Italian battleship have to be the worst line. They sacrifice everything for their high-caliber SAP, which you still can’t enjoy using because the dispersion is so terrible. If WG really wants the main battery to be terrible at hitting anything they should have at least made their tiny caliber secondaries SAP so a secondary build would be at least viable
So far the last few tiers on the British BB line are pretty horrid. I blasted straight through the German Battlecruiser line and had a TON of fun playing it. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the British Battlecruiser line as well and it has been pretty fun. Much more so than the British BB line. Which is weird because the early British ships, up through at least Queen Elizabeth, Were great.
It’s truly bizarre because they just get stronger (apart from Monarch).
@CruisingForMermaids Monarch is currently the one i’m on, lol. To say I don’t like it is an understatement. I’m very tempted to FreeXP may way through it.
Honestly, I found this line to be one of the most pleasurable to play. Really the only hard spot for me was the Vittorio Veneto. I thought that the tier 7, Francesco Caracciolo, was one of the most enjoyable experiences I’d ever had in a battleship, and the lower tier Italian battleships were very satisfying when you hit cruisers with a large broadside. Because yes, they do have 12 and 10 and 13 guns on average down there. I never faced an issue with their consistency, although obviously the accuracy can sometimes potato.
Honestly not sure what you’re thinking, but that’s your experience and preference.
Same, this line is great
I disagree. I’m super unicum in the italian BB’s and really enjoyed grinding them.The trick is, only use AP unless domeone is stuck nose in at a slight angle to you. Know when to use the smoke. One of the better BB lines in my opinion.
I’ve been doing the Italian BBs recently, currently up to the Lepanto.
For the most part I’ve really enjoyed it. like a million times more than the German DDs that I’m also working on, and definitely more than the German BCs that I did prior. Its been fast too. Like i think I had nine losses in a row as my first nine games in Veneto… but collected 17 kills in those 9 games.
I must have missed the memo on the SAP, because I’ve been using almost exclusively AP. unless there’s literally nothing broadside, and nothing that could *conceivably* be vaguely not bow in by the time the shells get there.
Personal highlights for me have been the Conte DCavour (all the barrels at that tier) and Veneto. Doria was OK but just felt like a slightly crappier Cavour. (it has fewer barrels, of a newer tech gun or something?), Lepanto feels sluggish compared to Veneto.
Only one I really actively dislike was Caraciolo. constant uptiers in that were hell.
Lepanto is godlike imo. SAP can slap on Superstructures and Bow’s/Aft’s. You can easily chunk 20-25k health per Salvo on enemy BBs.
Shoot SAP on them, switch to the next enemy and saturate him aswell and then hammer him with AP. The first SAP salvo (until saturation kicks in) is basically a free “Im gonna outrade you” since its less healable than HE