Jump to content

Premium Ship Review: Rochester


LittleWhiteMouse

Recommended Posts

QnzwHWk.jpg

The following review of Rochester, the tier VIII premium American heavy cruiser, was sponsored by my patrons on Patreon who helped me afford this ship. To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed in this review are current as patch 0.10.9.

Quick Summary:  Imagine a Baltimore-class cruiser with slight tweaks (generally nerfs) across all performance parameters and strip out her access to Surveillance Radar.  In compensation, give her access to Defensive AA Fire and Hydroacoustic Search and a Smoke Generator consumable.

PROS

  • American/German 27mm hull extremities.
  • Access to "American Piercing" AP shells with higher shell damage, penetration and auto-ricochet angles.
  • Great gun fire angles, especially to the rear (it's about time I got to review another ship with these).
  • Good anti-aircraft firepower for a tier VIII cruiser.
  • Competitive concealment and decent stealth range while firing in smoke for a 203mm armed cruiser.
  • Does not have to choose between Hydroacoustic Search and Defensive AA Fire.
  • Has a Smoke Generator.

CONS

  • No health regeneration.
  • Low DPM & fire setting for a pure-gunship heavy cruiser.
  • Painfully slow turret traverse.
  • Not terribly agile.
  • No access to Surveillance Radar.

Overview

Skill Floor:  Simple / CASUAL / Challenging / Difficult
Skill Ceiling:  Low / Moderate / HIGH / Extreme

Rochester pretty new-fish friendly.  Without Surveillance Radar to worry about, there's no reason to push in too close which may help reduce the amount of "death by over-extending".  Furthermore, her good concealment and decent smoke-firing properties give her a comfortable buffer.  Firing from smoke is pretty easy and Rochester makes it about as comfortable as it can get for an American heavy cruiser.  Furthermore, the forgiving nature of 203mm HE and her AP auto-ricochet angles will take the sting out of sloppy ammunition choices.  So good marks here.

Her carry potential in the hands of an expert is a little more limited.  Good knowledge of how to use and abuse islands will take you far, as will proper ammunition use.  Abusing her concealment along with her 27mm bows can yield some pretty meme-worthy encounters against 381mm and smaller-armed battleships that keep trying to use SAP or AP against her at close range.  But, while her Smoke Generator does have some team play uses (along with her DFAA and Hydro consumables), her lack of Surveillance Radar is dearly felt.  She just doesn't put the pressure on destroyers like she should, not without some incredible risk taking. 

Options

Rochester is defined by her consumables.  Really, it's the reason you're buying this ship.  So if this doesn't intrigue you, close your wallet now and skip to the end.

Consumables

uQ2BVCd.png

  • Rochester's Damage Control Party is standard for a cruiser.  It has unlimited charges, a 5 second active period and a 60 second reset timer.
  • Her Defensive AA Fire is also standard for an American cruiser providing and additional 50% continuous damage and 300% flak damage for 40 seconds.  Like many other American cruisers, it comes with a bonus charge to start (four total instead of the usual three) and an 80 second reset timer.
  • The Hydroacoustic Search Rochester detects torpedoes at 3.5km and ships at 5km for 100 seconds.  It comes with one fewer charge than normal Hydroacoustic Search consumables with only two (instead of three) but it has a standard reset timer of 120 seconds.
  • Finally, Rochester has a Smoke Generator in her fourth slot.  Like other American smoke consumables, this generates clouds for a full thirty seconds (which is good). It comes with two charges and a 160 second reset timer.

The duration of each smoke cloud is a bit odd.  She matches Anchorage's duration of 104 seconds which is decent, but not quite top grade.  Here's some of the equivalent smoke duration times at tier VIII for Smoke Generator consumables.

  • 124 seconds: American Destroyers, Loyang
  • 104 seconds:  Rochester & Anchorage
  • 99 seconds: Edinburgh
  • 89 seconds: Most destroyers, Mikhail Kutuzov
  • 70 seconds: Lightning, Cossack, Z-35, Belfast '43 (these have very quick reset timers)
  • 69 seconds: Z-23, Harekaze II
  • 10 seconds: Italian Exhaust Smoke Generator equipped ships (these have longer emission time)

The only other comparable values to consider are Flint (121 seconds) and Smolensk (89 seconds).  I'll talk about this more in the Vision Control (Refrigerator for you old-timer readers) section below.  But suffice to say, Rochester's smoke is pretty good.  She makes a lot of it and it lasts a fairly long time.

Upgrades

Your choices here aren't anything revolutionary.  The big decision here is whether or not to focus her upon camping in smoke or for more open-water manoeuvrability.

6NKbqD4.png

  • Start with Main Armaments Modification 1.
  • Generally speaking, Hydroacoustic Search Modification 1 is your best choice in slot two.  It will cost you cost 17,000Y35gE6B.png in the Armory.  If you cannot (or will not) afford that then default to Engine Room Protection.
  • In slot #3, Aiming System Modification 1 is best.  However, if her sluggish gun traverse ticks you off as much as it does me, you can sacrifice some accuracy for Main Battery Modification 2.  This latter choice is more worth while in an open-water build if you plan to be actively wiggling and dodging.
  • If you're planning to hug islands or camp in smoke primarily, then the extra acceleration provided by Propulsion Modification 1 is optimal. Still, there's a place for Steering Gears Modification 1 if you're planning to aggressively pursue a more open-water style of play.
  • Finally, Concealment System Modification 1 is generally considered optimal because of the stacked bonuses of air, sea and underwater stealth AND the increased dispersion to incoming fire.  However, if you're a smoke-hiding, island-humping pro, or just intent on once again going full-hog to the open-water route, then you can get Steering Gears Modification 2 instead.

Commander Skills

I haven't talked about heavy cruiser commander skills much since the (repeated) skill rework earlier this year.  It's going to be difficult to do so without going on a prolonged rant, but here goes:  Cruisers got screwed with the rework.  While battleships had to spend more points to get the same features as before, I really don't feel like there's enough good choices for heavy cruisers to be worth investing into.  If your ship doesn't need Inertial Fuse for HE Shells then you're kind of starved for compelling, competitive options.  I would love to be able to say that this is a good thing; that you can pick among your favourites without much fear of losing in-game performance.  But the rework didn't really add anything worth discussing to heavy cruiser game play.  The most daring build would be to eschew any shell-performance buffs and dip your toe into trying to be an AA ship if you wanted.  That's kinda neat, I guess, but AA performance isn't interesting anymore.  It hasn't been since the 0.8.0 rework.  It's a shame.

For a 10 point, brainless standard build, go with: 

  • Grease the Gears at tier 1.  Reasonable alternatives (in no particular order) include:  Gun Feeder, Incoming Fire Alert and Last Stand.  The extra turret traverse is best if you're going to grab Priority Target as I recommend at tier 2.  If not, then Incoming Fire Alert goes way up in value.
  • Priority Target remains my favourite tier 2 skill and I admit a healthy bias towards it.  Alternatives include: Demolition Expert and our first AA skill:  Focus Fire Training.
  • With Rochester's reliance on smoke, it's a pretty simple choice to default to SuperintendentAdrenaline Rush and Heavy AP Shells are the best alternates.
  • To no one's surprise, Concealment Expert is best at tier 4.  Don't get me wrong, Radio Location is nice, but give us some variety please, Wargaming!  The only other skill that vaguely interests me at this tier is AA Defence and ASW Expert and that's only if you're building an AA ship for the memes.

Feel free to double back through the options here to mix and match for a build you find works for you.  You really can't go wrong here, so don't sweat it.

Camouflage

oNzdeiY.png

You got one camo.  It provides the usual:

  • -3% surface detection
  • +4% increased dispersion of enemy shells.
  • -10% to post-battle service costs.
  • +50% to experience gains.

iog9rKp.gif
Rochester's default (pale) palette looks best in my opinion.  You can unlock the darker version through completing the 5th tab of the American Cruiser Collection.

Firepower

Main Battery:  3x3 203mm/55 guns in an A-B-X superfiring configuration
Secondary Battery:  Twelve 127mm/38 guns in 6x2 turrets with one superfiring forward over the main battery forward, one superfiring aft and the other four divided evenly along the sides.

jUAqeOK.jpg

 

American Piercing

Rochester has comfortable if unimpressive firepower for a tier VIII cruiser.  Her main battery of nine 203mm guns are unbacked by any other competitive assets with both her secondaries and her ASW airstrike both being entirely forgettable.  For being Rochester's sole weapon system, there is an expectation of competitive damage output from them to compensate for the lack of any other.  She kinda-sorta gets there with her improved AP shells.  For those unaware, American heavy cruisers tend to have better AP shells than their contemporaries.  Despite their low muzzle velocity, they have good penetration.  This is joined by good damage values for their calibre and reduced chance of ricochets from angled armour.  Grace of her Smoke Generator consumable, Rochester has the ability to cycle her guns more often than other American heavies -- she is not as reliant on making use of island cover to fire and stay alive.

abGmqst.png
Let's reuse this older penetration graphic from my Anchorage (and earlier, Wichita) review.  Anchorage and Wichita share the same AP penetration values.  Rochester has the same AP penetration as Baltimore, which is among the best at her tier.  At point blank ranges (such as the frequent jousts in co-op) Rochester has enough AP penetration to citadel through the belt of some battleships.

Rochester pays for this ease-of-use granted by her smoke with a less-than-ideal reload time on her guns.  While Baltimore and Wichita may cycle their weapons every 10 seconds, Rochester needs 12.  This extra bit of wait is just enough to take the edge off the competitiveness of her weapons whenever she's using anything other than AP shells.  Her damage output between fires and HE spam is comparable to that of Atago without the latter's ability to back this up with the occasional torpedo strike.  As such, it's imperative to use Rochester's AP shells whenever the opportunity arises.  Rochester can and will citadel just about any other cruiser it comes across at any engagement range if they present a broadside.  She can even smack shells into their machine spaces when they angle thanks to that one-two combination of great penetration values and those improved auto-ricochet angles.

The only issue with relying too heavily on AP rounds is the lack of fire-setting.  I can't count the number of times I got a target low with AP and they successfully managed to disengage.  A fire might have finished them off, you know, provided Rochester could stack one past their Damage Control Party.  However, Rochester isn't good at this, being among the worse fire-setters at her tier.

8mF0jVv.jpg
Charles Martel is listed twice.  That with the asterix (*) is using her Main Battery Reload Booster for 15 seconds.  Amalfi uses SAP instead of HE.  Rochester's AP DPM is competitive while her HE DPM is not.

8NWu66l.jpg
Rochester's fire-setting ability isn't great -- especially when you appreciate that your actual chances of setting a blaze are roughly half of what you see here once you account for your target's innate fire resistance.  She's comparable to Atago and most of the heavies pale in fire setting compared to the light cruisers.  The best light cruisers have FPMs up near 16 and 17 blazes, but this gets butchered if they take the Inertial Fuse for HE Shells commander skill.

Despite having a Smoke Generator, Rochester's game play does not stray very far from that already established by the American tech-tree heavy cruisers.  This generally summarizes to:  Find island.  Peek from island.  Cycle guns until you get their attention and hide until contact is broken / their attention goes elsewhere.  Rinse and repeat this until it's time to push forward or fall back.  The ballistics on Rochester's guns (especially her AP shells) makes her very comfortable in this role, allowing her to snuggle quite close to landmasses that will safely screen return fire from battleship calibre and higher-velocity rounds.  In open water, Rochester doesn't fare so well.  The same ballistics that make yeeting AP rounds over islands makes her long-range gunnery rather poor against anything but the most predictable of targets.  Combine this with a slow rate of fire and every dodged salvo hurts that much more.  But worse, Rochester's sub-16km range (with no way of increasing it) makes her dangerously vulnerable to return fire.  Even with the comfortable over-the-shoulder fire angles, Rochester doesn't kite particularly well, having neither the speed, range or agility to pull it off.  Add on the only modest damage output with anything other than AP broadsides and she's only a modest damage-dealer.

So yeah, Rochester is just your typical American heavy cruiser when it comes to her firepower.  The pair of wrinkles to keep in mind is that she has smoke to facilitate her slower reload.

CyB9Ipj.gif
Yaaaaaaaas! ♪  It's too bad she doesn't pair this with some great turret traverse rates.  Oh well.

VERDICT:  Comfortable yet ultimately unimpressive.

Durability
Hit Points: 41,900
Bow & stern/superstructure/upper-hull/deck:  27mm / 16mm / 27mm / 27mm
Maximum Citadel Protection: 152mm belt (+27mm bows for head on shots)
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  13%

NL89NK7.jpg
Rochester has a reasonable slug of hit points for a tier VIII cruiser, at least so long as you ignore her lack of a heal.  While you might not feel this lack when she's top tier, against tier IX and X opponents, her inability to recover health becomes a serious handicap when every other cruiser (and many destroyers besides!) can claw back health.

I can't talk about tier VIII cruiser survivability without addressing the elephant in the room:  Repair Party consumables.

Fully one-third of tier VIII cruisers have the ability to regenerate health and this creates a huge disparity between the survivability of those who can and those who cannot.  Ostensibly, the balance is supposed to wors out.  Those ships with heals are either extremely fragile (generally prone to giving away Devastating Strike medals to their opponents) or their damage output sucks, with the idea being that they need to survive longer (on average) in order to make up for the damage disparity.  That only kinda works out in practice and these rules do not apply universally across all of the ships at tier VIII.  This makes the lack of a heal feel much more pronounced on ships that go without when the difference of which ships have it (particularly legacy vessels) isn't clearly defined.

Rochester is semi-okay without heals.  I mean there are other ways to keep a ship safe and her Smoke Generator sure goes a long way to helping with that.  However, it would be a mistake to think she's going to shrug off much in the way of damage.  Her 27mm hull plating is nice but not as nice as it was, once upon a time.  While she can still troll 381mm or smaller calibre AP shells by prompting ricochets with steep angling, with penetrating hits to turrets and barbettes now giving away damage, face-tanking isn't anywhere near as effective as it used to be.  Thus, barring bullying the occasional Italian, German or British battleship at stupidly-close ranges, you can't count on her structural plate for repelling AP rounds.  Her citadel protection is decent for a cruiser though nothing remarkable.  Her citadel abuts against the exterior of the hull around her machine spaces and sticks up over the waterline besides.  Her citadel roof cannot be overmatched, however, so you're only giving away citadel damage to shells that strike near or at the water's surface, so that's okay.  Her 152mm belt also means she's proof against citadel hits from HE shells from enterprising Royal Navy battleships.  She also has a pretty healthy numberof hit points, being in the top third for her tier if you look past healing potential.

Finally, she does have at least some anti-torpedo protection, which is more than can be said for most cruisers.  It's not really going to do much against ship or submarine-launched fish but it may protect you from some flooding from carrier-borne weapons.

YSx6jHm.jpg
Rochester's armour profile is pretty straight forward for an American heavy cruiser.

VERDICT:  I wish she had a heal when she's bottom tier. Otherwise, she's okay.

Agility
Top Speed: 33 knots
Turning Radius: 750 meters
Rudder Shift Time: 10.5 seconds
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn: 5.4º/s at 26.4kts
Main Battery Traverse Rate:  6.0º/s

7TJzzAM.jpg
Rochester's agility is very middle-of-the-road.  If your cruiser can't be fast, you want to turn quickly.  Rochester can do neither.

I gotta give Rochester poor marks here. Comparing her to other cruisers, you can make the following claims about Rochester's agility:

  • She's not fast.
  • Her turning radius isn't small.
  • Her rudder shift time is slow.
  • Her rate of turn is sluggish.

Being on the poor side of average has a lot of stacked detriments for a cruiser.  The most effective combination for a cruiser is range and high speed -- this allows a cruiser to stand off at a distance where she can pummel enemy ships and give herself the maximum amount of time to avoid enemy fire.  Even with horrible handling, high speed and enough range can make up for any other agility detriments to keep a cruiser in the game longer than it has any right to be.  Rochester's downright pedestrian 33 knots doesn't provide that speed threshold needed and her sub-16km range doesn't tick the other box either. Now if you can't have that speed + range combination then hopefully you have a very tight turning radius and good rudder shift time.  Up close, your reaction times to dodge are much reduced and unless you can change course and/or speed quickly, dodging fire gets that much more difficult.  And here, again, Rochester falls short.  Her 750m turning radius isn't appalling nor is her 10.5 second rudder shift time the worst we've seen (it is pretty bad, though), but neither hit the benchmarks needed to help her avoid damage.

As a result, Rochester punishes you more than other cruisers for being caught out.  Combine this with what I said earlier about the lack of health recovery and being in the wrong place at the wrong time gets her punished hard.  It's very difficult to extract her when she over-extends and she's heavily reliant upon her Smoke Generator to band-aid misplays.

Now, it really doesn't matter what the source of incoming damage is -- be it battleship shells, HE spam, torpedoes or an air-drop of some sort, Rochester just doesn't avoid things well.  She's certainly better at it than a battleship, but not by much, all things told.  Her reliance on her smoke kinda precludes her from making good use of rudder-shift upgrades (you'll really want the extra acceleration provided by Propulsion Modification 1).  That, in turn, hurts Rochester's already mediocre open-water fighting ability.  Add on her sluggish turret traverse and I'm not a fan of fire and manoeuvre in this ship.  She can do it (all cruisers can), but she's not built for that kind of game play.  It's better to stick to the American standbys of finding an island and making it your waifu interlaced with a bit of smoke play.  This isn't a problem unique to Rochester by any means.  Only Wichita, out of the American tier VIII heavies, breaks the mould.

VERDICT:  A whole lot of meh..

Anti-Aircraft Defence
Flak Bursts: 5 + 1 explosions for 1,540 damage per blast at 3.5km to 5.8km.
Long Ranged (up to 5.8km):  108.5dps at 90% accuracy (97.7dps)
Medium Ranged (up to 4km): 353.5dps at 90% accuracy (318.2dps)

Kihfju9.jpg
Anything that doesn't specify whether it cannot or will always have DFAA has the choice of taking it, usually at the expense of relinquishing access to their Hydroacoustic Search.  Rochester's

As the meta stands currently, Rochester stands in contention for having the second-best AA power among the tier VIII cruisers (way) behind De Zeven Provincien.  The Dutch cruiser is an AA powerhouse, and one of the few rare examples in the game after the butchering of the anti-aircraft interdicting cruiser role with the CV rework (more on that in her own review).  Rochester's AA power is closely comparable to that of Cheshire.  While she lacks the higher overall damage output of the British heavy cruiser, she has better range on her medium-calibre guns, allowing them to put out damage for longer.  In addition, Rochester will always have access to Defensive AA Fire while the British heavy might not.

This may sound like pretty high praise, but it's really not.  Yes, Rochester has good AA firepower values for at tier VIII cruiser, but she's not a complete monster in this regard.  Even with Defensive AA Fire active, she's still not reaching De Zeven Provincien's levels of sustained AA DPS. In practical terms, this means that a pristine Rochester, correctly played is all but untouchable to tier VI carriers.  Fully specialized she can almost prevent tier VIII carriers from dropping.  Tier X can still dump on her but it gets expensive fast. That may be enough to discourage carriers from even attempting to poke at her but in end-game situations with the game in the balance, I wouldn't count on being immune to high-tier carrier attacks.  You'll have to Just Dodge™ like the rest of the plebs.

VERDICT:  Good as Rochester's AA firepower is, the AA interdiction cruiser archetype is still missing from World of Warships.


Vision Control
Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 12.06km / 9.48km
Base/Minimum Air & Underwater Detection Range: 7.25km / 5.87km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 6.79km
Maximum Firing Range:  15.86km

So, here's the 11,300 doubloon question:  Is it worth dropping a Surveillance Radar to get access to a Smoke Generator?

Conveniently enough, this question has already been answered in another tech tree line.  The British light cruisers allow you to swap smoke for radar from tier VIII+ starting with the Edinburgh.  Generally speaking, Surveillance Radar provides more influence in a battle with the provision that you have team mates that will capitalize upon your spotting.  Sinking destroyers early on wins games, after all.  However, in solo-play, a Smoke Generator is the safer option.  If you only have your own self to rely upon, then  increasing your own survivability is the way to go.

It's a bit of a fallacy to say that Rochester is just a Baltimore that drops radar for smoke.  Rochester isn't a Baltimore-class cruiser.  There's a lot of small differences between them that adds up quickly to disparities of performance, even before you swap out consumables.  Thus, the question on whether or not smoke is worth more to radar between the two vessels is complicated. Specifically to this section of my review, Rochester has much better concealment than Baltimore.  Rochester shaves a whole 540m off her base surface detection range.  After all of the upgrades are applied, this shrinks to a 420m advantage which is still noticeable.  Rochester sits towards the upper half of concealment within her tier and near the very top within her matchmaking.  So her concealment is good and in select scenarios can even be abused to flex, attack or disengage as needs be without the use of her smoke. 

But even her use of smoke is remarkable as she has better concealment values while firing in smoke than Baltimore or Anchorage which are visible at 7.18km and 7.98km respectively compared to Rochester's 6.79km.

Rochester isn't the first "sneaky" American heavy cruiser.  We've seen all of this before in Wichita.  She and Rochester share concealment values and I find her a better ship to compare Rochester to than Baltimore.  Both Rochester and Wichita can make some pretty bold plays by using and abusing their stealth and then following it up with clever consumable use.  However, I prefer Wichita's consumable combination for this, though.  Surveillance Radar is my kinda jam as it lets me abuse lolibotes and smoked up cruisers in all kinds of hilarious ways that Rochester simply can't.  Rochester's smoke is good, do not mistake me.  It provides Rochester with a greater level of survivability than that enjoyed by most of the other American cruisers at this tier barring Congress.  However, the ability to scatter the roaches is still preferable in my books, especially when a lot of what Rochester's smoke provides can be made up for with good use of terrain. 

dPckejM.jpg
Who needs smoke when you have an island waifu?

VERDICT:  Wichita-good, but not Wichita-great.  I'd rather have radar.

Anti-Submarine Warfare

ASW Armament Type:  Airstrike up to 5km away
Number of Salvos:  Up to two
Reload Time:  90 seconds
Aircraft:  Two flights of two PBY Catalinas with 2,000hp per plane.
Drop Pattern: 6 bombs each dropped evenly over roughly a 4km column
Maximum Bomb Damage:  2,100
Fire Chance: 12%

LfVx463.jpg
Rochester's air strike reticule with some ships for scale.  The length of this column is roughly 4km.

Hey, new section!

Oh, how I wish I could take subs into the training rooms or populate them as targets.  Rochester's airstrike ability is brand new with patch 0.10.9 and represents the bare minimum Wargaming will issue for anti-submarine warfare for those who have so far gone without.  It's so new, I have barely time to do any testing of it short of derping bombs into open water because no subs are available to test against at the time I'm writing this.  Anticipate anything and everything having to do with subs still to change significantly.

So let's theory-craft a little.

Note that Rochester's 5km range is where the strike starts,.  The drop pattern covers approximately a 4km stretch with six bombs dropping per plane at fixed intervals with a left/right scatter, effectively allowing her to engage submarines up to 9km away.  It takes 15 seconds from the time the airstrike is called for the first set of depth charges to detonate.  The bombs themselves are listed as having a maximum damage of 2,100 but the reality is that like all submarine damage, this appears to follow a blast-style damage similar to that used by torpedoes, meaning there's a whole bunch of parameters modifying this damage that I don't yet understand.  Don't even get me started with how this damage scales up with skills because I have no idea.  The in port values jump up to 2,415 with all bonuses applied.  Will that reflect in game?  NO IDEA!

It's a brave new world, people.  At any rate, to engage submarines with Rochester, you're going to have to get pretty damn close which means taking an active role in order to do so.  Barring submarines being stupid (please be stupid) this largely relegates Rochester's anti-submarine combat to late-game if it materializes at all.

VERDICT:  Still not ready for Random Battles.

48eHvEu.jpg
I do love me some PBYs.

Final Evaluation

Do you want a premium Baltimore?  You're spoiled for choice.

  • If you want a Baltimore that trades AP shell performance for stealth and agility, get Wichita.
  • If you want a Baltimore that trades AP shell performance and radar for smoke and torpedoes, get Anchorage.
  • If you want a Baltimore that trades radar for smoke and stealth, get Rochester.

Rochester's strength here is that she more closely duplicates Baltimore's AP gunnery than Wichita or Anchorage and changes up the game play from team-based with Surveillance Radar to a more selfish style with her Smoke Generator.  That's really not my cup of tea, so I'm not going to be playing Rochester much (if at all) after this review.  Wichita is the more compelling choice for me; I prefer that aggressive style of play of providing vision and molesting lolibotes over Rochester's admittedly easier "angry smoke cloud" game play.  This said, it's not like I'd be running out to throw money at Wargaming to get Wichita either. I'm not in the market for a premium Baltimore-class.  Maybe you are. 

That's really all I have to say about Rochester.  She's not terrible -- anything with smoke and not-horrible range is always going to be competitive.  She's just not offering me the kind of play that I want.  I had only modest success in her with no amazing games (rushing this review out precluded me from getting in only a handful of games to confirm her performance) but I'm certain that some players will be able to get some truly monstrous results out of her if people let her farm.

Overall? I'm likely to forget about her before long.  She's ultimately a very "safe" premium.  There's nothing surprising here to trip up the developers when it came to balancing her or for tripping up consumers who bought her blind.  She is exactly what you'd expect out of an American heavy cruiser premium.

Thanks for reading.  Mouse out!

  • Thanks 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.