Napkin Analysis: Balance Changes 0.12.11

[torino2dc]

One of the things I love about World of Warships is that whenever I think I am nearing the point of knowing most of what there is to know about the game, it reminds me that only a fool would make such an assumption. So too when I dove into the announced 0.12.11 Balance Changes -- I went in thinking they were going to be relatively straightforward, but the more I dug, the more I questioned. As always, I hope you enjoy.

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Renown (T6)

Changes:

Main battery reload time reduced: 25 to 23.5s.
Main Battery firing range increased:
Stock Gun Fire Control System module firing range increased: 15.4 to 15.8km.
Researchable Gun Fire Control System module firing range increased: 16.9 to 17.4km.

 

As far as ship performance goes, the Renown is not living up to her name. Among T6 battleships, she is generally bottom 3 in terms average WR, Damage, and Frags -- regardless of skill level.¹ Some help is clearly needed.

There is also the elephant in the room, namely the excellent performance of her premium sister Repulse.² To begin to understand why one might struggle and the other doesn't, let's compare them. Below are the major differences: 

Spoiler

At first glance, it would seem like the goodies are evenly balanced. The Repulse has the better gunnery and the more mobile platform, while the Renown has torps (!), better concealment, thicker deck armor, as well as better tools against airplanes and submarines. 

Why then the large disparity in performance? I would speculate that there are a few reasons:

• Role Clarity. The Repulse is a mobile long-range sniper. This is an easy role to understand and execute with the tools provided. The Renown is a ... well ... sorta ... roaming opportunist? She can brawl but doesn't have great survivability. She can overmatch but her gunnery isn't very consistent. It mostly depends on how well the player responds to the map and understands the matchups.
• Uptier consistency. Repulse is one of the easier T6 BBs to play in a T8 match. The range and mobility are great -- just drive around at the back and give fire support to the top tier ships. Renown has to get much closer to be effective, at which point certain weaknesses rear their head (16mm bow/stern, AA and ASW can't really deal with T8s). 
• 21 point captains. It's hard to judge how much the Renown suffers from routinely playing with under-leveled captains, but it will likely account for some of the disparity. RN BCs are already quite point-hungry, as they will want concealment and brisk in addition to standard survivability skills. Renown in particular suffers from her 45s turret traverse, which makes Grease the Gears quasi-mandatory. 
• Early Access. With so many dedicated players entering the tech tree at T7 or T8, it is difficult to say how much better the stats would have been had they had to grind through the tech tree like everyone else.

Will the changes help? Slightly faster reload and more base range are welcome, but I don't think tinkering with the gunnery will fix the Renown's problems. She will always be inferior in this department to the Repulse. 

Rather, I would have recommended taking a look at what was getting in the way of her effectiveness at medium-to-close ranges. The most glaring and costly⁴ weakness in this regard is the terrible turret traverse. Between the two ships, I am genuinely baffled that the long-range sniper has the 30s traverse, but the one with the brawling torps has 45s. To add insult to injury, the Renown is the only ship in the RN BC tech tree above Tier 4 to be saddled with this curse. 

Secondly, for the ship to be able to brawl semi-consistently, some survivability bonuses might be in order. This is already part of the tech-tree design with the T8 Hawke having 60s heals (instead of 80s heals), and the T9-T10 having superheals. I don't think it would be a stretch for the Renown/Rooke to receive the 60s heals as well. 

Lastly, the rudder shift of 14.3s base is quite pedestrian for a ship that supposedly has mobility as one of its strong suits. Given that the armor has prominent weak-spots (the aforementioned 16mm bow/stern) and strong spots (the 38mm upper belt is nice for baiting shots), a better rudder shift would help mitigate damage in the middle-to-close ranges. 

Conclusion: Buff that doesn't address the core issues with the Renown's design and instead tries to make her more like her sister. 

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Yūdachi (T7)

Changes:

Torpedo speed increased: 57 to 64kt.

 

Long time players will remember that when the Shiratsuyu first came out 0.5.15, she had the ability to run smoke and TRB in separate consumable slots, which made her kinda really broken.  It took a couple patches for WG to realize they had created a monster, but in update 0.6.8 the Shira had her two most powerful consumables squashed into one slot, and she has remained mostly the same ever since.

Two years later WG revisited the question: 'can we Shira, but balanced?' and out came the Yūdachi -- yet another sister with a serious inferiority complex. Let's take a look at the differences:

Spoiler

As the comparison hopefully shows, the Yūdachi gives up a lot for having smoke and TRB in separate slots. That said, the 15km torps gave her an identity as the only true long-range torp boat at the tier, which is definitely better than not having an identity at all.  

How has Yūdachi fared since her introduction? Pretty decently actually.⁵ She's middle of the pack among T7 DDs for wins and frags, but 3rd in average damage. Once we filter for top 10% of players, she's in the top 8 (out of 22) for wins and damage. Go Yū! 

Why the need for the buff? The only explanation I can find is that among all players the Yūdachi still trails her sister in terms of WR and Frags by a decent margin, and that is with all the advantages that premium ships generally enjoy (on average better captains and modules). These disparities go away once we filter for higher skill players, meaning that it is likely the weakest skill bracket that is disproportionately struggling. 

Here I think the balance team deserves praise: the increase in torp speed is something that will more than likely help the weaker players while not really affecting performance in the hands of experienced players.

That might sound like a controversial statement, but I would argue that it is due to several factors:

• Game Knowledge > Torp Speed. Torpedoes are mostly about anticipation and understanding target movement. Good players can make slow torps work because they can read where ships will have to be in two minutes time, and dispatch fish accordingly. What an increase in torp speed generally means is an increased number of options in terms of target selection.
• Concealment > Torp Speed. Being a good torpedo boat captain -- much like being a good submarine captain -- takes a lot of discipline in order to not spook the target(s). Managing concealment is a skillset that operates independently of torpedo speed. 
• Consumables > Torp Speed. The big differentiator between successful and unsuccessful Yūdachi players is how well they use their two strongest consumables, smoke and Torpedo Reload Booster. Used judiciously, the can offer a lot of extra damage. Or they can be completely wasted.
• Torp Detect > Torp Speed. Lastly and most importantly, the Type 90 torps equipped on the Yūdachi have truly awful detection at 1.9km. This value makes the torps easy to dodge no matter how fast they are. For context, her fully upgraded buffed torps running at over 70kts will still have a worse reaction time than Shira's regular 62kt torps. And they won't even come close to the kings of surprise torps to the face, as shown on the chart below. Torp speed counts for little in comparison to detection.     

Spoiler

The T7 DD 10km+ Torp Club 

Ordered from best to worst in terms of reaction time.

*All reaction times taken from the WoWS shipbuilding tool and rounded to the nearest tenth of a second. The buffed Yūdachi values were calculated by reverse engineering the shipbuilding tool's formula, so it may be off by a few hundredths.  

In the end, I believe that the ~7kt buff to the Yūdachi's torp speed will help her consistency against easy targets; targets that would have eaten torpedoes either way. Now they might eat an extra fish or two that previously could have been avoided. For beginner torp boat captains, that's already a nice bonus.

Conclusion: Surgical buff that will likely help those that need it most. Good stuff.

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Marlborough (T9)

Changes:

HE shell parameters changed:
Maximum damage increased: 4800 to 5500.
Fire chance increased: 24% to 28%.

 

The Marlborough was a dockyard ship in December 2021. Like many dockyard ships, the design team chose to err on the side of caution when it came to the power level of this 16-gun mega-King-George-V. Right before release, the HE alpha was hammered down from 5500 to 4800.^x Despite some small buffs to the sigma and to the HP recovery of the repair party since then, the performance numbers remain pretty bad. In a tier filled with some questionable battleship designs, the Marlborough generally sits towards the bottom.⁶

The proposed changes would revert the nerf to the HE alpha (+14.6% damage) as well as add 4% to the base fire chance of the HE shells. While this will surely will help her damage numbers, as well as bagging the occasional extra win/frag, I don't think the HE was the problem. This is because, barring the Illinois, the Marlborough is already head and shoulders above T9 battleships in terms of HE DPM and Fires/Minute (see chart below).    

Spoiler

The T9 BB 8+ Fires/Minute Club 

Ordered from best to worst in terms of fires/minute.

All fires/minute taken from the WoWS shipbuilding tool. The buffed Marlborough fires/minute were calculated by reverse engineering the shipbuilding tool's formula, so it may be off by a tenth or two.  

The Marlborough already had 50k more HE DPM than the premier fire-slinger at her tier, the famous and historical HMS Lion. I know this might sound controversial, but perhaps the HE isn't what needed fixing. Perhaps there are other areas that are holding the ship back, like:

• Sigma 1.45σ is putrid. 
• Rudder Shift 16.8s is very frustrating for a battleship with bad turret angles.
• Turret Angles The front guns have a 47° dead zone towards the rear, and the rear guns have a 42° dead zone facing forwards. 
• Repair Party I'm not sure why a mega-KGV doesn't get the T7's 60s heal cooldown.
• AP Fuse Despite both firing 356mm AP Mk VIIb, the KGV has 0.015s fuse timers vs. the Marl's 0.033s fuse timers. 

I would argue that addressing any one of these weaknesses would go much further than buffing what was already top-tier about the ship.

Conclusion: A buff that super-charges the Marlborough's strengths without addressing all the other reasons that cause her to struggle.

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Adriatico (T9)

Changes:

Main battery reload time reduced: 5.4 to 5s.

 

As we go deeper into this Napkin Analysis, the theme of sibling rivalries is beginning to ring out loud and clear. This time, rather than a premium/tech-tree sibling within the same tier, we have the tech-tree siblings above and below the Adriatico that are stealing the limelight. From the T2 Curtatone to the T10 Attilio Regolo, all of the Italian DDs are performing in the upper third of their tier.⁷ All except for the Adriatico, la pecora nera of the family.⁸ That's not to say that she is doing abysmally. She generally ranges in the 17th-22nd out of 27 T9 DDs for wins, frags, and damage. But a little bump in damage per minute might be just what the doctor ordered.  

Rather than comparing her to the other T9 DDs, I think a more productive avenue would be to compare the T9 Adriatico to the T8 Cuniberti and the T10 Regolo, because the latter two don't seem to be struggling at high tier.

Spoiler

At first blush, the Adriatico seems to perfectly split the difference between the T8 and the T10. There isn't a single characteristic that appears out of line. Which leads me to suspect that other issues are at play: perhaps the Adriatico suffers particularly strongly from not having a 21pt captain; perhaps she is disproportionately weak against the T11 ships that she must face regularly.

If the underperformance persists, I think it might be worth revisiting the Adriatico's 12km torpedoes, which struggle in a meta filled with 12km radars, as compared to the 13.5km's found on the Regolo.  

Conclusion: A little love-bump for a ship in the bottom third of her tier. Another may be in order to get her performance on par with her tech-tree siblings.

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Álvaro de Bazán (T10)

Changes:

Main battery reload time reduced: 6.1 to 5.5s.
Burst fire reload time reduced: 24 to 21s.
 

I have many faults in this life, and one of them is that I am not yet an Álvaro-enjoyer. In order to get a better perspective, I asked my clan-mate who leaderboarded the Spanish Tier 10 DD about what made her special. His response: Álvaro is a large DD that counters large DDs with her two main asymmetries, namely the excellent-for-weight-class concealment of 6.2km and her 3-salvo burst. In other words, when a Kléber comes sniffing in the Bazán's barrio, the frenchie will get a swift 10k kick in the teeth and have nothing to shoot back at but una cortina de humo. 

As compelling as it sounds to deliver burst-fire justice to self-important gunboat DDs, her characteristics must not have been strong enough to hold up in the fiercely contested T10 waters. Her performance is consistently in the bottom third of her tier.⁹ Most bafflingly of all for a ship with burst fire, she is bottom of the board for average frags. 

The proposed change will give the Álvaro a ~10% DPM boost, while adjusting the burst-fire reload to still be around 4 salvoes in duration (meaning it will always be more damage efficient in the long run to fire 4 salvoes on reload than 3 salvoes in burst). Ten percent more damage output is not insignificant, but for context it doesn't put her anywhere near the true damage monsters at T10 (see chart below).

Spoiler

The Tier 10 DD Dakka Chart (Base HE DPM)

What is more, a straight reload buff goes against what I would see as her core identity and main advantage: the burst-fire. To me, the message reads as: 'the Bazán is not intended to compete in a straight-up gun fight, but let's buff the reload to give the impression that she might.'  No! She will still get beaten up and her lunch stolen if she tries to go toe-to-toe with the true DPM powerhouses of Tier 10. Why encourage this play-style?

To me, a 10% buff to the HE alpha would have been a much more sensible approach, as it targets and promotes smart usage of burst-fire. Any monkey can just left-click slightly faster -- it takes a bit of brains to make smart use of a mechanic like the triple salvo. 

Conclusion: Ship in need of help receives buff that doesn't necessarily further her unique play-style. 

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Conclusion

I am happy that the developers continue to give some love to ships that needed some help. I think regularly making adjustments of this nature keeps the game fresh and interesting. My only critique would be that too many interventions focus on reload time, even where there are solid arguments to be made that the real problems lie elsewhere. 

An invaluable resource in compiling this analysis was the WoWS Wiki -- specifically the section outlining the various buffs and nerfs the ships have received over the years. @iDuckman, you and the wiki team don't get nearly enough credit for the awesome job you've done.🙏

As always to everyone, thank you for reading ❤️ 

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Footnotes

¹ NA Server, random battles, all players/Top 10%, excluding Repulse B because it messes up the data, https://na.wows-numbers.com/ship/4078909392,Renown/ accessed November 16th 2023.

² NA Server, random battles, all players/Top 10%, excluding Repulse B because it messes up the data, https://na.wows-numbers.com/ship/3743365072,Repulse/ accessed November 16th 2023.

³ As useful as it might sound to have almost 50% more HE pen, in reality 65mm-95mm armor plates are very rare. Within the Repulse's MM bracket, the only extra plates she can penetrate are: Mutsu/Nagato aft deck, Andrea Doria upper belt, Sinop casemate, Roma - AL Littorio - Vittorio Veneto upper belt, plus the turret roof armor of most T5 BBs. In other words, a very situational advantage.  

⁴ Bad turret traverse punishes players in multiple ways: 

• Anticipation. Weaker players struggle seeing firing opportunities early enough to traverse the guns in time.
• Brawling. Requires pre-turning turrets for the first pass, and likely turning the hull if the target doesn't die in one salvo. 
• Captain points. Grease the Gears is 2 captain points and has to compete with highly useful skills like Vigilance, AA + ASW expert, and Brisk. Given how important 3pt. and 4pt. skills are to a BB-build, 2-pointers aren't a priority until 18 or 19 points have been spent.
• Upgrades. Main Battery Mod 2 improves turret traverse, but at the cost of damage output (aiming systems or secondaries). 

⁵ NA Server, random battles, all players/Top 10%, https://na.wows-numbers.com/ship/3763222224,Yudachi/ accessed November 17th 2023.

⁶ Disregarding wins and frags, which HE-spammers traditionally struggle to attain, even the average damage output is pretty mediocre; 25th out of 38 for all players and 15th out of 38 among to 10%. Source: NA Server, random battles, all players/Top 10%, https://na.wows-numbers.com/ship/3761190864,Marlborough/ accessed November 18th 2023.

⁷ Imma need you to do some pattern completion and figure out from the previous footnotes where I might have sourced this assertion.

⁸ Fun fact: the Adriatico is the only tech-tree Italian DD that wasn't nerfed during testing. Despite receiving nothing but love from the very beginning, she still hasn't quite got her feet under her, which to me is a strong indication that it's the matchmaking, not the ship.  

⁹ NA Server, random battles, all players/Top 10%, https://na.wows-numbers.com/ship/3760076208,Alvaro-de-Bazan/, accessed November 19th 2023.

^x Running count of development changes being undone: 5 (0.12.11: Marlborough | 0.12.10: Rahmat, Chumphon, Harbin, Sejong)

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[HogHammer]

@torino2dc Wow! Excellent analysis, as always.  Also, I'm 100% in agreement - WoWs Wiki - @iDuckman and crew do a great job keeping everything up-to-date.

[I_cant_Swim_]

Fantastic post @torino2dc! Keep this up and we're going to need a dedicated Napkin Analysis section.

(wink wink...)

[iDuckman]

2 hours ago, torino2dc said:

An invaluable resource in compiling this analysis was the WoWS Wiki -- specifically the section outlining the various buffs and nerfs the ships have received over the years. @iDuckman, you and the wiki team don't get nearly enough credit for the awesome job you've done.🙏

Thank you.  @ToxicSymphony is the commander of the Change Log Army.  They've done a difficult job well.

 

[Asym]

I love data and determining what a root cause is.........  But, something nags at me in this game:  a "dissonance" of some sort.   Think about that ^^^^^ effort and ask your self: does the game really market to the top 10 percent or the bottom 50 percent, whom have absolutely no idea what ^^^^^ that means nor, do they care?

If the game itself "wants to be something else", more of an eSales young adult arcade game, why waste the time with ^^^^^  that?

I applaud the efforts of that level of detail LWM or @torino2dc provide;  but, I have no desire to play competitively in a game built for non-majority kids....  I compete outside of the game with real weapons...

So, this is a dichotomy,  that runs two paradigms at the same time;  which, for many is confusing and hard to come to grips with - are we serious or are we simply screwing around....  A dissonance for many that is actually driving many away....   It's the old "house divided" process where there can be no balance to insure continuation long term.

OK, what am I missing>?  Who actually uses this level of complexity anyway?  Really, to what end on small, time compressed maps? 

See, I am struggling with nuance........

[Itwastuesday]

Good post.

Buffing Marlbro HE is fine, but like you say HE dpm isn't what she lacks. It's rather the goofy balancing of giving a ship a strength and then nerfing things about the ship so that the strength itself is directly weaker (sigma). You can make the ship all sorts of weak but if it actually had a high effective HE dpm you could at least say it has something. But if it was accurate I suspect the triangle mafia would not be happy when a battleship shows up with 16 HE slinging guns that remove all their HP. The whole design is simply terrible.

Bazan is a very average destroyer in my mind. Nothing outstanding about it. Burst gimmick I find is rather stupid on a gunboat destroyer, it's almost never what you want in place of actual stable DPM and it's not the same as the murder button of Kléber. If the gimmick was really strong the boat would probably be well liked, but I don't think it's a good idea to have more destroyers oneshot at 2 minutes. Anyway, it's fast, not spotted from the moon and has some guns and solid HP. A DPM buff seems fine.

Beaten by DPM monsters like Grozovoi, YY and Hayate... And solildy beaten in HE dpm by the ship it's based on while lacking the fuel smoke, SAP etc.

It'd have been more intresting to make Bazan an AP burster a bit like ZF-6.

[clammboy]

1 hour ago, Asym said:

I love data and determining what a root cause is.........  But, something nags at me in this game:  a "dissonance" of some sort.   Think about that ^^^^^ effort and ask your self: does the game really market to the top 10 percent or the bottom 50 percent, whom have absolutely no idea what ^^^^^ that means nor, do they care?

If the game itself "wants to be something else", more of an eSales young adult arcade game, why waste the time with ^^^^^  that?

I applaud the efforts of that level of detail LWM or @torino2dc provide;  but, I have no desire to play competitively in a game built for non-majority kids....  I compete outside of the game with real weapons...

So, this is a dichotomy,  that runs two paradigms at the same time;  which, for many is confusing and hard to come to grips with - are we serious or are we simply screwing around....  A dissonance for many that is actually driving many away....   It's the old "house divided" process where there can be no balance to insure continuation long term.

OK, what am I missing>?  Who actually uses this level of complexity anyway?  Really, to what end on small, time compressed maps? 

See, I am struggling with nuance........

I think that some people just really enjoy doing the research they like to have answers. They need to know why something works or why it doesnt they love to analyze things. You need people like LWM and @torino2dc who did an excellent write up because lots of people love the numbers. They love to know range, sigma, fire chance, HE pen, rudder shift and on and on. It's like a hobby a game within the game to know everything and how it's applied and then use this info to there advantage.

For a guy like me I play the game mostly by feel. Through trial and error and mostly error I have learned where to go which ships to fear when to be aware of torps how to dodge another words the basics. If more people would just learn this the difference between "are we serious or are we just screwing around' would not be so far apart . 

Thanks for write up @torino2dc very well written.

 

 

Edited November 20, 2023 by clammboy

[torino2dc]

1 hour ago, Asym said:

OK, what am I missing>?

That the game can be both infinitely complex and stupidly simplistic at the same time without being self-negating. If other people don't want to take it as seriously as I do, that's totally fine; the game allows everyone to express themselves as they want. 

[Asym]

40 minutes ago, torino2dc said:

That the game can be both infinitely complex and stupidly simplistic at the same time without being self-negating. If other people don't want to take it as seriously as I do, that's totally fine; the game allows everyone to express themselves as they want. 

Until those diametrically opposed expectations play on the same team and booooom !  Lol...  It's why I quit Randoms.......the BOOMS became Stomps, which created frustration,  that became anger, which had to be reported......  PVE main for years now.

I stay in the middle as best I can. 

Well done and thanks.

[Scrubby_McScrub]

Sensible changes all around. 

I disagree on the conclusion about the Bazan. Reload buff will in no way all of a sudden promote a knife fighting style. It just helps it in what should be it's primary role which is a support dd for other dds. 

[torino2dc]

2 hours ago, Scrubby_McScrub said:

Reload buff will in no way all of a sudden promote a knife fighting style. It just helps it in what should be it's primary role which is a support dd for other dds. 

Fair enough. My main point was that improving the reload is the least imaginative way to fix a ship that is struggling, because makes the ship more like other ships. Which, to me, prompts players to play them alike.