Kleber...any advice

[Captain_Rawhide]

Just recently ground out the Kleber.  I know, I'm a little late to the party.  Having trouble getting it to make any difference in a game.  Had the same problem with Mogador.  I've tried playing it as a gunboat and a torp boat.  I've had most success as a gunboat, but the damage is pathetic.  Concealment is awful so spotting is out (although the BBs seem to think I should tank for them).  I've mostly just player her in Asyms where you would think she would do well with her guns.  I've watched some videos and they are pretty much just pew pew from cover.  I'm not the greatest player and I know Kleber has a high skill ceiling, but this is so frustrating not to make any difference even when  I know I've played well.  

Any advice short of shooting myself?  

[Wolfswetpaws]

Yeah, don't shoot yourself.  😉 

Fast French DD gunboats benefit from moving in paths that the opposition's turrets have trouble following.  
If done properly the turrets literally cannot rotate fast enough to acquire and aim-at the fast-moving DD.

The slow muzzle velocity and high-arcing projectile path of French DD guns benefits from being behind cover.
Lobbing projectiles on targets that cannot reciprocate is the general idea.

If you're not behind cover, then try to get hits on target.  More hits and sooner than the "other guy" can get on you.

Sink the opposing ships which can detect you as soon as possible.
The French DD's concealment is terrible.  But their speed is good.
So, they want opposing DD's to hide in smokescreens while their own hull charges towards the smoke while planning to gun and torpedo them from point-blank range.
Be wary of the opposing DD's torpedoes.  Some players are cool and savvy customers who can anticipate the charge, especially if their ship has Hydro.

Fast French DD's which lack smokescreens often lead short lives, but merry ones.  🙂 

Edited December 31, 2024 by Wolfswetpaws

[Utt_Bugglier]

33 minutes ago, Captain_Rawhide said:

Any advice short of shooting myself?  

Best way to have gunboat success in Kleber is to outfit it with the “Marceau complete Kleber replacement module’” 240K-ish coal.

All wiseguying aside, if you want to do the French gunboat DD thing at T10, Marceau might be better… it doesn't rely on MBRB, with a steady 3.5sec reload time, all the time. So, there’s never any having to wait on MBRB cooldown time.

[pew_pew_magoo]

Kleber has great guns and speed is your best defense. You have to play as a second line DD. Do not rush caps. Play behind a spotting DD and stay on the flanks. You are not a DD hunter. Burn BBs to the water while spamming HE from beyond secondary range. Mid game you can start to push with your team or kite depending on what’s happened to your flank. MBR is great for catching CLs broadside or nuking a DD that gets spotted.  Here’s my build. 

[Sumseaman]

Talk about late to the party for me too responding. What they said.

Also for the skilled player it arguably beats Marceau. Less goes out the barrels but more hit when and where it counts. Firmly in the swollen rectum.

Edited December 31, 2024 by Sumseaman

[Captain_Rawhide]

Thanks for the help.  I have incorporated most of it and my games have improved.  

[Wolfswetpaws]

16 minutes ago, Captain_Rawhide said:

Thanks for the help.  I have incorporated most of it and my games have improved.  

👍

[Wulf_Ace]

7 hours ago, pew_pew_magoo said:

 You are not a DD hunter. 

 

hahahaha

[Ramsalot]

If I may add my 5 cents:

It's not all about raw damage done or spotting enemy team (although you can do some serious spotting). 

It is true that you can not sustain high DPS outside of MBRB, buuut you can contribute to victory in other ways.

Remember Kleber can get a whooping 16.3km range, and at that range you can dodge hand of God himself.  Just be a dedicated pain in the neck pest, and draw as much fire away from your team as you can.  Every volley from that BB that is wasted on you will not chunk away from someone else on your team.  Your job is to piss the living guano off every player on the opposing team, so that they make it their mission in game to sink you.  Make them fail, and you would have contributed your share for the win.

To that effect, position yourself to piss rainbow of happiness close to your max range and never stop.  Your team will thank you for it.

Edited January 1 by Ramsalot

[SureBridge]

@Captain_Rawhide Kleber is actually a very nasty little (not so little) gunboat. I run it with range extension in the last slot, and the captain skill for +20% range, and delight at burning down ships like Puerto Rico or Stalingrad at range. Sit in the last 20% of your (very extended) range and rain down HE on them. I tend to use the MBRB once someone has put out a fire / flood - 15 seconds will give you 4 salvos to get perma-fires before your ROF drops again.

Later game you are great for sprinting to uncovered caps, and brutal torp strikes on BB's and cruisers from behind islands (6 Kleber torps generally kill almost full health anythings - and you still have 6 on the other side). American / British cruisers basically can't hit you past 10 km when your speed boost is on, ditto most battleships in the game (because of their baked in dispersion). Useful skills are "fearless brawler" and RPF (so you can point your nose at torp DD's and hunt them down with your detection disadvantage). Hunting DD's is about the only time when you will be using your torps "on purpose" rather than as an ambush or opportunity drop. If you can keep the red team shooting at (and missing) you, your teammates will be able to return fire with impunity.

I used to use this in clan battles a lot, but I can't effectively Kleber and call at the same time. It's also VERY hard to go from a torp boat (like Shima) to Kleber and back because the French DD's play super-aggressively: if I was in a CB and picked up less than 2M potential damage I wasn't doing my job.

[Sumseaman]

23 minutes ago, SureBridge said:

 if I was in a CB and picked up less than 2M potential damage I wasn't doing my job.

It is all about drawing the fire isn't it? I guess that's why Auboyneau has the skill. What is it? 2.5m potential when it activates?

[torino2dc]

@Captain_Rawhide Watch Yuro's guide on the Tashkent -- it does double duty as a guide on how to play the French gunboat DDs. 

[Frostbow]

Just curious. Between the Khaba/Tashkent and the Kleber/Mogador, who has the better shell ballistics ('better' defined as faster flight times making it easier to lead targets).

[Yedwy]

TBH I dont really like her (or Mogador for that matter) much, I guess you can go for 2 basic approaches (outside of taking a UU and clowning around with torps) - easy way with long range fire starting and damage farming but low game outcome impact and the hard way with taking RDF and maxing out reload to try and take out enemy DDs one by one that will be a high risk high reward kind of thing really, take your pick I guess

[Ensign Cthulhu]

On 12/31/2024 at 1:24 PM, Captain_Rawhide said:

Just recently ground out the Kleber.  I know, I'm a little late to the party.  Having trouble getting it to make any difference in a game.  Had the same problem with Mogador. 

I had even worse problems with the Kleber-line French DDs since I'm a co-op player and their great strength - gun-spamming from long range at high speed - is lessened by bots' ability to calculate lead quickly and accurately. It took me most of the Vauquelin grind to get the dodging part right, to say nothing of the need to get in close for torps (because bots are super-good at dodging those). One day it just clicked, and then things improved from there.

Your life in a French DD is literally "Just Dodge!"

On 12/31/2024 at 2:27 PM, Utt_Bugglier said:

Best way to have gunboat success in Kleber is to outfit it with the “Marceau complete Kleber replacement module’” 240K-ish coal.

While I know you're being light-hearted, I actively didn't do this at first because I knew my basic underlying problems with French destroyers weren't going to be fixed by having her.  On the other hand, I did get her once I was more comfortable with the playstyle as a whole.

[Utt_Bugglier]

50 minutes ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

IWhile I know you're being light-hearted, I actively didn't do this at first because I knew my basic underlying problems with French destroyers weren't going to be fixed by having her.  On the other hand, I did get her once I was more comfortable with the playstyle as a whole.

I took the exact opposite tack:

In the middle of some T10 ranked season, I needed a T10 DD of a different stripe than what I had (T10 gunboats with smoke -Gearing, F. Sherman, Harugumo, Daring), and the blazing speed of Marceau filled a void in mercilessly running down flanking/spotting Shimas and their ilk.

[Ensign Cthulhu]

3 minutes ago, Utt_Bugglier said:

I took the exact opposite tack:

In the middle of some T10 ranked season, I needed a T10 DD of a different stripe than what I had (T10 gunboats with smoke -Gearing, F. Sherman, Harugumo, Daring), and the blazing speed of Marceau filled a void in mercilessly running down flanking/spotting Shimas and their ilk.

Granted, you got the tool for the job and it worked, but I think you can understand the thinking behind my cautiousness. 

[pew_pew_magoo]

10 hours ago, Frostbow said:

Just curious. Between the Khaba/Tashkent and the Kleber/Mogador, who has the better shell ballistics ('better' defined as faster flight times making it easier to lead targets).

Khaba

[Utt_Bugglier]

40 minutes ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

Granted, you got the tool for the job and it worked, but I think you can understand the thinking behind my cautiousness. 

Sure I do. I get the benefits of learning a line as you move up it. And plunking down 250-ish Large in coal is a big commitment, if you’re not sure of how its features fit your plan.

But now with Ranked being non-stop, it leaves me playing comparatively few randoms, almost all my ship acquisitions are driven by rapid response to Ranked meta shifts. Even my last grind (Ipiranga>Los Andes>Libertad) was need-driven. (Until I found out my free Tennessee could stave in the skull of Ipiranga - and anything else in T8)

I did the same thing in the past couple of weeks with Georg Hoffmann. Rocky start, but finished strong - if delayed holiday travel hadn’t intervened, I have no doubt that I would have ridden it to R1 Silver - which would have been a first for me.

 

Edited January 2 by Utt_Bugglier

[SureBridge]

10 hours ago, Yedwy said:

TBH I dont really like her (or Mogador for that matter) much, I guess you can go for 2 basic approaches (outside of taking a UU and clowning around with torps) - easy way with long range fire starting and damage farming but low game outcome impact and the hard way with taking RDF and maxing out reload to try and take out enemy DDs one by one that will be a high risk high reward kind of thing really, take your pick I guess

Actually I do both @Utt_Bugglier. Since I use Kleb in clan battles I use RPF, and use it to "bump" torp DD's (which my team will help to kill). I also spend a bunch of time "off cap" doing cap denial, so hitting things in the cap with ANY shell does a reset. We've had a number of wins because Kleber has high enough ROF (and is hard enough to hit at range) that I could keep 3 enemy ships "tied" to a cap trying to take it (alternating front guns / back guns for a reset every 4 seconds. 

But you also have the "we need to take that cap across the map before it times out" and "go mug that BB because we don't have time to burn it down" missions. It's a surprisingly versatile boat as long as you don't pigeonhole your thinking. Yeah, it's got HUGE visibility for a DD, but it's a darn sneaky CL and back capping (and being able to hold that cap) are often critical missions.

If you're contesting a cap in the first 3 minutes of the game you are likely doing something wrong - especially in Randoms

@Ensign Cthulhu the bots in co-op are incredibly dumb (less so in asymm). In co-op the Kleber is the go-to because its torps cycle faster and hit harder, and I'm generally launching them at <4km range anyway. Gun down the DD, torp the cruiser, torp the BB and head for the CV. Apologize to other players at my starting cap for "eating all the food" as I cruise past the smoking rubble of the bots. Marceau is less good because her torps aren't up before you need to kill the cruiser.

[Ensign Cthulhu]

10 minutes ago, SureBridge said:

the bots in co-op are incredibly dumb (less so in asymm).

Dumb, yes, but still with the tendency to damage you in inconvenient ways just as you're about to pull the trigger... and to put torps in your path after they die in ways that make you say "How could they know I was going to be there?". They can't pull a Hail Mary detonation to save their skins any more, which is good. 

14 minutes ago, SureBridge said:

In co-op the Kleber is the go-to because its torps cycle faster

Going all-in on torps with Auboyneau at 21 points to drive Cassard, I noted the effect it was having on Kleber CLR and changed modules accordingly. Torp reload is down to under a minute. Insane.

15 minutes ago, SureBridge said:

Marceau is less good because her torps aren't up before you need to kill the cruiser.

Human Marceau vs bot Kleber or Paolo is always a nasty fight. Definitely a time to keep distance and/or try to scythe the launchers off. 

17 minutes ago, SureBridge said:

Apologize to other players at my starting cap for "eating all the food" as I cruise past the smoking rubble of the bots.

Seeing a Kleber in front of me is always a signal to tone down my expectations! 😁

[SureBridge]

1 hour ago, Ensign Cthulhu said:

Human Marceau vs bot Kleber or Paolo is always a nasty fight. Definitely a time to keep distance and/or try to scythe the launchers off. 

Just turn broadside and keep all your guns on it - the bot will point its nose at you so you are not in danger of being torped, and have double its DPM. The bot generally will continue to use HE (AP will overpen) and you will out-DPM it. 

When you kill the bots with torps, turn to face their corpse, and the torps are easy to dodge. Once you are halfway tot he corpse the torps will be dodged or are not going to hit, turn to engage the cruiser. For best positioning, put the cruiser on one side, BB on the other 🙂

(edit) and don't speed boost to the cap - hit your speed boost once you fire your first salvo, the speed difference will likely cause the first counterfire salvo to miss. Also if you speed boost in your torps may not be loaded by the time you take hits, and resetting your loading cycle sucks.