Premium Ship Review: Pommern

[LittleWhiteMouse]

The following is a review of Pommern, the tier IX premium German battleship.  Wargaming very kindly provided me access to her at no cost to myself.  To the best of my knowledge, the statistics discussed here are current as of patch 0.9.10.  Please be aware that her performance may change in the future.

2020 has been one Hell of a year, and not in a good way.  There was so much craziness going on, it's easy to miss that 2020 was the year that German premiums got good.  Mainz, München, Lowenhardt, Agir and Siegfried -- they're all damn respectable premiums.  Even Odin and Z-35 aren't terrible.  To cap everything off, in late summer Wargaming released Pommern.  On paper, she looks kinda blah. A slow-firing, 380mm armed version of Friedrich der Große?  Screw off.  This ship has no place being decent.  Yet to hear the hype surrounding this ship, she's not only decent but well liked.  So what the Hell happened?  Well, gentle reader, let's take a look...

Pommern = Chungus-Tirpitz.

Damn it, that's a much better name.

Quick Summary:  A Friedrich der Große-class battleship with twelve, inaccurate 380mm guns.  She also has two quad torpedo launchers and the Hydroacoustic Search consumable.

PROS

• German citadel protection, effectively making her immune to AP shell citadel hits except under extreme circumstances.
• Excellent armour profile for shrugging off HE hits with an ice-breaker bow,  thick upper hull and amidship deck armour plates.
• Heavy broadside of twelve guns.
• Heavy, long-ranged secondary gun battery with improved HE penetration values.
• She has torpedoes (!)
• She has access to Hydroacoustic Search.

CONS

• Absolutely appalling gun fire angles.
• Long 33 second reload.
• 380mm AP shells cannot overmatch 27mm hull sections found so commonly within her matchmaking.
• 1.5 sigma dispersion on her main battery.
• 105mm secondaries have only 26mm of penetration, limiting their effectiveness against heavy cruisers and battleships.
• Horrible handling.
• Anti-aircraft defence is too short ranged.

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

German battleships are very new-player friendly.  They are ostensibly immune to citadel hits. They have good armour protection for shrugging off HE shells.  Their gunnery has been improved too, so it's not like you're dealing with the worst dispersion in the game anymore.  Secondaries are fun and easy to use, automatically hoovering up damage.  Aside from being packed in at a high tier, Pommern is a very easy ship to see success in.  The only downsides for new players is that she forces them to sail broadside to unmask all of her guns which can lead to her getting chunked by return fire.  While these aren't likely to ever be citadel hits, that doesn't really matter when every salvo lands multiple penetrations.

For experts, Pommern provides all of the usual German battleship brawling benefits with the added plus of the combination of torpedoes and her Hydroacoustic Search.  She can play more boldly than Tirpitz can, for example.  She has more raw durability than Odin does too, so it pays to play aggressive when the timing is right.  Brawl and jousting kills are the best kills and this is the ship to do it in.  However, only a skilled player can pull these off with any reliability outside of PVE modes.

Options

Pommern is pretty bog-standard for a German battleship, showing up with Hydroacoustic Search and baiting players to spec secondaries instead of their main battery.

Consumables

• Pommern's Damage Control Party is standard for a German battleship.  It comes with unlimited charges.  It's active for 15 seconds.  It has an 80s reset timer.
• Her Repair Party is also standard, healing up to 14% of her health over 28 seconds per charge.  It queues up 10% of citadel damage, 50% of penetration damage and 100% of everything else.  It comes with four charges and an 80s reset timer.
• Finally, she has a Hydroacoustic Search consumable common to tier IX and X German battleships.  Pommern starts with three charges which are active for 120s each and a 120s reset timer.  It detects torpedoes up to 4km away and ships up to 6km away.

Upgrades & Captain Skills

Look, there are two ways you can build Pommern -- optimally or the correct way.  Optimally involves building to buff your main battery firepower while simultaneously building for fire mitigation.  This will give you the most consistent performance out of Pommern.

Hey, look!  It's this graphic again!

Thankfully, you're not a snivelling, simp-wimplodite that caves to peer pressure.  You know that the best experiences in World of Warships come from out-brawling your opponents.  Build your ship towards going ham with secondaries, Hydroacoustic Search upgrades and improved rudder shift time.  Chicks dig brawlers.  I should know.

Make the right choice.  Note that I didn't flag IFHE here.

Camouflage

Pommern has access to two camouflage options.   They provide identical bonuses standard for tier IX premiums:

• -3% surface detection
• +4% increased dispersion of enemy shells.
• -20% to post-battle service costs.
• +100% to experience gains.

It needs to be said:  Pommern's default camouflage is bloody gorgeous.

The alternate palette isn't bad either.

Finally there's the "Iron Cross" camouflage pattern which was earned through completing missions tied to the release of the German Aircraft Carriers.

Firepower

Main Battery:  Twelve 380mm guns in 4x3 turrets in an A-B-X-Y super-firing configuration
Secondary Battery:  Eight 150mm guns in 4x2 turrets and sixteen 105mm guns in 8x2 turrets divided evenly down the two sides.
Torpedoes:  Eight tubes in 2x4 launchers with one mounted on each side between the funnels.

Pommern is no Thunderer.  In terms of firepower, the two ships are diametrically opposed.  Thunderer has massive, quick-firing and super-accurate guns with decent fire angles but horrible gun handling.  Pommern has relatively small-calibre guns, she's slow-reloading, she has good traverse but is stuck with horrible fire angles.  Pommern subscribes to the whole 'toss enough poop at the wall' philosophy where accuracy is concerned.  Conversely, you can brawl with Pommern and brawl well.  Thunderer just sort of whimpers and dies in those situations.  That's enough of my soon-to-be-retired meme-boat.  Let's talk more about Pommern.

With many guns comes much DPM.  Pommern doesn't quite keep pace with Alsace, the other twelve 380mm-gun armed battleship at this tier.  Alsace has a better AP shell and slightly faster reload.  Pommern's HE DPM is pretty German -- which is to say crappy.  Her one advantage is her 1/4 HE penetration (95mm) which means that while her individual salvos don't do as much potential damage, she's more likely to hurt hard-targets like German and Soviet battleships.

Approximate AP penetration values drawn from wowsft.com.  Pommern's AP penetration isn't great, but that's largely owing to 380mm guns being rather small caliber for her tier.  Belt armour and citadel protection gets ridiculously thick within her matchmaking too, so you can't count on long-range citadel hits against other battleships.

An Egg Through a Garden Hose

Pommern has four weaknesses with her main battery firepower:

• Her fire angles suck.
• Her reload time sucks.
• Her dispersion sucks.
• Her gun calibre sucks.

I hate Pommern's fire arcs.  Her 5º/s rotation rate is okay, though.  
A-turret: 38º off the stern.
B-turret: 41º off the stern.
X & Y-turret: 42º off the bow

For those of you who can't abide any ship with obvious weaknesses, you can tap out right here.  Those of you who couldn't look past Odin's hit point total: shoo.  Begone.  This isn't the ship for you.   For the rest of you, let's go over these drawbacks and look at them in closer detail.

There's always a price for having a lot of guns -- at least until you hit tier X.  Usually this is just crappy dispersion but it's not uncommon for battleships to have compromised rates of fire too.  While not as bad as the new American battleships, Pommern has a "reload tax" for her twelve gun armament, paying for it with an extra three seconds on each reload.  Even with this deficit, her AP damage output still keeps ahead of all of the other eight and nine gun armed battleships at her tier with the exception of Musashi and Jean Bart (and then only when the French ship is on drugs) so that's nice. 

Pommern's HE damage is another story.  German HE shells, while benefiting from massively improved penetration, tend to suffer from a very mild case of being the absolute worst.  She's only just ahead of Friedrich der Große, the six-gun armed Georgia and the Sovetsky Soyuz-sisters when it comes to sustained HE damage output.  You might think that this means you should stay away from her HE.  Well, no.  It has a purpose.  While you should generally stick to AP shells wherever possible, her HE rounds do have their strengths.  Though she lacks raw damage, her higher penetration is more likely to ensure her shells will do damage against bow-tanking battleships. Pommern's 95mm of penetration should ensure that short of striking turrets, belts and conning towers that her numbers tick over -- modest numbers to be sure, but still. Similarly, an unappreciated aspect of German HE shells is that their fire setting chances aren't terrible.  While not British-good, they are reliable fire setters which can be a good avenue for some supplementary damage (at least so long as you didn't spring for IFHE for your secondaries).  This is particularly true when trading fire with intransient bow-on battleships or just before a brawl to tax enemy Damage Control Parties before your secondaries open up.

Despite her poor damage showing, Pommern's a pretty decent fire bug for a tier IX battleship.  German HE damage is lackluster but their fire chance per shell is pretty good.  This performance is, of course, assuming you can stack the hits which has its own set of problems.

This all said, Pommern's AP shells are far and above better, damage wise.  The only issue is that their overmatch potential at tier IX has a lot to be desired.  With more and more ships having 27mm+ sections of armour along their hulls, Pommern cannot reliably penetrate angled targets.  Angling against Pommern works very well in anything but a very light cruiser.  While there are a glut of 25mm cruiser bows and sterns to bullseye (and the occasional 26mm bow on tier VII battleships when Matchmaker is being gentle), Pommern's AP rounds are far from reliable.  If it were just a question of having enough raw AP penetration, it wouldn't be so much of an issue, but her inability to best 27mm+ hull sections is a real drawback given their prevalence.

But all of these questions of rate of fire, overmatch and flagging HE damage are all moot if you can't reliably put shells on target.  Pommern's dispersion is ... well, it's not good.  With Pommern's 1.5 sigma rating, RNGeebus has been given free reign to troll or bless you as He sees fit.  Her twelve guns deliver a shotgun blast of shells flying every which way.  Your aim can be perfect only to be plagued by overshoots and undershoots.  Similarly, you can be well off your mark only to have this same spread of shot veer a shell straight into your target's citadel, making you look like a genius.  The better you are at aiming, the more frustrating Pommern's dispersion seems.  Yes, stray shots will sometimes work out in your favour but it's not something to be relied upon.  Couple this with her longer reload and this wonky sprays are all the more saddening.

Overall, Pommern's main battery gunnery is a mixed bag.  Now, I am of the opinion that having twelve guns solves a lot of problems.  Her 1.5 sigma isn't that bad when there's so many shells being spat out.  Her 33 second reload isn't so awful that her damage suffers thanks to firing so many barrels at once.  Her AP shells might not be able to overmatch all targets, but when the shells do land, they have decent penetration and respectable damage values.  Her HE shells might have low damage per shell, but they have great penetration and solid fire setting chances.  Her fire angles make my eyes bleed but at least her turret traverse is okay.  So there's give and take in nearly every aspect.

I think it's easiest to say that Pommern's guns are simply "sufficient" and leave it at that. They're not terrible but they're not good.

Once again, a standard dispersion test.  This is 180 AP shells fired at 15km at a stationary Fuso bot.  Shots are coming in from left to right with the Fuso effectively bow-tanking.  Pommern was equipped with the Aiming System Modification 1 upgrade, effectively making this sampling a "best case scenario" in terms of her overall dispersion area.

Pommern's torpedo arcs are very comfortable and you can use them to ensure that you're not overangling against an enemy.  Just switch over fast to your torpedoes.  If you can line the fish up with the bow of your opponent, you're showing too much side and are in danger of taking penetrating AP hits.  When it comes to her secondaries, their only major drawback  is the 26mm penetration on her 105mm guns.  You'll be tempted to take IFHE to make them more effective but that's an expensive choice and it will severely hurt the fire chance on not only them but her main battery guns as well.  It's not worth it, in my opinion, but you do you.

Secondaries & Fish to the Rescue!

As a certified Bigpitz, Pommern's secondaries and torpedoes are both excellent. 

We'll start with her torpedoes.  They have one fault and that's only have a 6km range.  This is a common enough flaw among German battleships; they're all shackled to this range.  In PVP battles, the opportunities to use her torpedoes are uncommon because of this short reach but they are oh-so satisfying.  A broadside of four torpedoes is enough to cripple just about any battleship she comes across with only the chonkiest of thunderchunkers able to shrug off said hits and stay mean.  Just about anything else will be reduced to a snivelling wimplodite crying hax.  You totally get bonus points if you sink a destroyer with them too.  With Pommern's Hydroacoustic Search, closing to such distances is a lot less risky than it is for Tirpitz but she has more advantages over the tier VIII premium than just that.

Pommern's secondaries have excellent firing angles.  She doesn't contend with any of the wonky weirdness of other German battleships' fire arcs.  Odin, Bismarck and Tirpitz secondaries have some turrets which behave like they're occluded when they really shouldn't be.  At a 30º angle, Pommern can bring all of her secondaries to bear onto a target, bathing them in a torrent of fire from fourteen barrels worth of hot-LUV!  There are only two issues with Pommern's secondaries.  The first is one of accuracy.  Pommern's secondaries do not have the improved dispersion found on ships like Massachusetts and Georgia.  It takes her more shots to land a similar number of hits.  You'll just have to deal.  The second issue is one of penetration.  Pommern's secondaries have the same 1/4 HE penetration of her main battery guns which is amazing.  However, her 105mm secondaries "only" have 26mm of HE penetration.  Without Inertial Fuse for HE Shells, these guns struggle to deal direct damage to anything other than destroyers.  As Pommern's 105mm guns make up the bulk of her secondary battery, it's a bit of a bummer.  They're so close to being all kinds of awesome.  Oh well.  You'll just have to burn the thicker targets to death instead.

So how good are these secondaries anyway?  They're #2 in my books for secondaries at tier IX.  Here they all are, ranked:

1. Georgia - Excellent fire arcs, high rate of fire, good range and improved accuracy.  The only issue with these guns is that they lack penetration to hurt anything bigger than a destroyer.  While their chance to set fires is also pretty low, their improved accuracy makes up for the difference.
2. Pommern - Excellent fire arcs, high rate of fire (105mm), good range, very high penetration.  If Pommern had accuracy and/or a uniform battery of German 128mm, she'd be god-tier.
3. Friedrich der Große - High rate of fire (105mm), good range, very high penetration.  Friedrich der Große doesn't quite ditto Pommern's fire arcs so she misses out.
4. Alsace - French secondaries look better than they are.  They're held back by a lack of penetration on their 100mm shells.  They can't even directly damage tier VIII+ destroyer hulls.  At least they can set fires with the high number of shells they spit out.
5. Jean Bart - She largely dittos Alsace but with worse firing angles.
6. Izumo & Bajie - Decent range.  That's really all these guns have going for them.  Their fire arcs are bad.  Their rate of fire is nothing special.
7. Musashi - She just has decent range.  She doesn't have enough of a broadside to be worthwhile.
8. Lion, Iowa, Missouri, the Sovetsky Soyuz-sisters - lul.  No.

Playing second fiddle to Georgia's secondary is pretty damn high praise, I've got to say.  Go, Bigpitz!

Much better.  See?  These are what good fire arcs look like!  Pommern's 105mm secondaries not only make up the bulk of her defensive damage output, but they also have the best fire arcs.

Summary:

• Meh gun performance but she gets twelve of 'em, so that fixes things.
• Torpedoes are bae.
• Secondaries are bae.

VERDICT:  Hilarious up close.  Meh at a distance.

Defence

Hit Points: 81,900
Bow & stern/superstructure/upper-hull/deck:  32mm / 19mm / 145 to 235mm / 50 to 80mm
Maximum Citadel Protection: 300mm belt + 150mm turtleback + 45mm citadel wall
Torpedo Damage Reduction:  25%

Pommern has a big ol' slug of hit points and standard heals.  Nothing fancy, just effective.  Yes, I made these colours deliberately as pretty as possible.

Pommern is blessed with all of the usual defensive boons of German battleships.  Namely:

• She has a large hit point pool.
• She has excellent protection against cruiser-calibre HE shells.
• It is very difficult to land citadel hits against her with AP shells.

German battleships aren't built lean.  They're enormous.  While this does make them a bigger target, easier to hit with ... well, anything ... it does ensure their hit point pools are on the large side.  This in turn means more raw hit points can be hoovered up through their standard Repair Party consumables.  This does, unfortunately, make them attractive targets for anyone looking to farm up large amounts of fire damage.  While Pommern can do nothing but properly manage her Damage Control Party consumable to mitigate the resulting blazes, she is at least well protected against HE shells.  Her distributed armour scheme generally just leaves her superstructure and the very tips of her bow and stern vulnerable to direct damage from small and medium caliber HE rounds.  Similarly, this distributed armour scheme ensures that Pommern has little to fear from overmatching AP shells from the largest Japanese battleships. Short of better defence against bombs and torpedoes, you couldn't ask for a better armour layout.  So she's fat and tough.  This is nice.

There's a hidden plate along the underside of the 150mm extended waterline belt.  It's divided into two parts and helps plunging fire overmatching the 32mm bow from entering the citadel.  The forward part is only 20mm thick.  But echoing the layout of the 50mm deck plate is another 50mm plate which cannot be overmatched.  Thus even if Musashi, Yamato, ARP Yamato or Shikishima overmatches the 32mm bow, it's nigh impossible for them to score citadel hits on Pommern through her snoot.

There's another hidden plate in the stern protecting the citadel in a similar fashion, but it's 110mm thick.  The geometry there is a bit janky to accommodate the steering gears though.

Bigpitz also inherits a turtleback protection scheme for her citadel.  Turtlebacks have a reputation for providing immunity to citadel hits, but this is undeserved.  A well designed turtleback can help mitigate citadel damage, but this needs to have very shallow angles relative to the horizontal in order to prompt ricochet checks.  It also has to be set to the correct depth so that shells can't plunge underneath it, bypassing it entirely.  If the turtleback is angled too steeply, aside from providing another (hopefully) thick piece of steel to slow down incoming shells, it can actually work to the ship's detriment, steering shells via normalization mechanics into the citadel rather than away from it.  Thankfully for Pommern (and most German battleships), her turtleback is well designed and short of shells being thrown at it from very long distances, it is guaranteed to auto-ricochet any AP rounds that punch through her belt.  Even at these distances where her turtleback can no longer guarantee to ricochet shells, the combination of belt, turtleback and citadel armour is usually in excess of the available penetration.  Pommern might take penetrating hits but the shells soon run out of steam before reaching her citadel itself.  It is safe to say that she's is largely immune to AP citadel hits. 

While Pommern has the angles of her turtleback correct, it suffers from a high-water placement that can be bypassed.  Normally this isn't an issue.  However, when Pommern turns, she unwittingly hikes her citadel's protection up over the waterline "flashing her panties" as Yuro coined it.  Any perfectly placed sub-waterline hits WILL citadel Pommern when she's in a turn like this.  Needless to say, it's a pretty rude shock for Bigpitz drivers when they get walloped for most of their health simply for playing with their rudder.  Note that this raising of her citadel happens on the inside of her turn, not the outside which dips down somewhat.  This dip reduces the effective angle of her turtleback by about 2.5º or so -- it's not enough to foil her turtleback's protection but it is a slight reduction which helps with those auto-ricochet checks.  This is all to say that Pommern is vulnerable while turning, but it's not an enormous and easy-to-exploit weakness.  It has been hyped as being more exaggerated than it is.  Just because she can take citadel hits, this does not mean that she will.  To land hits like this, Pommern needs to be giving up a near perfect broadside, so time those turns appropriately, watch out for flanking fire and it becomes largely a non-issue.

It is worth mentioning that this dispersed armour scheme can work against her when it comes to shrugging off AP hits, especially if you're lazy about keeping her properly angled.  The thick plates of her upper hull and along her waterline ensure that every penetrating AP shell fuses.  Provided the shell is slowed down sufficiently to pop inside her, she takes full penetrating hits when other battleships might only suffer over-penetrations.  This is where her shoddy fire angles on her turrets is a big liability.  In order to unmask her twleve gun broadside, she has to give up protection against return fire from AP shells.  In order to stay AP-safe, she's reduced to a six-gun battleship.  This reduced battery makes RNG's influence on her awful dispersion all the more pronounced and can be frustrating.

Pommern's more telling weakness comes from torpedoes, bombs and fire.  She does have a Hydroacoustic Search to help mitigate the foremost of the three, though that's no help against air-dropped fish.  Similarly, AP bombs make a ruin of her and it's not like her AA defense is up to the task of keeping her super safe (more on that later).  She's her own worst enemy when it comes to fire mitigation.  You're going to want to build her up for secondary bonuses.  This precludes her from taking much-needed (and let's face it: optimal) fire reduction skills.  This means it's open season to stack blazes against her and you KNOW every Royal Navy battleship is going to paint your decks with their phat HE shells.  Similarly, you can expect almost everyone else to huck HE at her given the difficulties of hurting her with AP.  As awesome as full secondary builds are, the prevalence of fire damage means that such build are never optimal.

Overall, Pommern is a well protected battleship -- as well protected as you could want and then some.  She has her weaknesses, so do what you can to mitigate them.  Otherwise, enjoy your tuff-bote.

e
German battleship armour is stupid complicated and the in-port armour viewer does NOT help you see everything that's important -- most notably the angles and thickness of turtleback armour but all of that other stuff I mentioned too.  Note how high Pommern's citadel sits and how little of her turtleback dips beneath the water's surface -- only the corners submerge and only just.

VERDICT:  Top marks.

Agility

Top Speed: 31 knots
Turning Radius:  940m
Rudder Shift Time: 17.3 seconds
4/4 Engine Speed Rate of Turn:  3.8º/s at 23.3 knots

With three exceptions (and only one of them notable), tier IX battleship agility sucks inflamed, red monkey-butts.  I'd call Pommern's agility a disaster but Minnesota exists, so that would feel like a misplaced superlative.  Instead I'll just describe Pommern's agility as "not good".  She has so little going for her here.  I mean, at least she has a decent top speed of 31 knots.  She also doesn't out turn her turrets, so there's that too. After that, though, everything goes the way of Harambe.  Her turning radius is a travesty.  Her rudder shift time is upsetting.  Her rate of turn is bad though admittedly better than some of her contemporaries.  However if you think that's worth celebrating then I'm worried you might also have a strange oral fascination with inflamed baboon posteriors.

The best thing that could be said about Pommern's agility is that you really don't need this ship to do more than travel in a straight line most of the time. 

You don't need pants for the victory dance... ♫

VERDICT:  Awful.  The only reasonable part about her is her speed.

Anti-Aircraft Defence

Flak Bursts: 7 explosions for 1,470 damage per blast at 3.5km to 5.2km.
Long Ranged (up to 5.2km):  158dps at 75% accuracy
Short Ranged (up to 3.0km): 466dps at 70% accuracy

Bigpitz is an HP pinata for enemy carriers (as are most battleships, frankly).  While she does spit out a welcome amount of flak, that's hoping that enemy carrier players will oblige you by flying their planes into one of those blasts.  Her AA DPS is largely centred around personal defence, being short-ranged and intense only within her closest aura.  The best she can hope to do is make attack runs against her expensive -- shooting down planes only after they've dropped.  Given her large size and horrible handling, she's such a tempting target for CV drops -- be it with bombs, rockets or torpedoes.  AP bombs hurt.  HE bombs and rockets stack those fires she's so often poorly specialized to handle and her enormous broadside makes her an easy mark for full spreads of torpedoes.

Keep close to your allies to make yourself an unappealing target.

Accuracy values greatly reduce the impressive baseline sustained AA DPS values listed in port.  The above values have been modified by accuracy and demonstrates the numbers you're more likely to see before aircraft armour is accounted for.

VERDICT:  It's open season on your hit points.

Refrigerator

Base/Minimum Surface Detection: 17.28km / 13.58km
Base/Minimum Air Detection Range: 12.81km / 10.38km
Detection Range When Firing in Smoke: 16km
Maximum Firing Range:  Between 21.34km and 24.75km

Well this is all just an embarrassing bucket of fail.  Her surface and aerial detection are just plain bad.  You're not hiding this ship.  While there is an argument to "not bother", particularly when it comes to the expensive investment of skills like Concealment Expert (which could be better spent on Fire Prevention or something to boost her secondaries), the Concealment System Modification 1 upgrade is still worthwhile if only to add further disruption to enemy gunnery.  Furthermore, with the large maps and longer engagement ranges in higher tiered matches, it's not that hard to get outside of 14km of enemy ships -- at least in the early minutes of the game.  This can be life saving if Pommern comes under focus-fire from HE spamming ships.  Still, the best way to keep her safe is arguably to use an island to break contact or at least to frustrate incoming fire.  Given her crappy agility and size this is much easier said than done.  You an also pull off fun tricks like parking in friendly smoke and keeping her main battery guns silent and just letting your secondaries go hog-wild.  Do mind the inevitable wall of torpedoes, though.

Truly, the best thing about Pommern is that she gets access to Hydroacoustic Search.  The only other German battleship that gets both torpedoes and hydro is Odin, so this is pretty noteworthy.  Still, having Hydoracoustic Search isn't enough to keep Pommern safe if she's stationary -- Pommern already needs to be moving to dodge anything.  She doesn't have enough acceleration or agility at low speeds to get out of the way of incoming threats unless she's already moving at a fair clip.  You can use this consumable offensively, which is super fun to pull off on the rare occasions where it's relevant. Do mind the retalitory fish from whatever you dug out of their smoke clouds, though.

VERDICT:  Terrible, generally.  Hydro is nice, though.

Final Evaluation

If I'm terribly honest, Pommern didn't wow me. 

It's not that I don't think she's a good or fun ship, it's just that she treads familiar ground.  Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and Odin all echo Pommern's general design principles.  "Bigpitz" describes her well.  She's an improved, up-tiered Tirpitz.  This didn't guarantee Pommern would be good, mind you -- Wargaming has mishandled such projects before (California comes to mind).  But Pommern didn't stray from the established formula too much.  The craziest thing about her is the inaccuracy of her guns and even that's a pretty safe measure given that she has twelve of them.  I enjoyed Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and Odin, so Pommern is comfortably familiar for me.  She's about as safe of a tier IX premium as Wargaming could hope to design.

For Wargaming, this is doubly important given the number of "failed state" premiums there are at tier IX.  The list is hella long: Missouri, Musashi, Kronshtadt, Jean Bart, Benham have all been retired with Alaska and Georgia set to join them in the new year.  Seven of the fifteen tier IX premiums released so far have been or are slated to be retired with two (Black & Neustrashimy) still MIA with fates undisclosed.  Pommern and the upcoming Hizen have some pretty big boots to fill with all of those absentee premiums.  Pommern has to be good but she's not allowed being too good lest she become too popular and get the axe as well.  I'm not trying to instill a sense of panic-buying in anyone, but I do fear that given the competency of this ship's design, she may end up being a little well liked by the masses and end up retired herself.  Time will tell, I suppose.

Overall, I give Pommern good marks.  She performs exactly as advertised and she's different enough to be fun and novel.  Good work, Wargaming.  It's too bad for them that this year will be remembered for civilization threatening to collapse and not for the year that Wargaming let German ships get good.  They've knocked out quite a few good hits under the German flag.  Maybe that's just a sign of the Apocalypse.

Thank you for reading!

 



[Wolfswetpaws]