A while back I posted about the American tier 6 cruiser in WoWs, and I think I said what basically everyone already knew about it, that the ship is outstanding, and a real high-point for the tech tree. As I've now played about 50+ games in her, and unlocked the Pensacola at tier 7, I felt it was time to do a quick revisit on the Cleveland and see if there was anything I wanted to say with hindsight before moving on.To begin, the Cleveland is still a rocking boat full of excellence. Many of you will have heard rumours that you hear about the Pensacola being a pretty sad follow up from such a fantastic vessel as the Cleveland are pretty accurate. The stock Pensacola is a genuine disapointment after the Cleveland, although, it's eventual configuration is pretty awesome, and we'll chat about that next time.
The Cleveland performs brilliantly, though, not as brilliantly as I remember from the closed beta version of the game. The original Cleveland was pretty much broken. It had a super high rate of fire with its multitude of 6 inch guns, it was fairly tough, and it was a fast, high-impact anti-aircraft ship. Nothing about that has really changed, though, with the benefit of a few dozen games, I have started to notice some of the blemishes. Something that will start to get on your nerves fairly quickly is the slow shell velocity of the Cleveland's guns. The shells of the Cleveland exit the barrels of your guns, and then seems to take the most relaxed and scenic possible route to the target. At ranges of over 7km, the shells start taking a very high, lobbing arc, which makes it more difficult to predict the fall of your shots. Over 10km, you will find that if you enemy makes even minor course corrections during the flight of your shells, you'll basically miss with at leas half your shots. Most players also like to say that the Cleveland's under par gun calibre (the tier 5 Japanese cruiser has 8 inch guns) completely make up for their lower calibre with superior rate of fire, and decent chance to set fires. This is definitely the case, and I will miss that rate of fire as I play the Pensacola, but one thing I won't miss is the 6 inch gun's tendency to bounce AP rounds off of the hulls of Omahas and Kumas. I cannot begin to tell you how annoying it is to watch an AP round ricochet from the hull of a tier 4 cruiser, simply because it has taken on the slightest angle to your fire. By comparison, the Pensacola's guns will consistently punch holes through the armour of tier 7 and 8 cruisers, except when the most extreme angle is presented.
Another oddity of the Cleveland for me was that I found myself actively not taking the AA defense barrage ability. I don't know if it was sheer dumb luck, but in 4/5ths of my Cleveland games the teams just didn't have carriers. Not sure it this was just an eccentricity of tier 6, or the nature of the SEA server, but I could not seem to buy my way into a game with aircraft, and so I found myself using the hydro acoustic search option instead, since destroyers were at least guaranteed to be on the enemy team. The catapult fighter that replaced the spotter aircraft from the closed game kind of unnecessarily doubles your AA countermeasures, so I ended up changing the AA barrage to acoustic sweep. It seemed sacrilege to remove the AA barrage from a Cleveland, but you can't replace the fighter, and you might as well be more flexible. If carriers had simply been more common, I would probably have stuck with the dedicated AA role, so on your server, it may be a different story.
Wrapping up, the Cleveland is still a totally badass ship, and you will feel a touch of joy when you get it, and sadness when you get to the Pensacola. I have found cracks in the makeup of the Cleveland, and am starting to appreciate the Pensacola more and more as I play it. However, I still can't recommend the Cleveland enough. If you are looking for that first tech tree to farm out while learning the game, make the the US cruiser line. No torpedoes to screw up your team with, and simple, good clean HE spamming fun. She's still got it.
No comments:
Post a Comment