DD in Operation Killer Whale

[r0tty]

Hi,

I'd interested to hear anyone's thoughts on how to be an effective team member as a torpedo DD in the Operation Killer Whale. I just had a game in a Japanese DD and found it very difficult to contribute. Every good target (ie slow moving BB) is guarded by gun emplacements on the shore, or by screening DDs. I tried entering the Haven in the West entrance but I didn't get enough support to destroy the guns, so I couldn't quickly get near the BB heading that way as I was spotted the whole time. After that I was too far back to get in range of anything useful.

I was wondering there is any point in heading up to the North East side of the map early on to soften up the ships that spawn there later in the game?

Thanks,
Rotty

[Ace42]

Torp DDs tend to be very variable in ops.

If the op's scripted is such that the bots don't really evade, you can just rack up a ton of torp damage by hard pushing and spamming the torps; if the bots are using standard AI, then their ESP means they'll juke a ton of torps.

If you memorise the bots behaviour and the timings, you can premptively torp stuff so they get clapped when they spawn, they typically won't react to torps that are generated before they spawn - which is a bit tricky, but when you see a competent player execute it they don't really leave many ships alive for teammates to kill.
Toggling off lock-on when you fire the torps supposedly limits bot ESP, but I've not noticed a tangibly difference in behaviour. No matter how many weird tricks or gimmicks I use ("Don't switch to guns after; don't lock on to someone near them; don't try this when it's a full moon!") it tends not to change how bots react to my torps one way or the other.

For killerwhale specifically:
Teammates, especially the BBs, should be nuking the forts pretty quickly - there's not a lot you can do until those go down.

Once they're down, the Nurn mid should die very fast and you can quickly push forward to either try long-range torping the Gneise from a distance (as close as you can safely get, obv) - ideally if you're mid you'll clip some transports and Bayern with some torps while they're en route to the Gneise.

If there's still forts up mid because teammates are being useless, you can instead take a hard right and try countering the DD, Bayern, and Nurnberg that are spawning there - ideally dealing with the DD (Gaede, I think?) first by outspotting it, but smokefarming to help take it out before it can torp teammates pushing that choke is also valuable.

You can potentially hang around mid long enough to get off another torp salvo - but you do want to very quickly move into position ready to torp the new Nurnberg that spawns early and hard pushes into the haven from the left-hand-side so that you can nuke it before it causes the secondary objective to fail.

If its AI gets a bit weird and it bails on pushing the Haven and instead goes behind the big mountain range, you can just ignore it and move on to the DDs pushing the haven; same applies if teammate(s) are premptively moving to do deal with it for you.

You need toback to mid so you can prevent the DDs (IIRC it's a Gaede and a Fubuki?) pushing into the haven via the two chokes your team entered through; or rush there after killing the Nurn yourself if teammates are just totally useless and making you solo everything.
Bait the enemy DDs into shooting you so that a teammate passively spots them, make sure you're angled against their torps so you can kite between them if necessary, and smoke farm the DDs down to try and get them down ASAP.
The worse teammates are at spotting / countering the DDs, the more suicidal you have to be trying to solo them.

Once they're dead, maintain your stealth against the cruisers that spawn and try and torp the two BBs (Fury and Dono) down. Once they're gone, can head to end-zone - as teammates will farm down any remaining ships in the wave you need to kill while they're waiting.

While you're doing this - keep pinging the secondary objectives, and calling the idiots on your team who are preemptively refusing to contribute to these secondary objectives as many cuss words as you feel is both appropriate and mild enough for you to avoid getting chat-banned.

[Jackson]

I'm sure Ace gave good advice, but I'll be short and sweet. I wouldn't consider a torpedo DD to be a worthy option in most Ops. Bots are fairly good at dodging unless you fire from point blank range, but unlike Coop, if you do that, you'll die quickly and won't be terribly useful.

[Nepgear]

I haven't played ops since T10 was added, but before best use would be sitting around A1 to spawn kill the BBs for the secondary obj. Assuming you still have the alpha for it, probably same thing now.

[Jaynoble55]

I find some ops to really reward a good torp DD player if they are good, and I mean good. Killer Whale is NOT one of those operations. Speaking of Killer Whale has anyone heard if we are getting that and Narai in t10 ops soon? Getting really sick of Hermes.

[r0tty]

@Ace42. I saulte you Commander for your awesome reply! o7. Some interesting ideas there and I particularly like the early hard right to the Bayern option, which I had not previously considered. I like that you made it optional on what your team are doing with respect to carrying on straight to the freighters. I will definitely be giving that a go. I also like the option of heading up to the NE side of the map relatively early to deal with the Nurberg and Bayern, and I will give that a go. As I said an awesome reply, even to the point of chiding your opponents. In the game I was referencing I think the most useful thing I did for the team was post 'You guys do know that you have 6 mins to reach the objective or die, right?'. Half the team were stopped in the Haven, some of them with full health.

@Jackson. Fair comment, but I have found I can be extremely effective, particularly on Aegis where I regularly score a Major Contribution. I think I do decent on the other maps and only Killer Whale has prompted a question like this. Even the game I am referencing that prompted this question I scored 57K damage and ranked 4th on the team in a comfortable win, so not a stellar game, but not terrible either. More than one DD on each Operation is probably too much though, so I'm not totally disagreeing with you.

@Nepgear. I'll give that some thought too. Sounds like a long wait though. :)

@Jaynoble55. Agreed, that's what I noticed, and have tried to copy the better players. I can't recall many gunboat DDs excelling though. Sorry I don't know anything new about t10 maps. I've given up on high tier ops, as I only want to play tech tree ships, and it's a waste of time as they often make a credit loss even with a good performance.

Again, thanks everyone for the replies.

Rotty