Graf Spee

[Boomer]

Got it thinking it might make a nice addition to my German cruiser line... only... it is god awful. how do you use it?

It's like a low dps cruiser with the handling of a battleship, so while it might have more hit points, it needs them because it can't get out of the way. I'm currently at about a 1 in 10 win rate with this thing.

What is its secret?

[Firewalk]

Graf Spee is a pseudo-BB, just like it was in real-life. You got Scharnhorst-sized guns with tolerable dispersion and a hell of a torpedo barrage. That being said, Spee excelles in mid-range combat. Most targets I tend to use HE against, unless it's a cruiser silly enough to go sideways.

Just play her like you would any heavy cruiser and practice making those shots count. You got bigger guns that any other cruiser at her tier, just not quite the tankiness of a same-tier BB.

- RA -

[Donegali]

Can't help you with her secret unfortunately, I played her 2-3 times and haven't looked at it since. Personally I couldn't make her work, felt like I got citadeled the second a BB looked at me, the dispersion used to mock me and she was so sluggish that all in all I lost interest in attempting to learn her. I do remember her torps being pretty good though.

[Boomer]

Yeah the dispersion is terrible. Its rare that anymore than 1 in all 6 shells hit at any distance. The match making isn't helping either. I'm being lumped into matches with tier 8's

[Howard Roark]

I just got her myself and have been having a blast in the weekly op. She's definetly an odd duck, and certainly not for everyone but if you can make her work she's a ton of fun.

I'm no expert, but what I've found is that she's a great cruiser killer and her AP can hurt BBs (I've even citadeled one). DDs should be avoided as you don't have the DPS to fight them. She really is a weird BB/CA hybrid and should be played as such, stay in the mid to back, try not to attract the attention of BBs (and don't giver them broadside), and rain damage down over time. With her amazing health pool (for a tier 6 cruiser) and heals she has great staying power; don't expect to rack up dev strikes (too few guns), instead focus on staying alive and chiping away at the enemy over time. Her torps are good but aren't her primary weapon; they should mostly be used for defense or YOLO rushes.

Good luck, I hope you can make the ship work for you!

[CMDR Sweeper]

When I drive the Graf Spee I load AP exclusively, I rarely fire HE in it.
However broadside targets are your best bet, you also aren't easy to citadel for most targets you face on the cruiser side either.
So you can afford to be a little deadly BB with it, but the guns are fairly accurate and you can deal really really bad damage with plunging AP fire.

Its strongest point is in the Operations, just remember to operate it like a Battleship and not like a cruiser.
But don't sail into multiple BBs, because that will end in tears.
Angeled BBs at range may be your best bet for HE as usual, but if they go broadside, let them have your AP.

[Boomer]

Ive found AP shells bounce a lot, so much so it gets frustrating. I'll stick with operations for now and see what i can get out of it. Being a premium at least ive been earning a bit of credit with the thing. :)

I imagine sailing into multiple battleships would end in tears for just about anyone though. :D

[HitachiMako]

play like a bb, shoot broadside cruisers with AP shells and torp on any bigguys comimg near

[Boomer]

What would be involved in refunding the dlc? its not good. it might have been once before but its not anymore. its worse than a free ship

[eMercody]

Tell that to the mikasa, it’s probably premium because of the weird experience it offers or the historical value than actually being good.

[Lavian]

Graf Spee has a highest in tier win rate for her class https://wows-numbers.com/ship/3764303664,Admiral-Graf-Spee/?p=266

I certainly have no idea how to use her though. It's certainly a struggle trying to adjust to her.

Mikasa also has around a 52% win rate, though I wonder if that's just due to people not realizing that her secondaries fire like machine guns, while her main battery pretty much can't hit anything reliably.

[Pranne]

Any tipps for that ship?

I have it too but as soon as i come under fire it is mostly over.

[HoLeeKow]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1800090142&tscn=1562899883

This was yesterday , I got in a game bottom tier but managed to play smart , survive and win

[Boomer]

If you were in any other ship your score would probably have been higher. It has rotten dispersion. I can aim at a stationary battleship midships that has run aground 12kms away and only 1 shell in 6 will hit.

[Lavian]

Eh. She is what it says on the tin. She's a pocket battleship, and she sure feels like one. The problem is that she can't take hits like a battleship and she can't deal the same damage either. She's also not particularly fast to offset the drawbacks. Not that she's particularly slow, but there are bigger ships in-tier that can beat her speed (well, there's at least one ship anyway). The torpedoes are nice to have, but not something you can really rely on most of the time (they are torpedoes after all). The hydroacoustic search is a decent safety measure, but being a pocket BB you also may just get hit anyway if you're caught out by torpedoes, even with hydro spotting them from longer range. Having a fighter is cool, but also other bigger ships in tier have that too (or again, at least one).

I pretty much end up comparing her to Dunkerque and question why I'm not playing the bigger ship with more guns (all concentrated to the fore), longer range, and slightly higher speed.

Concealment is a factor I guess, so there's certainly that.

I don't dislike Spee; she seems alright, and I pretty much perform with her as well as I do any other cruiser at this point (which isn't great to be honest; not totally horrible though) but I do have a hard time knowing what exactly what to do with her. I'll continue to play her, but she's in a kind of weird spot where both BBs and DDs seem exceptionally threatening, whereas most cruisers would see spotted DDs as relatively easy prey. She also doesn't seem to be better at hunting cruisers than a BB. That said, she is like having a mini-BB in the place of cruiser, so it does make the match balance a little different if you're not matched against another Spee.

[s u p e r g r a m p s]

Spee is one of the more balanced premiums on the market, which means it's very mediocre and isn't overly competitive. The most success I've found with her is utilizing her beefy HP pool and low profile at staying around 12km to utilize her concealment to bully and punish enemy cruisers and battleships with her nice AP.

You pretty much want to avoid battleships and kite away from them, using your 8km torpedoes if they're trying to run you down; you cannot really out-trade damage with other Battleships for an extended period of time due to your low comparative DPM and thin armor. You really only want to push in on enemy cruisers, using your best-in-tier HP and repair party to out-trade any cruiser you face. In some cases you can overmatch the plating (19mm) on some cruisers you face, allowing you to easily citadel them from any angle.

Your hydro is also best used when facing DDs and when your pushing in on enemy cruisers that have torpedo tubes. Graf Spee kind of struggles against enemy DDs due to lackluster german HE + low DPM, doing so little damage that AP does 216 less damage on overpens than standard HE penetrations! Because of that, HE should only really ever be used to start fires on angled ships that have more than 19mm of plating.

Now this next bit is part of my personal build and will make most normies vomit so I'll just black it out to spare the poor unicums from reading this next part. My build[wowsft.com] is REALLY weird, as I experimented with it for a while and is by no means the most optimized: it combines a tank build and a tiny bit of a secondary build with AFT + SBM1 for a secondary range of 5.8km (with the secondary flag of course), which gives me Spees 150mm guns that have a 32mm HE pen to at the very least aid in fighting at close range, which overlaps my Hydro ship detection range. Why I chose this build is mainly because I didn't want to do a really boring survivability build and wanted to try something different. Why I don't choose ASM1? you gain about 11m better dispersion, which is all and nice but I felt could be swapped out with some secondary range since the dispersion is kind of bad as it is; same reason I didn't go all in the secondary build with MFSA as the secondary dispersion only went from like 116m to 103m, which is like 13m (combined with the atrocious 1.0 sigma secondaries have, it doesn't help them that much)

And that's Graf Spee in a nutshell. Hope that helps