USS Black is still a work in progress. Please be aware that all of the statistics and performance discussed here are subject to change before release.

Hell and fire was spawned to be released.

Quick Summary: A reward-version of the Fletcher-class Destroyer with Radar.

Cost: Black is not for sale and can only be earned by achieving Rank One in five seasons of Ranked Battles.

Patch & Date Written: 0.6.1, February 11th, 2017.

Closest in-Game Contemporary Fletcher, Tier 9 American Destroyer

Degree of Similarity: Clone / Sister-Ship / Related Class / Similar Role / Unique USS Black is a Fletcher-class destroyer but, like most premium ships, she has a few changes to make her stand apart from her sister ships. The changes summarize to the following: Black has access to the USN Radar consumable as an option in her third consumable slot.

Her deck armour is 19mm instead of 13mm.

The torpedoes she launches are slower, longer ranged and harder hitting than Fletcher’s with a faster reload.

Black swaps out the two twin-gun 40mm Bofors mounts behind her #2 turret for a pair of twin-gun 20mm Oerlikons instead.

She’s slower than Fletcher by 1.5 knots.

She turns slightly better than Fletcher.

PROs

Armed with five, rapid fire 127mm rifles.

She can fire up to ten 13.7km range torpedoes, doing 21,600 damage each and a with reasonable 96s reload per launcher.

Decent anti-aircraft armament for a destroyer, including the option to take Defensive Fire .

. Excellent handling, including a small 560m turning circle, a 3.0s rudder shift time and 34º per second turret traverse.

Good concealment values, dropping down to 5.8km with proper specialization and providing a huge stealth-firing window.

USS Black can combine smoke and radar, making her the ultimate spotting & support ship.

CONs

Her 17,100 hit points are on the low side for a tier 9 destroyer.

Horrible gun ballistics which makes gunnery of any target outside of 10km punitive.

Her torpedoes are the slowest ship-launched fish in the game at 43 knots, taking a full two minutes to reach maximum range.

On the slow side for a higher tier destroyer with a maximum speed of 35 knots.

Her consumable “options” aren’t really optional. If you take anything other than Radar in her 3rd slot, you’re a fool.

Doesn’t appear to have Missouri’s massive credit-earning potential.

Here it is. This is the second reward ship for Ranked Battles, requiring primacy in five seasons to unlock her. Even in her preview state, Black has caused a lot of fuss. This seems to be a trend with these reward vessels. This is not likely to ever be a common ship. While it can be argued that over time, more players will have reached rank one in five seasons, the natural attrition of the player base will also see some of these veterans hang up their cap and stop playing. Flint isn’t commonplace. Black promises to be even more rare.

That doesn’t undermine the dangers to the meta that an unbalanced ship can present. Still, the alarm that has met Black’s preview statistics has been considerable. While not quite an Alabama Drama Llama in scale, the sky is once again (or is it still?) falling in certain community groups. I stress that what we’re seeing presently is nothing more than a preview of the ship and not her final form. Things can change. Hopefully this thorough look into USS Black’s current build will provide enough insight to see where changes may or may not be needed.



Black shares the same camouflage scheme as USS Flint, the first premium reward ship for Ranked Battles. #GetBoat



Options

Black has the same options as the Fletcher-class but with the added bonus of getting access to Radar in her third consumable slot. You have to swap out Engine Boost for this. Her Radar is identical to that found on Baltimore and Missouri, with a 9.45km acquisition range for 35 seconds. I firmly believe that Wargaming made a misstep with Black’s consumables. Swapping her Engine Boost for Radar is a non-decision with radar being optimal in the majority of situations. A more balanced option would have been to make players of USS Black choose between a Smoke Generator and Radar. Thinking this would balance her is, of course, contingent on believing that a destroyer having radar is acceptable at all. We’ll see if this consumable combination survives testing.

Consumables: Damage Control Party

Smoke Generator



Engine Boost or Defensive Fire or Radar Module Upgrades: Six slots, standard USN Destroyer options.

Premium Camouflage: Can I call this tier 9+ standard? It provides the same bonus as the Missouri: A 3% concealment bonus, a 4% increase to enemy gunnery dispersion and a 100% bonus to experience gains.

Firepower Primary Battery: Five 127mm rifles in single turrets in a superfiring A-B-P-X-Y arrangement. P turret is forward facing behind the torpedo launchers.

Torpedo Armament: Ten 533mm tubes in 2×5 launchers mounted before and behind the rear funnel.

Black is armed with five 127mm/38 Mark 30 naval rifles. These are the same guns first seen on the Benson-class destroyers at tier 8 without any significant improvement in performance. This staple of the USN Destroyer line is known for its tremendous rate of fire and excellent gun handling but also its famously poor ballistic qualities that lead to a very high shell arc over range. So while Black can potentially dish out monstrous levels of damage, landing those hits is considerably more of a challenge than the 130mm of Soviet Destroyers, for example. These weapons are very much par for the course for American destroyers and offer nothing in the way of surprises for veterans of the American destroyer line.

By tier 8, destroyer caliber guns begin to lose the arms race versus the armour values found on capital ships. Even upgraded with Inertial Fuse for HE Shells, her rounds cannot penetrate tier 8+ Battleships anywhere except their superstructure. Her 127mm guns can only penetrate 21mm of armour without the skill while being able to best up to 27mm of armour with it. This value is important — it’s sufficient to damage the bows and sterns of all cruisers and select deck areas on most of these ships.

But it’s as a destroyer hunter where these guns excel, provided you can close the range. Their very fast turret traverse rate of nearly 34º per second allows the ship to be thrown into evasive maneuvers while maintaining her gun lock on target. This makes her a very real threat to any rival torpedo or gunship.

Like USS Sims before it, Black has what the community has often referred to as “naval mine” torpedoes. Their speed is downright laughable at 43 knots (115.1 meters per second under the game’s compressed distances). It takes these torpedoes almost a full two minutes to reach the end of their impressive 13.7km range. With a 96s reload, this allows you to put a second salvo in the water before the first is little more than 3/4s done their first run. The good news is that they have a very short surface detection range of 0.9km. However, given their slow speed, her targets have approximately 7.8s worth of reaction time which is fairly standard. Their real weakness is if they’re picked up early. They’re so slow that some ships can turn away and even outrun the darned things. Black’s torpedoes are, at best, area denial weapons. While possible to ambush someone at point blank range and make their life miserable (and short), more often they’re used as a fire and forget series of water-mines, helping push the Reds away from a given area.

During testing, there was a bug present where Black’s torpedoes weren’t doing anywhere close to the right amount of damage. Though listed as capping out at 21,600, their damage was all over the map and never where it should have been. Several of the testers and I took USS Black out into training rooms and slammed fish into various bots, ensuring we got midship strikes with single torpedoes. Strikes against ships without anti-torpedo defenses never got higher than 12,804 damage. Hits to the Yamato’s torpedo bulges did 8,368. Yet hits to a Mogami (A-Hull) did 13,093 while hits against the upgraded (C-Hull) did 12,397 damage. This is despite the torpedo bulges for these three respective ships reducing damage by 55%, 13% and 18% respectively. The math doesn’t add up. Bug reports were filled out.

Did I mention this ship was still very much a work in progress?



Black’s torpedoes will be a heck of a lot more fun to use when they work properly.

Maneuverability Top Speed: 35.0 knots Turning Radius: 560m Rudder Shift Time: 3.0s

The Fletcher-class, and by extension USS Black, has great agility. With a tiny turning circle and excellent rudder shift time, Black appears equally well set up to dodge fire as Fletcher. However, it should be noted that she’s 1.5 knots slower than her sister ship. But there’s more to this ship than that.

Black bleeds speed faster than Fletcher does in a turn while maintaining a comparable maximum speed with her rudder hard over. It takes Fletcher approximately 20.4s to drop down to 30.6 knots in a turn while Black will drop to 30.3 knots in roughly 12.9s. This makes the Fletcher “skid” more through the first leg of the turn while Black’s hull bites in. Thus, Black has a quarter of a second’s advantage in progressing through a 90º turn at top speed and almost two-thirds of a second for full a 360º turn.

Though Black has the same rudder shift time and turning radius of Fletcher, Black is slightly more agile in a turn despite their similar stat profile. Who’d have thought?