World of Warships Blitz - "USS Gearing" review 

She's by no means a bad ship, and reading up on her history, and the stories told by her former sailors, were great. Plus, I'm just finishing up Hornfischer's "Last Stand...", which gives you a whole new level of respect for destroyer crews back then, attacking a fleet including heavy cruisers and Yamato herself head-on, to save their CVEs.

yeah their revamping z23s guns like why 150mm were historically accurate :(

I wasn't recording yet at the time, I generally practice some rounds until I'm at least moderately successful, to get a feel for the ship. I started playing her like a Grozovoi, as an aggressive gunboat. With the proliferation of radars, especially among DDs that are in the caps early, smokes can be almost irrelevant in the opening stages. Gearing doesn't have the speed (once the engine boost is down), torpedoes are slow, and gun arcs & dispersion are tricky. I mostly died from focus fire, going in too aggressively early on, or from CVs (Gearing's AA is ok for a DD, but has nothing on the Swedes). Especially Hallands are a nightmare in early-game cap situations, since they're almost impervious to CVs, fast, hard to dodge torps, and negate Gearing smoke. I got a bit more successful when playing her more conservatively, less as a gunboat, more like a small support cruiser early on. I still don't rack in the damage numbers, but I can generally be somewhat useful to my team.

@@FunandGameswithTerry Maybe firsts impressions on the ships and then perhaps a highlight for the video

I'll let the camera roll next time, at the very least, I can use it for a fail video

I had underestimated her early-game firepower. Playing a bit less reckless, I've been more successful :)

The German and Soviet dds have bigger guns, but they feel a bit cross eyed. Hard to get them on target. I find that the European dds have very precise guns and angles, I seem to be able to get more ap shells on target with them. What am I doing wrong with the German and Soviet dds?

@@iceberg9248 Paneuropean DDs have very strong guns at close range. If you like duelling at close ranges, these ships are the best for you. The fast torps are also very useful there. At bigger ranges, German and Soviet DDs can land their shells easier.

The long-duration smokes used to be Gearing's gimmick, but now, we've got a lot more smoke DDs & cruisers, and radar DDs make push & smoke play in early game tricky. I've tried stealth torping with the good surface detection, but they're too slow to make that work, mostly. I use the torpedoes more for area denial, or unaimed shots at large congregations of BBs. You can still smoke rush BBs, if they get isolated, but in top tiers, that's becoming increasingly rare, and you don't have the strike power of a Shima to one-shot a BB, so you need an exit strategy as well.

@@FunandGameswithTerry Nowadays, I feel like it has become increasingly quite difficult to play DDs in tier 10 battles. Things like Minotaur, Worcester, Des Moines, etc haunts Destroyers in any game mode. In my opinion, Minotaur is the best DD to go with. Back in the day when there were only American and Japanese DD lines, I really liked to play Gearing. Now with other new DD lines, Gearing is not that much fun to play with. I tried other new DD lines such as German, Pan-Asian and European lines, but It doesn't feel good as Gearing. I still like to play the USN Gearing even though there are a lot of powerful destroyers. While Halland has extremely high AA damage, fast torpedos, faster main guns reload and high flooding chance, its torpedo damage is very poor. One has to hope for Permanent Flooding for causing damage. Shima has excellent torpedos, but CV's and CA's easily destroys it. Furthermore, it can't brawl other DD. Z-52 has better guns than Gearing, but its torpedoes are not the best in terms of damage and number of torpedoes. Gearing is neither the best nor the worst in any aspect. The only thing that disappoints me is its torpedo speed. Other than that, Gearing is fine. So, I started playing Minotaur as a DD and it is fun. It has extremely fast main gun reloads, 16 Torpedoes with good range and average damage that gets reloaded in a minute, 3 smokes, good AA damage and AA range and it gets Air defence alert skill, Sonar skill. As long as Minotaur doesn't get hit in the citadel, it is fun.

yep, known bug, unfortunately. Fingers crossed that it'll be fixed :)

@@FunandGameswithTerry good to know, i thought I was going crazy lol