[2022] Tier VII California Buff Discussion Thread

I want you to know, Sailor_Moon that I used to hate the California as much as you do. Or maybe you love it, but hate how it plays .

I dug through the stats and compared them to the other BB's of her tier trying to pinpoint exactly why the damn thing always FEELS so anemic when I play it. The actual stats surprised me with not being as bad as I had previously thought, so I doubled-down and started comparing it further and settled on the tagline of:
"It's a New Mexico with better accuracy and AA at T7".
The problem is that American HE doesn't pen like German, doesn't bash things like British, and the AP shells don't overmatch as much on a T7 ship as they do on a T6 ship. Further, up from T6 to T7 the ships around it and facing it tend to get faster, leaving a thickums like California still on the slow side of things while it's closest counterpart, Colorado, at least has the nice overmatch potential that comes with 16-inch guns. Colorado even gets a little extra sigma at the cost of slower shells. Toolset_Difference makes a ship feel very different.
So I played a LOT of Cali... or at least if felt like a lot of Cali..

I was pleasantly surprised! I shot HE at long range, avoided taking fights with other BB's when I could, and focused mainly on punishing cruisers that were distracted. The shells tend to have a nice vertical dispersion (outmatched at T7 only by Florida and Prinz Heinrich at around 16km), so I would routinely smack them around.
It certainly isn't a carry-ship. There are some boats that just aren't going to shoulder burden like others can, but I decided I didn't hate her playstyle as much as I did when it was released.
I am missing that it originally had nice secondaries before release. That would have been such bait for me

My pleasure :)
I literally think of you every single time I take out the California so I was determined to make it work .
It really isn't easy though. I will grant you that 100%. I actually like boats that are tougher to succeed in but the 356's at T7 with 34.2 natural reload is roughums.

Ahskance has been swearing by the Oklahoma Secondaries
We've gone back and forth about this in the office.

See, the AP pen (or lack there-of) was also a major problem for me until I realized that the AP is perfectly suited for citadeling the cruiser from Tiers 5-7, but will struggle horribly against BB's.
So I started shooting the CL's and CA's more often

It really is kind of funny, because I never really looked that deep into the specifics of the T7 battleships that carefully until you convinced me to look at California. Once I did, I realized that it's not just the Cali that feels hard, it's that nearly ALL T7 battleships suffer from the same thing: the armor-scheme paradigm-shift that happens between T7 and T8.
California is a big chonker that eats a lot of HE damage, but it's actually pretty hard to citadel as it sits quite a ways below the water. The 35mm torpedo belt is pretty trolly when it comes to deflecting BB shells as only Musashi can overmatch and ignore it. It's just so slow that you end up taking a fair chunk of damage before you can reposition so it doesn't "feel" tanky.
I actually appreciated the trip down exploratory lane. I never realized that the Scharnhorst and Gneisnau arguably have the best armor layout of any T7 BB.

And that's just the thing: the HE doesn't blap like the British, and the AP doesn't overmatch like the Sinop or Colorado.
You are forced to take the very best shots you can and reeeally hope they work out.