[2022] The lack of imagination

The Rework provided more room for more [Ship Type]-oriented skills. IE: An entire tree of skills that are Destroyer-relevant, or an entire tree of skills that are Cruiser-relevant.

A benefit of doing this is that it allows a more focused design-space for balancing, as opposed to having a smattering of skills for every type of ship creating a sort of mash-up build possible.

Also,

Type_93 is correct in that you can have 20 skills or 100 skills, you will have players that run the numbers and find the min-max'ed "Correct Build". That build will then be treated as mandatory.

For folks that are less concerned about min-max'ing, they pick among the variety of skills based on what they find fun.

Use of the sped up Repair skills on my Montana in Ranked resulted in my highest Potential Damage game ever. I was able to use all my Repair Parties while being barraged by a Minotaur and killed it after the final Repair was used.

That does sound like a fun idea when considered solely for that purpose. However, our game design folks need to be able to design with a fair assessment of what a ship can and cannot do including updates/skills.

Adding more and more and more options can make for outlier issues like double-range Smolensk which then have to be balanced around that possibility. Games which tend to embrace massive possibility spaces like that tend to be PvE focused as finding new and crazier way to kill AI enemies is fully normal for that type of game experience. PvP games are honed differently.

All of our ships are balanced for Random Battles because it's the primary mode of the game. That is a definable metric that we can use for a foundation.

Clan Battles see some ships limited or removed for this reason. A ship might be tankier than expected due to the lower amount of ships/damage, for instance. The only way to solve that would be to have multiple versions of a ship for different modes, which would require extra balancing teams to set new foundational values and then constantly tweak/evaluate them. While this could be interesting, the amount of work that would be required is untenable.

PvE can be tuned as best as possible with the ships existing in their current form, but you are correct that it's hard to have one game that has many different forms of play.

Use of a 19 point Commander is fine. Even a 10 point Commander will hit the basics and be able to provide Concealment Expert if needed.

Our game doesn't require best-in-slot everything to be playable.