Overview
There’s a lot of debate over cruisers and speccing for Survivabilty Expert, and it’s not clear to what cruisers benefit the most from the skill. I’ve went ahead and taken the liberty of doing a decent amount of number crunching and figuring out what cruisers could fit this skill into their captains, and what cruiser’s can skip the skill for another.
Basic Information and Summary
Survivabilty Expert is a 3-point captain skill that gives 350 HP multiplied by the ship tier, so at Tier X, speccing this skill on a captain will give whatever the ship that captain is commanding a bonus 3,500 HP.
Now, for the most part, this skill is mostly picked up on destroyers, due to the % increase of HP being equal to or above 10%, which is nice to have when destroyers are the ship class with the least HP. Speccing this on battleships is mostly for the memes, such as on a captain for a Yamato to buff her HP to almost as much health as Kurfurst; the % increase is something like 2-3% increase which is more or less pointless on a battleship, a ship’s class that already has the most HP of the 4 ship types. Aircraft carriers also do not benefit from this perk, as they are usually far away from the frontlines and increasing HP will also increase the fire damage that is taken, which for a CV is not something you want.
So what about cruisers? They’re the in-between for small, low HP destroyers and massive health pools of battleships. It would make sense that at least some ships would benefit from this skill, right? That’s usually the argument of an unsure commander that has 3 captain points on his cruiser to spare. Well, for cruisers, the average % increase across tier II-X is 6.3%. Now that does seem like a low number, but that is the absolute average across the board, not inlcuding the new cruiser-battlecruisers Kronshtadt and Stalingrad, as they skewed the averages when they were included.
However, you must keep in mind that Tiers II-V have very small HP increases of 750, 1050, 1400, and 1750. Once you get to tier VI and above does the average increase of HP break 7% which is not bad in some arguments, but some beg to differ. Regardless, the following google doc has a color coded system that I’ve based off of the overall % average, the average HP of cruisers in the tier, and the average % increase for the tier:
- Blue means that the % increase is way above average and is a great idea to take SE
- Green means that the % increase is above average and is not a bad skill to pick up
- Yellow means that the % increase is around average meaning the skill can be skipped, but dosen’t hurt to take to boost the ship’s HP to above average
- Red means the % increase is redudant since the ship in question already has above average HP so the skill can be skipped if your cruiser captain is on a budget and needs more important skills
- Red Letters means that the ship is a cruiser-battlecruiser and does not count to averages
Table
