Since T-8's don't get a heal, just how much durability can you really get with captain skills? Yes, you can mitigate fire damage, but you can't do a thing about pens.ĬE & IFHE are both a 'Must' for Cleveland. That means at the ranges you're going to fight EVERYTHING with 152mm guns and above is going to pen your armor. Now factor in that the Cleveland pretty much has 25mm or less armor on the entire ship with a cit at 127mm. Even if you shoot AP, you're pretty much to need them fully broadside with minimal angle and be at under 10km to be able to do AP pens.

You may find a few ships that have 25mm bow/sterns but it's not many other places that you will be able to damage with HE (other than the UK CLs). That means that without IFHE, for most of those ships (Moskova, Mino, Neptune, Ibuki being the exceptions off the top of my head), the only thing you will be able to HP pen is the superstructure. Remember, since it's now T-8 MM, you will see T-10's and T-9s. Without DE it will drop the 12% fire chance on the Cleveland-8 to 9% (so 25% drop in fire chance overall). IFHE on 152mm lets you to HE pen 33mm instead of 25mm armor. The question each player needs to answer is whether to try to buff durability or buff damage output. I would rather place it on survivability and lowering the consumables to deal with the HE spam. You could be right, my argument to counter would be IFHE counters DE therefore its a waste of points on that combo.

World of warships cleveland ifhe