World of Warships | Flight School: Aiming

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Hello everyone. My name is Ray and in this one we're going to be going over aiming your ordinance, aiming up drops, and um hopefully this video can help you out just uh just a bit. Um give you some insight of what I look for when I'm doing my drops like my my actual attacks. Um just a TLDDR. Uh there is no real way to calculate where to like where's the perfect area to release your ordinance, how much lead you have to give, and it's not like a surfer ship where you can just count the lines on the reticle and know what the enemy ship's uh target max speed is and you know, stuff like that. There's no real formula for that. It's just experience and just um just game knowledge of and I I guess a bit of a get a bit of predictions um when you are going to be doing your strikes like torpedo bombers or rockets and skip bombers anything like that see how much lead you have to give how late or how early to release your ordinance stuff like that it's just go into the training room tor you'll see in the next slide here just go into the training lobby and then just practice striking you can ask a friend to pick a ship or you can use AI uh the the the computers and just have them move around different ships, different classes, different nations. Everything is different. It's mainly going to be trying to practice aiming and landing ordinance like with your rockets and your torpedo bombers. Dive bombers and escape bombers are a little easier. So, the main thing is going to be about the torpedoes. I think that's like the biggest issue people have.

[00:01:38]But yeah, just go into the training lobby, just practice. This is literally just the pretty much the main way to improve in anything. You just want to keep practicing and practicing. And then when you realize, I'm doing this and that.

[00:01:53]Everything is doing everything, you know, lining up correctly, but my torpedoes aren't arming or I'm still not giving enough lead. You know, I'm lining up the drops properly, aiming for their, you know, striking their broadsides, but torpedoes are still missing. enemy ships are turning in, slowing down, turning away, you know, stuff like that. At that point, then you can start asking yourself and start looking at the replays. There is a replay system. You can just check your drops and stuff. See how much lead you should be giving. If they are too fast, then you you have to lead more. Or sometimes it's just a not it's just not a good target.

[00:02:32]Best example is when you're trying to torpedo a French destroyer, they go well over 40 knots, right? If you have 35 knot torpedoes that you're dropping with, chances are you're not going to hit the destroyer unless they're already stuck in a crossfire between you and your allies. That's like the best way to go about the strike. But in an actual 1 v one scenario, if you bring torpedo bombers, chances are you're not going to land it. So just don't even try.

[00:03:00]Anyways, moving on. So, it's not going to be many slides here. It's just a very brief presentation just explaining um just very briefly the strikes and my thought process on this. Um I can include like myself going over drops in like probably like a next clip later on in the video. We'll see how this goes.

[00:03:25]And if I feel like I didn't explain it well enough, then I'll probably do a post recording, like another recording to just clip it on to this. So, we'll see. Anyways, understanding squadrons.

[00:03:36]So, there are multiple different squadron types with multiple different ordinance for each. Rockets, torpedoes, die bombers were the first three. Copper bombers came next, and then skip bombers came later. I believe this is all five that we have so far. I don't think there's anything else. Um, there will probably be more in the future. probably mines, but we'll see.

[00:03:57]So, yes, every squadron has their own reticle. Every squadron has their own ordinance. And for each different squadron, for each different ordinance that has their own reticle, it is important to know as a carrier player um what your squadron does. So, your ordinance is the most important thing, H, AP, SAP, which is specific towards Aquilo rockets. Um, these are classified as AP, but based off of stats, they are basically SAP. It's just weird coding.

[00:04:29]Um, knowing the armor penetration, knowing the approach angle, reticle will basically give it away. If it's more horizontal, then you will go for broadside. If it's torpedo bombers, go broadside. Um, die bombers, usually you will go uh when the ship is either bow in or stern into you. Um, and same goes with carpets. skip bombers. You'll be going for the broad sides. There's a lot of stuff like that. You should know how your squadron performs and how you want to go about it. If you're rocketing someone when they're bowing or sterning to you and you have like tiny Tims or like so for example, you're running like a Soviet carrier and you rocket someone who is bowing to you, chances are you're not going to get that many hits. um probably probably like a few clips here and there, but um chances are yeah, you're just not going to be able to get like a a successful strike on that. So knowing how your carrier wants to approach that angle, what is the best angle for that, it is important to know that. So again, trading lobby or you just 99% of the time just go for broadsides. Just approach them at the broadside like everything else in this game. AP broadside, uh, H broadside, everything is just broadside in this game. Torpedoes, pretty much 99% of the things that we have, it's just broadside.

[00:05:51]Okay, this is a big one. Um, when you are doing your strike, there are multiple phases within the strike that you will notice. You can see my cursor here. Is my cursor visible? I think my cursor is visible. Hopefully, it is. Um, basically if you are going about your strike, you see this little red dot here. I I made a little red dot. This is basically the center of your of your gauge cluster. Um, it shows your your engine boost here, your max speed, how much time left you have on the drop. Um, and when you first start the attack run, it'll start out as orange color. That's the prep phase. And then the once your ordinance are ready to release, it'll turn to green. And this is the ready attack attack ready phase. And from here, this is when the reticle will start aiming down and start lowering and start um basically getting ready to improve your dispersion the longer that you hold on to it. So, you definitely want to have this aimed down. Now, we can go ahead and read on here. Do not use your A and D keys to adjust your aim. The offcentering reticle, which is the red dot, will adjust the yaw of the plane squadron. Y'all, for those of you guys who don't know, is basically turning the turning the plane side to side. It's not it's not uh what was that what's that turn what is that term? Uh roll, I think. It's not going to roll your plane side to side. But it's it's just going to adjust your plane so it turns horizontally. And this is going to be really perfect because if you use your A and D keys, A and D keys, chances are you will be adjusting your your roll. But um this is for uh maximi maximizing the amount of movement that your planes make. But it also results in a more inconsistent and very widespreading reticle. And you really want to you really don't want to use this when you are doing your strikes.

[00:07:44]When you are in the prep phase and then entering the green phase, you want to just have it so that your in this case your cursor your red dot is off center from the reticle. So this way your planes can actually turn or turn ever so slightly. Then this is perfect for precision aiming during your strikes. If you do this, your planes will turn and it will retain its reticle for the most part. Well, not for most carriers at least. It will it will it won't it won't spread the reticle as much.

[00:08:15]It minimizes the room for error. Greatly improves dispersion of the attack, especially when you start letting the reticle aim down all the way and then you start moving. This is essential for every single strike that you do. I see so many times when I'm playing carriers or when I'm playing as a surface ship, I see the enemy carrier or my own ally carrier doing a torpedo strike, but I see the torps fan out just going off to Narnia. This is most likely because the carrier player is either using A and D keys or he doesn't know how to properly aim down the reticle or waiting for the reticle to aim down all the way before releasing your your ordinance. And this isn't this isn't just for torpedo bombers. It's for every single ordinance that we have in the game. Every reticle has its maximum and then its minimum, which is its smallest size. Um, which results in a different type of dispersion pattern and how wide your your ordinance will fan out. Smaller is better. You want to wait a little bit longer and then adjust your aim. And I think this is where I I should probably yeah I should probably do a post-recording like a clip of in trading lbs just to show this type of movement.

[00:09:24]But this is very important. This is from a Malta video as you can see here. Um I'm just holding W to go max speed during the torpedo strike. And I'm using the off center cursor from my reticle so that I can turn my planes horizontally to to line up the drop on the Yamato.

[00:09:43]This is essential. So, make sure you guys do this. Um, I'll go over that in the video afterwards this or after this in the clip, but yeah, just keep this in mind when you are going about your strikes.

[00:09:57]Here's another tip. I went over this briefly in my previous videos. I believe in my midway video. I think I I talked about this using free look, which is right click by default when you're doing your strikes.

[00:10:09]Um, this is really helpful for things like Hakuru or the Midway or anything that has a really long aiming requirement like aim time. Uh, I think FDR torpedo bombers as well. If it takes a while to aim down the strike and you have a shaky hand or you're just not really good with keeping, you know, just keeping the reticle straight or you're always like moving around a little bit.

[00:10:32]Um, you really want to be using the right click feature. Right click is a free look feature and this is present on every single ship. Uh if you play surface ships and you hold right, you're looking at a c certain way, hold right click, you're able to look around without your turrets turning. This is the same thing here for planes. When you are doing your when you are flying around controlling your squadron, you can hold right click and you can look around the map wherever you want to look and it won't adjust the planes at all.

[00:10:59]planes will continue going straight unless you use your WD and then you can move your planes around. But if you let go of the right click, um, then it'll go back. It'll it'll click clip back to where you you were originally looking at. This is a really nice feature because when you're doing your strikes, you really want to keep a steady have a steady hand and keep the reticle to be as straight as possible without turning.

[00:11:25]um especially for the longer aiming aiming uh squadrons. And this will basically ensure that the reticle will aim down all the way with minimal movement and minimal amount of errors and and um basically like uh what is the word? I wouldn't say glitching, but it'll be kind of kind of stuttering a little bit with with the the aiming if you are moving ever so slightly. So everything every single movement counts as a um a react the aiming will react the reticle will react to any type of movement. It's really hard to explain. I I I'll just show it in in the clip afterwards. I'll go more in depth, but just know about this about this little trick. You can just hold right click during the strike. It'll help you aim down all the way. You can take a look Oh, you can take a look at the UI here that I'm using. I'm just holding right click and this makes it so that the planes um were able to aim down properly and it doesn't matter if I'm looking around or not.

[00:12:22]Lastly, this is near the end of the end of the slideshow. Um even if you aim it down all the way, you can have bad drops, you can have good drops.

[00:12:31]Sometimes you'll just obliterate someone off out of the game just based off of luck. Sometimes you'll just miss everything like MVR, the tier 10 uh German carrier, the AP bombs. you can miss completely. It happens and don't let it discourage you. Um, sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you'll just rage and just feel really bad. At this point, it's more of like if you are missing a lot, yes, you can reach out to someone and ask them, show them like a clip or the replay and ask them, am I doing this right? Is this really is it me or is it this the dispersion? And most likely another carrier player will be able to help you out. You know, they'll be looking at the reticle. They'll be looking at how you approach the angle.

[00:13:13]And then lastly, they'll look at the bombs. And it depends on what kind of carrier you play, which is really weird with how they did with the with the German carrier um line. The tier eight is very accurate and very strong with his AP bombing, but then you go to the tier 10, it's just complete just a circus show. It's really bad. Like the dispersion because of the nerf. So, it's just RNG. And like everything else in this game, it's RNG. battleship salvos, everything is RNG. So, um, just keep trying. Keep trying and, you know, that's pretty much it. You just got to keep trying. You just got to throw throw your ordinance at them and see see whatever sticks. If you are struggling, you can always join my Discord server and ask people for help or you can ask, you know, ask anyone really.

[00:14:02]And I'm pretty sure you'll get some flak for it if you ask a random person who doesn't play carriers. they will most likely hate carriers. So, um you know, but even still, it doesn't hurt to ask, right? So, this is going to be the end of the slideshow. If you have any questions, just let me know of uh anything here. I'm pretty sure I kind of went over everything that there is for at for aiming at least. It's not really much to it other than just learning. The big one is most likely just leaning uh leading properly, right? like if you really want to lead your lead your um ordinance your squadron properly against a specific target and knowing how much time you have to lead that's that that's honestly the biggest one but yeah I can show some stuff um going to training lobby and just talk a little bit more about that like showcase like um turning and aiming and all that stuff how much lead to give but yeah I mean TGR like I said just practice yourself just go into your training lobby just set it to enemies have the moving um option click and not the firing option. Um, and then just keep striking and keep releasing your ordinance and just keep practicing.

[00:15:09]But yeah, that's going to be it for me.

[00:15:11]I'm going to go ahead and uh show some clips here and there. And if you guys like the video, let me know. There's not much that I could really do regarding aiming. Like I said many, many, many times so far in this video, I'm just I'm just repeating myself. But hopefully this video helped you guys out. If you have any questions, feel free to ask on my channel or on my Discord server. A lot of people are there right now and active people. So yeah, someone is bound to help you out. So, yep. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.

[00:15:38]All right. Before we get into the actual examples, uh I was just notified from a friend that on the PTS server, uh PTS is the public test server. You can see.

[00:15:51]Wow. Very cool. This is for the next update. Um someone actually told me that. Yeah. Here we go. So, this consumable, as you can see, it's right next to the DCP consumable. These are the the patrol squadron that actually hovers your carrier after your carrier gets spotted. You see there, it's active for 600 seconds. It's a normal time, right? But they changed this to interceptors. So, that's pretty interesting. I guess this is so that um so that you don't get CV sniped as much or well the enemy carrier isn't able to just place fighters on you and then just despawn your own fighters cuz they will latch on to each other and then they can go in for a free strike. Um because once those fighters go down, you have a cool down of 38 seconds. So that's 38 seconds of them being able to strike you. So I guess this is what they decided to uh change without notifying anyone. So, this good eye to whoever commented um to the dude that commented on my YouTube video about this. Thank you for this uh this heads up. This is another unannounced change that the Wargaming has done to the carriers, which is very cool and a pretty good start to the uh the the 2026 waterline segment where they want they want to improve carriers.

[00:17:04]So, yeah, there's that. Anyways, all righty. Hello everyone. Here is the example section of the video. You guys made it this far. I appreciate you guys staying here for this video. I I was rambling a little bit in the presentation, but I mean it's just not really something you can explain to someone, right? So, um anyways, here we are. Rockets. We're going to be leading this Montana battleships. Montana, it's important to know armor schemes when you are striking something like this. Um, your tiny your I'm running H4s right now on Midway. Penetration is 33 mm. You can see it when you hover over down here. 33 mm. So, generally I want to be aiming for the super structure cuz Montana is covered and his deck is covered in 38 mm. Bow and Stern is 32, but better off to just focusing the super structure.

[00:17:56]Some carriers rockets can penetrate over 38 with tiny Tims for example, but for the most part in this example, we're just going to showcase dropping the Montana. So, as you can see here in the center, there is my reticle right right there. And what this is going to be useful for is let's say, like I said, when you aim it off center, like if I aim it right here, it'll follow my my planes will follow. This will be the uh yaw movement. And this is really nice.

[00:18:25]For example, though, if I do clip away from it, you see that my planes are not clipping on, right? But if you start to approach the reticle just slowly, you can see that it'll start to clip on.

[00:18:36]Right now, it clips. I'm not pressing anything on my keyboard. You're just moving the camera a little bit closer to the reticle and boom, it's clipped. Now, this means I'm able to make subtle adjustments, right?

[00:18:50]Very nice. This is perfect for aiming and aiming down on um minor adjustments so that your reticle doesn't get, you know, it doesn't expand or anything like that.

[00:19:02]As for the strike itself, you just lead a just lead a little bit.

[00:19:07]Base it off of this timer. 3.7 seconds.

[00:19:10]You lead, you release, and you just check. Okay, that looks good. Oh, what the All right. That That was a That was a lag. That is not supposed to happen.

[00:19:21]Some crazy burst fire rocket moment. Um, but yeah, let's say you you're just trying it out. Okay, let's say you don't lead as much. You just drop it right on him. He's going to slowly drift away.

[00:19:33]And if these were longer machine gun timers, you can you can just guess that, oh yeah, you know, you would probably miss those rockets. He's slowing down right now, so it's really easy. But let me show you guys what I mean by the torpedo bombers and holding right click.

[00:19:45]Midway torpedo bombers are notorious for being pretty bad. A lot of a lot of people say it's bad because when you want to aim it down all the way, people are just constantly making adjustments like this. They're very long aiming time. Look how wide this reticle is. And look how long it takes for it to um to aim down. And you can see any subtle adjustments, it does start to make the reticle expand a little bit. And this is what I mean. And this will cause the torpedoes when you release them to start fanning outward, which is not what you want. You want your torpedoes to go to just go straight towards the target.

[00:20:19]So, we're going to showcase it again, but this time with right clicking and so that the aetical can aim down on the way. Let's go ahead and do it on one drop on the Montana here. Start the attack run. Line it up. Hold right click. You see on the UI on the bottom left, I am holding right click. And this lets me look around, right? So that there's no movement. Once I get close, I can make a final adjustment and release my ordinance. And the reason why I say you want to make sure your reticle aims down all the way is because there's a feature where if you are going to be using your your torpedo bombers or anything >> you can see how wide the reticle is, right? Look how long it takes for it to aim down even when I'm holding right right click. Okay.

[00:21:08]Okay. So, there's that. Now, I'm going to show you how quickly it once you just let it aim down all the way and then you you move it after it is finished aiming.

[00:21:17]We're going to go ahead and see just uh how you see how there's no movement at all, right? No movement at all. Okay, now it aimed down all the way. Look how quickly it reims itself after you let it sit. After you let it aim down all the way, you just have to let it aim down all the way once, which is the very beginning. And then from there, um, every single time afterwards that you make subtle adjustments, it'll reim itself very, very quickly. Mainly the most important thing is you don't move around too much during this prep phase or else it'll cause this point to be very, very, very wide. You really don't want that. Even if you are holding right click now, by the time it's already really close to the timer expiring and so you have like no time to do any type of adjustments.

[00:22:03]So, I'll do one example here. Um, you can strike at a target that is angled against you uh with the midway even though you have very long um very long aiming timers, right? So, if someone's already angled away towards against you like this, what you can do is you can just start your attack like this. Aim it down. Hold the right click so that it is aiming down. You don't want to do anything. You can speed up if you want.

[00:22:28]All right. Speed up if you want. Let the reticle aim down. And then from here you can make subtle adjustments to turn it and it aims down properly and release.

[00:22:36]So this is basically how to do it. There is the slot three upgrade module that you can take and this will increase your your attack timer by 5 seconds. It is very strong on torpedo bombers like this FDR um midway haku. These guys all really like that slot three upgrade because you can aim farther away. It gives you more time to aim, but also the risk for that is it actually makes it so that when you are stuck in that attack phase longer, it makes it so you are prone to eating flack during the strike.

[00:23:13]This is why you would generally take enhanced aircraft armor, the fourpoint anti-lack skill. It helps a lot with that, but um that's more of like another topic for another time. But yeah, this is just another example some some examples of what I do, what I would recommend and how you should go about your strikes. Um, again, how how much lead should you give? It's just all about feel and you got to keep playing.

[00:23:38]You got to keep trying. Try what works and if it doesn't, ask a question and uh someone will be able to help you out.

[00:23:44]But yeah, that's going to be pretty much it for this one. Hope you guys enjoyed.

[00:23:47]Hopefully it was helpful and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.

[00:23:56]Hey, hey, hey.