World of Warships Final Review: U.S. Tier IX Freemium Cruiser Vallejo

Ladies and gentlemen, I salute you. With Update 0.11.9., we are getting a brand new U.S. cruiser, the Vallejo. The ship will be available for 22 000 Steel. As such, she becomes the only non-tier X ship that can be purchased with steel in the current catalog of the Armory.

Is she worth it? Is her damage output compensating for her lack of a Surveillance Radar? Here is my opinion.

Historical background

Vallejo is based on a preliminary design for the Worcester-class of light cruiser from the U.S. Navy. More specifically, Vallejo is based on Scheme D from December 1941.

Compared to the Worcester-class, Scheme D was only armed with five turrets and was equipped with catapults amidship.

In World of Warships, Vallejo is falling a similar archetype to Lazo as a DPS cruiser equipped with a Fast Take-Off Spotter that has a lot of charges and a very quick cooldown but in return, it only lasts for 60 seconds. She also gets improved ballistics compared to the other U.S. light cruisers.

As an interesting Easter egg, the ship carries two models of the first mass-produced UAV in the United States, the OQ-2 Radioplane.

Ship’s preview

Ship’s commemorative flag

The camouflages

The permanent camouflage of Vallejo comes with the standard permanent tier IX economic bonuses:

• +10% Credits
• +100% XP
• +100% Commander XP
• +100% Free XP

The Good and the Bad

The Good

• Far better ballistics than other U.S. light cruisers
• Fast main battery reload
• Great fire starting capacity
• Fast turret traverse
• Good firing angles
• Strong anti-air with high range
• 38 mm deck armor
• Tight turning radius
• Great concealment
• Fast Take-off Spotter consumable for firing range increase on demand

The Bad

• “Only” 30 mm of penetration with HE
• Terrible AP penetration
• No access to Hydroacoustic Search
• No access to Surveillance Radar
• Fast Take-off Spotter consumable with short duration
• Thin main belt armor
• Low speed compared to other tier IX cruisers

Modules

Hull	Engine	Gun Fire Control System	Main battery
Vallejo	Propulsion: 100 000 HP	‎‎‎Mk9 mod. 1	152 mm/47 DP Mk.16 in a turret

General Characteristics and Playstyle

Consumables
Slot 1	Slot 2	Slot 3	Slot 4
Damage Control Party Work time: 5 s Cooldown: 60 s	Defensive AA Fire Number of charges: 3 Work time: 40 s Cooldown: 80 s Damage from continuous DPS: +50% Damage from flak explosions: +300%	Repair Party Number of charges: 3 Work time: 28 s Cooldown: 80 s HP regeneration speed: +0.5%/s Casemate damage regeneration: 50% Citadel damage regeneration: 33%	Rapid Take-off Spotter Number of charges: 5 Work time: 60 s Cooldown: 10 s Maximum firing range: +20%
			Fighter Number of charges: 3 Work time: 60 s Cooldown: 90 s Number of planes in a squadron: 4 Patrol radius: 3.0 km

When it comes to her playstyle, Vallejo is keeping it simple. Very simple. Damage farming is the name of the game with this ship!

Unlike almost all U.S. cruisers in high-tier, Vallejo has no access to radar and, as a matter of fact, doesn’t even have a Hydroacoustic Search consumable. Because of these limitations, she isn’t particularly suited to be played as a support at close range. However, while she loses these valuable tools, she gets her own special toy, a Rapid Take-off Spotter. Just like Lazo, this spotter plane has a short duration but at the same time, an incredibly short cooldown. This offers amazing flexibility when it comes to when and where you want to deploy the spotter. While the duration of it seems to be short, in total, and with the Spotting Aircraft Modification 1, it’s 7 minutes and 48 seconds total duration. This will be more than enough if combined with proper positioning.
Generally speaking, you will be playing at long to medium range with this ship raining down shells on anything in range. She is especially good at melting cruisers at her tier.

While her gameplay is as simple as you can get, she will still require a certain level of situational awareness as her citadel is thinly protected and above the waterline. Although to be honest, in my experience, getting citadels with battleships on her is still fairly inconsistent because of how narrow and thinly armored she is.

If you want to see the ship in action, here is a commented replay of one of my games:

Main Armament

5 x 2 152 mm/47 DP Mk.16 in a turret
Maximum Firing Range	15.680 km
Reloading Time	6.1 s
180 Degree Turn Time	7.2 s
Optimal firing angles at the front	32°
Optimal firing angles at the rear	32°
Sigma	2.05 sigma
Maximum Dispersion	141 m
Shells
Type of Projectile	HE – 152 mm HE Mk39 mod.12
Alpha Damage	2 200
Penetration capacity	30 mm
Explosion size	0.58
Fire chance	12 %
Projectile Speed	812 m/s
Air Drag	0.2
Projectile Mass	47.6 kg
Type of Projectile	AP – 152 mm AP 130 lb Mk35 mod.12
Alpha Damage	3 200
Projectile Speed	762 m/s
Air Drag	0.21
Projectile Mass	59.0 kg
Projectile Krupp	2 000
Projectile Detonator	0.025 s
Detonator threshold	25 mm
Ricochet Angles	45° – 60°

In case someone was still wondering, Vallejo’s main battery is heavily focused on raining HE down range. However, she does it far better than the other U.S. light cruisers as her ballistics is superior due to a lower air drag value. For the sake of comparison, it’s almost the same flight time as Soviet high-tier 152 mm guns at any given range. This allows Vallejo to get full use of her spotter plane and hit targets even at long range quite easily.

The firing angles and fast turret traverse also lead to some particularly appreciable gun handling when kiting.

When it comes to the AP, you should generally avoid using it. While Vallejo has nice HE shells with improved ballistics, the AP got badly hammered. While above 10 km, the penetration remains a tiny bit better than what you would see on the Worcester, below that range, she gets completely outclassed by other 152 mm AP shells. If you end up facing heavily armored heavy cruisers or large cruisers, you will have to get particularly close to penetrate their citadels.

Anti-air Armament

The anti-air of Vallejo is pretty nice for a tier IX cruiser. She gets the juicy 6.9 km range on the long-range and 4.0 km on the mid-range and the constant DPS is solid as well.

Overall, while she won’t be a straight-up “no-fly zone”, she will still be effective at dealing with average CV players.

The Armor

Another little gimmick of Vallejo is her armor protection. Compared to the other U.S. light cruisers, her deck is fully covered with 38 mm of armor. This offers her some welcomed additional protection against both HE from cruisers and AP from battleships that would overmatch easily her peers.

One thing that you will need to be careful about is her thin citadel protection although she has a bit of a Smolensk syndrome. Battleships shells over-penetrate her citadel quite easily at close range when flat broadside.

External armor protection:

Front and rear armor protection of the middle section:

Citadel armor protection:

Turrets armor protection:

Final Opinion

Vallejo is…. a complicated case. She is, by all means, a great damage-dealing cruiser. The problem is that there are a whole lot of strong ships available for steel. Bourgogne, Stalingrad, Ragnar, Incomparable, etc. That’s already a lot of interesting ships to consider. If you are like me, down to buying steel camouflages, the ship is definitely worth it.
She might not have a rich gameplay other than “Hehe guns go brrrrrt!” but when it comes to the one thing she does, her performances are not to be questioned.
If you are still missing previous steel ships outside of things like Plymouth, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Shikishima, I would recommend going for the missing ships first. Afterward, you can happily grab your Vallejo and rain fire on the enemy ships.

Recommended Build

For the Vallejo, I recommend the following commander build and upgrades:

If you have Alexender Ovechkin, his improved Survivability Expert is quite useful on Vallejo.

This concludes my review of Vallejo. Thank you for reading this article!

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