You'll find at the extremes of her range (distances greater than 9km) that these guns struggle to hit small targets that are constantly manoeuvring. Each fire they do set should be seen as a bonus, not an inevitability. They cannot be relied upon to tax the Damage Control Party of enemy vessels. Though these guns have excellent reload rate, each hit only has a 5% chance base to start a fire. Her 127mm/38s are terrible at setting fires.With Massachusetts' improved accuracy, she's very good at hitting the belt armour at close range so they tend to work best at distances of 5km+ against larger targets. At very close ranges, this will cause Massachusetts' secondaries to shatter against the thick belt of battleships and cruisers, mitigating some of her damage output. Secondaries tend to aim for the waterline of enemy ships. If you take the Inertial Fuse for HE Shells you can increase their penetration to 27mm which will allow them to punish all cruisers within their matchmaking spread and lower tiered battleships. This limits them to damage select cruisers and destroyers or the superstructures of more protected ships. They can only deal direct damage to areas of 21mm of armour thickness or less. It's unlikely Massachusetts will ever be the darling of the competitive scene because of these flaws. Her guns, while still boasting good performance, are overall less reliable. Massachusetts has the worst sigma value of any of the aforementioned American battleships with a 1.7 value compared to the 2.0 of North Carolina and 1.9 of Alabama, Alabama ST and Colorado. The second issue compounds on this problem, however. This range deficit isn't terrible when the ship is top tier, but on some of the larger maps and against higher tiered opponents, this lack really begins to hurt, especially when compounded by her low top speed and surface detection radius. The alternative is to make use of her Spotter Aircraft consumable to temporarily boost her range when needed. This is a less than ideal solution given Massachusetts secondaries which compete for attention with Secondary Gun Battery Modification 2 in the same upgrade slot. It can largely be alleviated by taking the American upgrade, Artillery Plotting Room Modification 1, which resets her maximum range back up to Alabama levels. With a maximum reach of 18.3km stock, Massachusetts is one of the shortest ranged battleships at her tier, besting only Monarch and Roma.

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