Glossary · Mechanics

World of Warships glossary: common WoWS terms explained

Broadside, overmatch, kiting, DPM, radar, heal, and dozens of abbreviations appear in battles, guides, and chat. This glossary explains the most useful World of Warships terms in plain English.

WoWS Guides

Guide illustration: World of Warships glossary: common WoWS terms explained

Key point

WoWS vocabulary mixes naval language, official game terms, abbreviations, and community slang. Broadside, for example, can mean the side of a ship or a salvo from all guns that can bear, while Repair Party is the official name of the healing consumable.

Positioning and tactics Gunnery, shells, and armour Spotting and information control Consumables Classes, statistics, and abbreviations

Positioning and tactics

Broadside: The long side of a ship. Showing broadside means presenting a nearly flat side to enemy guns; firing a full broadside means using every main gun that can bear.
Angled / Angling: Turning the hull diagonally to increase impact angles and encourage ricochets. Angling does not protect against overmatch, HE, or every armour section.
Bow-in / Bow-on: Facing the enemy with the bow. It reduces target size and often protects the belt, but limits available guns and can make movement predictable.
Bow tanking: Using the bow and armour angles to absorb or bounce incoming AP. It fails against guns that overmatch the bow plating.
Stern-in: Fighting with the stern toward the enemy, usually to maintain an escape route while keeping some guns in action.
Kiting: Fighting while moving away, changing speed and course to make enemy salvos miss while continuing to deal damage.
Push: Advancing to take space, support an objective, or force the enemy back. A useful push is timed with allies and spotting information.
Flank: One side of the map or team formation. Winning a flank creates new firing angles toward the centre.
Crossfire: Two or more firing lanes from different directions, making it impossible for the target to angle effectively against all of them.
Focus fire: Several allies shooting the same target to remove it quickly instead of spreading damage across multiple ships.
Brawl: A close-range fight where secondaries, torpedoes, turret angles, HP, and reload timing become decisive.
Cap / Capture point: An objective area that generates points after capture. To cap means entering and progressing the capture.
Contest: Entering an objective occupied by the enemy to stop or slow its capture.
Reset: Hitting a ship that is capturing to remove part of its capture progress.
Zoning: Using torpedoes, radar, guns, or the threat of damage to deny an area to the enemy.
Open-water gunboating: Firing without island cover and surviving through range, speed, concealment, and evasive movement.
Island camping: Holding a position behind an island to fire, use radar, or control an area. The phrase is often negative, even when the position is tactically useful.
Torpedo beat: Community joke for a tight and successful torpedo dodge.

Gunnery, shells, and armour

Salvo: A group of shells fired almost simultaneously by one turret or the full main battery.
Alpha damage: The amount of damage an armament can deliver immediately. High-alpha ships hit hard per salvo even if their DPM is modest.
DPM: Damage per minute: theoretical sustained damage output before accuracy, armour, target access, and player decisions are considered.
AP: Armour-piercing shells. They are strongest against exposed broadsides and armour thick enough to arm the fuse.
HE: High-explosive shells. They can start fires and deal direct damage when their penetration exceeds the armour thickness hit.
SAP: Semi-armour-piercing shells. They do not start fires but can deal heavy damage to sections they penetrate.
Pen / Full pen: A penetration where the shell enters and detonates inside the ship without reaching the citadel.
Overpen: An overpenetration: the shell passes through the target and exits before detonating inside.
Shatter: A shell fails to penetrate because the armour is too thick for its penetration capability.
Bounce: A ricochet caused by a shallow impact angle. Ricochet thresholds vary by ammunition and ship.
Cit / Citadel: The protected vital area containing machinery and magazines. A citadel penetration deals the shell’s maximum listed damage.
Devstrike / Devastating Strike: Destroying a ship after removing at least half of its base HP in a very short time. Players also use the term loosely for spectacular one-salvo kills.
Overmatch: An AP mechanic that ignores the angle of armour that is too thin. The shell calibre must exceed 14.3 times the plate thickness.
Sigma: A value describing how strongly shells tend to cluster toward the centre of the dispersion ellipse. It is only one part of accuracy.
Dispersion: The area in which shells can land around the aim point. It varies with range, ship formula, upgrades, and effects.
Shell grouping: How tightly the shells land inside the dispersion ellipse.
Lead: The distance aimed ahead of a moving target to account for shell travel time.
Waterline aim: Aiming near the waterline to hit the belt and citadel of a broadside target.
Fuse: The shell mechanism and delay that determine when it detonates after penetration.
Arming threshold: The minimum effective armour thickness required to arm an AP shell fuse.
Normalization: The change in shell path toward the perpendicular after penetrating armour, helping it pass through later layers.
Saturation: Reduced damage to a ship section that has already lost much of its local HP pool.
DoT: Damage over time, mainly from fires and flooding.
Fire / Flooding: Damage-over-time effects removed by Damage Control Party. Poor DCP timing can leave a ship exposed to the next effect.

Spotting and information control

Spot / Spotted: A ship is spotted when the enemy receives enough position information to see or target it.
Detectability: The distance at which a ship can be detected under current conditions.
Concealment: The ability to remain undetected and choose when to engage or disengage.
Hard spot: Normal line-of-sight detection by a ship or aircraft, rather than radar or hydro.
Proxy spot: Guaranteed detection at extremely close range, normally 2 km, even through smoke or terrain.
Gun bloom: The temporary increase in sea detectability after firing the main battery.
Smoke firing penalty: The distance at which a ship becomes detectable when firing from smoke.
Perma-spotted: Unable to go dark because an enemy continuously maintains detection.
Vision control: Using concealment, destroyers, aircraft, radar, and hydro to see the enemy while denying equivalent information.
RPF / RL: Radio Position Finding / Radio Location: a commander skill pointing toward the nearest enemy ship without revealing exact distance or identity.

Consumables

Repair Party: Restores part of a ship’s lost HP. Recoverable damage depends on the ship and damage type; citadel damage is usually far less repairable than fire damage.
Damage Control Party: Extinguishes fires, stops flooding, and restores disabled modules. The ship is immune to new listed effects during the consumable’s action time.
Hydroacoustic Search: Detects ships and torpedoes through smoke and terrain within defined ranges.
Surveillance Radar: Detects enemy ships within its radius through smoke and islands. It does not detect torpedoes.
Defensive AA Fire: Temporarily strengthens anti-aircraft damage and makes air attacks more costly.
Engine Boost: Temporarily increases maximum speed and, on some variants, acceleration performance.
Smoke Generator: Creates smoke screens that block line of sight. Firing from smoke still applies a smoke firing penalty.
Exhaust Smoke Generator: A smoke variant that usually allows the ship to remain concealed while moving at high speed for a limited time.
Main Battery Reload Booster: Greatly reduces main-battery reload time for a short period.
Torpedo Reload Booster: Greatly reduces or nearly completes torpedo launcher reload, depending on the consumable variant.
Spotting Aircraft: Temporarily increases main-battery range and changes the aiming view.
Fighter: Deploys fighters that patrol around the ship and engage enemy aircraft entering their area.
Submarine Surveillance: Detects submerged submarines within a defined area.

Classes, statistics, and abbreviations

BB: Battleship.
CA: Heavy cruiser.
CL: Light cruiser.
DD: Destroyer.
CV: Aircraft carrier.
Sub / SS: Submarine.
HP: Hit points: the damage a ship can still take before destruction.
XP / BXP / FXP / CXP: Experience, Base XP, Free XP, and Commander XP.
WR: Win rate: the percentage of battles won.
PR: Personal Rating used by some third-party statistics sites. It is not an official in-client statistic.
MM / Matchmaking: The system that creates teams and determines the tier spread of a battle.
Uptier: A match where your ship faces opponents one or two tiers higher.
Downtier / Top tier: A match where your ship is among the highest tiers present.
AFK: Away from keyboard: a player who is inactive or absent.
DC: Disconnected from the server.
Buff / Nerf: An increase or reduction in the power of a ship or mechanic.
Meta: The ships, builds, and tactics currently considered strongest or most common.
Build: A ship configuration combining upgrades, commander skills, consumables, and sometimes signals.
Respec: Resetting commander skills to spend the points differently.