xxNihilanxx

How would you balance the current CV iteration?

Mate, accusing us of making an "oh, I can never be safe no matter what I do" argument is a little below your usual standard of debate, that isn't what was being said and I think you know it. I already operate on the principle that it is far better for me to sacrifice my cruiser if it saves our DD but there is a huge difference between doing that and losing both, which is what your proposed solution would end up with. On the subject of broken, the counterplay you describe, which would inevitably lead to the loss of both DD and support cruiser, is the best we can hope for against a single player who, at most, would lose a few of his infinite plane reserves while he is sitting safely away from the combat taking no risks whatsoever in the described exchange? To illustrate my point, why don't you take your CV into the cap at the start of the match to provide close range support for your DD and let him smoke you up for your safety.? I'm not talking capping an unattended cap late-game, we have all seen multiple CVs do that, we are talking about cap contesting here. If you have such faith in your proposed solution then I am sure you will be only too willing to demonstrate just how successful it can be.

No offense, mate, but you could have changed tier/ship class. I know I would have done.

Well I might be tempted but I've bolded the part that precludes me from your statement anyway. In all seriousness, though, as you point out, there are multiple factors to consider and this is why, upon consideration of all of those factors, it doesn't happen and won't happen.

While that seems like a valid solution on paper it wouldn't work in practice because that would leave the cruisers, exactly as it does now, open to being sunk very early on by sustained enemy fire. I already follow my DDs as close to a cap as my detection radius will allow while sailing my cruisers in order to provide close-range fire support against enemy DDs but I have to turn away quite quickly to avoid being deleted by the incoming fire that inevitably follows. If it was possible for cruisers to do so we would already be doing it, it isn't. I am sorry but your solution just isn't practical. I understand you when you claim that the bulk of the playerbase is completely clueless but we aren't all clueless, there are always exceptions, so believe me when I tell you that if it was possible at all to provide the kind of close range support for a DD that would be required to stop the CV making his life entirely miserable I would already be doing so. The best you can achieve is to follow the DD into the cap or very close to the cap with a ship like the Minotaur in order to provide both close-range fire support as well as AA support but spotting from the enemy CV can make this tactic quite hazardous even if he does lose a plane or two. Sure you can smoke up but we all know what happens when a spotted RN CL slows to smoke. That is pretty much lunchtime, I respect the hell out of you, I'm sure you know that, but I have to disagree with your notion that this solution is even remotely possible.

Assuming you are correct, and I don't doubt for a second that you are, and assuming that there is no chance that WG will abandon the rework and leave CVs as they are (they already make DD lives miserable) how would you propose they fix this situation? You mention that DDs will not be able to carelessly contest caps so how could DDs carefully contest caps under the new system? Even with smoke the CV player can just wait it out and then proceed to make said DDs life miserable? It is undoubtedly the role of DDs (light cruisers posing as DDs notwithstanding) to contest caps but, as you have indicated, the presence of a CV would (and does) negate this role, and by extension - the entire class, entirely. So how do we fix this? What is your solution?

Bird, bird, fish, scarab beetle, reeds, sun, Horus. Water lines, fish, fish, bird, Ra. Crooked-staff, crooked-staff, Ra, Dog head. Ankh, man-with-pot-on-head, eye of Horus, fish. That should sum it up for you quite nicely.

CVs always were and always will be the most hated class in the game, it is totally inevitable. Why? Well the answer is simple. The arrival of naval air power in the form of the aircraft carrier rendered all other ship types obsolete in their existing forms. For centuries naval combat remained essentially the same, fleets of ships of various sizes armed with guns of various sizes firing big chunks of metal at each other. Technologies changed, ships changed, guns changed but the basic principle remained the same. For centuries. The arrival of the aircraft carrier changed all of that. It was what is known as a disruptive technology. It didn't follow the pattern of simply enhancing all that had gone before but rather it changed the face of naval combat forever. There hasn't been an "old-style" naval battle since the carrier became king. Fast-forward to the present and WG made a game that, for the most part, was centred around the "old-style" of naval combat - ships lobbing big chunks of metal at each other - but, at the same time, they also included the very thing that made all of that totally obsolete. They were never going to manage to balance that any more than they could balance a sword, spear and shield game that included rifles. The latter made all of the former totally useless. By even including CVs into the game the devs made a HUGE rod for their backs in terms of balancing and yet chose to do so anyway (seriously WG did you even understand naval warfare enough to begin to think that decision through?). Either in-game CVs would be representative of the power of their real-life counterparts, in which case they would be so over-powered compared to all of the "old-style" surface ships as to make it totally abhorrent to play against them, or they would be merely a shadow of their real life counterparts, in which case they would be weak, useless and unattractive - not to mention an abomination in the eyes of carrier enthusiasts. Nothing will change in respect of this after any proposed rework because nothing can change. WG are trying to mix two entirely contradictory styles of warfare in the one game and it just isn't possible. Not without irritating the hell out of a lot of people.

Skybuck Flying

Yea, mate, the video was on a loop.

On a completely different note, how many other people noticed just how much @Sub_Octavian was crapping his britches at having to be the one to show us all the proposed rework? Towards the end people were demanding maximum AA dakka-dakka and yet, no matter how much they end up putting in game, it is still going to be nothing compared to the flak he is gonna take over this.

Who are you calling a monger? I'm a minger not a monger.

The stream raised more questions than it provided answers, it's only natural for people to voice concerns - I don't think we need to engage in primate poo-flinging quite yet.

Your very presence suggests otherwise.

It looked to me like all of the target ships were either stationary or slow-moving, straightling bots (so yea, I guess a fair representation of the majority of the playerbase) therefore we did not get any kind of accurate depiction of how the attacks would interact with a ship that is attempting to actively avoid a strike. Oh believe me, I have just as little faith as you in WG's ultimate ability to balance CVs, but they may yet surprise us all and get there one day. On that score I have a time-share in an igloo in Hell to sell if anyone is interested?

With all due respect, mate, Sub_O did say multiple times during the stream that the damage levels, as shown, of both the attacking aircraft and the AA were anything but representative of the ultimate, finished product but that rather we were there to look at the basic concept of the changed gameplay and not get hung up on relative power levels. He specifically asked us to ignore that side of things as they fully intended to tweak all of those kinds of "settings". Now, remembering that this is WG we are talking about, whether the final tweaked version represents anything resembling decent balance is possibly up for debate but I guess we will ultimately have to just wait and see.

Ignore him, mate, he just wants more new players in Aircraft Carriers to seal-club. It's kinda his thing.

As others have said, once you reach tier 5 you leave the protected matchmaking that you enjoyed at the lower tiers and are able to face ships two tiers higher than your own. This is how the game operates. Do not be disheartened, even low tier ships can have an impact in the game. Sure it is true that the higher tier ships can punish you hard if you make a mistake but the flip-side is that that this helps to teach you not to make mistakes (in theory). When low-tier it is advisable, particularly if you do not consider yourself to be very strong at the game yet, to adopt a more supporting role. Do not play too aggressively, stay closer to your higher-tier ships, and lend fire support when possible. Enemies will try to shoot you in preference to others as they will see you as an easy target but, with time, you will learn to use that to your team's advantage. Low-tier cruisers, for example, can use their manouevrability to dodge lots of incoming fire and each salvo dodged is a salvo that didn't do damage to your team. Chin up, mate, it's not the end of the world.

Removal from the US CL line would not affect this. That's an interesting concept, could you explain which ones and how? I can see that some ships were absolutely balanced around smoke (RN CLs) and yet the increasing amount of radar in the game does not seem to be an issue with their balancing. Do people not care about the ships that were balanced around smoke as more and more ships get released with radar or is it convenient to just ignore that? Smoke always has had counters, most notably torpedoes. Are you trying to suggest that the low-tier ships that don't face radar in regular abundance are running rampant? I must confess I have never seen anybody complaining about the Emerald, for example, being super-OP. The only low-tier ships I have ever seen people complain about are the Nikolai (which has no smoke) and the Kami variants (which are not exactly known for being smoke-firing monsters). How is it that the players at low-mid tiers can handle smoke without relying on radar and yet, for some reason, the high-tier players need it so desperately?

Luckily all DDs have torps and they are equally a counter to other DDs. They always did, sitting still in smoke has been one of the easiest ways to get yourself killed since the game came out. No, I am saying that pushing a radar button requires somewhat less skill than effectively torping a non-clueless DD in his smoke or shooting a smoked up target. Of course positioning counts for the radar cruiser but in many cases that positioning can be something as simple as being in range of the target. The radar ship doesn't even need to be able to fire on the target when he triggers his button so let's not pretend that there is a huge amount of skill involved, especially when we compare it to the amount of skill required to play a DD effectively.

I would love to see your list of ships that are one or two tiers higher than the Henri IV.

Torpedoes counter smoke sufficiently effectively and always have. Firing into smoke has also been made easier over a number of patches with smoke circles now showing in zoom mode and the inclusion of the x-marks-the-spot style facility into the game. These methods , however, do not just rely on the simple push of a button but rather require a degree of skill to be effective - though still nowhere near as much skill as is required to actually play a DD effectively or, for that matter, a smoke-dependent cruiser (I do not really include the Kutuzov in the latter as it is not really smoke-dependent, it has smoke but really doesn't need it in order to be effective).

Our clan leader has issued us all with super-secret, time-travelling torps. It's all very hush-hush. Surely you've noticed, on rare occasions, torpedoes travelling well beyond their maximum range and sailing, seemingly forever, off the map? Well these are our torps and they are heading for a target in a completely different match.

Irrelevant in a discussion about ranked battles. But since you brought it up, no they aren't. So the article you quoted is obviously not a reliable source and therefore you cannot cite it as proof that ranked is competitive, yet you chose to do so.

But the article you quoted said it was for the most skilled. If that part is demonstrably false why is the part you wish to focus on not similarly "dubious".