eliastion

All AA auras deal continuous DPS + the medium and long ones (although some ships have medium starting at distance 0) create flak. The announcement of shifting damage from flak to DPS seems pretty straightforward in this case: the medium and long range auras will get more DPS but the damage from their flak will be reduced. That way especially ships like Atlanta should deal more consistent damage because - avoiding their flak will still result with suffering more significant constant damage - flying into the flak will be less deadly The ships that might fear these changes more are AA DDs - their AA basically sucks anyway. A careless CV can still lose planes to it by flying into flak - and this might no longer be the case with less damage allocated there. The increase in constant DPS, on the other hand, is unlikely to make much difference because there still won't be that much of it anyway.

Actually, while I'm in favor of this change, this is a terrible argument for it. Nerfing cruiser stealth (compared to DDs) has many effects but making them more likely to push close to caps to support their DDs in the opening phase of the match will most definitely NOT be one of them. Sure, when I play a DD, I tend to be a bit closer to the front. But when I occasionally play cruisers - my only t10 is Zao but that's supposedly one that (according to OP) is going to suffer - I find out that being spotted by DDs is actually not quite as common as I'd expect. Especially in the latter part of the game - I'm usually spotted when I fire my guns, in fact. And it's far from rare for me to be the - or one of the stealthiest ships on the map because DDs often die quite fast and the late game often sees 0-1 of them per side, making most of the map devoid of DD spotting.

I take it you'll prefer if all cruisers and battleships at t10 had the same 11km stock concealment - I mean, it's a buff to cruiser concealment, yaay!

This is, actually, a good change. DDs were hurt by certain cruisers being too stealthy (especially certain Radar cruisers). Cruisers had little concealment advantage over certain stealthy BBs. These changes give the stealthier classes a bit more concealment advantage over the classes that are supposed to be less stealthy. Obviously it's a bit irrelevant with 2 CVs per team right now but once we get to more reasonable levels of aerial presence and concealment matters again, it should be better than pre-patch in this regard. That is, unless you include the planned "standardization" (read: buffs across the board but hardly noticeable at t10 and huge at t8) to Radar ranges.

Actually... that would be awful. A single ship should never be able to completely stop a full strike - and if there should be any exception to that, this exception would be an AA-specced AA cruiser with defensive fire active and the right AA sector reinforced. It definitely shouldn't be a BB. What ships with good AA should be able to do is: mitigate the damage and inflict some damage. So, your Nelson shouldn't be torped by all the planes (some should be forced to withdraw due to accumulated damage), it might eve shoot down something... but being able to completely neutralize an attack from the same-tier CV? Nope. The first strike detachment successfully dropping the load is the bare minimum that even a lower tier CV should be capable of (although that drop might be rushed and not as well set-up as the CV player might want). Of course there's the separate problem of the failproof GTFO option that make attacks against heavy AA platform more forgiving than they should be, but that one is being addressed one way or another in the upcoming hotfix - so it should be just a temporary issue.

Actually, manually disabling your AA is the most useful precisely in the "started by CV" phase of getting spotted. A CV is quite fast (and has situational awareness on planes - that's unnecessary and makes finding DDs much easier) but a DD is pretty stealthy. When I play a Haku, I make a conscious effort to locate the DDs but it's not always as easy as I would like (as a player sitting in my Haku, that is - in general I'd prefer DDs to be harder to find for CVs ). The DDs that keep their AA active are the DDs that get easily located by me even before they get near the caps. "Silent" DDs, on the other hand? Unless they are very predictable (go straight for the caps, leaving allies far behind) they often elude my initial scouting. Similarly in later phase of the game - a DD with AA turned off until spotted is a DD that's not just harder to attack at first contact but also a DD with much better chance of avoiding said first contact at all. It would be much better if planes lost the situational awareness, though. It's a small thing but without situational awareness (so they only see when under fire, not when simply spotted) on planes CVs would find it pretty damn hard to locate previously unspotted/long hidden DDs (at least without the aid of RPF). I don't think planes really need to know when spotted for any other reason than hunting the DDs - and removing such capability would give the latter some breathing space, leaving more space for stealth play even with a CV in the match.

It's not a matter of heavy AA but of time pointlessly spent flying to get out of mostly ineffective long-range auras. When you're in the heavy AA, the delays are enough to make you pay for your mistakes. That's not how attacking with planes works now at all, though. Planes that drop their load just "fly away" and become invulnerable very quickly - and that actually can't really be changed into any "going out of AA" because they are not controllable anymore (your control goes back to the rest of the squadron) and become sitting ducks just isn't good design either. Oh, and if we're talking realism of attacking water to get out of trouble - actually dropping your load in the water (not as a controlled attack on some spot of the water, of course) is a pretty natural way to make your plane lighter and give it some more power to gtfo, especially if it requires climbing to higher altitude. Actually, it doesn't matter how much weaknesses the CV will have. Because people aren't capable of understanding that if the hull is hard to attack then it doesn't mean that there's no risk. Even when planes were hard-limited, people argued that CVs never take any risks. Note that I'm not talking about balance here but about taking risks: as long as CVs don't need to show up and slug it out with the enemy within visual range, they're going to be perceived as the "no risk" class. They will be hated by many, that is inevitable. Anyway, we're making it an offtop. Let's stop here. I understand your position - I just disagree with the suggestion you made because it would cause problems while the issue at hand (F-abuse that lets you "cheat" your way out of being penalized for plane mismanagement) can be easily solved without introducing said problems at all.

There are four factors that can give you lots of damage and little kills: 1. AA damage is spread out (it doesn't target one plane at a time) so you can deal much more than one plane's worth of damage to a squadron and not get a kill 2. Torpedo bombers have a pretty powerful heal (it basically prints new planes in air) - it has a long cooldown and limited charges butt it's potent when available 3. Planes that manage to get away and return to the carrier are fully repaired the next time they take off 4. If somebody else shots the plane down, you get the damage you dealt but not the kill, obviously If you get huge damage but few kills, it most likely means that the enemy was pretty adept at managing his planes and managed to have most of them return safely. Either that or he was constantly attacking you (first in line) and flying straight into concentrated AA of your allies behind you so that most kills ended up credited to them. But I'm more inclined to believe the option #1 - good plane health management. If, on the other hand, you end up with (relatively) little damage but many kills, this usually signifies a potato CV player that flies straight into flak bursts. They deal a ton of damage and lead to their quick destruction, so they don't get to heal or return to the carrier - meaning that much less damage gets "lost" (as in, doesn't contribute to making planes into fireworks). Also, the planes could have less hp (by being even as low as t6 when you're playing a Mogami while Salem can only meet t8 or 10) but this factor is unlikely to contribute as much as the way the enemy CV handles his toys.

Actually, if one good attack is all you've got, then you're probably picking your targets wrong (and not "bad ship" but rather "a ship at the edge of a blob where you'll get 6 ships shooting at you after you pass over your target")... It sometimes happens to me that I need to GTFO after a single strike but that's an effect of misplay on my part, usually. Anyway, this is turning into a bit of an offtop, so let's leave this at that.

Thing is - it's supposed to be "disengage" button. It's just too powerful at doing its job. And as for the rest of the post... well, the problem is - there can be a lot of spread-out long-range AA. If you try to do it this way, you'll just end up with some ridiculous tricks where players don't use F for its intended purpose and instead end up attacking water because this will be easier, faster and won't require navigating to a place with absolutely no AA. So... nah. Let's allow F to do its job - just not with the super-efficiency it does now. That's my opinion, at least.

I think there is a much bigger problem than just balancing to reduce "excessive efficiency" - mainly, we really need to remove the "torpedo soup" option available to the long-torps Haku where you basically fly around and - rather than try and hit some target - you just saturate the area with torps from various angles. It has nothing to do with how strong or weak it is: it's just bad for the game, torps are just popping up from strangle angles and hitting ships basically at random. The easiest thing to do (until a better solution is conceived) would be to temporarily remove the "long torp" loadout completely. It might be conceited, but I have a suggestion here: Instead of reduced vulnerability for the squadron after recall, the recall itself should be delayed in one of the two ways: A: Immediately after attack, you shouldn't be able to go "F" just like you can't immediately start another attack run. The duration of that lockdown could be adjusted for balance but the point is: you'd need to keep the planes alive for a bit after an attack to allow recall. B: Make the recall a delayed action. So after you initiate recall, you should be flying the planes for a couple more seconds anyway. This way you can still avoid flak and your planes don't just suicide into it - but it ceases to be an immediate "get out of trouble NOW" button. You can recall the planes any time you want but, again, you still need to keep them alive for a bit before they can launch into the safety of stratosphere. I think these approaches are better than "considerable penalties". Rather than penalize recalling, you should just make it less effective at saving planes that the CV player mismanaged already.

I would go another way about this: 1. It shouldn't be possible for all AA guns of any aura to just die permanently. At least 50-75% (up to balancing) of your AA firepower should be recoverable with time/DCP charge. AA is important, there are AA-dedicated skills and modules - it was always bad that AA could be almost (or not that almost) wiped out - but now CVs never go completely out of planes. It becomes even more important for surface ships to never go completely out of defense. 2. It shouldn't be harder to resupply planes - it should be harder to save them when you mess up (the magical F). CVs actually are punished for throwing away their planes - I'd wait how AA tweaks and press-F-to-enter-low-orbit changes play out. I know that when in a couple matches I managed to suffer heavy loses to my squadrons, the plane respawns proved to be painfully slow. If you lose a lot of planes, you never really recover from that - even at t10 where you have quite a lot of spares to begin with. This sounds a tad too strict (although the number and duration of the "transmit coordinates" would decide a lot of things, ofc.) - I'd start with making fighters unable to spot ships. The fighters of surface ships already are mostly useless for that, torps aren't spotted by planes anymore - and one of the points of the rework was "no more multiple squadrons with some of them hovering somewhere and spotting". I don't think CVs need the option to just put extra stationary planes for spotting - let these things remain exclusively an anti-plane weapon. On the other hand, they should probably be a bit faster at target acquisition - it feels as if I can just ignore them unless I plan to linger. It's ok to be able to perform a single strike despite a figter in the air - but it's possible to do two or even three before they really engage my planes sometimes... No. I strongly disagree. Just tweak the consumable fighters and AAs - we don't need the return of "private air battle". This I agree with completely with the visibility part. So far I have yet to notice that a ship has certain sector reinforced - unless you count "hey, these planes fell from the sky awfully quickly; were they in a reinforced sector? That's quite possible, I would've reinforced this sector if that was me down there." As for the power... I'd hold on with that. The effect seems big enough on paper - once non-flak AA becomes more effective in general, the reinforcement levels should become quite apparent.

Although it actually sounds like something that SHOULD be relatively easy to balance: reducing the AA and hp scaling from tier to tier (so that both AA damage and plane hp increase slower) should be doable. At worst there could be an artificial addition of "tier shield" for planes where higher tier AA deals reduced (and lower tier AA increased) damage. You'd think that. And yet even at t10 some of the (already rare for obvious reasons) DDs popping up by opening fire at me earlier than they need to. Or (even more often) making it ppossible to decap with some reliability by leaving AA blazing while they sit in smoke. The AA is made so that it's not quite as effective in pointing me to them as main guns but it still gives me some grounds for guessing and it's far from rare to be able to decap - if not with one strike then in 2-3...

Sorry, but that "solution" makes no sense. For several reasons: 1. Even the best case scenario (what you want) is: you split the playerbase between the normal servers (significant reduction in playerbase hurts MM and WG doesn't want that) and need a lot of extra power for what's normally a relatively small PTS server (basically you'd need to create full-scale infrastructure; even if you work with the servers normally handling the normal game, that's a lot of complication on technical side of things). 2. It would quickly devolve into exactly what we had: people interested in CVs would play the test servers. People who wanted to play other ships would just stay on the normal servers because why would they bother with PTS? This applies even more to DD players - how many players would deliberately go to play their ships against what's usually their most feared counter? You'd be seeing more of what the PTS offered: lots and lots of CVs playing against teams of mostly bots. 3. People on PTS just wouldn't care - on main servers many people normally care for their performance because stats and stuff. On PTS? Sure, what you gain transfers to your normal account but it still isn't "real" environment, expecting that people would play to the best of their ability is very unrealistic. Yes, it would be nice if things could be tested the same way as on live server without actually putting them on the live server, but effectively creating a second parallel WoWs just wouldn't achieve that and even if it did - the consequences wouldn't be favorable either. WG just pushed for the option that also had a lot of downsides but at least guaranteed results. I get the rest of your post but, as you say - there are no CVs in Ranked. That's explicitly one of the reasons why it's a t9 Ranked. So... what's really the problem with having this Ranked during the "CV testing period" when CVs aren't allowed inside?

Errm. More like: a hotfix for a patch introducing something that WG said - again and again, and AGAIN - was not a finished product but something in need of large-scale testing by and against real players. WG literally said that CVs were going to be inevitably unbalanced as hell because - without checking out how they perform in live environment - the opposite was not possible. Normally new ships tend to appear on live server in the hands of supertesters, select community contributors etc. - but it wasn't possible here. I understand the frustration that certain problems were not anticipated (perhaps they could, even should) - but being surprised by the fact that things are being changed? I would be extremely surprised if things stayed as they were at launch. In fact, even just lack of any hotfix (as in: all the changes waiting until the next patch) would be surprising already.

Actually, they do. You can't be deplaned but people think "infinite planes" and don't realize how long it takes to actually replenish these planes. Let me put it this way: my Hakuryuu (with all the buffs that my build includes) replenishes torpedo planes at the speed of one per 74 seconds. If I mismanage them badly enough to lose them all, that means that a full strike (2 planes that drop whole 2 torpedoes) can be put together in 2 minutes and 28 seconds. A full squadron has 12 planes - replenishing that would require 14 minutes and 48 seconds (assuming that the planes just sit on deck and none of them die in the meantime) of the 20-minute game. I would most likely be sending some less-than-full squadrons in the meantime and probably still losing some planes here and there even when playing cautiously - so even if the initial wipe-out somehow happened within the first minutes of the match, losing all 18 torpedo bombers I have on deck would mean that I never take off with a full squadron again in this match. Now, 18 planes means 12+6 and it takes a serious blunder to lose a lot of planes all at once, but unless you handle your planes with some care, you WILL suffer. I feel like I'm doing well in my Haku, I rarely catch flak and rarer still do I fly into a lot of it, usually most of my planes go home safely. But on more than one occasion I was made aware that "infinite planes" aren't quite as infinite as they might seem So, setting aside how it's actually balanced right now, yes, while CVs can easily make up for a plane going down here and there, losing a bunch of them lowers their effectiveness noticeably. And if they keep doing that, forget full squadrons: they can find themselves struggling to send full strike detachments. Of course, right now this only really happens (as in, getting quite this bad) to the potatoes because there's a lot a CV can do to mitigate the damage from AA and save your shot-up but still surviving planes in a pinch.

Btw. do you know what the best AA DD is right now? Z-52 Forget about Grozovoi with defensive AA, don't mind Harugumo with her high base values... 0-4 km of mid range aura with 7 flak bursts (9 with AA module) 4-5.8k m of long range aura with 3 flak bursts (so can be buffed up to 5) The damage of these short-mid range bursts might be a tad underwhelming due to lack of AA consumable to buff it, but still...

WARNING: digression that has little to do with the issue of AA balancing. Are you sure you want to use realism as the gauge for how many planes you should be downing? Are you REALLY sure of that? Because historically ships weren't really shooting down as many of them as WoWs AA cruiser performance might've led you to expect... Appealing to "realism" in things regarding balancing tends to be a risky thing. Not to mention that it misses the point. If we need AA cruisers to be able to protect themselves better, it's because we believe that to be better for the game, NOT because of real-life "balancing" of these things.

Saipan just feels awkward. I used her to grab that 200 steel snowflake in coop and haven't touched her since. I'm seriously contemplating converting her to doublons because - as she is - I just can't really see myself playing her in the future... and, well, doublons might not be of very great value, but compared to a port decoration...

Well, I've managed to run out of points Then again, I use torpedo acceleration and CE. I'd also like Last Grasp, Improved Engine Boost and maybe Direction Center for Aircraft if it affects the fighters spawned from planes as well (it seems like it should) but I didn't have points for these. But yeah, CV builds are only marginally less of a no-brainer than they used to be (then 19 points were actually an overkill with nothing remotely relevant to spend them on).

But how much use would you really have of RPF on a CV? You have an early warning system already: if something sees your planes but your planes see nothing, it's pretty much certain that it's a DD (at least when you run stealth at high tier, I'm not sure how foolproof it is at low tiers where the ships are a bit smaller). With that, combined with plane speed, it doesn't take that much effort to find these DDs anyway. Stealth, on the other hand, is always welcome - both for planes and for the hull. And yes, I know a CV often sits so far in the back that it doesn't really matter, but then again: aren't we talking Kaga that normally gets spotted at spawn?

Then again, plane-HP and less-AA-damage sounds like the cornerstones of a standard high-point captain build for CVs. So they don't really seem to be reasons to not just share a captain with some silver CV.

1. You overestimate the population on test server. You further overestimate the % of that population that actually bothers to give any feedback, be it to WG or to the community. 2. On test server it was mostly a game of whack-a-bot where the result was irrelevant anyway. You never required "special tactics" there. 3. The "just tag them once" strategy where you just hit one strike and blast off with F-key is woefully inadequate in almost all situations. You really shouldn't be getting your planes into situations where you can't conduct the second attack - and only striking once per squadron is a huge waste of DPS. The only thing that could've came out of PT was someone thinking up a torpsoup - but people were probably too preoccupied with more interesting uses of these torps: stacking drops for extreme damage against immobile targets, stealth-torping or just trying to figure out how to try "close" (well, as close as the arming distance allowed) drops with 4 torps instead of 2 availabale in the "short torping" configuration. Who would want to bother with filling the water with torps against bots? And even if someone would do that, they would also need to share their experiences and suggest using it against humans to counter their AA builds and lower (compared to bots) predictability. Not to mention that even now this tactic is... well, let's say: situational. If you want to control the battle, spamming torps everywhere in hope that enough will hit things to rack up big damage numbers... probably isn't what you should be really doing. Although it can certainly be effective if you happen to meet an enemy team that loves to cuddle among themselves - their AA becomes mostly impenetrable in a big group while their vulnerability to "random" torps shoots through the roof.

They watched too much IChase and substituted skill with being trigger-happy with F key. All planes are currently equipped with early test engines from Apollo program to launch her to the stratosphere - too high to be reached by your AA but, on the flip side, too high to spot anything on the surface of the sea since they are just propeller planes with no advanced optics to spot ships so far below and have crappy radios so that they can't signal their position even if they do see them. More seriously - it's possible to send the rest of the squad back. And some people decide to give up a lot of striking power by just going for the safe "launch one strike and GTFO" that minimizes the losses (it's rare to lose a lot of planes on first approach when they are all still healthy - you need to play "catch them all" with flak to suffer anything close to significant losses, often you lose nothing) but, well, means that you need to bring in the new squadron before getting any subsequent strikes off. It most likely will get changed a bit in future patch because it's just stupid that the planes can disappear pretty much immediately like this.

No, that's actually not what they can do. Haku has two TB options: 1. The point-blank torping set-up. The torps have reasonably short arming range but also a relatively short torp range AND they strike in sets of 2 (you drop only two torpedoes per strike) so you can't rack up big damage quickly. 2. The long-range torping (with stealth build allowing actual stealth torping, even). Not good at adjusting aim, with long torp arming (so you need to drop from relatively far away) but also long range and dropped in sets of 4. This - in theory - allows heavy strikes against immobile or very predictable targets. Problem is, that the devs overlooked the torp soup option. Cutting the range of the torps of the 4-torp set-up kinda goes against the very idea of it. However, there's the option to simply remove this loadout and maybe re-think something else in its place.