El2aZeR

Then we will quite possibly never have good choices in CV play, no matter how you change the loadouts or even if you were allowed to pick your own (which in itself is a horrible idea). The very nature of the requirements CV play and random battles impose on them prevent that. CVs have clearly defined roles and the ship you're captaining needs to be able to fulfill them without compromises, with an emphasis placed on strike ability. There will always be that one loadout most suited for it. Captain skills are far from complex, there is a core build of skills for every ship that it needs to be effective at what it's doing while the remaining points can be spent as the player sees fit. Deviate from that and you automatically create what would be inferior to a counterpart with "the right skills". There are barely any choices to be made here. Also captain skills technically speaking have no potential detriment, your ship will either get stronger or not change at all. Sure, it'll be inferior to contemporaries if you chose the "wrong" skills but the fundamental basis remains the same. You'll never interact with armor penetration mechanics, these calculations can be as complex as you want to make them to be because the player will never consciously face them. Having to choose a loadout on the other hand always has the potential of making you weaker if you pick the wrong one. Let's pick your example: Why would you ever want to play these proposed loadouts? 3/2/1 is the only potentially viable of the three and even that pales in the face of the versatility 2/2/2 provides. You'll never need three fighters while the DoT your additional DB can potentially stack and scouting potential will be sorely missed. On paper a 2/2/2 Hiryu will outplay, outscout and/or outdamage you, a Saipan will toy with you and you will still crush a Ranger or a Kaga. Nothing has changed. There are no options here, 2/2/2 is the best one for randoms period and will remain so unless you create a straight up more powerful one (such as 2/3/2 for example). As such the same thing you have said about the Ranger also applies to the Hiryu. There is only one loadout option that will be viable unless a straight up more powerful one comes along, therefore taking away any choice is more than fine. Squad sizes are debatable and (imo) no longer count as fundamental design principles of CV play. The fundamental idea of USN being better at air control than IJN CVs in itself can be adjusted not only through squad sizes or plane characteristics, but also reserve allocation as Enterprise has proven. Having flights of 6/4 is not and should not be set in stone. Haku would not be nearly as difficult to control if the UI worked right. Giving USN CVs smaller flights and more squads is well within acceptable limits once you fix and improve it. Giving CV players the option to build their own loadouts can only end in disaster. If you impose limits on the other hand then why even bother with giving players the illusion of a choice that has only one viable answer anyway, with every other choice severely limiting the usefulness of your ship? It's a lot better to fix the very basis of their play into a place you know works and let player interaction, not potential mistakes made in port, define the outcome. Fighters that spend their time spotting are wasted if you aren't covering your team at the same time, you haven't already secured airspace (at which point fighters become superfluous) or have more of them than you will ever need (and have probably sacrificed your strike potential to get them, aka made yourself worthless). This will never change. That's fine imo as it gives bombers a role outside of their damage potential, with a small historical precedent as a bonus. Bomb alpha on one side, fires on the other. Only thing that really needs to be done is to provide them with a skill based drop option that will guarantee hits when done right but also provide options to evade for the target (simple solution: the earlier you click, the more accurate the drop). The damage potential is already there as anyone who has gotten lucky at least once with the 1000lb bombs will tell you, not to mention that it will skyrocket with AP bombs.

Oh, nevermind then.

Whether you have fighters or not depends on the CV you are playing, not on the loadout. Which is why IJN CVs are currently far superior than USN ones, as they can fulfill ALL roles of CV play. On the ones you have to choose you play the loadout that has the maximum strike potential as any other is utterly worthless. USN AS is by far the easiest loadout to outplay, balanced just slightly less so. Fighters are crucial, but on the other hand only having the ability to contest air superiority with no strike ability to back it up is utterly worthless unless the match itself is played out at a higher level. Besides, all three USN loadouts only work if the enemy CV is stupid, so picking strike to maximize your game influence is only logical. I strongly disagree. Giving players only bad choices is far worse than having "only" one viable basis to work with. Making CVs more diverse and giving them more choices would make them far too complex to play for an arcade game. The current fundamentals are mostly fine, all it needs is thorough refinement.

Regarding loadouts, technically speaking there is no choice when it comes to other CVs either. Starting T7/8 you either play strike or you go home. Taking away choices is actually a good thing, it prevents potatoes from choosing a loadout which is significantly inferior to others. Not to mention it is way easier to balance. As for lower tier TBs, you have to understand Midway and Essex have a potential alpha strike of more than 140k with their AP DBs (assuming they're using the teased high tier AP bombs). Giving them corresponding tier TBs as well would make them extremely overpowered. Low tier fighters give Taiho players ways to outplay an Essex while remaining inferior in terms of raw power. As such air superiority comes down mostly to player skill, so it's actually fairly balanced this way.

Don't believe all these filthy scrubs. Karma is the most important statistic in the game and a superb indicator of your personal skill and mannerisms as well as your success in real life. On a more serious note, afaik karma currently only influences how many reports you need to get chat-banned. RU is the only server that hands out small rewards for having high karma. You can completely disregard it as a value. As for my personal score, I tend to play ships that make others cry and use very... "colorful language" in chat targeting my teammates whenever I see them doing something stupid. For whatever reason my karma seems to be growing every month. No idea how I'm achieving that.

This is the guy that thinks there is biased RNG in this game and is screwing him over specifically. Do you really want to know?

Also less armor with 25mm plating instead of 27mm, allowing 380mm guns to overmatch it. Dunno why anyone would want to bother using her instead of DM. Cruisers themselves are already plenty accurate, giving one more accuracy in the face of these trade-offs seems like an incredibly bad deal to make. So she's basically a tankier cruiser. With better gun performance. Guess WG is finally admitting that anything other than a BB has no place in this game.

...Oh. Yeah, considering the ranges BBs are most effective at that turtleback will probably rarely ever matter. Btw, DWL stands for Design Water Line, right? I guess she's gonna have a high citadel (comparatively speaking)? Kinda makes sense balance-wise too when you factor in the advantages she has in bow camping

Deal with Flint like you would with any smoked up cruiser: - charge it (if close enough) - torp the smoke - try smoke firing - radar/hydro - run away (especially viable against a Flint due to her short range) If you simply stick around and let him burn you to death YOU have misplayed and he's more than welcome to reap the benefits.

Actually depends on the angle of the turtleback. If it's at autobounce angles the actual thickness won't matter.

...wait, they actually lowered the survivability of AA mounts in the face of RN BB thermonuclear HE?!

Zao, Hindenburg and DM have 30mm side and/or deck plating which enables them to bounce 406mm or 420mm shells. Ibuki also has a bit on the upper side (which is really weird considering she has 25mm on the upper belt just below that). So yeah, no more troll armor (or skilled utilization of which depending on who you ask) for cruisers against those T10 french guns.

Goats? What goats? (Sadly the game ended before I could take full advantage of my BBaby tear makers, so I was only able to bomb 2 Bismarcks into oblivion.)

Better question: Why isn't Monty leading in stats despite being "overpowered"?

Player statistics should always be taken as an indicator and never as an absolute value. Only in combination with other factors do they tell the whole story. In the case of CVs you should always play out the first fighter engagement carefully so you can get a good grasp on how skilled your opponent is, no matter what his stats say.

Yes, because obviously you are favored by RNGesus whereas he is not. He's not a pathetic noob after all, he knows everything there is about this game but because everything is rigged against him he gets bad results.

- goes for T10 BBs and cruisers in a T8 CV. - complains that his planes get wiped L2p scrub.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/698780/Doki_Doki_Literature_Club/ Play it at your own peril.

If they were bots they'd probably play a lot better than they do now.

I find Yamato to be fine tbh. She's the perfect bow on camper. Utterly boring to play as a result but she does the job.

I would think so since they have a lot better pen. But even if not, I believe you'll get as much damage as on a good HE bomb drop at least even without citadels, but you'll be able to do so far more reliably since with the AP bomb drop reticle (which should hopefully be the same as the one on Enterprise) you'll be able to get all bombs to connect instead of having to pray to RNGesus every time you attack something. Honestly GZ was such a disaster I reckon they simply grabbed onto whatever excuse they could find first.

You can either just view them in the port even for ships you do not own (just select whatever ship you want to see in the tech tree and hover over the planes to see their stats). Or you can use wows-numbers.com and hover over the modules on the respective ship pages. Doesn't show you the speed of empty bombers but they're always a bit faster than same tier fighters.

Huh, interesting. Remember when she played second fiddle to the Yamato and everyone said "just target everything around the Yamato and you'll do fine"? Yeah, now she gets called overpowered on that very basis. How the tables have turned.

If they use the AP bombs they've previously teased they should be a lot more effective as they have both far higher alpha strike and penetration power, therefore should be effective against all BBs. To put things into perspective 2 AP DB squads from Midway will have a theoretical alpha strike of 141400 damage. T8 TBs at T10 might be pushing it even if they're effectively T9 thanks to the upgrade, but then again with AP bombs in place I'd reckon you'll use these to hunt down DDs most of the time anyway. Even Enterprise can do that fairly reliably in a T10 match.