Syrchalis

Isn't that showing you something? Kutuzov AA is so far beyond anything balanced or reasonable that CVs avoid you in a 8km radius like the plague. For a reason. Every pilot gets end-stage cancer immediately when he even gets into spotting range of a Kutuzov. Luckily there is usually just one of them per game. But generally talking there is more CAs than any other class in the game and every CA can cover 3-4 ships easily if it positions well. It's not rare you have NOTHING to go for as CV because there is cruisers everywhere. The only ships you can generally attack are DDs, and only IJN ones, because SN ones will be far back with the CAs and US ones have the same ridic AA and AA consumable that CAs have. People always forget how unbelievable STUPID and also BROKEN the AA consumable is. STUPID because: - It removes ANY player interaction, choice or >anything< fun - let me explain you, from a game design perspective - if you want >FUN< you have to give options, maximize interaction and the AA consumable is the pure opposite of that. It's a one-click-and-forget ability. Compare that to CV attacks. I love how some really stupid (or ignorant) people think attacking as CV is one click. First you have to find a target. This is already insanely hard, because 90% of ships are impossible to properly attack if they aren't stupid (so generally you just attack someone and hope he is a f**king potato) - second you have to approach at the right angle, if you [edited]that up you lose half your planes before you even got into position. Thirdly the attack. At first this is TRULY ONE CLICK. But while they fly for the attack, you will reposition that attack at least 3 times, so it really hits where you want to. Fourthly, you have to compensate for what the target is doing. This is the beauty of CV attacks, because BOTH PLAYERS INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER and have to respond to one another. There is CHOICES to be made. The AA consumable is just one button click - the CV response is extremely monotone, because it's not a choice at all: If you're already close you HAVE to go for it, because otherwise you lose half your planes before you get away and coming back lose the rest. If you're still far away you fly away and wait 40sec. It's NOT a choice. There is absolute right and wrong in every case and it's just boring and stupid. The cruiser doesn't get anything out of it either, because he has no choices as well. There is no interaction between the players, because no matter what the CV does, the cruiser just clicks the squad to focus and that's it - he does that no matter what happens. There is no reason to do anything else. - The way it goes about countering CVs is the worst way. Decimating squads (with focus on long range AA which is the worst kind) and reducing accuracy - CVs have one strength and that is reliable attacks and that consumable takes that away, leaving us with 4 minute cooldown attacks that have worse spread than BB Salvo at 30km. If it would buff short range AA instead it would at least force the cruiser to be close to the target, but this way some of the really broken AA ships, like particularly the Cleveland just evaporate anything in 7km range - AND THAT crapIS GETTING BUFFED NOW? After every CV up to T9 complained about the horribly broken AA of Cleveland? BROKEN - mostly just because of how high the numbers are. What buff does AA get? 200%? 500%? The normal AA already takes squads down hard, but with the AA buff of the consumable it's beyond ridiculous. And what's even worse is that cruisers with little AA get barely anything out of it, because it's a freaking PERCENTAGE. The accuracy reduction is THAT insane that WG actually BUFFED USN Divebomber spread under AA consumable a few patches back. Yes you read that right, WG buffed CVs, because of how oppressive the consumable was. We CVs can deal with this bullcrap because we've always dealt with all the bullcrap WG threw at us. We deal with the fact that Interface gets improved every patch for everyone BUT CVs who are stuck with an alpha-worthy mess of a UI with inverted controls, a dumb chatbox that blocks half your screen (which is irrelevant to other classes, because they don't click on screen), beyond inaccurate "COCKBLOCK CIRCLES" for your plane attacks (why the [edited]do divebombers have that even?) that make your planes fly circles and screw up every attack and useless "drag and drop" features for all your 20apm user needs (mostly just to exploit the game and fly bombers out of the map border). Rant over. But this really had to be said. We are a minority and WG treats us as such. Now they are just putting the nail in the coffin and I honestly dont think it's a bad idea, because this way they won't give anyone hope that they might actually try to make anything about CVs good. There you have your reason. It's new and CVs take far longer to really get used to, so they stay "new" for longer. Once that passes and you get to T7/8 where AA really starts getting dumb you'll probably drop them again.

This is a question going around the forum for months and generally players in these tiers don't have the game experience to really judge why this is happening. While experienced players generally play low tier cruisers, BBs and DDs for fun, very rarely they play low tier CVs for fun. (Maybe this fact already is giving you a hint!). So the argumentation is always "AA way too weak, sealclubbing!!11" - because there is just no experienced players bringing in light from the other side. The thing is, try playing Langley or Hosho. If you lose the first fighter fight you are screwed. Even Langley has only 4 fighters if you lose your first 6. The same is true for your bombers. So if the AA was anywhere near as potent as T6-10 you would do 1 attack run and you would be out of reserves already. To be honest, "no AA" is a vast exaggeration. While some ships, like the Arkanses Beta truly have >no< AA, the "weak" AA of other ships shoots down a plane occasionally. You have to consider this - if you shoot down 1 torpedo bomber randomly, you already removed 10% of a Langey's TB reserves permanently from the game. And >you< aren't all ships in the game. There is more ships around you because the maps are small, so the AA adds up. Plus if you lost the first fighter fight you as a CV will also bleed bombers to the enemy fighters like crazy. I've not rarely made the enemy CV completely useless within 10 minutes on T4. Here a picture of getting clear sky, shooting down every single plane a Langely has (30) - 2 days ago.

The reason you can do well in a T4 CV is that most people have ZERO experience in dodging your attacks. The ships are far more manuverable at this tier and the planes are about half the speed of high tier, making dodging super easy. Players just dont dodge. I can nearly count on enemies sailing straight with torpedos already in the water - thats how bad it is. Every single plane you lose hurts a ton in this tier, so if you take 1-2 planes with your AA that's about equal to shooting down a 1-2 squads on higher tiers.

I can't count it on one hand how often I engaged 4 ships with my Tirpitz alone and killed all of them. There is no exaggeration here. Play some Hiryu (a CV that has no access to T7 planes and faces the most ridiculous AA) and then play some Kongo or Amagi or whatever BB and tell me where you felt more useful. As for the T10 thing - Yamato beats Montana because Yamato is better against Montana than vice versa. Montana is just better at killing anything else, because Yamato overpens like crazy. In other words, Yamato is an expert at killing Montanas, that's why it feels superior.

So is this any good state for the game? Is that really better for everyone?

Maybe play some DD. You WILL get focused by a lot of CVs (or the other DDs, look at what they're doing). I'm not talking like 30% of games, more like 70%. This is a surprisingly high amount given how many potato CVs are out there.

Come play with me and watch me destroy fleets in my BBs. If you can play them they are ridiculous.

You have to keep one thing in mind. If you can bring down one squad of an equally tiered CV something is wrong. Because it's not a 1vs1 battle here. It's 12vs12. What happens if two of your ships drive close together? You get absolute immunity to air strikes. With just two ships. Nothing required, automatic AA will do everything, you just have to drive close together. It's not about "what people usually do" but "what people CAN do". Because while people suck at working together generally, there will be that one 3 man division that is just absolutely immune to CV attacks, which is BS - nothing in the game is just "immune" to DDs, CAs or BBs. So far okay, we CV players can deal with that and the horribly broken AA consumable and certain ships being AA-cancer (Cleveland, Kutuzov, pretty much any CA over T8). But FURTHER buffs to AA? I'm sorry, but I'll not play this game anymore if all I can do is attack lone DDs. Even those shoot down a plane or two nowadays by themselves. Fletcher and Gearing even take whole squads down.

Yes, because you can angle to avoid that, plus it doesn't stop you from doing damage, or anything else really. The AA buffs make it impossible to do anything but AFK in a corner. And while you will not get oneshot every game, the AA will be overpowered every game and since it doesn't require aim, skill, attention, or anything else you can't even outplay it. It's just there and [edited]your day. So you can't compare that at all. It's like BB secondaries had 15km range, would always hit 100% and you would just die automatically after 1-2 minutes if you don't go out of range - while meanwhile the BB can shoot at other things and just the automatic secondaries kill you - and disable your weapons/torpedos.

Torpedo nuking DDs wins games and gives tons of XP. A lot of CVs know that.

If there were 4 CVs per game there would be a lot less DDs and torpedos as well as the DDs would get spotted a lot more, making them less game-staling and annoying. But with the upcoming AA buffs you'll just see more of the "torpedo soup".

Why bother with BBs that have enough AA to go solo and be safe? Why bother with the stress of managing 8 squads - which is TBH about 4x harder than anything else in this game, and I played every class extensively. And especially why bother when every patch you'll just get nerfed again? I've long since moved on to BBs mainly, because you're just god. DDs cant hurt you if you are smart. Cruisers get oneshot. Fire simply gets repaired. Most CVs are too bad to properly drop nowadays. I mean, if you're a CV player like me, you barely ever take serious damage from a CV drop just because you know how to counter it. If 5+ ships focus you plus you get CV dropped, yes then you can actually die. But otherwise you're a floating fortress that obliterates everything easily.

Oh look, another of those who can't be bothered to learn counterplay.

Hakuryu has always been superior to Midway, due to 4/2/2 setup. 4 Fighters can contain Midway completely and 2 TB with 2 DB still give you the strike power of a Shokaku, but with more plane HP and speed. Just Midway is a mile easier to play, simply because of less squadrons and most Hakuryus were using strike setup. It's literally the only CV that should really use AS setup. Since Midway lost a TB for a DB it's just completely inferior. Especially after the last patch with the AA consumable for CVs.

WG just wants all CV players to quit, so they don't have to deal with balancing them or they don't lose all the whiners that are too lazy to learn how to play against a CV. The few people that play CV cause barely any profit and the money it takes to make CVs a fun part of the game for non-CVs as well as CVs is just not worth it.

They lose too many whining players that cant be bothered to learn any tactics against CVs, so they are essentially removing CVs by making their game zero fun.

Hiryu and Ranger are pure pain to play anyway. Saipan is okay due to T9 planes. Still a freaking god damn T6 Cleveland will still wipe out your T9 planes from 7km within 5 seconds.

Meh, AA buffs, and that even in the tier area where AA is [edited]CVs royally in the butt already. T7 is unplayable and T8 is no fun either, because every single ship can all by itself shoot down your planes like flies. You'll never see a pilot return from an attack and only half get to attack - a lone ship. That's really ridiculous. Why not just reduce squad size to 2 for IJN and 3 for US outright? Man wargaming... And I thought we all agreed that playing blind without CV support against 5 Shimas or Fubukis is no fun.

I always love when players complain about how their CVs never have fighter setup. But it's actually very selfish or outright stupid to desire fighter setup on your CV. Trigger_Happy_Dad made an effort to explain that a while back (I think in the german forums) and was met with... let's just say it wasn't generally accepted. Due to the thread about damage I was recently browsing various stat sites to see how I fare in my Essex against the rest of the world and playing around with the options a bit, I found something completely unrelated that I found incredibly interesting. But before I can show you what I mean, let me ask you, what makes a good bomber CV and what a good fighter CV? Damage for bomber CVs and planes shot down for fighter CVs, right? (You sadly can't see spotting in stats, but then again, both types of CV can do that well). So what I did was to arrange the stats for most average damage and most planes shot down, with the focus being on winrate though. NOTE: Noone with <100 battles is inculded, so no heavy bias due to low sample size. The lowest winrate on the first page is 56,89%. Which is unsurprising because those are all good players, otherwise they wouldn't be on page 1 of average damage. Now for the planes shot down. Note that to have the highest average planes shot down you are basically required to have fighter setup and be at least decent in it. The highest winrate on this page however is 57,14% and that's an outlier. The lowest is at 32,80% with 125 games. They have more than twice the planes shot down, but less than a quarter of the damage and the winrate reflects that. See a pattern there? So next time bombers fly over you, know that while you might get bombed yourself, you're much more likely to win in the end. P.S.: I'll gladly do the same with other stat sites or a different CV, but I'm sure that in most cases it will look like this.

That's all nice and will probably narrow the insane 70% to 30% winratio gap there is, but as you said, even for the Ryujo, which has probably the best AS setup in the game, it looks like the damage setup wins. So for random battles it's very clear whats better. For ranked this doesn't change much either. For teambattles I would say IJN AS setups are good, especially Hakuryu if it was T10, but aside from that, I still think even in those that bomber setups would be better, simply because you need a lot more bombers to actually get through to a coordinated team and an AS setup just has no bombers to spare. So your damage will be 0. While the bomber setup might do significantly less than in random battles, it would still deal SOME damage, which is more than nothing.

Guys, stop hating on Aerroon tho. I've posted the math behind this and it shows that using premium consumables and not using them can be right - it all depends on: Are you driving high tier or not? Do you have a premium account? How good are you at the game compared to average players? And if it comes to becoming better at the game Aerroon is right, you should start using them in high tier, even if you don't have a premium account. Just if you give no damns about improving or winning and are generally a rather mediocre player then it might not be worth it - but even then it could help you push you out of averageness.

This is just EU though. I checked the other servers too - but generally speaking if you want to check for CV stats EU is the way to go anyway, as here are (slightly) superior carrier players than on the other servers OR slightly inferior players in other classes so carriers can wreck them a bit harder. But I think it's the former.

Hm, maybe you're not abusing the TBs to their full potential then? I can't stand the fighter layout and I average 100k in the Saipan. It's a really great ship and dearly hope the RN CV line will be like the Saipan. Still I have 30 plane kills on average too.

At least you chose a funny picture.

It's still more than anyone else has ever gotten in the Hakuryu. Also there is Yamato games out there with 400k+, those are impressive as hell too. I don't own one sadly, so I didn't get to try. But I'm not saying you're wrong. It wasn't exactly hard with the hordes of Tirpitzes back then and no mirrors.