invicta2012

It is best to either specialise in AA destroyers (Commonwealth line ahoy, please) or to use your DDs defensively. Carriers love open water, teams that are spread around, they can be OP in that meta. When a melee breaks out they are often no use at all. IJN CVs might be able to spam torpedoes into a zone but the Americans can't - those things go 35 knots and have to be fired under the side of the ship they are attacking. Stay alive, let the enemy come to you... there will be plenty of dumb BBs to torpedo.

In Random games. Good luck with that. Any way. Some FEEDBACK from low tiers. Could you please cut down on the length of time it takes plane squads to form up when launched? I've been practising with Langley in Co-op games and the distances on some of these low-Tier maps are so small that by the time the blokes goes "Airborne!" and the squad forms up you've flown past your target. Last game I sank two bots with secondaries while desperately trying to get the planes I'd launched to come back and defend me. A melee button to cut all that nonsense out would be very useful. The manouverability of these planes is also poor in small map, low-Tier games. You really do struggle to get them near the target, which is odd because the distinguishing feature of a biplane is its low speed turning circle. Also - US torpedoes only doing 35 knots? Fair enough, I suppose, but you probably need to add an indicator to the low-Tier ship to tell people they're not going to hit most of their targets attacking from behind (a standard tactic on old CVs).

That too. It's just too easy to find things, really! The CV spawns in the middle runs at 45 degrees in either direction and will bump into something eventually. Most DDs aren't fast enough to make progress up the map before the planes arrive. Not even Le Terrible..... Everyone hated torpedo cross drops but at least there were lots of active counters to that type of strategy - dodging, smoke, allied CV fighters, shipborne fighters, DFAA, Manual AA control, Manual AA focus, AA support ships like Atlanta which were guaranteed to wipe out enemy CV squads, Hood's UP Rockets, and drops that could be panicked and scattered, their accuracy decreased. Losing planes mattered to the CV as they could be deplaned. Very little of this is now in the New CV gameplay. The fact that the CV doesn't dev strike you any more doesn't matter... they can get the same effect in three strikes and the player being attacked has no real strategy in defence. That's the bit WG have missed. The gameplay has been tested and balanced through games of CV vs Bot. Bots don't mind being sunk, players do, and they want to know what they did wrong, and what they can do next time to prevent it happening again. The answer is: nothing much. If the CV can work the controls and dodge the flak (which the opposing player has very little control over) then the same thing will happen next game, and the next, and the next. The damage CVs do can be "balanced", but the gameplay of Target vs CV sucks and is months away from being ready to go live. El2aZer calls it a cross-drop, and that's good enough for me.

The last thing a Destroyer captain is worried about at the moment is their guns, to be honest. How's Leone's AA suite? Last week I would have bought her for the lols and the 12k torpedoes. This week, absolutely no damn point.

AFAIK, this is not true. It helped, but not as much if you have skilled enabled. Even in operation Dynamo, that was pointed out. Same as secondaries. The psychology helped. The player thinks "I responded to the threat. I was not helpless", so they don't get so cross when they get hit. As it stands the player is being attacked by an enemy that they have no response to. This makes people angry. WG has already recognised this - they have nerfed airborne torpedoes so that you can no longer be dev struck from full health by TBs. They're trying to make the damage the same as taking a salvo from an enemy ship. Because no-one gets angry when they take a salvo from an enemy BB or cruiser, do they? No-one immediately points their guns at the ones impertinent enough to fire on them. That doesn't happen. Peace will reign and people will accept that 5k chip damage. Or not. Honestly. WG need to give people a meaningful feeling response to CV attack. The CVs have near unlimited planes, so there is little effect on them - allowing the other players to click and target their enemies in a manner of their choosing would defuse so much anger, that even if it only made AA 10% more effective, the game would be 50% happier.

Press O and select a side of your ship to buff.

1- Planes can have RPF. So if the DD is at the front, as they usually are, then all the CV has to do is keep flying straight forwards and RPF will tell them on which side the nearest ship is. Keep doing that and you'll find the DD. 2- You have a delightful choice as a DD player at the moment. Try and play as a fleet ship, stay alive until the enemy CV is occupied, use your friendly AA, wait for an opportunity. You might get shot at by disgruntled teammates (as I just did in my Aigle, which has been rendered pointless in the CV meta). Or you can try and sneak round the edges of the game, perhaps try and solo cap... and await the inevitable kind attention of rocket planes. 3 - In the old system they got one go at you every 2 minutes or so, you could always dodge, and shooting down their planes meant something. Now the only thing that matters is the damage you take. BBs have heals. Many cruisers do, and those that don't tend to have fairly decent AA. Most DDs have neither, making them soft targets. 3-5k and a fire from a rocket attack every 60 seconds hurts. 4 - CVs can cross drop torpedoes. Their torpedo squadrons have more than one squad in it, and each squad can drop torpedoes. Some CV TB squads have to launch up close, others don't. So the cross drop is not dead, I'm afraid. In fact it's probably more viable than ever if you take the L shape approach (one set of torpedoes sent long, the other delivered short so that the ship has nowhere to dodge....

Farragut A and B Hull have no mid-range AA at all. Farragut C (which trades x1 main battery for 2 x 40mm Bofors) is better but has 1 shell per mid range burst to Monaghan's 3, so would be less effective. At long range they both look the same.

Quad 40mm Bofors FTW. Kidd, Fletcher and Gearing have them too (Atlanta doesn't), but it's a nice thing to have at Tier VI. Of course the Juneau class (improved Atlanta) had six of them. Yes please..... That was what we were doing in my last Monaghan game. Abandoned capping straight up, took to playing with an NC and Baltimore and picked off a couple of battleships along the way. So some DDs still have a role. Not sure others do, though.

Funnily enough - or not - Monaghan got a big buff in this patch. As she gave up her two rear guns for AA which previously did the square root of nothing much, it was quite nice to shoot down some planes from a Lexington. Her Mid range AA is better than Atlanta's...

You can turn them off in the Port. Gear icon, bottom right, just above your ships.

It would be a lot easier with one CV per game, to be honest. As for AA.... there has to be a full manual takeover facility. A few dodgy fighters or consumables won't cut it.

"It Takes Skill" is nonsense. It should take skill to play well, not skill to play at all. Part of the appeal of WoWs is its pace and obvious nature - select ship, move ship, point guns, fire. These ships are not like that. You cannot "manouevre through the flak" in a Langley squadron which is barely catching up with the ship you are trying to attack. And Who is going to be accurate when their aiming reticle - a key part of the efficacy of dive bombers - is no longer on the visible part of the screen? I'm not yelling. I'm trying to pick up the CV gameplay from scratch and it's not going well. Former CV unicum players are probably not going to be taking out a Tier IV CV but new players are, and they're not going to have too much fun judging by the way these ships are currently playing.

Ps - turn the Spike Milligan buzzer on the boost off, please. Although I did find that playing this during a new CV game improved my mood no end.

Dear WG. Sorry, but I hate it. I only ever played RTS CVs up to Tier VI. After that the clunky interface and fighter aggro tactics like Strafe made it a hassle to learn and no fun to play. I was hoping this rework would improve things, so I've had some games in a Langley and Ryujio. I now have a headache. We are constantly telling you that your Public Testing always involves Tier X Unicum players looking to get a preview of the new mechanics (and so get an advantage on the other players). No-one ever seems to Test Tier IV, V or VI stuff properly. And it shows. First I tried playing against CVs. I can support what everyone says above. Sector system is clunky, changing sectors needs to be part of the normal HUD. I miss CTRL+click, being involved in selecting my AA's targets. Sector control is something I forget during an intense battle - it's like switching to a the tactical Map when you're in a DD knife fight. Why would you do it? The AA auras don't make much sense. They seem to make ships behave in odd ways, and they are a mechanic which can be understood and exploited by the CV player and to which the Ship player has no counter, other that those silly Catapult fighter squadrons and DFAA, all of which can be baited into irrelevance. DFAA should be changed to be a function which the player can choose to use (CTRL/Click and hold). You should get 30s/20s charge time but it only fires when you select it. If CVs are going to be a constant threat, I want much more manual control over my AA. Third, Destroyers are suffering. Massively. They cannot have enough AA to ward off the constant attentions of a CV and stealth is rendered useless. DD play was such a fun, exciting and involving part of the game and it has been ruined. As to the CVs: you won't get many new players with this meta. It's still too complicated and doesn't relate to the rest of the game. Based on playing Langley, the problems with this ship and the rework are as follows: 1 - Planes too fast, Planes too slow. The thing about RTS was that you launched your planes, and they behaved like other ships. You kept them near the action zones, you brought them into play when you needed to. When one squadron had completed its attack run, you had other squadrons to manage. This system wants to be like that, but it becomes more like tedious shuttle runs to and from the CV to the front. Langley is incredibly bad in this regard. Her planes are OK for spotting, but too slow for attacking - AA starts being effective before you're in the range where you can start an attack run, so even with boost you will tend to lose your entire squadron rather than just the attack flight. Which means back to the CV and another 45-60 seconds before you've flown back to the action, having achieved nothing. This is only fun if you think shuttle runs are fun. 2- Poor visibility. Positioning of planes prior to your attack run is key. But you have no binocular view or zoom, making it difficult to see the enemy ships and track their movement. Are they going towards you, away from you? It's hard to tell until you get close enough for them to shoot at you. 3 - World of Reticles and sloppy controls. In World of Warplanes, your have a direction indicator (where you are going), a firing reticle (where your guns will fire) and a bomb reticle (beneath your planes). All three appear to have a close and friendly relationship. In WoWs these three appear to have fallen out, quite badly. The firing reticle lurches after the planes like a grumpy child being pulled along by its parents. The player view of the planes appears to be completely detached from it. What's worse is that the first aiming reticle is often too small and doesn't indicate where you will fire. When using rockets or dive bombers the final aiming reticle often appears a way behind the location selected with the first reticle (often being off the screen, if they are DBs) and your planes have insufficient manoeuvrability to correct the error. This isn't like changing the lead on your guns. It's horrible. 4 - One Torpedo???? One of the things about RTS CVs was that they gave you a fair go. You could be useless, but you could probably hit something with a torpedo squad. The new CVs don't even give you that. A Langley player has to deal with 1,2 and 3 above and their reward is one torpedo, which can be easily dodged by a bot in a Kawachi. I know we complained about Lexingtons dropping six torpedo spreads but this is much too far the other way. 5 - Flak bursts. These aren't as easy to dodge as people say they are. 6 - Bugs and crashes. Five games, three client crashes. No idea why. On the good side - ships like Huang He, with decent AA, smoke and versatility, now feel more useful than before. So I'm going to go and play that.

The problem is that the new CVs are horrible to learn and far too powerful when you master them. If WG think that new players are going to come along and enjoy playing this class they are quite, quite wrong. I have never felt so much of an idiot as I do when playing these ships. I enjoyed my best result through using my secondary guns and ramming someone, and I'm not sure that's what they intended. The lower Tier planes reel around like they're drunk. Even getting them anywhere near the target is an exercise in frustration. And you get shot down so, so often. Dodging flak is a reaction game, and you're driving sluggish, fragile planes. The way the AA auras are set up means that you are hugely likely to derp into a flak burst while setting up a run - losing your entire squadron rather than the attacking planes - so the game starts to involve an awful lot of failing and returning to the carrier. When you do manage to get within firing range further annoyances occur - the Dive Bomber reticule falls off the bottom of the screen, for instance, and there's no "time to target" indicator as there is with guns or torpedoes - and after that the end result appears to be launching 1 (one) torpedo. Spotting, though? You're great at that. You can see everything on the map, keep DDs permanently under surveillance, reveal the spawning locations and course of the enemy team. Presuming that you do manage to master the firing mechanics then there's nothing you can't pester into non-existence.

It's three different types of derp in one ship.

They're clearly better at it than me. If the idea is to make the class more fun and accessible, then it fails. It's like trying to herd a group of drunk cats.

I think you need to realise that most CV players can't (currently) hit anything. Honestly.

Oh yes. And why not?

And if WG wanted to make a quick buck they could stick Tier VI Cleveland (Columbia) back in the Premium shop. She would be in clover.

Gosh yes. Low tiered in Huang He I found myself at the top of the team results just by doing usual cruiser stuff and not "OMG ITS A CV RUN FOR YOUR LIVES". Tier IV CVs are pitiful, Tier VI ones can largely be ignored in anything with a modicum of AA... there appears to be no threat at all below Tier VIII.

Exeter has the same consumables as Emerald. I think we're actually arguing about not much here. Exeter is a good ship in her own right at Tier V and they've probably given her one too many, or one too good, consumable.

Yes, but I can't change the sector, unless I've missed something, without pressing O and having to look at something else other than my HUD. I play other games which much more complex interfaces which manage to do this, I'd like Wows to do it too.

? Both ships have decent gun systems, KK has marginally better armour, Exeter has better concealment. Both have torpedoes and Hydro. The biggest difference is smoke, and Exeter 's should be short duration to stop it being OP in combination with its other qualities. If KK had smoke she'd be a nightmare...