dasCKD

Quick note, I also don't go after carriers in my carriers even as I can. I found out that generally speaking at tiers 6 and 7, I do far better if I just let the enemy carrier menace the allied team whilst I rip their planes from the sky (seeing as how WG moved all of the XP and credits to killing enemy planes) whilst farming damage on enemy ships. When the enemy carrier dies quickly, my team usually steamrolls the enemy and my Saipan damage average drops. Am I a scumbag? Yes. It's still not rigging.

So what you're saying is that you, in your IJN DDs, spend the entire game hunting down other IJN DDs, trying to make sure that you oppose their runs, trying to make sure they sink, and playing for the team. Or instead do you stalk battleships and throw torpedoes at them and, in the rare occasions when you run across other IJN DDs, you just try to disengage to minimize your own health loss and prolong your game. A Yamato won't shoot at another bow on Yamato because it's easier to farm damage on smaller cruisers and battleships. A Benson will avoid fighting against other Bensons when they can because it's far safer and rewarding to bully IJN destroyers at close ranges. In my Zao, I personally do everything I can to avoid fighting other Zaos or even other cruisers. If I can't end an enemy in one or two salvos, then I try to disengage so I can go harass the enemy battleships. The simple fact is that these games at higher tiers are expensive. We can preach about altruism and playing for the team all we want but if we can't foot the servicing bills then the games becomes unplayable. I could spend about five minutes gunning down another Zao at the cost of about 50-70% of my HP, or I can burn down a Yamato and an Iowa in that time frame. Carriers are the same, they have to foot their bills. Hovering their planes over friendly ships doesn't pay anything, getting up there and sinking enemy ships does. You are getting angry at a carrier for doing what, and let's me honest here, EVERYONE does. Stick in a group, form a defensive blinding screen, use the AA consumable in waves, maneuver to avoid carrier, use landmasses to personal benefit. My clan has members that have about 50-60% win rates, average to good players. Nothing special. Even so, we still manage to easily avoid having the carrier do damage to any of us just by basic formation maneuvering. Whilst it might be true that maneuvering like that is difficult to achieve in randoms, it is patently false when mostly average players can still pull off a formation that makes a 70% solo win rate carrier mostly useless.

The Taiho didn't go after the other Taiho because Taihos have defensive fire cooldowns and extremely powerful ones at that. Your carrier was probably just bad as was the enemy carrier considering that from your telling of the story he was completely unopposed by your carrier and still only managed 3 kills. Unless your team was crawling with Montanas, Des Moines, and Minotaurs that is a very poor performance. Then again he managed to sink a destroyer, so the battle might not have been as black and white as you would like us to assume.

REMOVE RADIO DETECTION! That is all.

I only played her on the public test, but she's really fun. I just think of her as a baby Atlanta. Her HE barely does any damage, but your guns are always firing so even someone with an aim as bad as mine (I have issues hitting targets with a Zao) you can hit targets. You are also insanely good at stealth firing with AFT so it's really easy to torment and infuriate battleships and even cruisers. I don't think she's a good ship, the Benson is a good ship. It's like the Myoko and the Atlanta, one is objectively superior but the other one is more fun.

I'll come back later to edit this post to break it down to points and their explanations The news of the German stealth firing nerf will probably spread over the entire player base within the next few days. The magnitude of the nerf was so harsh that you would have thought that the KM DDs have the HE alpha damage and gun arcs to make the Zao green with jealousy. With further consideration however, it's quite easy to see that War Gaming is up to. They envisioned the KM DDs as close range DD hunters and point holders. As this is probably the case, they don't want to create another line of the playstyle that is currently being held by the Akizuki and Blysawica. They are obsessed with ship uniqueness if the RN cruisers are anything to go by and KM DDs would do their best work up close anyways considering that they have lackluster HE but very potent but low caliber AP. I personally don't like having opnions removed, but War Gaming's efforts to shoehorn ships and their players into their game vision by disregarding player opinion is a topic in itself, but that's not what this post is about. Stealth fire is a mechanic that War Gaming has stated that they want to remove. At the moment stealth firing is a very limited ability that very few ships in very specific circumstances could use. They're also rumors floating around that ships that are most heavily affected by the stealth firing nerf would be compensated in some other trait. The Zao, the ship with the most infamous stealth firing abilities, would probably benefit from the changes irf anything as she has the armor, the range, and the gun arcs to dodge and negate incoming fire even if the enemy ship can see her. Ships like the Akizuki would be the ones to suffer most with her slow speed and large silhouette, but at least she has a smoke screen. The nerf would also create a wider gap between premiums like the Blysawica and their tech tree counterparts, but stealth firing from destroyers is not something that is tactically significant enough that taking it away would be a gigantic nerf to the class especially after the HE performance nerf. The larger issue in my opinion is a far reaching gameplay balance one. Battleships a currently the most represented class in the game. War gaming has long espoused the need for a rock, paper, scissors system and to a large part this system is theoretically necessary in order to naturally balance ship numbers in the game without necessitating the creation of rigid numerical quotas and limits for each ship class. If they are too many cruisers then more battleships would be launched. If they are more battleships then more destroyers would be launched. If they are too many destroyers then more cruisers would be launched. That is the theory anyways. The problem however is battleship rushes and its effectiveness. Destroyer charges flat out doesn't work, a tier 10 cruiser would dispatch of 2 destroyers with similar ease to dispatching of 6 of them if the destroyers just charge said cruiser. Battleships charging a destroyer is another matter however. This is mainly because ship number balancing is not done through pure combat effectiveness of a ship class against another but rather the ways their spheres of influences interact. Each ship can be thought to exert a sphere of influence, a sphere of power that holds most strategically aware players away. The power of the sphere becomes more pronounced closer to the ship of origin, as guns, secondaries, and torpedoes all increase in lethality up close to the enemy ship. The issue is that a destroyer, the battleship's counter, exerts a sphere of influence that is fundamentally very different from that of a cruiser or a battleship. A battleship or a cruiser exerts their spheres mainly using their guns. If you come close to them, they shoot at you. The closer you get, the more shots they land. The closer they get, the more likely those shots are to hit somewhere that will really hurt. Destroyers depend on the threat of torpedoes to exert their spheres however, slow loading weapons that can be easily evaded if the enemy anticipates the torpedo destroyer early on. This means that an aggressive and skilled team can push past a destroyer blockade with similar difficulty whether or not the destroyer is alone or is with three or four friends especially now with the introduction of the hydroacoustic search on prominent battleships. The rock, paper, scissors system doesn't work because destroyers can't effectively exert power in the form of a sphere against the battleships. A destroyer's in-game relevance is self-eliminating. One destroyer is incredibly important for the team's success and exerts a sphere of influence that keeps the enemy ships at bay. Three destroyers is generally ideal. Once the destroyer count hits four and higher however, they become largely redundant. The power to exert the sphere of influence is shared between the destroyers so they individually become less powerful in effect. To simplify the effect, an appreciable rise in battleship numbers will reduce a cruiser's strategic effectiveness so battleships can be used to balance cruiser numbers. An appreciable rise in destroyer numbers won't reduce a battleship's strategic effectiveness and so we have the current situation where battleships can just reign free without any contest apart from each other. This is where stealth firing comes in. Stealth firing is not class specific, and some ships are far batter at it than others. At present however, stealth firing is the only effective thing to cull battleship numbers. A large battleship population means a diminished cruiser and destroyer population. Smaller and stealthier ships nullifies stealth firing completely in most cases. Battleships on the other hand can't really do anything about it because basically every ship capable of the stealth fire can easily outrun them whilst still raining down fire on the battleship. A few battleships and a few cruisers reduces the effectiveness of stealth fire because the combined arms as well as speed of mixed ship teams can chase down and kill the would be stealth firer. A pure battleship team however is extremely ineffective at dealing with the stealth firer as the stealth firer can dictate most of the terms of engagement as well as when to break off the engagement. Battleships can't force and engagement against any stealth firing ship in the game right now. This means that currently stealth firing ships are the only ships that are fulfilling the overall destroyer's goals of suppressing battleships when their numbers grow too large. I theorize that this is in fact the reason why battleships are so dominant around the mid tiers but far less prominent (though still populous) around the higher tiers where ships like the Zao lurk. I find the removal of stealth firing concerning. It is currently the only thing that is really stopping further battleship number rises and it isn't a large stretch to theorize that the removal of the mechanic will only result in battleship numbers growing even larger than it is right now.

They're giving the Taiho, Essex, Midway, and Hakuryu anti-ship missiles in a few patches

No. -Yours sincerely, CVs

They were given ships and told to tell the player base about it. They played the ships and told the player base about it. No large changes were made last time, they probably assumed that no large changes were made this time. Expecting them to be clairvoyant is just inane, especially seeing as how the 'enlightened' didn't seem to be in a hurry to prapogate the information from a week ago either.

Much obliged Which is why I specifically said, in my original post, and I quote : Honestly. Fewer people would argue with me if they listened to what I said Like I said, I don't necessarily agree with what War Gaming is doing by shoehorning players into playing the game the way they meant it to be played. I simply explained what I believe would be their primary reasoning. Ichase didn't know and neither did any of the large Youtubers (and if they knew they didn't say anything). It's probably safe to assume that most of the playerbase isn't aware of the changes.

The topic will never be brought back, the distinctiveness and biomass of this topic will simply be assimilated into the hive fleet to feed the true rulers of the galaxy!

I'm more of a Tyranid fan myself .

I just went with red. I thought it works quite nicely with her wouldn't you agree?

A bit off topic, but what color hair do you think a shipgirl of the Zao would have?

With ships like the Imp and the Arkansas, the tier of the carrier doesn't even really matter. A Hosho would get you just as surely as a Ryujo. Carrier Alpha doesn't even really change until about tier 8 or 9 so being undertiered in a ship with as despicably bad an AA rating as those two doesn't make much of a difference.

You kidding? MM is horrible for my Kamikaze! I always end up in tier 4-5 matches without any big long juicy tier 7 BBs to farm damage on!

This isn't about the state of the gameplay though, this is a fundemental misunderstanding of the game mechanics.

You're up against a Bogue, they had fighters, hardly a high level player. They're the ones responsible for the Bogue's appalling win rates. No matter what WG says, your goal in a CV is to prevent as much damage as possible whilst doing as much damage as possible. Your goal is not to shoot down planes. Attack where the enemy fighters aren't around, open up the engagement with a strafe, and keep your carrier close enough to the front lines so that you can retrieve your planes before the enemy Bogue can shoot your planes down. Your fighters are there to protect your strike and foil the enemy strike, it is not there to shoot down enemy planes.

That's more like it!

Don't try to snipe an enemy CV ever unless you are confident that you can put them down. In regards to the IJN fighters, the health bar is representative of a squad size. If you multiply the fighter statistics by the group size then you get the performance in game. Don't engage the USN fighters unless you need to and use your fighters conservatively. Strafe them if, I repeat IF, you need to start an engagement. Retract your fighter if you can, your planes outrun theirs. You are losing because of the way the game works. Zuihou has 4(5) planes per squad. Bogue has 6(7) planes per squad. Therefore=> Mitsubishi A6M2 1210 hp x 4 planes 44 dps x 4 planes 4840 effective hp 176 effective dps Grumman F4F-4 1090 hp x 6 planes 43 x 6 planes 6540 effective hp 258 effective dps 6540 v 4840 176 v 258 That is why you're losing.

The forts spots destroyers and spots and shoots at aircraft. The way the game mode works is broken, the first team that wins the initial mass rush wins with no regards to different team compositions. It also means that those who holds forts and beacons are at a dramatic strategic advantage unlike in the other game modes in which there is far more potential for tactical latitude, ambush opportunities, and the like. Bastion is fundamentally a bad game mode and should not be expanded.

Honestly, do none of you understand the rules of engagement in a Waifu war?

They're plenty of things. Like enemy destroyer/battleship/cruiser/carrier spotted, torpedo spotted to the bow/aft/starboard/port. There's also messages to inform me when I've dealt heavy damage to the enemy ships and the like if I pushed too far as was focusing on trying to gain as much situational comprehension as possible. Having voice notices minimizes the amount of things my eyes have to focus on when I'm in the middle of battle.

The main issue with those voices is that you're basically crippling yourself in battle unless you speak Japanese.