Capra76

How does this fit in with CV's mirrored MM? How can MM balance a triple Yamato division (say) against a triple Amagi if BB's hard counter is capped and mirrored and the presence of a CV would actually make the Amagi's situation worse?

The big complaint about the last ranked season was the perceived dominance of the Benson, limiting ships to T7 does remove this but will likely transfer the problem somewhere else (Blyskawica maybe).

I have a question, does this flag actually do anything, like extra credits/XP or early access to your 72 white raisins*? * Syro-Aramaic reading of the Koran joke

Fair point, that isn't fair either, and I think the difference in AA strength over the tiers is far too much, your Hiryu for example can face a Kongo with 93 AA or an Iowa with 536 AA, in which case your fate depends entirely upon the MM, which surely can't be a good thing. But at the end of the day the game isn't about shooting down planes with AA you don't control, it's about putting bombs, shells and torpedoes onto big grey ships and watching them sink.

What else is the game about if it isn't sinking ships? Capping maybe, but if you took the guns and torpedoes off DD's do you think anyone would play them? At the end of the day CV get to sink ships without other ships having a fair chance to sink them, and in my books that's OP.

Will someone tell me how a 9:1 k/d ratio is balanced without trying to pretend that planes are somehow the same as HP?

Fair enough, I lost my temper a bit and apologize. Re: +/- 2 tiers, I imagine an Iowa will shred a T7 squadron in seconds and an Izumo probably isn't much fun either, but how often are you going to encounter T9 only battles as a T7 CV, and presumably it works both ways with T5 BB drawn into T7 games and of course once you get to T10 the MM will always be in your favour. Either way, is not the big problem with the larger spread going to be the possibility of facing T9 CV, but if that's the case we're back to my original point that the only thing that usually hurts a CV is another CV.

Scouting? Air defense?

Seems Domin1c dragged me down to his level of argument, sorry.

Sky plague fan boy.

Cant' find a sensible response so resort to ad-homs. Bye

I'm sorry, but I don't accept that planes are equivalent to HP and sending out planes equals risk because: losing planes does not equate to damage on the ship; the XP credit for shooting down planes is mediocre; other players cannot get the credit for damage/kills and the associated silver; the game is all about kills, not shooting down planes with automated AA so CV are costing other ships gametime, XP and silver without them having any chance to earn it back. Also the only way that you're going to lose all of your planes is if the enemy CV completely owns you or you do something completely stupid, so yes sending planes up is a risk, but it's a completely different sort of risk to everyone else. On that run! On that run! You do understand that if a BB makes even a slight change in course a DD's damage will be completely eliminated on that run. Is that why Hiryu is top damage dealer at T7? 24/4 = 6 different potential attacks plus of course another 24 DB and 24 fighters.

I'd wager the vast majority of those that do die do so to other CV, which means that CV are essentially fighting a completely different game to everyone else.

Because the point I originally made was that ships that can deal damage without any risk to themselves are OP.

Doesn't change the fact that its an automated system and non-cv ships are essentially not able to fight against CV. I said AA was more like torpedo detection, not that it is exactly identical, they're both systems that allow ships to minimize damage taken from torpedoes without any real player involvement. The difference of course is that ship torpedoes generally need to be launched from 7km+ and can be seen from up to (I think) 3.75km away, TD helps you avoid, AA reduces the numbers .Check out the survival rates on those ships (w/e 21/5): Yamato: 48.24% DM: 43.44% Shimakaze: 38.57% Even the best of those is inferior to every single CV in the game at every tier, only the Langley/Bogue even come close. Nowhere have I said that AA needs a buff, what I said is CV are OP because, fundamentally, the only thing they are really fighting against is other CV. It's not the fault of the CV players, it's a fundamental problem with the design of the game, but rather than fix this WG is trying to balance the unbalancable, because so long as CV are effectively immune to other ships any damage they do is OP.

You don't need to know how they work to understand that they almost never die.

How is that remotely relevant? Also, AFAIK, CV can cap if they really want to, and presumably do so in certain circumstances. The fact that CV chose to hide at the back rather than slugging it out on the front lines doesn't mean they've somehow lost the ability to cap So 1/3 games you don't get everything completely your own way, presumably mostly when you meet higher tier carriers, and what, 1/10 total wipe out? Still sounds o/p to me. Maybe WG should give planes a maximum range of say detection +1km to encourage them to take their fair share of the risks.

Hence my original post saying that they are OP, because being able to inflict damage with no risk whatsoever is OP. And how often does that happen? 1/2 games? 1/10 games? 1/100 games?

Using a completely automated system to limit the amount of damage the planes can deal to you is not, IMO, fighting, it's more like the torpedo detection ability if anything. Hakuryu has 100 planes in its hanger, which is 25 complete squadrons, is it even possible to lose all of those and if so how often does that happen? Please explain to me how a 9:1 k/d ratio is not OP.

Problem is that CV are OP because no other class in the game can actually fight them, so in terms of attacks on other ships it genuinely is no risk, all reward. Did you know that Hakuryu has a 82% survival rate and a k/d ratio of 9:1? The T7-9 ships are all above 70% and I'll bet you the vast bulk of the ones that do go down are lost to other CV, virtually the only time I've seen one go down to a non-CV it was an AFK/bot.

IMO the real problem with the game is that late tier BB are massively OP against CA, which means CA become hugely under-played, which means players move either in to DD or BB, which then gives you crazy MM with 5 BB against 6 DD.

+1 I think the idea that USN DD are gunboats is a bit of the myth, the ROF and DPM look impressive but the shell arc makes them highly situational, they're very good against isolated DD if you can get into a close range fight but that's fairly rare, otherwise they're not actually all that useful, it can be a struggle to hit BB from invisifire range and the amount of damage you can do is fairly minor, more importantly if you're shooting up a BB you're not using your most powerful weapons, i.e. your torpedoes.

The problem with that theory is CV's mirror MM, which means that any advantage one team gets in BB needs to be countered with a disadvantage in CA/DD, but how can the MM be said to be balanced if DD are not part of the rock-paper-scissors and a T9 DD does no more damage than a T7. CV are a class that sits above all others, essentially fighting their own battle against the enemy CV, they have no hard counter of their own so how can they be part of R-P-S? The R-P-S model is broken at the minute, BB are a very strong counter to CA and CA can strongly counter DD, but both BB and CV have no effective counters.

From WT I get: Anshan - 27,546; Fubuki - 28,681; Benson - 29,407 Your 25,664 is the all time result for the Anshan, I would guess that Fubuki/Benson will change depending upon when we ask WT the question, but I think the point remains, Anshan in terms of damage is comparable to T8 DD and the case that Anshan (at T6) deserves a buff remains to be made.

The problem with that is that you are using data going back to the very start of the game, which takes no account of the various balance changes made in the numerous patches since then and gives a potentially misleading impression of the current strength of the ship, the problem is particularly acute when you are dealing with ships that were introduced at significantly different times. If you want to compare the current performance of the ships then the thing to do is use current or recent stats, saying that a ship is unbalanced based on stats from 6 months ago is an obvious non-sense. One other point, I don't think WT tracks all games, for example if you limit your search to 1 week only it gives you 5971 Shokaku games, my dataset says 7220 (w/e 14/5).