tocqueville8

I don't see how it's contradictory. I know she's not as good for hunting down DDs and that that's often what wins games; what I'm saying is that she would've probably be unfun for me to play as much as for others to play against, if not more. Also, it might be weaker for top players, but I just got the feeling I'd do better in her than in the Audacious, for instance. Also, I think I mentioned the MvR as being excessive (well, appearing to be: I'm still at the Parseval) with her ease in getting citadels with dive bombers.

I'm not sure what you mean. I've seen videos about the FDR, and her ability to farm permafloods/fires, mostly ignoring AA, seems excessive and unfun, which is part of the reason I didn't get her with the coupon, but that's one ship, it's not the whole class. I would say, I think CV are less balanced in competitive modes, as their attention is divided among fewer surface combatants, but that's for the "we don't want CVs in competitive modes" thread, not the "CVs are the problem in this game" thread.

The difference is that there might not even be a random USN DD in front of your Colbert, or there might be, but it might be some yoloer or simply someone who doesn't read chat nor react to the F key commands... I'm all for teamplay, smoking up cruisers, offering fighters, coordinating crossfires, etc. I use chat a lot. I'm just saying that kind of coordination doesn't happen very often in Random. Is a Colbert+Gearing div fair? Well, it is allowed, so yeah I guess. Is it balanced? Well, no, imho. It's certainly more balanced in Clan Battles, where teammates are more attuned to one another and combining ship consumables is commonplace. I don't want to derail the conversation, which was and is about CVs. I'm just saying in general I'd rather face a CV in a DD than a div that plays around smokes and HE spam/radar in any class. Cheers.

I'm not sure I agree. I treat plane damage as normal damage: it helps the team, and in some ships, mostly EU DDs, I can bait it to some extent, just like I play heal-Tashkent, not smoke-Tashkent, to bait potential damage. Even if I didn't do a lot of damage myself (damage is always welcome, mind you), I contributed a bit by diverting the attention of the CV or some BBs/CAs. Also, and I'm certainly not bragging about my WR, which is nothing special, but I find myself firing at CVs quite often, honestly more often than I feel they're focusing on me in particular.

Good question. I consider some CVs unbalanced, especially the Hosho with her amazing double torps in an environment where lots of ships have basically no AA. Also, it seems a bit too easy to get citadels with German CVs, as the attack run takes very little space, so it's basically impossible to outmaneuver the planes the way one might against an IJN CV. Still, that can be adressed with a precise nerf, it's not something about the whole class. As for the rest, the ability to form divisions like Smolensk/Colbert + USN DD (see one of the latest Jingles videos) seems unbalanced, and contrary to what "Randoms" should probably be about. I'm not saying I'd report them, but it is unbalanced imho. Also, it seems unreasonable to me that T6-7 DDs have a torpedo range far short of the radar range of the cruisers they often face, and they need AFT to be able to fight back at all (not that they should or would, but still...).

What? How will you "progress"? Progress where? If you're good, this balanced system you're proposing would put you in a worse-than-average team to compensate, and your WR would go down, inevitably. Good players are good because on average they play against an average player, and they're better than him/her. But if you make sure the teams have the same average winrate (or something like that), there's no way good players would "stay on top", winrate-wise. It would increase the odds that it would be the losing team they'd be on top of.

This would quickly lead to teams being of equal skill, which would increase or drop everyone's winrate to 50%. Then winrate would be meaningless and they'd have to go with some other parameter (PR, xp, damage or some such). Then everyone would keep winning exactly half their games forever (with some fluctuation, but not more so than a fair coin has fluctuations), which equates to an economic reward, in terms of xp and credits, for the bad players, and a punishment for the good ones. Then the good players would justifiably leave, as the game would be punishing them for being good, that is for being better than the average opponent.

That's what I think, as well. What I'm saying is that many commentators seem to think CVs are just OP no matter who sails them, due to the fact they'll "accidentally" spot ships on their way to the targets, even if they're crap at dropping the targets. Good point. But still, with a higher cruiser/BB ratio it becomes more important to have someone's who's good at deleting cruisers. If you get the really bad BB, the one who doesn't use overmatch properly for instance, it's a bigger disadvantage than with the current matchmaking, where there's probably another BB ready to pick up the slack.

I only checked for T10 CVs. There were at most 10 players with an overall WR on those CV of 80% or above. Most had significanty lower WR (65-75%) once you looked for their solo stats, though again, they might not tell us much as most of these people play a lot in divisions, and those solo games could be too old to be reliable. 1) You say the skill gap is huge, but other commentators have written that even a potato enemy CV captain can be very annoying because of the spotting. I'm of the opinion that CVs are *harder* than other classes, as they generally have a harder time than DDs or BBs at deleting enemies, which is what wins games, and instead require consistency in the drops and some forward thinking about plane management, but the community seems to be divided, with many thinking that playing CV well (well enough) is super easy. 2) My point was that the very high or very low WRs of CVs are to some extent a statistical artifact caused by there being only 1 per team in most games. If the game only allowed teams of, say, 1 CV, 1 BB, 3 cruisers and 7 DDs, to better reflect historical reality, then the top BB captains would have a WR in the 80s, as their ability at doing "BB stuff" (deleting cruisers) wouldn't be diluted among 4-5 BB players. Clearly, in a game focused so much on angling and concealment, having 4-5 CVs per team like there are 4-5 BBs per team would be a nightmare, and also quite unrealistic (BBs would actually shoot at each other every 30s or so from 15-25 km, but CVs would generally strike each other from far greater distances).

"At will"? Come on...

That's my point. By countering DDs, which become more powerful at high tiers due to better torpedo range, CVs make landslide games less likely.

For any T10 CV, the EU leaderboard has at most 10 players with a total WR above 80%. The Audacious for instance has only 3, and 25 above 70%. If you look into it, many of these have a solo WR between the mid 60s and the low 70s, which is still excellent, but more in line with what you'd expect for a top player whatever the ship type. There are exceptions, of course: a certain @kytis has an 80% WR in the Hakuryu over 31 games, with an average damage of 281k, which is insane, but that's rare even at this level. Conversely, you can find players with a WR above 80% in most T10 ships as well, though again many are going to have few solo games in them, which makes it difficult to assess correctly. But more fundamentally, I don't think a higher (solo) WR for CVs would tell us they're broken. Most CV games, at least at high tier, have only 1 CV per side, and since CVs compete directly against each other (who can find and sink the DDs first, who can spot better, give better air cover, help the team where most needed...), the better player will emerge. If you're the better CV captain, the "CV stuff" in the game is going to see your team at an advantage. But if you're a DD captain, you're often only 1 of 2-4 DD captains. You might do a wonderful job on your flank, but it's still only one flank. If you're in a battleship, you might be very smart with your positioning and angling, but that can be useless if the other BBs on your team yolo, or camp too far back, or they snuggle with you instead of setting up crossfires. The "BB stuff" is divided among 3-5 players, usually. I wouldn't go as far as to say that "a good CV captain has more influence over the game than even the best DD captain", but to some extent it is true that CVs are playing their own game, and being usually a 1v1 game, it's more skewed both ways, just like Ranked Sprint 3v3 was more skewed (I'm not sure that's the right statistical term, btw) than Ranked 9v9, which in turn is more skewed than Randoms. Cheers.

But how does that help once the DD is already dead? Losing DDs means losing caps and map control, often being forced to retreat and huddle up due to the threat of torps, eventually being surrounded. That's great for the enemy team, but not especially good for the enemy CV, who wants to strike isolated targets, not huddled-up targets that share their AA.

No, the premise I was referring to is that "a good CV captain has more influence than even the very best DD captain."

Meh. The Hosho is, possibly the FDR. Kaga as well, though she seems to attract more bad players than the rest. Maybe the MvR, especially for cruisers. I can't say I've ever been particularly frustrated by a Ranger, or an Implacable... Imho it's like saying cruisers are broken because the Smolensk is, or BBs because of the Thunderer. CVs could use a nerf in general (burning mechanic, spotting mechanic, maybe a fuel limit...), but I'm not sure it makes sense to put them all at the same level. Cheers.

I'm not sure I agree with that premise, but in any case I think they should pair CV captains that have WR within, say, 8% of each other. I don't think CVs are terribly unbalanced; I think they're balanced around there being only 1 every 10 ships or so (meaning: Randoms, not competitive), which is why if feels especially burdensome to have a bad CV on your side or a really good one on the enemy team.

Meh, it was C cap on Okinawa, so the map was open and his team didn't really need him spotting. This Z-52 pivoted around the island to make me waste my radar, as a few seconds at a time, even with a full gun build, aren't enough to sink a Z-52. If I got closer to make sure I could pivot around the island as well, I would enter his hydro range, and I didn't have an island to protect me from the rest of his team. I probably should've just left him alone... Something similar, same DDs involved, happened to me on The Atlantic. Moral of the story: the Smaland is great, but only if she can get a quick kill in the open, otherwise smoke and hydro are probably better.

What? How? The job of a CV gets easier if the enemy team breaks up and ships become isolated, but it doesn't matter very much whether there are DDs or not. A CV will do her own spotting, so a DD advantage won't help her much. On the other hand, if the enemy DD is dead your DD can push up a lot better (as long as there are no CV, and he pays some attention to radar). My point is that, being often the last ship to die, the CV can mitigate a DD imbalance for a longer time than even radar. Personally, I'm okay with that, as I enjoy long and balanced games, even if it means dealing a lot with a CV in the 2nd half. Granted, most of my interaction with CVs has been from before the German line was introduced, with those ghastly AP citadels...

Killing DDs? Smaland and Daring. Cap contesting? Z-52. When smoked up, hydroed-up, and behind an island in the cap, she's very hard to dislodge. Special mention: RPF Benham, just for the sheer number of torps.

Okt Rev is ugly as sin, and very vulnerable when giving broadside, but she has good HE and she's fairly tanky when angled due to having a small superstructure. I think you can get her for coal, which is nice. She still holds my T5 dmg record. Texas is very reliable: the AA isn't what it used to be, but she's just fine. Viribus Unitis has low hp and basically no AA, but she's stealthy, she has 6 guns at the front (no other T5 BB has more than 4, iirc) and she has good frontal armor, as well. Very underrated. Giulio Cesare would be the most powerful among these, but she's not available anymore. I'd say get the Okt Rev as a captain trainer for coal, and maybe the Texas if something's burning a hole in your pocket.

Indeed, but as a DD captain I find radar much more infuriating than CVs to deal with. I can somewhat mitigate CV drops (not HE dive bombers, to be honest), or smoke up, but 10-12 km radar for 30-40s, across islands and everything, is a bit excessive imho.

CVs work by "democratizing" spotting, which is crucial at high tiers as DDs become more powerful. Even if your team loses the DD on one flank, you're not completely blind because the CV can drop fighters or spot directly, at least for a while and at a cost (fighters for spotting are not fighters for AA cover, and spotting with planes might mean not attacking with planes). CVs can spot all over the map, but they're worse at it than DDs: air detection radii are much smaller than surface detection radii, and in many cases they're equal to or smaller than AA ranges. Without a CV, a DD disadvantage would snowball into a massive map control disadvantage much more quickly, as there would be nothing pushing back against the enemy DDs, especially at high tiers, where torpedo ranges are usually far greater than the DD's surface detection radius.

You mean positive impact, due to spotting? I mean...the other day an enemy Asashio (43% WR or so, didn't even have Concealment Expert) sank 4 of our ships like it was nothing, while our equally incompetent CV (T6, tbf) did absolutely nothing, hid in the corner of the map and was brutalized by said Asashio. Even a potato BB or DD can get a Dev Strike or hold back a push with the threat of torps or their sheer hp and armor, while a potato CV is going to do jack s***, as they lack any consistency in their drops and the strategic sense required to help the team where most needed.

Nah. I mean, in Epicenter I usually drop fighters on this side of the cap, to help a DD, or on the opposite, to spot the enemy's (as long as it's not a Smaland or such, otherwise I won't bother). That gives away very little, as everybody sort of expects at least one DD to go in. On Domination, I won't drop a DD that goes for some between-the-caps torpedo action, as that would just give him away, but some fighters on the flank cap are always useful, defensively or for spotting, and again I don't think they give much away.

I understand, I'm just saying this guy was about to wrecked by planes for sure, yet he still resented my help.