Mulletproof

You fall back and become part of the lemming train. As a destroyer, you've been mitigated and there is nothing you can do to push a determined CV off of you besides smoke and hope he loses interest. You can't request fighter support. Nobody is going to move up with you even though they insist you take caps. You will be spotted and focused down if you don't pull back. CAs and BBs don't have it so bad. They can be part of the lemming train and still have the legs to reach out and touch somebody.

No seriously. I understand you want to nerf CV influence, WG. I also understand you need to grind a full two tiers just to get from four to six, making it heavier XP lift. Alright, fine... But that same influence reduction has come at the cost of XP generation. It blows, frankly. I used to think low tier battleship grind was like slowly gouging my eyes out with a rusty fork, but at least there I could "influence". With low tier CVs, my XP generation is in the tank, even with flags and camo. It's absolutely painful. Excruciating. I'm going to go out on a criticism limb here and say I'm not a potato CV driver. I don't fly my plans into walls of enemy AA. I know you still have to spot. But there's only so much you can do at T4 with single anemic torpedo drops, trolling rockets and bouncing bombs. You've influenced T4 CVs waaaaaay into the ground and with it, the ability to generate any meaningful XP. I've never landed sixteen torp drops before and barely moved the match needle, and LOL those 3k citadels against a BB when you can get them. OTOH, I played some T6 where I could actually be a threat, generate XP and have video to prove it. I have a lot of problems with the CV patch, but this one is going to be fatal to a lot of players that didn't get that 8.o XP boost for having already invested in the line. The grind from T4 is long, painful and barely rewarding even with modifiers thrown in. Please look into it. Seriously.

I will stand by you there as well. They have proven remarkably inept at fixing and sometimes unnecessarily fixing their game. Even unwilling, at times. I think the op has a good idea tho. Force the surface ship to multitask. Maybe get a 25-50% effectiveness out of your AA if you don't manually use it, full effectiveness if you manually direct fire.

Spotting per airplane type versus the targets they are intended for. Rockets are obviously intended to be DD killers. Increase rocket plane spotting against them. Dive bombs and Torps are kind of multirole, so maybe DB increase spotting against captial ships and Torps versus cruisers. (still, you would be surprised at how many DDs I can kill with a single T4 torpedo drop). Playstyle-- If you're not flying the plane intended for the target, you have a harder time seeing ships that aren't yours. Allowing them some form of anonymity on the battlefield. If you really want justification, they, um, fly at different altitudes looking for targets. If you don't like that, radar sees through islands in this game, so nyah.

If you're somehow equating the current self-defense fighters to the pre 8.0 fighters a CV could actually deploy, there would appear to be a misunderstanding.

It's the change to radar nobody asked for when not being able to radar through land masses would have solved 99.9% of player complaints and actually balanced the mechanism. I mean, great, I have an extra 5 seconds to maneuver for minimum aspect, but meh, I'm now in-range and radared for longer. WG has a strange definition of nerf.

Honestly, this is an issue. There is no counterbalancing force to push a CV off of a DD target anymore. Can't request fighter cover because, well, none of that exists anymore. If a DD has to stick around an AA screen just to survive, what's the point? Can't spot, can't torp, can't even screen flanks without fear of CV focus. Not to say this is 100% of the time, but it's a thing. I've done it and had it done to me. Didn't even need to fire a shot, and I can spot much, much more accurately now that I control the aircraft directly. Not sure what there is to be done about it without reinstituting fighters, however. Maybe change spotting on the different aircraft classes? Rockets are obviously the DD killers, so give them the spotting range while DBs and torps get a reduction in their ability to spot DDs. Don't know. CVs are just... problematic.

Been finding 10 a tough nut to crack with all the subranks there. Kinda getting burnt out on the backslide and Buffalo nonsense.

Clearly I spent all day locking down a capture point and had no effect on the game. https://youtu.be/TUtvtyEEtpU

Refunds are available. Go to your depot and cash out everything CV related. There's a special section for them. I don't know how that's going to work for your free XP, but I got the hell out of everything I had spent on CVs and put it to other, more useful lines.

You don't even need to be a unicum CV driver. I've noticed you can spot and lock down a DD with vastly more accuracy than point and click. It's much, much easier to judge the AA bubble and perma-spot the DD, letting him blow through his consumables until your team pulverizes him. Yes, you could do that before, but now its EZ mode with no fighters to stop me. I can just loiter all day long until you're dead. Hell, I've got a vid showing exactly that. CVs are so broken it's not even funny.

So, it's 'whining' to provide a context to the op's opinion? Pretty quick to make this personal, aren't we? But at least you got it in the end-- Pluses and minuses.

Just because you offer a dumb alternative doesn't make the first one any less stupid. Likewise, you miss the point that I'm simply illustrating plusses and minuses to both sides-- Op doesn't like his guaranteed damage from two torpedoes and I don't like taking my entire damn flight into AA just to sightsee the pretty explosions. Don't try to white knight for them. It's horrible and you're horrible for trying to do it.

Okay, you take torpedo damage. That sucks. Try this on for size-- I have 6 torpedo bombers. Only two of them will drop ordinance per pass. Yet all of them will take AA damage just for the privilege of flying around. I have to take my entire flight of six into some bullsh*t wall of AA where every last one of them will take stupid amounts of damage just so two of them can make their drop at mid-tier. Do you realize how inane that is? Seriously, don't get me started at the stupidity CVs represent right now. I've got a massive list that doesn't feel sorry for you taking two torpedoes when a skilled CV driver previously could have dropped its entire wing on your doorstep at minimum arming distance to insta-delete your nagato.

What's funny is that WG never had a policy of not nerfing premiums. They have a rich, rich history of nerfing premiums. Most just don't care until it goes from somebody else's problem to their problem. This game is in a permanent state of flux-- to the point where they are only making changes to radar how many years down the road because they're only now realizing its unfair? lol. WoWS is a perma-beta product. invest at your own risk.