Ducc_ducc

I got those stats from your opening thread, where you bring up hypothetical win/loss/save ratios. They may be much better for a good player, who can leverage the class to better results. Even so, according to battle efficiency metrics, DDs are the better class. You can fail up if you have a slightly negative winrate through star saving, and this can be shown using some basic math. Generally, up to 40% WR can be saved using star saving and the automatic star gained from each rank up. This can be seen by another set of ratios and looking at their slope. Generally for each 5% WR you drop, you need to save another 10% of stars to break even. So if you have 40% WR, you need to save 1/5 stars to break even, this becomes more and more difficult the lower your WR is, and when you get down to 30% its generally impossible. Now you may be experiencing some level of failing up, which would explain a bit. According to WG's own metrics, DDs have the second highest battle influence. This means that playing DD badly is in fact, more detrimental to the team, as that's a greater battle efficiency loss then playing BB badly. If your plan is to fail up, BB is a better bet, because they have the singular lowest impact upon the match of every class therefore, your failure means nothing, because you weren't particularly necessary to begin with. This is acutely the case with Thunderer/Yamato, where an opposing Yamato/Thunderer is probably going to be there to make up for your handicapped play, and thus you balance each other out. It's moreso the case that you are adjusting for the fact that you are useless to the team by playing the less relevant class, then actually playing a strong ship.

Your math doesn't check out. Firstly, using your own numbers, if a deadeye BB wins 1/3 games, is top 1/3 lost games, and is not top 2/3 lost games, he has no star increase. This can be seen just by plotting it on a graph. Even if he is top half of the time, the increase is miniscule. Plotting this against an average DD player with a 50% WR and the same chance of getting top (DDs have a higher base experience gain due to battle influence.) We get the above graph, with red being deadeye BB and blue being the DD player. Even assuming the WR is only 45% for deadeye BB. Star gain is only marginally better. We can also note that for both of these, star gain will fall as they approach a higher rank, let's say at a rate of 2% per rank, and 4% for the deadeye BB. The ranks that will be capped out are very different, and the average player will still cap out at a higher rank then the deadeye BB, because he will actually make star progress, rather then the BB player, which makes a very small amount of stars with a falling star conservation rate. Also looking at your pitiful stats, the battleships have a marginally better winrate then your DDs, which may explain how you had a better chance of success, although your ranked battles show a 0% ranked WR in BBs, maybe its not updated to your current stats, but that could explain the difference. Now if we have a poor DD player, it my be true that BBs are easier to rise through the ranks with. However, comparing the ability to rise through ranks to the average player, I think that giving up wins sabotages your ability to generate new stars, rather it gives you the frankly, much less valuable, and more questionable, ability to hold the tiny number of stars you gain. This usually evens out, and does in the numbers you presented, as a wash or 2/3rds efficiency of teamplay. Now matchmaker efficiency for DDs is a gamble, but by Wargamings released metrics, DDs have the highest battle efficiency, besides CV, per class. This means that playing DD badly is in fact, more detrimental to the team, as that's a greater battle efficiency loss then playing BB badly. If your plan is to fail up, BB is a better bet, because they have the singular lowest impact upon the match of every class therefore, your failure means nothing, because you weren't particularly necessary to begin with. This is acutely the case with Thunderer/Yamato, where an opposing Yamato/Thunderer is probably going to be there to make up for your handicapped play, and thus you balance each other out. It's moreso the case that you are adjusting for the fact that you are useless to the team by playing the less relevant class, then actually playing a strong ship.

This is where I dislike Weegees direction. You make a fair point on late game, but that is a fault of engineering aircraft carriers with a massive hangar and recharge. Making the early game far more punishing and late game easier is a core CV mechanic, and part of why I think they’re overrated as a class. Most games are won or lost early-mid game, and CVs do much more mopping up then they do actually winning games. This is why I suggest longer ranges and higher overlap, to key into that core mechanic of playing conservatively on early game.

Clearly this poor man has never encountered RTS Minotaur.

Honestly the DD. CVs can’t cap, CVs can’t smoke me, and CV’s are out-DPS’d by DD. I’ve seen far more games won by the last surviving DD then games won by a CV.

I think that the main point of contention is this. The CV is balanced to a specific environment regarding massed AA bubbles, the ability for cruisers to provide AA support to their respective destroyers, etc. The fact of the matter is that when you have five CVs per side, the number of AA platforms and thus the support thins, while the number of CVs exploiting that lack of support increases. The OP fundamentally misreads how CVs are balanced, and why his suggestion doesn’t work. The idea that having more CVs in game doesn’t work isn’t proof they aren’t balanced, it’s proof of concept that CVs are balanced fundamentally for use in a team environment where ships can effectively deny CV by massed AA. This is why I object to the WG AA changes, particularly capping damage by overlapping bubbles. Overlapping AA should be both easier, and exponentially more damaging then it is. Nerfing it reduces the concept of how CVs perform in their environment and as a theory for some unrewarding convenience to noob CV captain while making the elite CV play even easier.

Honestly, it is but poorly. I've very rarely seen a tier 8 CV top a tier 10 game, or even get mid. I agree that accessibility and balance are at odds though, and I lean very heavily towards a more punishing game for the CVs. If you look through my other comments, you can note that I heavily disagree with how Weegee has set up their AA and how it operates, but that's a different issue from why they're capped, or the point I was making, that cutting into the number of AA platforms reduces the AA stacking per cap and makes OP's suggestion untenable.

You're projecting your desired response to the response given by the community. No one here is angry besides from some irritation at how you bait and your rather snide tone. There have been several answers already given for why mass CV games are unlikely to work out. They are in order of severity; Don't mesh with envisioned role of CV as a multi-use spotter and damage dealer countered by AA stacking. Matchmaker doesn't have enough CVs for this. It would require map size rebalancing to compensate for less surface ships per square kilometer. It would require AA rebalancing to allow those surface ships to bubble AA more effectively. Those points are all fair, were laid out evenly, and then you take them as proof that in the current climate CVs are systemically broken. That's a leap of logic that both goes past what you stated in your post, and shows some baiting in the OP. Firstly, the very point that CVs are interchangeable with other ships is clearly wrong by just looking at the core mechanics of AA stacking. They're clearly meant to be less powerful/virtually useless against a decently uncompromised flank. Weegee has strayed pretty far from that vision, and I think erroneously made CVs more forgiving by capping damage from the bubble, making flak disappear in the end run, and removing core concepts like increased AA range and high use AA skills like the 50% damage bonus by the former tier IV skill. IMO AA needs to be reworked to make it far less forgiving for the CV to wander into a death blob, perhaps a damage multiplier for number of AA bubbles you're in. This would bring CVs in line with the core mechanics they have been in with the rework, a very reserved anti-roamer and very late game player, countered by decent cap presence and some foresight by players. Of course, with that change CV alpha would need to go up, as it would be a very long and patient wait to find your targets and deliver a strike. That would reward the CV for target finding better, and keep the rather cathartic feeling of getting a well deserved strike up. When I played in RTS, you had to hunt down the two or three ships available, and you had maybe five vulnerabilities all game. The reward was so much better for finding them though, because of the extreme effort required. Now it's a very dull series of easy strikes, a result of the whole affair becoming too easy on the CV and their alpha being tanked to a negligible level.

Oh no, the stealth torping is probably the least powerful part of DD gameplay. Farming out 30-40,000 with guns using island and smoke is pretty easy even on IJN DDs, and adding into that mix the powerful cap dominance and ease of slipping out of their counters, DDs are currently the most powerful class in the game. So much so, that most of the game is focused around countering the DD to prevent them from running away from the match. If you step back in a match and examine exactly what it is that wins games, or watch how teams perform. The game is actually built around DDs and how they are played, from caps, to spotting, and yes, their counters. It's very difficult to say DDs aren't the most relevant class in the game when 90% of the gameplay is won or lost by your DD players.

Honestly? As a DD player you can very easily do as much as a same tier BB or CA, as well as bring your team a handy victory. The very best DD players are on par with the very best CV mains in terms of winrate, and a simple look at the stats page can show that much. It's frankly easier to win as a Destroyer, due to the higher stopping power of the DD on a flank. A CV can do very little about a flank collapse, while destroyers quite easily reposition or can use smoke to slow the advance. I've played a thousand DD games, and nearly as many CV games, many of them during RTS, and quite frankly, the current CVs are harder to win with then a well played Akizuki or Akatsuki due to lack of cap presence or stopping power. CVs just apply a small amount of pressure at the right points in most cases, not an overpowering damage presence or cap power. You do need the entire team to counter a well played DD. Saying you just need to push back with another DD or a radar shows you barely understand DD play. It's extremely easy to slip out of radar and avoid DDs with any situational awareness and some foresight. They did design the game with an absolutely massive amount of islands after all.

No, this is due to map size and core mechanics, not due to innate power level of the CV. As far as standoff damage, the CV struggles to meet the DPM requirements to sink any ship within three to four minutes, far longer then any other type. CV and anti-CV gameplay is centered around avoiding AA and creating high AA concentrations. This is why CVs are an issue in smaller settings without reduced map size, because it’s a lot of space to blanket in order to have tactical impact. That’s why I feel standardizing AA range, and removing the ability for very long range AA like the Minotaur, was a mistake, since it removed a key component to the anti-CV gameplay. you only need 10-11 platforms on large maps, on smaller maps they would perform better obviously. This also brings in the second issue with your hypothetical, which is that surface gameplay would feel sparse based on map size. I don’t find it silly that it requires 11 ships to counter one highly effectively. Countering a skilled DD is a team-wide effort to locate and pin down the ship, before it very systematically deals massive damage with torpedoes and destroys vision. We’re just very normalized to team-wide anti DD play, more so then against CVs, which are fairly rare. To be fair I main IJN ships and the last time I died to a CV was two months ago, so I’m fairly biased to seeing it as a non-issue.

It’s really not all that different from losing DD though. I’ve been on a lot of teams that lose CV early and win. Mainly because CV DPS is very low, and because they’re actually very predictable when it comes to spotting, they can be worked around by a clever player with a modicum of effort. Of course, losing the CV is usually due to an egregious team error, (total flank collapse, DD slipping past lines, and so on) so losing CV is pretty correlated with a loss.

CV power is calibrated to the AA it meets per tier. That simple, when you have 10 surface ships in game, the AA is necessarily better and harder to get around then when there are 6. It’s not a difficult concept to get around. Due to this, having 5 CVs in game takes 4 potential AA platforms out of the game. If this were to change, you’d have to pull CVs away from being limited by AA, and towards more options like a fighter squadron to counter CV aircraft, etc.

Sure. But let’s not kid ourselves. The CVs won’t do nearly as much damage as the same battleship/ultra high skill CA count, what irritates players isn’t the CV attacks, which are quite frankly, pitiful until you hit X, but the fact that you don’t get damage numbers from farming them out like you do a BB. You would also want a range extension on AA guns, since the CV damage is watered down by more surface ships, giving surface ships better AA coverage. Giving the surface ships better coverage for overlapping AA would be the best way to compensate for a greater CV/ship coverage. The limit as is gives a better coverage of AA, having as few as 6 surface ships over three caps eliminates the potential for group AA. Besides, Matchmaking really doesn’t have enough CVS besides from tier IV and VI for over 2 CVs/game.

I... Cannot legally confirm or deny this.