Commander_Nishikuma

You forgot angling against incoming fire, watching the minimap for signs of destroyers and/or torpedoes, predicting where ships are going to go, and actually playing the objective. Carriers don't have to worry about the last bit since all they do is just kill everything. That's boring.

You blow some hot air for being someone that played the old Hakuryuu like a damage-farmer and seal-clubbed when you weren't. It's not hard to drop a torpedo spread on a destroyer at all, all you do is corral them between your planes and an island and then either hit them or make them turn out, allowing you to drop more torps and stop them from PTFOing or just outright killing them. Carriers were a cancer to DDs already, and the new rework just proved it even more.

It's not that hard to pull off at all. You literally disregard all your other ordinance and just go out scouting the entire team with your stealth planes, maybe hitting some patches of AA from the occasional stray DD that was behind some mountain you flew over, find the biggest blob of ships huddling together for AA and just spam-drop your entire flight's ordinance right then and there. You can spot most cruisers and BBs outside of their AA range since they still have air detection values that are beyond 6km. Stealth torping is neat, yes, but if a CV brainlet like me can make this tactic work, then what's stopping a potato from using this cheese tactic to ruin other people's games? There is no counterplay to it, and that's why people are complaining. I would too, honestly.

Had my first live fire game in Ryuujou yesterday. Kind of wish I had stumbled upon this thread beforehand because that Indy I had to play against kicked my [edited]on the fighter front.

And now we wait..

I would actually suggest the Pan-Asia line of destroyers. Those capital-ship hunters are a good mix of IJN/US DDs with their own flavor of gameplay. You can stealth-torp with concealment expert, contest caps and engage lone DDs at the cost of not being able to torpedo DDs. Like everyone else has said though, it's all about learning the play style that you want to pursue. There's plenty of ships across all of the lines that perform like ones from another, but there is a "meta" to them in the end.

Co-op made appreciate Aoba, but my Wickes game was the one wheree I went wild. Both times the teams were great as well. You want to protect people like that, so you can imagine what happened when an AI got close to them..