Who thought this US CV rebalancing was a good idea?

[MrSparkle]

My Ranger is even more crapthan it was, but at least it used to have a chance. 1 fighter is simply not enough. Went against a Hiryu (which was always a bad matchup) and my 1 fighter got locked into fighting his 2 fighters, above two friendly ships with AA, and my fighter lost. My captain has Aircraft Servicing Expert and Air Supremacy, I have Air Group Mod 2, and they had no chance.

And it's TB squad seems nerfed. AA chews it up like it's made of paper, but the DBs survive fine. TBs can barely drop one or two torps before being blown out of the sky. It approached a New York - A tier 5 New York - and only three TBs survived long enough to drop. I tried dropping on a Ranger I previously set on fire with my DBs; the DBs both survived fine but the TB completely wiped before being able to drop (and no they didn't attack at the same time). Manual AA may have played a part I'm not sure but man it feels nerfed.

Ranger was never good compared to it's competition but now it's just a liability.

I thought the US strength was fighters and DBs?

[Sovereigndawg]

Let the Captain decide his own load out. Then no one can complain because they did it themselves. What Carrier Captain in the real world doesn't decide their own loadouts. Just give them squadrons and let them decide what they do with each one. I mean really, it's not computer science here.

[WanderingGhost]

It is, but instead of properly balancing fighters (USN fighters are actually insanely OP compared to IJN unless they get the short stick on RNG) they removed proper AS loadouts which, if you couldn't stomp Hiryu's planes with an AS Ranger the issue is the captain, not the ship. And instead of improving the accuracy of HE DB's to be able to more consistently hit, or at least buff HP that they can survive all the AA buffs to cancel manual TB drops, they went "nah, give them a TB (or 2, which is broken usually, on Midway) and AP bombs that can be even more infuriating to everyone. 

[Warped_1]

I am guessing, based on your description, that you are using autodrop and the turns of the enemy ship are extending your time in it's AA bubble.  

I think the new loadout for the Ranger is it's best one, but they should have made it an option, not the only possible choice.  WGs scares me with its heavy handed attempts to "fix" CVs.  This is just like the no straffe/manual drop "fix" for T4/5 but a refusal to even acknowledge that you shouldn't put a T5 CV in a match against a T6.

 

[Crucis]

38 minutes ago, Sovereigndawg said:

Let the Captain decide his own load out. Then no one can complain because they did it themselves. What Carrier Captain in the real world doesn't decide their own loadouts. Just give them squadrons and let them decide what they do with each one. I mean really, it's not computer science here.

Absolutely not.  CV battles should NEVER be decided by the loadout lottery.  They should only be decided in game.

 

A core problem that the devs refuse to acknowledge is allowing carriers of different nations to have squadrons of different sizes.  And another problem this causes can be seen with a comparison of the Ranger and Hiryu (and is probably present with other same tier  CVs).  The Ranger has a single 6 plane squadron, while the Hiryu has two 4 plane squadrons.  But what happens when you give each carrier that 4th level skill that adds =1 plane per squadron?  Yep, you go from a 6 vs 8 plane situation to a 7 vs 10 plane situation, where the Ranger only gains a single plane while the Hiryu gains 2 planes.

if squadron sizes were the same across the board, then they could balance squadrons with one less factor to much things up.  They could  balance squadron capabilities by balancing the individual plane capabilities.

 

 

 

[MrSparkle]

33 minutes ago, Warped_1 said:

I am guessing, based on your description, that you are using autodrop and the turns of the enemy ship are extending your time in it's AA bubble.  

I think the new loadout for the Ranger is it's best one, but they should have made it an option, not the only possible choice.  WGs scares me with its heavy handed attempts to "fix" CVs.  This is just like the no straffe/manual drop "fix" for T4/5 but a refusal to even acknowledge that you shouldn't put a T5 CV in a match against a T6.

 

No I don't use autodrop. They're just so weak to AA compared to my DBs that I swear they've been nerfed. Then again my fighters with all the relevant upgrades have been performing like craptoo. Maybe RNG is bending me over since I returned.

[MrSparkle]

1 minute ago, Crucis said:

Absolutely not.  CV battles should NEVER be decided by the loadout lottery.  They should only be decided in game.

 

A core problem that the devs refuse to acknowledge is allowing carriers of different nations to have squadrons of different sizes.  And another problem this causes can be seen with a comparison of the Ranger and Hiryu (and is probably present with other same tier  CVs).  The Ranger has a single 6 plane squadron, while the Hiryu has two 4 plane squadrons.  But what happens when you give each carrier that 4th level skill that adds =1 plane per squadron?  Yep, you go from a 6 vs 8 plane situation to a 7 vs 10 plane situation, where the Ranger only gains a single plane while the Hiryu gains 2 planes.

if squadron sizes were the same across the board, then they could balance squadrons with one less factor to much things up.  They could  balance squadron capabilities by balancing the individual plane capabilities.

 

 

 

We've been crying for that since the game first launched.

[Estimated_Prophet]

55 minutes ago, MrSparkle said:

We've been crying for that since the game first launched.

As much as I hate the arfing mechanic, why didn't you strafe into his fighters as he came in to lock you up?

Ranger should still murder Hiryu's fighters in a strafe battle...

[MrSparkle]

I strafed, he dodged. I can't always catch them off guard.

[Avalon304]

23 minutes ago, MrSparkle said:

I strafed, he dodged. I can't always catch them off guard.

Then exit strafe and reengage at another time.

[FlashTX]

I will just say the CV problem is still a problem.  WG needs to get it fixed by listening to the players.  Which players, I have no idea! 

[HazeGrayUnderway]

The USN CV Revamp needed to happen because Tech Tree USN CVs were ALL garbage.

 

Post Revamp, Bogue is competitive with Zuiho:  Look at the historical stats of the two, it was so lopsided in favor of Zuiho it's freakin' hilarious.

Post Revamp, Midway is a desirable ship once again.

 

But post Revamp, Independence hasn't gotten better.  Ranger, Lexington, Essex have gotten worse.  Lexington is the first of these Revamped CVs to go through Ranked and she is absolutely getting slaughtered.  Next Ranked Season, expect Ranger to do even worse than her already embarrassing performance from last Tier VII Ranked.

 

1 fighter unit in Tier VII-VIII does not cut it with the array of squadrons the competing CVs there have.  I don't know who at WG thought it a good idea to go down to 1 fighter unit when you got Hiryu, Shokaku, Enterprise sporting 6 units in the air, including multiple fighter units and more bombers than your dumb 1 fighter unit can stop.

 

6 USN CVs have undergone the Revamp and only 2 of them are any good, the rest undesirable trash.

[MrSparkle]

8 hours ago, Avalon304 said:

Then exit strafe and reengage at another time.

Didn't know you could do that. Is that something new too? Last I remember only Saipan could disengage, and I don't even remember the specifics of that.

[HazeGrayUnderway]

2 hours ago, MrSparkle said:

Didn't know you could do that. Is that something new too? Last I remember only Saipan could disengage, and I don't even remember the specifics of that.

Any fighter unit can exit strafe once manual CV attacks are available, but anytime this is done they lose 1 plane from the unit.  Except Saipan, she doesn't lose a plane.

 

You have to be careful in later tiers though.  IJN fighters get faster than USN ones.

[SgtBeltfed]

14 hours ago, Sovereigndawg said:

Let the Captain decide his own load out. Then no one can complain because they did it themselves. What Carrier Captain in the real world doesn't decide their own loadouts. Just give them squadrons and let them decide what they do with each one. I mean really, it's not computer science here.

In real life, a carrier captain has little choice in the loadout of his ship, period. What his ship is carrying is determined well above his paygrade.

[MrSparkle]

3 hours ago, SgtBeltfed said:

In real life, a carrier captain has little choice in the loadout of his ship, period. What his ship is carrying is determined well above his paygrade.

A carrier captain also wouldn't send one fighter squadron at a time vs an enemy's two.

It's impossible to use real life examples unfortunately. All that we can do is keep telling WG that there is a problem, not that they'll care.

I remember when Midway had jets :(

[GreyFox78659]

I like the revamp. It fits my play style.

[DemonicTreerat]

Well obviously the developers. But those are the same folks also refused to acknowledge that they completely screwed up Montana's deck armor (and still refuse to account for the missing armor on Iowa and Montana) until one of them made a public goof, ignored cruisers lack of any effective way to hunt down DDs until matches became 5+ DDs per side, etc. So their judgement might just be compromised by a combination of alcoholism, stupidity, and bias.

What we're seeing is the typical "hey lets throw out a half of a half-assed idea and see if it works without installing the other half at the same time. How cares if it completely screws over a group of players - less work for us." Will it change? Almost certainly not given who staffs WG and makes their decisions. That would require admitting to screwing up.

[Palladia]

Part of it works, part of it doesn't.  The parts of it that don't work,  T7 and 8,  really,  REALLY don't work.  USN CV's are just worse than their IJN counterparts in every way. Unable to keep up in air supremacy with even the IJN's balanced loadouts and not even approaching close to as effective in their damage. All AP bombs do is add another roulette and remove nearly every other ship type from the list of targets for dive bombers.

The only way this is going to work is if USN fighters at those tiers are given a special buff like IJN fighters get at T4 and 5.  Not a huge one, but enough so that in those 10v7 matches the IJN squadrons suffer heavy losses for their win.  Also buffing the accuracy of USN dive bombers so its not such a massive crap shoot would be good.  Like...to Saipan levels of accuracy.  Thats the only way dive bombers are going to be able to effective work as a USN equivalent of IJN damage.

[Numbah18]

On 1/13/2018 at 11:48 PM, MrSparkle said:

We've been crying for that since the game first launched.

What is this we you speak of  If all the squadrons were the same size then the only thing that would make one nation better than the other would be stats. Why would you pick IJN anymore when is the same except for better AA and a few more spare planes.

 

On 1/15/2018 at 10:25 PM, Palladia said:

Also buffing the accuracy of USN dive bombers so its not such a massive crap shoot would be good.  Like...to Saipan levels of accuracy.  That's the only way dive bombers are going to be able to effective work as a USN equivalent of IJN damage.

You can't really buff DB accuracy to much without them being an undogeable squad that can hit everything.

[MrSparkle]

Personally I'd prefer 2/1/1. I wasn't a big fan of the 0/1/2 strike loadout even though I had some success with it and I know 1/1/2 is a buff to that loadout (and to 1/1/1), but it's nowhere near what Ranger and Lexington need. It's just wrong for US CVs to not use their superior fighters.

[LizardKin19]

I have been playing my Lexington recently, and I agree that having to rely on one fighter squadron for defense of a whole fleet is rediculous.  The Shokaku, at the same tier, has a 3/1/2 loadout, which gives it TWELVE fighters (or fifteen with air supremacy) versus six (or seven with air supremacy.)  This means the one torpedo and two dive bomber squadrons have NO chance of making it past those fighters intact unless the Shokaku captain isn't paying attention for some reason.  Also, the rearm time for American squadrons is too long.  When you inevitably lose your fighters and bombers to either the AA guns of higher tier ships, or to IJN fighters, then they take forever to deploy a new squadron...and your now worse off than before.  At least make it so that each carrier is launching an equivalent number of each plane, either by equalizing squadrons, or by giving the Lexington, for example, 2 squadrons of six (12, or 14 with supremacy) which is still one less than a supremacy Shokaku has with it's three squadrons of fighters.

On another note, while I know that high tier ships are supposed to be more difficult to attack, one unsupported ship should not be able to totally annihilate an airstrike in seconds, with only one or two planes making their attacks, then getting wiped out on the way out.  With the recovery times that carriers have, they are basically out of the battle until new planes can be launched, and then they are also wiped out.  Instead of being a useful part of the team for attacking enemy ships, the CVs are basically relegated to scouting and hoping their teams can destroy the enemy.  This problem is most prevalent from Tier VII and up, when a Tier VII CV can face Tier IX ships.  That stacks the odds even more against the CV.  I'm not saying that AA is too strong, it's that planes are too fragile.  Should losses to squadrons occur?  Yes.  Total wipeouts?  No.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post.

[MrSparkle]

You bring up a good point Lizard: A single ship should not be virtually immune to air strikes, even ships like the Iowa class with historically excellent AA.

What if AA was changed so that it's cumulative within a bubble? The more ships in a given area the stronger the AA of each ship, and a ship by itself does not have so much AA that it shrugs off air strikes. It already sort of works that way now, in that the more ships sailing as a fleet the better the AA protection. But it's not the same effect as I'm imagining right now. I'm imagining an AA system where that strong AA defense is only present in a fleet sailing together. One ship can't just pop Defensive Fire all by it's lonesome anymore and have it's full effect, it would instead boost the AA even further in an area around the cruiser (including the cruiser itself).

AA would be a teamwork stat with a lesser individual ship stat.

It would seriously shaft CVs though that by necessity have to stay back and out of sight for much of the match. A CV up near the front lines is a dead CV until it's safe to move closer.

I'm just tossing ideas out there. No way Wargaming will give a damn.

[C_D]

On 1/19/2018 at 1:17 AM, LizardKin19 said:

I have been playing my Lexington recently, and I agree that having to rely on one fighter squadron for defense of a whole fleet is rediculous.  The Shokaku, at the same tier, has a 3/1/2 loadout, which gives it TWELVE fighters (or fifteen with air supremacy) versus six (or seven with air supremacy.)  This means the one torpedo and two dive bomber squadrons have NO chance of making it past those fighters intact unless the Shokaku captain isn't paying attention for some reason.  Also, the rearm time for American squadrons is too long.  When you inevitably lose your fighters and bombers to either the AA guns of higher tier ships, or to IJN fighters, then they take forever to deploy a new squadron...and your now worse off than before.  At least make it so that each carrier is launching an equivalent number of each plane, either by equalizing squadrons, or by giving the Lexington, for example, 2 squadrons of six (12, or 14 with supremacy) which is still one less than a supremacy Shokaku has with it's three squadrons of fighters.

On another note, while I know that high tier ships are supposed to be more difficult to attack, one unsupported ship should not be able to totally annihilate an airstrike in seconds, with only one or two planes making their attacks, then getting wiped out on the way out.  With the recovery times that carriers have, they are basically out of the battle until new planes can be launched, and then they are also wiped out.  Instead of being a useful part of the team for attacking enemy ships, the CVs are basically relegated to scouting and hoping their teams can destroy the enemy.  This problem is most prevalent from Tier VII and up, when a Tier VII CV can face Tier IX ships.  That stacks the odds even more against the CV.  I'm not saying that AA is too strong, it's that planes are too fragile.  Should losses to squadrons occur?  Yes.  Total wipeouts?  No.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post.

AMEN...

total wipeouts...is ridonkulous

[Crucis]

On ‎1‎/‎17‎/‎2018 at 7:43 PM, Numbah18 said:

What is this we you speak of  If all the squadrons were the same size then the only thing that would make one nation better than the other would be stats. Why would you pick IJN anymore when is the same except for better AA and a few more spare planes.

 

You can't really buff DB accuracy to much without them being an undogeable squad that can hit everything.

Right now, why would anyone pick USN CV's?  It would be vastly better to have squadrons be the same size, and balance CVs by balancing their planes.

What it would come down to is that IJN CV's would trend towards more TB heavy loadouts while USN CVs would trend towards more DB heavy loadouts.  And when I say "trend", what I mean is that in any situation where the USN and IJN CVs of the same tier had the same number of squadrons and that number was odd, the USN CV would have 1 more DB sq while the IJN CV would have 1 more TB sq.

 

Another way that they could deal with the squadron size mismatch, though it's a nasty and almost certainly controversial solution would be to get rid of fighters entirely.  The benefit here would be or seem to be that squadron size mismatches in TBs and DBs seem to be relatively unimportant.  of course, having no fighters whatsoever would mean that it'd be entirely up to ships and their own anti-air capabilities to defend themselves from enemy bombers.

 

Or here's yet another thing they could do.  Rather than making all squadrons the same size, why not make only fighter squadrons the same size?