On the Imperial Japanese Navy tree, I'm loving the tier VIII Amagi battleship and tier VII Hiryu carrier both of which feel very powerful and deadly for the opponent, the former with its big guns and solid armour and the latter for its multiple squadrons of torpedo bombers and dive bombers. Even with the changes to manual torp dropping my carrier is a threat to almost any target.
I'm less thrilled with the tier VI Aoba cruiser, but that may partly be due to being spoiled by the american tier VII Cleveland cruiser. I find the firepower of IJN cruisers lacklustre and I have a lot of trouble getting good use out of the torpedo launchers.
I still enjoy dropping in the tier VI Mutisuki destroyer and having a quick run around the map. The guns are next to useless but the long range torpedoes are fun to send streaking at targets 8 km away.
On the American USN side of things, I'm in the tier VIII Lexington. I enjoyed USN carriers up until they changed the flight squad numbers and now I can either go for air superiority with 2 fighters and some damage from 1 torp bombers and 1 dive bombers, or go 1 torp and 3 dive bombers for damage... but dive bombers feel really sad and hardly ever do much in the way of damage. Compared to my IJN tier VII carrier I don't do a lot of damage and either I kill a lot of enemy planes and get hardly any experience or credits for it even if I basically remove his ability to affect the battle, or the other side has no carrier and my fighters become scouts. I'm not quite ready to give up because the tier IX Essex has a better squadron layout I want to try so I'm slowly working towards that but I hope Wargaming is gather stats and seeing lower performance on the USN carrier side.
The rest of the USN types are doing fine. I've got a tier VI Farragut destroyer that has great firepower and speed, and the tier VI New Mexico battleship is hilariously fun, so much so I'm considering keeping it as one of my "money maker" ships. I was working up the cruiser line and had a huge amount of fun in the tier VI Cleveland cruiser, but sold it after unlocking the Pensecola and have not bought it yet.
I think you mean the tier 6 IJN Mutsuki (no unnecessary "i" in the middle :-) ). And I think the Mutsuki is the worst of the IJN dessies I saw/played with. All of the IJN dessies have underperforming guns, so their strength is in their torps. The t5 Minekaze is my favourite so far. Half the reload, same distance, similar speed, bit worse damage for the torps, better concealment compared to the Mutsuki. And I still prefer the 3x2 tubes rather than the 2x3. The t7 Fubuki has at least better damage on the torps and a lot better gun.
ReplyDeleteThe USN carriers seem...better? in comparison to the IJN carriers. IJN carriers hardly get loadouts of 2 fighters and the USN carriers bigger squad size means they have the upper hand in any dogfights. I almost constantly get wrecked by the USN fighters even when I have a tier advantage. My only chance is to lure the enemy fighters into a fight above friendly cruisers/battleships (dessies tend to turn off AA guns to not light up themselves prematurely). And the increased squadsize also helps in torpedo runs. It's easier to hit with several torps when they are much closer to each other. A 3-4 hit run on a BS is totally doable, while with an IJN squad a 2 is the best you can hope usually.
I prefer the IJN Carriers with 3 torp squadrons over the single torp squadron the USN carriers have right now. Agreed that USN fighters control the skies, but I've developed methods for dealing with them and still getting damage on targets :)
DeleteIn my previous comment I meant Hatsuharu as the t7 IJN dessie. The Fubuki is actually the t8 one. Error on my part. :-)
DeleteYeah, I prefer the IJN carriers also. While that 1 squadron of fighters is usually not enough to win, but enough to stall the enemy until I unload my first round of payload from the rest of the squads.
Btw. what do you pick as second and third skills on your carrier captain? Do I get access to the fourth skill line when I pick another second line skill instead of a third one? Because as I can see, none of the third ones are beneficial for a carrier. :-(
I'll need to double check, but I think for Second I take the load torps faster? And third I have to take the View Detection indicator which has been handy, especially on Hotspot where we start in trouble.
DeleteBut I wouldn't worry about skills too much, I was on the 0.4.0 test server on the weekend and they got completely reworked.