Are lower tier CVs as broken as we think they are? - World of Warships 

I remember when US BBs were explained as having good AA. Such a joke now.

Old RTS carriers had an incredibly high skill floor and were by far the most punishing class to play as you could lose your entire arsenal to two CLs hidden behind an island. I miss the old days.

Tried flying with planes like these in War Thunder. Torpedo bombing there is a whole different story: you FEEL the weight on your plane with that heavy torpedo. Takes a while to climb up to high altitudes due to the extra weight and you arent turning your plane this well even without the torpedo. Also can't fly high then swoop down and drop your torp. If you swoop down from high up, your plane will increase speed drastically and depending on your torpedo's limitations, you cannot drop your torp when you are flying too fast or too high or else it will drown the instant it hits the water. You have to fly low to the water and slow while aiming your shot and weathering AA fire and enemy fighters. Then you drop the torp and have to try to escape with your life. Neither game is perfect, but it's interesting when you play lots of different ww2 games for new perspectives. Naval aerial bombing warships (using actual naval bombers) in WT feels like a struggle; in WoWS you feel like God's hand over the ocean.

Imagine expecting WG to actually balance a game. They have no incentive for that. Quite the opposite. The incentive is to have as broken vehicles as possible to get people to grind or purchase them, and rotate the brokenness so there is always something new to grind or buy. This is what people call powercreep.

Funnily enough, I remember the old RTS style of carrier gameplay having some extremely broken aspects as well. For example, you used to be able to one-shot BBs with unavoidable cross-drops from torpedo bomber squadrons, AP dive bombers could do 35-40k damage on one strike, and a good CV player would find ways to beat all the counterplay and single-handedly annihilate an entire enemy team. Likewise, if a CV player wasn't an absolute god, they were likely the main reason why their team would lose, while the feeling of powerlessness that CV players would have against no-fly zone ships like the Des Moines and Minotaur is something no person playing any game should experience. The class has simply been messed up ever since the beginning; the so-called "good ol' days" weren't actually that good.

Hey Flambass, I have an idea: How about you create a new Account an test the f2p grind in the upcoming economy changes. Would like to see it :)

bismarck's AA was built and designed for high performance aircraft in mind it physically had troubletracking and dealing with something so slow flying like the swordfish.

I remember getting the Kaga in a supercontainer a friend gifted to me. I played 1 game without ever playing CV ever after rework, I sucked. Went in and played 4 games with the Ryujo and then 6 games on the shokaku I watched a Video with Toptier playing Kaga, I then went and play with my Kaga. I completely Stomped the sh*t out of the enemy team. And I only played 10 games with CV and I'm not an unicum player or a gifted man with videogames. I just avoided AA blobs, learned the basic mechanics and thats it.

I started playing WOWs because I was interested in the carrier action in WW2 and got the Langley. I sucked hard, got the Orion, played a loot with it and after 1-1,5 years, I understood the game and moved on to other tiers. End of last year, I gave CVs a try again. This time with Hosho, and even though I sucked with the Langley, I now had enough game experience to utterly crush the enemy teams at T4 with it. (I suck with Ryujo/Ranger nonetheless) All in all, I liked the experience, because I learned to line up torpedos with a CV like you did at 8:17 against the Moltke. It's basically a guaranteed hit. I now profit from this knowledge by playing other classes ...

I remember when I tried carrier when they were new on Legends, I'd literally just find the DDs and circle them til my team killed them. Fun and engaging game play.

To be honest though he's used to playing cv's and knows how to actually use them normal t4 carrier players aren't that good (Sometimes you get that really good one but they only focus on you the entire game whist ignoring the fact that there team is losing) Edit...The reason Bismarck couldn't deal with the Swordfish is because they flew so low they were almost skimming the water with there wheels so the aa could not aim low enough to hit them infact some of the pilots had to pull up a bit to lose there torpedo's

now do this with the other nations too pls, flambass

IME as someone who has been playing a LOT of submarine recetly: subs are basically helpless if anyone on the enemy team is paying attention and actually engaging. A DD driver who is aggressive and sharp on his rudder is basically guaranteed to kill a sub. my experience with people yelling about subs is that they are the same people who yell about CVs: it's BB players who want to camp behind a rock the whole game or sail in straight lines the whole game and never come out of spotting scope view.

Remember playing the early battleships wich have 0 AA, carrier could strike me all game and i would shoot down 0 planes fun and engaging.

I really miss the RTS carriers, wish WG would make the RTS option available so I could strafe players who play CV’s the current way. Also, don’t forget that with the RTS way, the returning planes could be shot down.

I was lucky enough to get the DREADNOUGHT in a container. I have sailed it four times, each time I face 2 Tier IV CVs. It has ZERO AA GUNS. Not even a guy making rude gestures from the lookout tower. Needless to say its lots of fun sailing the Dreadnought.

And now imagine what it was like until ... a year or so ago, when Hosho still had a double torpedo drop. Yes, you were forced to return to your ship sooner, but instead of four to five attacks with around 4800 damage, you got two with 9000 or more, if you got it right. The nerf was needed, and is still not really enough.

How did you get two games where your low tier CV was top tier? Try being tier 6 playing against tier 8, IJN planes evaporate.

The biggest issue with CVs IMO is the fact that there's no reason to conserve your resources. Before, carriers knew that they had to ration their aircraft. Now that you can just throw everything into AA and not care.

well to be fair, flambass, i still consider you one of the best players on the eu server. i have played this game for more than 3 years, got two t10 cv in my inventory and i barely have been able to be half as successfull as you are. so i do think you are the exception rather then the rule

ok, I started watching this hoping Flambass will struggle to get a hit.... nope, turns out it's just me being a potato in every ship out there...

this is a short story of about a year ago: I was trying to come back to WoWS after ~6 months to 1 year of not playing (I got bored with it) and was trying my hand at the Japanese Cruiser line and was playing at tier 4. Having no AA and constantly facing 1 - 2 carriers just made me stop playing all together, you have 0 counter play to an enemy who sits at the other side of the map and you can't avoid all the torps / rockets no matter how hard you try.....

Alot of the people I had seen from T4 to T6 hasnt really tried to dodge your attacks. Not saying that CVs arent OP (They are in the hands of a good player) but you also need to take account for those that dont really seems to try to dodge. Honestly, I had seen the game's own AI dodging better from torpedo attacks then some of those players

Hosho was nerfed hard, it was a proper beast before that

No AA at T4, barely effective AA at T5 on crusiers, I k ow how this is gonna play out without even watching.

To the "can CVs 1 shot people?" i think Hornet may be able to 1 shot bigger DDs with the b25 strike, ive taken 22k in my gumo from them and it wasnt a straight lined up strike.

Now try that again with a FRESH commander with no skills (or 6 at the most)

Well, WG thinks that giving rockets to WW I era planes is good, but giving AA to ships of that era not good.

I mean the idea that a single plane carried more than one torpedo and that that torpedo always performed perfectly. Is undeniably mental. If torpedos worked irl as they do in wws it would of been a different war

The Swordfish apparently were too slow for Bismark AA targeting, causing the guns to fire in front of the planes missing them entirely. Mind blowing indeed.

ah the tiers where enemy has literally no AA totally balanced

-Are lower tier CVs as broken as we think they are? -He Is litteraly a smurfer player and he go play tier 4 with full Camo + level 21 captain. Do you really want to understand if the low tier aircraft carriers are broken? Just play them as a player in tier 4 would actually play them!

I was mad, as DD player because of the f CV's. So I wanted to unlock the Worchester... spend weeks to unlock it, then... CV rework.. unlimited planes............................................

Enjoying the extended vid flambino keep them coming please 🙏 😀

Low tier u get the joy of double cvs every match ya fun and engaging how bout giving cvs a fuel range limit like 20 k then they would acc have to maneuver and put ship in harmes way to be effective

So let me get this straight: The class that was most capable in ASW has no answer to Subs in WoWs. The class that was almost unable to defend against submarines (BBs) actually excell against Subs nor than every other class. Meanwhile Carriers, which were probably the class of ships most vulnerable to fires, can’t be set afire for longer than 5 seconds. They can tear AA-Cruisers apart like every other ship. And obviously carriers also had large plans producing facilities on bord so they wouldn’t run out on planes. Seems legit WG. Well done!

I miss the old carriers... A, I loved playing air superiority, crippling the enemy carriers and giving my allies safe skies so they didn't have to worry, though I only was doing chip damage compared to strike carrier. I also miss the old Cleveland built for AAA. Carriers literally turned around rather then getting anywhere near me.

Thank you for showing why CVs are despised.

You have practiced too much in the high tier CVs :-P In all seriousness, when I started playing 2 years ago it was a nightmare due to all the double CV games at low tier. You get no chance to play the game since you're constantly spotted and have no way to deter the planes from going after you. Sometimes I feel maybe I should try them out properly but if I don't want to get banged by CV's why should I inflict the same on others so I don't.

That comment about Bismarck not being able to stop the Swordfish torpedo planes is probably the real life equivalent to this game, because those planes were made of canvas so unless you hit the pilot or the engine, you basically do no damage to the plane

I felt dirty just by watching this gameplay xD

32:25 la única razón por la que obtuvo tanto daño como cv es por qué simplemente se dedicó a atacar a los BBs lentos, con bajo AA o no esquivaban los aviones, algo que cualquiera que sepa apuntar puede lograr

I have always (at least since the CV rework) thought that lower tier CVs are actually even more broken than they are at high tiers, as a balance to the fact that players have less insight into how to maximize them. I was going to say that they require less skill, but the whole point of CVs at any tier is that they need less skill to have a big impact on the game than other classes of ship.

Just today i did 166k in my serov without even having a problem…we still lost cuz my team didnt cap the bases and in the end it was just a enemy sub who i searched the whole map but cannot locate it and the time ran out

The tier 6 Soviet CV is so over powered. I have had some monster games in it. Can easly rocket plan cruisers for half health a run.

The last game triggered my inner hate towards matchmaking of lower classes and a reason why I don´t play them really often. Just look at 34:58 : 5 T8 ships (CV, 3BBs, CA), 4 T7 ships (2BBs, CA, DD) and 3 T6 ships. WG things it is perfectly ok, but being the ONLY T6 SURFACE SHIP IN T8 BATTLE IS NOT OK. Because of those 3 T6 "ships" was 1 CV, 1 frickin submarine and just one cruiser. Enemy Pensacola played quite well and due to xp-bonus managed to top the scoreboard, friendly Graf Spee probably haven´t had such a blast...

I’m new to WoW - WoT equivalent was artillery and it’s been nerfed to the ground thank god. CVs absolutely belong in the game but from my limited game play so far, one thing makes zero sense to me. Fact that you can basically launch unlimited planes and there’s zero penalty for losing all your planes. Imagine having limited # of planes, and having to repair a depleted squadron (taking time) - then ship AA and formations would actually count for something, and impact a CVS operational power. I know wild ramblings, what do I know I’m just a tank player!

So the answer is: YES

I stil lthink that even if the RTS CVs were much more powerful when used correctly the "new" CVs are such a dumb idea. I actually liked the old CVs and AA at least did something as the planes were limited and the attacks were more powerful but you could do less and every mistake you paid as deplaning up to T7 was very possible

Tier IV carriers are just cancerous. You have virtually no AA so even what minimal "counter play" may exist when you have function AA is gone. There's CV's and there are XP pinata's for the CVs. Two games are being played, one regular game where everyone is trying to have fun playing their T4 BBs, CAs, and DD's, and then the carrier game where they race each other to rack up damage before the game ends.

I'm still in the camp of CV's need to be in the game. One of the things that attracted me to the game in the first place was the naval history side of things and we are talking about the time which was the death of the Big Gun Battleship and the rise of the Carrier Task Force. Would the game be more fun hitting the big, fat delete button on CV and giving up? With the way it is now of course it would for the majority of players but that's a big chunk of the Naval History side cut out. Imo by far the biggest issue with CV in this game is still the amount of spotting they do Lets face it, the average player does it totally by accident on their way to gank their chosen victim. It's also an area where they can actively encourage and reward the "Team" part of what WG insists is a "Team" game. Give the planes a restricted radio range equal to their concealment. They can spot all they want BUT only the friendly surface ships inside that radio range(say 10km from the aircraft) get to see what is being spotted. Everyone else outside that range, treat it like a cyclone. Lit up on the map but not rendered into game. Hell even throw them a bone, maybe let them use fighters as a relay to extend their effective target spotting range back to their fleet. it's not like fighter consumable is being consistently used to protect their team so at least that would take some thought and effort to pull off. Damage output of CV class is wildly inconsistent ship to ship so they need to stop with the sledge hammer approach of trying to find a one fix for all and go back over them one at a time. Taking the nerfed credit/xp earning off is a must to stand a chance of balancing and have players actually believe them too. They have to be far more transparent with it if they stand a chance of dealing with the bad rep CV's have. Just my thoughts but these are old ideas that have been fed back to WG sssooooooo many times so, yeah.... maybe we get the Radio range? They did talk about it a while back. Not holding my breathe though

My real problem with carriers are not that they are op, it is that they are op in the sense that the player who play the carrier can make the whole difference in a game. A good cv player can pretty much decide the outcome of the game, especially when the other team got a potato. When your team got a 34% cv and the other a 60%, you pretty much have lost already. Not always of course, there's always exceptions but often enough. If WG could take the player skill in account during the mm for carriers, I think it would be better. And we see something like that with submarines, where the experienced player might be the deciding factor in a match. A bad sub player doesn't really affect the game as much as a bad cv player though.

and people wonder why Coop mains exist, just show them this video and tell them about submarines and all is revealed as to why, because people actually want to play a game for fun, not to be a target for something that they either cant see or hit, sometimes both

My carriers are all the tier 6 ones, and I have to say I cannot replicate what I see here. My planes get instantly wiped out by AA on every attack run. I'm lucky if I get to drop one attack, and most often any such attacks go wildly off course... especially dive bombs. If there's a fraction of a pixel not on the target ship, the bombs will all fall RIGHT there. Makes me wonder if it's something to do with Captain skills.

How did this man say 'Best lower tier CV is Hosho' I had to grind through that thing to get to Ryujo and it was a fucking pain. You get shot down in a matter of seconds, you get super small attack squadrons, and there's a high chance you get to face Tier 5/6 ships who are just way stronger. What am I missing

Sub is easy to spot from the air if he's been at least hit once you can see the oil stain on the water above her

Playing Haku was so stressful and hard to master in rts. The team with the better cv player usually won now every cv player owns the map.

These games presented here aren't typical, you were top-tier every match. Almost any of the Tier VIII CVs when bottom-tier are rough to play.

Rocket planes actually suck at hitting dds, if your team sucks you can't impact the battle much at those tiers. Farming and getting big numbers is easy though

I must be doing something wrong. I can never make a CV work this well. Granted I never liked the class to begin with. I probably don't even have 100 battles total for CVs. I never get those numbers for citadels. I find the entire class frustrating. Flambass took a squadron in against 2 ships with what looked like decent AA and dropped 3 bombs on 1 ship for 2 cits. I have never seen that in person. I really wish the CVs worked like air strikes and anti sub drops work. And you had a like a cool down like normal ship artillery. And CVs would spot using a spotting aircraft that would like light up a circle on the map for some period and would have a cool down before it could be used again. I think that mechanic would work better for all ships instead of the current setup for increasing range. But there seem to be a million ideas on how to make the game better and yet we keep playing still.

Two major things about the Swordfish attack on the Bismarck, 1: it was at night, and 2: the Bismarck had AA designed to shoot faster planes, and the Swordfish were so slow the timing on the AA shells was way off.

Cyberbullying has to stop! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!

Here is my take on RTS cv's. I personally suck at RTS games so my cv cap was tier 6-7 with RTS cv's and i enjoyed playing them (Again i suck at rts games but it was a nice break). A lot of my time i focused on strafing and perfecting it and the reason was simple if i cant out play the enemy cv I would switch too a defensive stance and strafe enemy planes as much as I could and I got pretty good at this, too the point where my highest plane kills is still in a RTS cv today. I have a new CV at T10 and the only time I play it is to knock of my snow flake in December. The holy grail of cv defence use to be a DM or a Mino and now days they are easy damage and taken out with distain. As a CA main prior to CV rework I barely play them these days simply because I hate being a damage farm for CV's, an aggressive wp DM use to be a cv's worst nightmare now it is just free damage for them. (My absolute favourite was when i got dev struck by a haku two games in a row during ranked a couple of seasons ago) By the way it was a ranger witch was T7 with 64 plane kills.

Bombs work better on DDs

Flambass, you genius bustard, you figured it out! If you can't beat em, JOIN EM! I will now be playing CV EXCLUSIVELY! Thank you for helping me realise what I was missing. Forgive me Carriers and welcome me as one of you. Hence forth, I shall now identify as a c hunt. Wish me luck and my foes "fun". Fair winds and following seas. Cheers

Wow. I’m playing this ship so wrong. Ty for this vid. --> newb. Jeez man

49:21 clevelands for once where pretty nice in killing of planes fast. I used to play the game like 4-5 years ago so bevor carrier rework, and they where awesome in AA. + I played some pretty fun games with friends where i would play a cv with an almost full fighter loadout. First roll was to take the enemys planes out and keeping my 2 mates alive. Second roll scouting for dds. that was acually funny. The biggest joys came after the game when the enemy carriers came crying. And sadly thats the only thing i miss about wows...

Low tier CV is great. Then you switch back to tier 8, get all tier 10 matches and feel like you punch yourself in the nuts every game lol. I will say tier 4 CV's are OP. Whenever I am having a bad day I play my Hermes or Hosho and everything just goes right lol.

Is there point researching German cvs?

T4 CVs are just way broken, I am not even going to try to argue they are not, however, T6 and T8 CVs are in a procarious positin, they are gods when they are top tier and good when mid tier, but they are peasants when bottom tier, and if you play them right and focus on helping your team, i.e. spotting and striking DDs and subs and doing some general spotting, you don't get that much damage, this was playing as a damage farmer, and yoir teams were actualy able to think and breathe at the same time, so they pretty much had this game without you TBH. I can break 100k 9 out of 10 times in T6 CVs if I am not bottom tier and if I go farming, its not that hard to do, but you are not helping your team that way, you are a burden, like that Shima trying to torp from 20km, try playing T6 CVs against T8 or T8 CVs against T10, if you play the way you did in this video, you would get deplaned in 5-8 minutes and than you would just twidle your tumbs for the next 15, unless you play Kaga, that one is a floating plane factory, and I love it lol.

I'm not against infinite planes but like... the squads should reload only one at a time, and like stupidly stupidly slowly from the reserves you start with so you're not USELESS but you have a reason to not just throw planes at a wall. As for everything else, just... I mean fuck it, carriers ended big gun naval encounters, they're always going to be broken, or they're going to be unfun.

Bearn anh ark royal: h e l l o Bomb on dd's to brrrrr, skip bombers have good pen, ark royal if you land all 3 slow Torps, about 9k+ damage. Ark royal you really, really struggle if you get up tiered especially with tier 8 aa with how slow your planes are, bearn you still do but not as much, in ranked you can basically buttsex any DD with ark royal, I do not have bearn but I do have ark royal, ark royal is hilarious when you see those dd's get 1/3rd of their hp just deleted from them from just **1** drop, and then the turn around to buttsex them again.

Well ya even at low tier there are some ships that have S*** or NO AA! Agincourt is 1 NO AA Arizona Way crap AA umm there are a few others that get put into matches with a CV a few ppl quit playing this game early on that I know JUST Because AA ruined it for them 2 from the RTS Days of which I also played and like 3 since the re work they love the game with little to no Air Craft

Had my best Ranger game ever last night, got 70,000 damage, which may not be a lot to you but is to me

The swordfish were made from paper, they were hit plenty of times, shells and bullets just passed through them.

I am not prone to conspiracy theories but.. the Ryujo game.... Both the Nelson and New Mexico did everything they could to take every shot Flam threw at them... -.-

Servo is beyond broken. did 2 drops with rocket planes on a Ranger, first drop was 30700 damage with 8 citadels. next drop killed him.

What's so unexpected. That AA was meant for modern planes. not canvas paintings and wood. shells would pass through and leave clean holes , not having enough time to arm...Plus they were calibrated to intercept modern metal framework planes.

Try that on the na server, it'll be you with nothing but bots, and half of those will suicide Okay, after watching this I'm looking at switching servers... if this is what passes for good on eu, I'd be a exponential super unicorn

"getting the new player experience" > retrains a level 19 kaptain for a Tier 4 CV "durability of the biplanes is nuts" > the dude with all defensive perks under the sun

G1: Nerfed Hosho still looking toxic, and you could have used your APDBs on that DD at the end, he was really low and the delay on the rockets was obv fucking with you.

Oh yea i miss the good old days with my Mino... every CV was taking his distance from you and dident even try there luck.... and now ? Full AA Mino Captain+Attachments and you cant even denie a useless Midway drop on you

Ty for the real talk Flambass! All Cvs are broken AF, they need to rework the AA, the dmg output by Cv and there spotting. But this drunken Devs do a shit for saving there Game they destroy it more and more :/

Balance would be a pack of subs or destroyers, a couple of cruisers, one battleship, or one aircraft carrier. Basically equivalent displacement.

That's crazy, your alter-ego can be heard talking without you even moving your lips

low tier CVs are just as broken as high tier CVs (for their tier obv, not saying a hosho is as broken as a nakimov) because on low tier AA is literally useless. If high tier AA cant even stop multiple drops, low tier AA cant even shoot down planes

yeh. bismarcks AA wasnt designed to aim that low. the swordfish could more or less fly under the fire of the AA guns. nothing special. just modern weapon sytems vs very old and very slow biplanes

6 minutes 2 kills，2 kills from stealing a 600hp and 1300 hp slow ass bb， enemy cv need balance for making 1300 hp on me

R.I.P Kraken

Can we just aknowledge how stupid it is that 5 torpedo bombers are in a flight but only 1 can launch a torpedo at a time? I wouldn’t mind if they reduced the damage per plane but that's just straight up idiotic.

My Brother did 80k dmg and 5 Kills with the Rhein within his first 10 Battles. We were both 300 Battles overall Players 2 Weeks ago, even tho we registrated within Beta times

Biggest problem with T4 CVs is the fact that Torps don't rely on RNG so they are the most effective strike for CVs as most players in the game sail in straight lines or don't know how to engage the planes with there AA yes there are some ships with no AA but I can kill alot of planes with ST louis

Flambass: I have to see what a teir 8 cv is like. Me: Oh dear god, Flamba in Shokaku.......

yo, what the fuck? i just watched you drop torps on a Wesser with only half a formation. that used to be impossible. wtf happened to AAA in this game?

CVs are broken and annoying in every tier.. but what is more "fun" than one CV? That's right! Two CVs!

did Flambass ever mention the fact that u could extend AA range back in RTS CV days?

Would a fix for CVs to be always -1 or less of top tier? That tier 11 destroyers, battleships and cruisers are added but there would be no tier 11 CVs?

First: You have played IJN line, which tier-to-tier are the most powerful Secondly: About EXP. You farmed battleships - it gives you big numbers, but little experience. Play USN aircraft carriers and bully destroyers. The DMG will not be big, but you will be at the top of the table every time and most games will be won

CVs aren't broken - you just got lucky every. single. match :P

I used to do those million miles torp run and I cringe a lot seeing people doing these "till the boundary drop" I just can't figure out why should one do these.