Carriers were a mistake

Wargaming is in a perpetual redesigning of carriers with no success. I can now tell you why? Because they were a mistake at the first place, a copy-paste of World of Tanks artillery without thinking about the role.

In World of Tanks, shooting while moving has little point unless you are at point blank range. Movement, or even turret rotation ruined gun dispersion that took time to shrink back after you stopped moving. That means that an already stationary tank has a huge advantage over one that moved into its line of sight, even if they are otherwise equal and spotted each other at the same time. The stationary can instantly fire an accurate shot and then either withdraw or angle its armor. The moving tank has to stop and wait before it can fire. If the stationary had an obstacle nearby, it could hide behind it before the attacker can aim.

Therefore, in World of Tanks, camping is a winning strategy. Since two teams camping for 15 minutes is not a fun gameplay, they introduced artillery which can shoot over the map, without retaliation, but with slow aiming. This allows the attackers to send a fast moving spotter into the enemy, find the campers and the artillery lock on them. If they keep camping, they get a huge shell on their top. Good artillery players could pre-lock the usual camping spots and fire on spotting.

World of Warships doesn’t have such movement penalty. On the contrary, a stationary ship is easy to hit. While a ship moving bow-first cannot fire with all of its turrets, it also present a smaller target and hides its vulnerable parts. So there is no problem to solve, a camper can be defeated by an equal ship moving towards it. While in a WoT game with no artillery the campers would win, eventually making the game unplayable, a World of Warships game without carrier is a complete and enjoyable game. Most ranked games I played had no carrier at all and I didn’t realize any change of strategy. DDs still spot, cruisers still shoot them, battleships still shoot cruisers and there is no widespread camping (besides the usual backside star-savers).

To make things worse for carriers, the air defense capability of ships prevents them to hit campers on the back, as flying over enemy ships is a bad idea. They must hit somewhat isolated battleships or spot destroyers… which is exactly the job of the destroyers. They even have torpedoes. They are just redundant.

The fundamental problem is that the destroyer-cruiser-battleship game is complete and needs no fourth element to add. Anything they come up with keeps being redundant and simply take someone else’s job, making his play miserable, just think of the DD that is perma-spotted by a carrier and practically removed from play. Any kind of “good” solution would need to give them a role on the battlefield that isn’t the role of somebody else and I just don’t see any.

I think the best course of action would be completely remove carriers from the game, repaying the credits for hulls and modules owned and refund all the XP spent as free.

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PS: short personal note: I’ve reached Rank 10, which is the best rank available for Tier 8 ships. Further ranks would need Tier 10 ships, and I don’t even have a 9.