Board Thread:Special Events/@comment-1820055-20140815075833/@comment-24928130-20140822225009

Boy o boy...



Level 103

By the end:

Kongou - 91, Hiei - 85, Ooi/KTKM - 99, Tone/Chikuma - 82, Shoukaku - 97, Zuikaku - 95

Fuel - 38k, Ammo - 18k, Steel - 42k, Bauxite - 8k, Buckets - 246

75 sorties total

37 times north to node H (stopped by ACP - 21 times, Wo - 2 times, Aerial opening - 2 times)

23 times mid route to F (stopped 13 times, mostly by DD cut-ins)

3 times south in initial tests

20 boss encounters (5 full sinks, 1 no damage, rest were chipping damage)

2 Deadends (once for forgetting to re-equip Saiuns after sparkles, and the other I have no bloody clue)

9 stopped at node A

3 stopped at node C (mostly cause the subs chipped a ship to red)

I quickly settled for the 1BB, 2CAV, 1CLT, and 2CV setup cause I found it to be the best option for decent survivability and offensive power without utterly draining your resources. I also didn't have Yamato, Musashi, nor Taihou, so my choices in heavy hitters were Nagato/Mutsu. They were too prone to getting crit to red (and expensive to supply/repair) so I opted for the remaining Kongou class that I had. Let's say that I was incredibly impressed with Hiei's ability to dodge almost every shot fired at her (Kongou, not to much). Yes, there was a drop in firepower for the boss, but the real damage came from my CAVs and CLT. The BB was there simply to clear trash and did a very good job of it.

Speaking of CAVs, the Tone sisters were great and performed very well by dodging a lot of shots and only getting hit to medium by everything ranging from Ta-class to BB-hime. I think sparkling might have played a factor into it, but they could certainly take a hit and still contribute.

CLT well... great offensive power (ALL HAIL KTKM), but terrible at avoiding getting hit. My CLT and CVs were the worse culprits in the getting shot/chipping to red department. The Kaku sisters were the main reasons I had to constantly retreat at ACP or yasen. They could certainly take a hit or two (rarely getting shot to red from even ACP or BB-hime from full health), but they were also consistently getting chipped red. For a ship with such high luck, I don't think Zuikaku really deserves it with the number of times she gets hit (not like that stats means ability to dodge).

At the boss node though, this fleet shined. I didn't use boss support because that was a waste for chipping, but this fleet didn't really need it. They were able to clear out most of the mobs by daytime. Generally speaking, at yasen it was just BB-hime and 1 mob (rare occasions, two mobs). Luck? benefits of sparkling? Perhaps. What I found incredibly annoying was that the majority of my encounters were head-on, meaning that I could at best take away 200-300 of the health away. T-advantage and parallel were where all the full sinks happened. Of course, surviving the daytime is a roll of RNG.

When the final kill can around, the chipping fleet simply couldn't deliver because it's balancing defensive and offensive power, and BB-hime just doesn't give two ***** about defensive power. I opted for the 2CLT, 2CAV, and 2CV fleet for two reasons: 1) I was getting REALLY REALLY REALLY tired of ACP wrecking Zuikaku to red, 2) and I needed to maximize offensive power and get as much damage in before the BB-himes could do anything (HA, like that worked...). Final kill took 14 attempts and I used the kill fleet in the last 4 sorties, partial sparkle (or maybe even just flagship sparkle, don't remember, to excited at the time). The end result was this:



Pure. Luck.