Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26962604-20170522231348/@comment-26366865-20170523045450

You really don’t need anything fancy for clearing normal maps – a kai’d fleet with half-decent equipment will easily get you up to and though half of World 5. I’ve seen people clear B41 (a bunch of CAs with no air power to 5-1) with half their fleets at kai level because they didn’t want to bother leveling the relevant ships. Levels are only really needed at 5-3, since you need the evasion to get thorough all those night battles, and again at 6-3, where high-level, high-power destroyers are pretty much mandatory. (do note that 5-3 can be sub-cheesed, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see people at W6 without a single Kai Ni)

EOs are a different story, of course. While 1-5 and 2-5 can be cleared really early, 3-5 and onwards require either high-level ships or some very specific combination of ships and equipment to be cleared efficiently, and even 99+ fleets will regularly struggle with 5-5 and 6-5.

As for events, the first thing you need to keep in mind is ship-locking. If you don’t have enough ships to properly tackle all the different tags, you’ll really struggle with low-level ships missing and getting shot all the time, or have to suffer through additional nodes due to bad routing. The devs were really nice by allowing us to sortie everything at the last map in the last event, but you really shouldn’t expect that all the time – we even had hard-only locking once. Getting a fleet capable of dealing with extensive ship-locking takes a lot of time and resource investment, so if you are serious about doing full Hard, you need to start ASAP.

Next, equipment. Top-notch, maxed equipment will really save you a lot of headaches when dealing with stuff like Combined Fleet vs Late Model DDs, so if you don’t have Akashi yet, start farming. Half-baked setups with basic craftable cannons and shitty fighters will really screw with your chances of clearing, so you need to start investing soon – equipment improvement is also a really long process.

And finally, there’s game knowledge. Do you know why the 2 guns + seaplane + AP setup is the recommended setup for BBs? Have you ever looked at how air power is calculated? What about pre-cap and post-cap damage modifiers? Knowing this stuff is absolutely essential – there’s no point in having the best tools if you don’t know how to use them. Bad setups will always lead to lots of wasted time, resources and sanity – and if you are doing Hard, you really can’t afford to sortie with crap, especially in the later maps. Please don’t be one those people that gives a TCI to a 12 luck girl, then complains that she “refuses” to kill the boss. Knowing why shit like that is a bad idea is a very important step to clearing events efficiently.

As for how long it takes, it really depends on how much time you are able and willing to invest. I believe three months is enough time to get a fleet ready for Hard, assuming you’re willing to put in the effort and do things efficiently. That said, I’ve never been very efficient with training, so I’m afraid I can’t help you there.