Board Thread:Fleet's Prepared-ness/@comment-27121313-20151109101724/@comment-26095489-20151122113009

Short cut (and recommended) is to do easy to save resource and can get AS, if you want the A medal you can do e4 Medium, plus the hard mode reward in e3 can be easily obtain with akashi improvement, no need for wasting resource here

Yes, Abukuma is way better than jintsu with opening torpedo set up, the most you will use her in E4 is to help clearing more trashes when farming in easy were there is no lock, IMO not recommended to use abukuma for clearing in Hard unless you got high level Katori combos, plus E4 hard final is pure-pure RGN, get your resources/time ready

Shelling support still best aerial support because of CAs (fBB in Hard) need stronger strike while areal could easily do scratch damage, so far the only time aerial support can be recommended is for boss support in E5