Temjin wrote:
If the enemy is about to win by capping, and the rest of your team just needs a bit longer to make it back in time, dive bombers are your best bet for resetting that cap to buy your team enough time.
I would contend that this situation probably occurred precisely because the torpedo bombers you should have had didn't outright sink ships earlier in the battle! I mean okay that might be a use for dive bombers, but dive bombers don't always score even 1 hit in which case this doesn't work! Its that level of useless. Parking your carrier near the cap would have similar effectiveness. Carriers tend to be very poorly handled as ships. They really also ought to be better armed, but all secondary guns are comically impossibly bad in the game right now. How can they hit the water 100 yards from your own ship?
They are good at setting enemies aflame as well, forcing them to use their repair kit. This might sound small, but if they are under fire and happen to be set on fire again, that damage adds up.
That's paper theory at best. Fires only occur every several hits, and while dive bombers might average about 1 hit per mission they don't always get one. Also as far as I can tell the ships turning/movement have no real effect on dive bombing accuracy, which means a player has no reason to pay any attention to coming under attack by them, unlike torpedo planes when you want to turn into them and then pay close attention. This makes them just kind of lame in overall game play terms. They can't even force other players to react the way all but the worst torpedo plane commanders will.
One idea I've seen people floating as a way to make the more useful is to let people select an HE or AP bomb load before takeoff, the former with a high probability of fire/soft damage, the later having a chance at really damaging hits on capital ships, but with the level of arcade Wargaming is aiming at that probably wont happen.
Personally I think the dive bombers need to be like the navy field ones (didn't like the game but I think this part had merit) in which you can choose the release height of the bombs as the planes dive, balancing accuracy against vulnerability to flak and thus ability to do future damage.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
