[Azur Lane] Fleetbuilding 101 - Flagships transcript

What's up, guys? In this episode of Fleet Building 101, we'll be covering the flagship. With that being said, the other two main fleet slots, both referred to as off flag, don't have anything special going on positionally, so they won't warrant their own videos. Okay, so being in the middle, the flagship offers two major positional advantages when it comes to interception and barges. When it comes to interception, the flagship's auxiliary guns are equally far away from both the top and bottom lanes from where enemy suicide ships may approach.

A battleship in the top position will be too far away from the bottom lane, and their secondary guns won't detect the suicide ships until they get too close. Vice versa for the bottom position. Also, the angle at which they would fire at the opposite lane would be too sharp and more prone to missing. In most of campaign, with chapters 12 and 13 being the rare exceptions, suicide ships are something that cannot be flatout ignored unless you're severely overleveled and overgeeared, and putting one battleship in the flagship position is usually enough to handle them.

Then for barges, there are some battleships that fire their barges directly in front of them that cover the most amount of area from the flagship. These include Monarch, Eizmo, Hood, and so on. Most, if not all of the best battleships these days have targeted barges. So, unless you're using those affforementioned older battleships for fun, it's not something you really have to worry about. As for how you can tell whether a barrage is targeted or fixed, targeted barges have a targeting property.

For example, we can see it here in New Jerseyy's barrage data. The two arcing portions of a barrage are targeted and then the third part of a barrage fires straight shells that are not arcing and is not targeted. Technically, she would hit more of this barrage from the flash position, but it's the weakest part of the barrage by far, and the low damage is spread quite thin, so it's not really something worth considering.

Looking at Monarch's barrage for comparison, there's no targeting property because it's fixed. Do note that the wiki is maintained by people who may occasionally make mistakes like all people do. So, there might be a barrage where they forgot to add the targeting property to the data, even though the barrage is actually targeted. To catch it, all you have to do is pay attention for the 3 to 5 seconds or so when the battleship activates a barrage in combat and see if it's targeted.

Back in the day, before we had wide access to barrage data, watching the battle was how we gained information about barrage properties. These days, most if not all of the best battleships have targeted barges. So, barrage patterns are usually non-factors when it comes to deciding what ship goes where, like they used to be. Okay. Aside from these two positional properties, the rest of the flagship considerations are related to skills.

This is information obtained from reading skill descriptions. I'll run you through numerous examples in hopes that you'll get the point by the end. The really popular thing right now is the GVP engine with GVP as the flagship plus Eldrich and Trafalgar in the Vanguard. Looking at their skills, Eldrich activates her 60% slow, which lasts for 6 seconds when the flagship fires her main gun or launches their Earth Strike, and then Trfalgar activates her 10% evasion rate debuff for 10 seconds when the flagship fires their main guns.

Since GVB fires twice as often as other ships, she has to be the one to trigger these effects every time she fires. Otherwise, she'll only benefit from them for half her salvos. Not only that, but she also has the highest reload out of all the best battleships. Since her cool down reduction is exactly 50%, her even numbered salvos do line up with those of normal battleships. And then for those salvos, she fires just before the other battleships as well and applies Eldrich and Travular's debuffs before the other battleships fire, making sure that everyone benefits.

Even if you're not using GVB, you would still want to make sure that the entire main fleet gets Eldrich Interfogar's debuffs. So, whoever fires first should still get the flagship position, provided you are using Eldrich Interfogar in the Vanguard. This would likely be HMS Vanguard if you're using her. Otherwise, Azuchi is quite fast as well. And Alsas is not that fast, but she has a preload that would benefit a lot from being the flagship and activating those debuffs to increase the damage of her preload.

Another example is Plymouth, who increases the damage of the flagship by 18% if it's a battleship. If you're using a flagship that does 100k damage total, Plymouth's debuff will add 18k to the total. But if the flagship does 200k damage, then the 18% will be 36k total damage added. So, you would want to prioritize putting the battleship with the highest personal damage output in the middle to make the most out of Plymouth's debuff.

There are also some skills that are tied to the other main fleet slots. C-52's debuff that increases damage taken by enemies is tied to the top position of the main fleet. If her debuff is the only one or most important one in the fleet, then you would want a ship that fires or launches first to be in the top position so that all your main fleet ships can benefit from it. Her debuff is not as potent as Eldrich or Trafogars, though.

So, if you're using the three of them together, then you would want the flagship to fire first, activating Trafalogar and Eldrich's debuffs for the entire main fleet. Then, the top ship fires second, so that the main fleet ship gets some of Z-52's debuff, and then the second and third ships get the debuff in full. Guam has something similar, an armor break debuff that is also tied to the top ship firing, but her debuff is permanent.

So putting a ship with a preload in the top position will result in the most benefit, but it's not as important since it lasts forever. So even if some of your ships don't benefit on their first salvo, they will for the remainder of the battle once applied. Here are some different types of buffs. We have Vanguard, who reduces the flagship's main gun spread by two, and same with the USB auxiliary. This is a strong effect, but it doesn't do anything once the spread is low enough.

So, for example, Meckllinburgg, who has minus spread from her skills, would not really gain anything from having additional spread reduction, meaning someone else without any innate spread reduction would benefit a lot more from being the flagship and receiving the buffs. Here's another example, Northampton 2. She has a 50% slow that is activated when your flagship launches their airirst strike if that flagship is a USS carrier.

If you're solely relying on this slow to set up your attacks, then you'll obviously want to use a USS carrier as the flagship. pretty straightforward and one of the uncommon cases where you should be running a carrier as the flagship. If you do this though, you obviously can't make use of Trafalar's debuff, which requires a battleship flagship. So, it's either one or the other. Not saying that the Northampton synergy is particularly good in the grand scheme of things.

Just something to consider if you're building a fleet centered around using her slow. Moving on to some other examples involving individual skills. Here is Nagato. Her faction buffs activate when Sortita is the flagship and her big seven Sakura barrage is also centered. So yeah, just read the skill and you should know. Specifically, her 20% damage buff to IG and carriers is in a separate clause and does not require the flagship, but you would still be missing out on the firepower, reload, and accuracy for ships, and the hit rate of her barrage would be severely reduced.

A good chunk of faction buffs are like this with other examples including Rishlu and Mikasa, but not all. For instance, Victoria Vento and Soy use can just go wherever. One last thing I'll mention, sometimes there are these ships in campaign that fire arcing shells at your main fleet, dealing a ton of damage and potentially setting them on fire. If your main fleet ships are concealed, like if there are carriers or you're just doing chapter 14 where even battleships have concealment, the enemies just fire directly ahead.

For some reason, I feel like my fleets on auto tend to kill the bottom enemies first, while the enemies at the top tend to survive for a bit longer, meaning the top position is in more danger of being shelled. So, I put my squishier off flag ship in the bottom position. This may not apply to you because your fleet targets the enemies at the top for whatever reason, or maybe there's just some other content where the bottom is more dangerous in general.

So, just pay attention and move your ships around as necessary. And that's pretty much all I have to say on this topic. I don't think I covered every single skill in the game that have an impact on which main fleet ship should go into which slot or every situation where you might want to consider breaking the general rules outlined in this video. But I hope I have given you the tools at least to think about each situation on your own when you come across it.

All right, thanks for watching and see you in the next one.