Getting pretty quiet here...
New year bonus is one of five elite ship. not sure who I should pick between Fubuki and Edinburgh.
Fubuki has, imho, a much better character design and can only be constructed in the light pool (you can build Edinburgh everywhere).
On the other hand Edinburgh has a decent spot in a HMS fleet while Fubuki is not really outstanding in any way considering we already have a lot of good torp focused DD.
Anyway, I've been busy farming 10-4 (still no Jintsuu in sight), some quick considerations:
- Fortune is amazing, 15% damage reduction to the main fleet (retrofit skill) is golden when Nagato+Mutsu can halve the health of a BB.
- Akashi/Vestal are a godsend if you plan on doing a part of the battles in auto, switching between two tanky BB may possibly work but it's not gonna be cheaper and the shelling can also target the side positions, main fleet healing will prevent any unlucky death.
- Having a CVL healer is mandatory, you need both the healing and the screen clearing, the second part is very important since you need to clear the screen when the enemies BB shell your main fleet. With Kongo and Haruna (first two shells are fired at the escort fleet, then two other are fired at the main fleet) you can clear the entire main fleet attack, with Nagato (three shells to the main fleet) you will probably still take damage.
I went with Shouhou - Hood - Akashi and they really worked very well, fantastic healing and Shouhou's damage is pretty great.
- Tirpitz will do 80% of the damage with 0 ammo (down from 130), this, coupled with CL secondaries, make Tirpitz a fantastic choice for 3 star clearing
- Boss fleet can be whatever as long at is has great damage and tanky escorts, BBs are preferred (they can also deal with suicide ships as an added bonus).
Meanwhile JP/CN are getting new (supposedly) broken as fuck ships (I'm looking at you Amagi) and some awesome skins (they will probably be added later to EN server, at least the skin of ships that are released here), Helena, Montpelier and PoW in particular are a
massive step-up from their base skin. You can watch the livestream
here (the good part starts after around 70 minutes with new ships, skins, retrofit etc. etc.)