One of the things people want to know about Illustrious relates to her rarity; given that she is an SR carrier, how well does she do against the big three carriers? The Fox twins, Akagi and Kaga, and Enterprise. Does she fall flat or short of the mark? Or is she a force to reckon with?
Contents
Stat Line
For carriers, I generally tend to look at two or three stats. Reload and aviation being the two big ones. health pool doesn’t matter, but most backliners have large health pools. If, for some reason, they don’t, they are either a light carrier, a monitor, or a very confused vanguard ship that somehow managed to glitch its way into the backline.
Reload Stat
We look for carriers who get to strike first. The other part of that has to do with your plan equips, but anyway, even PvP mode is dominated by Enterprise anyway.
There is one well-known effective counter to her who is Akagi and Kaga, and this is due to the preemptive victory skill that they have which reduces their cooldown for the first airstrike because of this, both of them get to attack first.
They can even take out Enterprise before she even gets the chance. So, what does this have to do with Illustrious? Well, she has the lowest reload of the four with no buff to her cooldown. In PvP this can give Enterprise a chance to roll Lucky E, making Illustrious’ attack completely ineffective.
How to ignore Lucky E?
The only two ways to ignore Lucky E would be to have your cooldown be at least 5 seconds faster. Because that is about how long it takes your plane to reach the backline at PvP or at least 8 seconds slower.
If you did the latter option, the fox twins could potentially get two airstrikes off before Illustrious even attacks once. So then, if you think about it, the reload stat doesn’t give her any advantages in PvP.
Aviation Stat
The higher it is, the better the damage. Illustrious also has the lowest aviation, which means her damage won’t be as impactful as the other three. Only Enterprise has about a thirty-point difference with Illustrious, which isn’t that much. Still, fox twins can have a massive difference with illustrious if they are together because this triggers the First Carrier Division. Its massive jump will allow Kaga and Akagi to do significantly more damage than Illustrious and Enterprise.
Equipment
Illustrious made me aware that not all carriers run the same loadout. Carriers generally tend to run three of each type of plane. Illustrious on the other hand uses a 6 fighter and 3 torpedo bomber setup. In other words, she does not have any dive bombers, which takes a good chunk of her DPS away.
This is something that could be worrisome in both PvP and PvE. Not having that damage means that all fleets will take a bit longer to beat, which could result in being defeated if the PvE mission isn’t tough enough, so you might want to consider where she should be used now. All of this so far sounds like I’m leaning towards her being a bad ship, not the case. Unlike Sandy, Illustrious can still be a lot more reliable in a lot of scenarios.
Illustrious as a Support
The best way to look at Illustrious is as a support, and there are two reasons why. While this puts her at a disadvantage in the DPS game, she does have up to six fighters at her disposal. This may not be a huge bargaining chip but having more fighters means doing more damage to enemy planes which could potentially prevent the planes from doing damage to your fleet at all. This is more of a PvE than a PvP thing, and even then, anti-air can generally take care of most of it, especially if you have a certain light cruiser with you.
Skill
This is where you will see a lot more benefit out of her. As you all may know, after she releases an airstrike, she will apply a shield around the vanguard that allows them to tank damage which, from what I’ve seen, includes collision damage. This allows your vanguard to survive a lot longer, especially when paired with a healer, which can help them a lot. It gives breathing room to the vanguard with the healer, especially if they take a lot of damage.
The shield is also based on her health which means that it can be boosted with the use of tool kits but take note that the bonuses are only about up to a hundred health, as the max health boost that you could get is about a thousand and the skill is 10% of the health pool. I’m not sure about how effective that boost is, especially since you do sacrifice up to 200 aviation boost for steam catapults, making her torpedo bomber a lot weaker. Honestly, I’ll stick with catapults so that her torpedo bomber could still do a decent amount of damage.
Overall, you can use her in mob fleets with one of the healers since it takes a decent chunk of damage off my front line. For PvP, she may not be the best to use, but her skill does give your vanguard a little bit more health and does make them a lot more annoying to deal with in general. As long as anyone looks at Illustrious as a support carrier, I think you will have a great time with her.
