Mikasa

Tier: 4

 Man 330 FP is a lot for a CA.  Wait, what do you mean she’s not a CA?  She has 5.3k hp!

 Meet Granny Mikasa, the eternal butt of jokes.  She was bullied on JP/CN release for her terrible stats and ill-fitting fleet buffs (IJN had no good BBs at the time, and all their good frontliners relied on torpedoes), and slipped into obscurity.  Then Manjuu grabbed the bully-bat and made the first good IJN BB, Nagato - who is ALSO a flagship-reliant IJN buffer, and thoroughly skunks Mikasa in every way possible.  She then slunk off to a dark corner, never to be seen again.

 Mikasa’s main gun is nothing short of terrible, and her secondary gun has sub-par efficiency (although at least it’s a CL gun).  Very uniquely, Mikasa does not have an AA gun - instead, she has an extra secondary DD gun.  This is not particularly helpful, as the DD gun shares targeting with her CL gun, and will thus mostly shoot stuff that’s already dead.  It also means that Mikasa is the ONLY ship, in the entire game, with NO way to attack planes in any way.

 Oh, and 5.3k HP.  Because you want your flagship to have CA-tier HP right?  At least she has Heavy armor.  And I guess an 1/8 chance to take half damage, but you really can’t rely on that.

 The FP buff for IJN ships sounds cool until you realize several things:
  1. Most of the good IJN backliners are carriers, not BBs.  The good BBs are Izumo (who wants to be flagship for barrage purposes), Nagato (who is better than Mikasa in every way, and wants to be flagship for both her IJN buff AND her barrage), Amagi (who wants to be flagship for barrage purposes), and Hyuuga (who really doesn’t care where she is).
  2. Mikasa needs to be flagship, which prevents stacking with Nagato and sabotages barrages for 3 of 4 potential partners.
  3. while there are IJN frontliners with good guns, most of them focus on torps (which Mikasa does not buff).
  4. IJN BB piles are heavily disadvantaged in PvE.  In addition to the lack of airstrikes, most of the IJN BBs have atrocious AA guns, making such a strategy a poor fit for the AA-heavy ch12.  Once ch13 is released, the global Air Superiority mechanic will further punish attempts to run mass BBs (on all maps, not just ch13).
Even if all these issues are ignored, it is still extremely debatable if Mikasa’s buffs can potentially outweigh her horrible stats and lack of AA gun.  In my mind, they cannot.

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