Win Levi Mirrors Today.

The first problem is this strategy relies on you not timing out which has happened to me more times this week in mirror matches that in the entire time since Leviathan was released.

The second problem is that CG was disingenuous (or lied - take your pick) as to the reason behind the change.

"Running Tie Dagger exposes you to a P1 counter"

There were 2 changes to TD: One increased the Max protection gain - this benefits you vs P1 as it makes it easier for TD to survive a mass assist / assists. The second change was to stop TM gain - this has nothing to do with P1, and was geared to stop a Chimaera counter as there is no TM gain anywhere in the default Executor lineup. The second change is the one that is interfering with mirror matches.

As your post suggests, for a mirror match, you need to start with Dagger, Interceptor, MkVI. This runs the risk of timing out and will still leave you vulnerable to a P1 counter, which is apparently what CG wanted to avoid. The alternative is to do a true mirror to keep yourself safe from a P1 counter but then the match is determined by the coin toss as to which Leviathan goes first.

This change is an utter dogs dinner from a game testing point of view.

Under most circumstances, I agree with you Seedy. And obviously, it's better to try to find a solution than complain about the problem. This is really irritating - I'm losing my patience, and I know that complaining on the forums is essentially screaming into the void, but there's really not much in the way of options.

FWIW, I've got about a 50% win rate with various comps. I'm still looking for the right one. As of now none of them seem to offer the same kind of consistency that I was getting before the change and even when I'm winning it's taking longer and often down to seconds before the timer runs out. It's really putting me off the game all together. This problem started day 1 of Levi - and they ignored our complaints about the mirror - so the community solved the problem and people got comfortable with the solution - and now, for some inexplicable reason they decided it was time to address a problem THAT WE ALREADY SOLVED.

But hey - we've got a reason to R9 a ton of characters now while getting hit left and right with characters going to cantina nodes - so we've got that going for us. They keep ratcheting up the pressure and then making changes like the dagger changes - it's getting tiresome.

/rant

I can understand why seeing post about Levi complaints get tiresome, but remember that CG claimed to help Leviathan players with this change. It does the opposite. And if a change only hurts players and does no good then it has to be reverted. 

The Mk6 start does seem like the best solution so far.  However it's most certainly not 100% WR.  The best we can say is some very close to 100% winning the ult race.  However there is a risk of timing out even putting on auto as soon as ult is reached.  I've been winning most of the battles [Edit: the "small sample size" disclaimer] so far but the timer can come down to anywhere within 30 seconds. My personal record I believe is 0:05.  Granted it will get better as I muscle memorize the sequence, bad rng can still lead to losses.

Another caveat is that if the opponent brings out Mk6 as the 2nd RI, and one shots your dagger, things can fall apart real quickly.  BitDynasty released a solution to that, but even then he admited that "1 out of 4 times" it wouldn't work due to bad rng.

I've tried this. According to another post you commented this on, it doesn't work. His failed 4 times. Mines failed as well. So you must be facing weaker fleets or something. 

CG is a disaster anyways. I'll keep trying it to see. What do you use to reinforce?

I have tried this and it doesn't matter. Tenacity Up wears off and they will eventually get the hangers anyway. Whether they do it three turns before ultimate is available or one doesn't matter. Plus, you are giving them debuffs to decrease their ultimate cooldown, but denying yourself the same. 

What I have found to be somewhat effective if they go first is the sacrifice Reaper trick. Their cap ship can resist, but if it doesn't, you're golden. 

Firstly, at the top end of fleets it takes too long to get to the ult and you don't have enough time to finish the battle a lot of the time.
Secondly the possibility of a win with this technique doesn't mean the battles aren't more of a grind and more of a chore.

The problem here again, while this can be viable on offense, it leaves you open on defense, as the previous mk6/sa counter.  You will be the easy target on the shard with this team on defense.

I noticed some odd stuff happening yesterday as well, I thought they had possible rolled back changes.  Someone left Bomber/SA/Malgus on defense.  I thought great, easy battle.  Of course lose the opening coin flip (probably 25% at best opening coin flips for me since change).  TIE dagger on opponent never came on the field, but somehow, I couldn't get ahead of opponent on the TM train.  They stayed consistently ahead the entire match.  I started dagger, malgus, bomber.  I think that somehow with dagger in the hanger, the team still got the benefit of it.  Otherwise I should have jumped ahead of them because I could gain tm while they shouldn't have been able to.  After they reached ult, they started annihilating my ships like they were paper.  This had never happened before the changes.  It was a weird battle.

Tried again and I even went first and still lost. Still somehow didn't get my ultimate to go off first. So I think it's official. You are wrong. 

CG has failed us all again and big time. It's time to boycott and stop spending until they either revert their screw up or fix it again. 

Stop the Spend 2024!