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.

Great update. I did 7 battles today with a leviathan mirror match and didn't go first one time. Thanks for that CG.

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. 

I'm finding the Mk VI stopped working today. Leaves my fleet too exposed and they start destroying my other ships. So even if I win the ultimate race, my fleet is to weak to win. I'm back to hoping for the coin flip.

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. 

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 been trying this and variants of it. It’s hardly working, I’ll keep trying but the TenUp isn’t holding long enough to stop the rush.

I did have a bit more success using profundity with MK6 but under Levi the 2 turns isn’t long enough.

It's actually not that simple. If you are on an easy shard where no one changes their reinforcements, then you can probably win 75-90% of the time. If you are on a shard where they change their reinforcement orders then you have to guess correctly what their reinforcements are and it's back to a coin-flip the first battle and if you guess wrong, you will know the reinforcement order and can win the 2nd battle. If the 2nd reinforcement is Mk6, you bring out scimitar as your first reinforcement and you wait until just before their Mk6 comes out and stealth your fleet so that their Mk6 can only target your Mk6. If their Mk6 nukes one of your ships, you can time out. If they use ES as the 2nd reinforcement, you need to bring your bomber out 1st because you need concussion mines to take out the fleet since ES regenerates health and protection for their fleet and scimitar doesn't have enough firepower and you can time out.

The solution is not to use the Leviathan to counter the Leviathan. Use the Profundity with Mk6 as your first reinforcement. It has over a 90% win rate and it doesn't matter what the reinforcement order is. 

The Leviathan is a product of poor testing because it's now such a bad counter to itself and I think the complaints are warranted.. I'm fine if they don't fix it because given their history, the fix is probably going to create new problems and maybe it will be worse.