My recommendation is that you can consider playing Azur Lane and Girls' Frontline. Both games are pretty good from what I heard and seen about them.
Im already playing azur lane, i have to say, its refreshing to play a game with a little influence of pay2win elements, since you can compensate with player effort
The fact that Azur Lane has little pay-to-win elements which can be compensated with player effort makes it one of the best mobile games to play currently. This is especially so since the current mobile game market is oversaturated with trash games with ridiculous amounts of pay-to-win elements. I also recommended Girls' Frontline in my previous post since it is similar to Azur Lane in the sense that there is little pay-to-win elements in that game and that those elements can be compensated with player effort as well.
Im still not near the end game, i only have laffey retro, a somewhat ok HMS fleet and an incomplete IJN fleet
Its a sore spot for me, the girls i want with great art isnt really good in battle, so i have to consider meta or art.
Well, that is one of the problems with this type of collection games. It is truly a pity that the battle performance of some shipgirls are just not as good as their artwork. The only possible solution to your dilemma is to perhaps improve your skills in the game to the extent that you can clear most maps with almost any combination of shipgirls.
Yeah, but i just deal with, like researching or studying the new ships which might influence something in the game, example, i enjoy my ajax kai but she is so squishy but a good dmger, like glass cannon, and i only use her in some safe maps, but a new ship change that, a new hms ship sheffield buffs all ships that has lower hp with dmg reduction, i think it was 10% at lvl 1 and 30% at lvl 10. Now i can use ajax
Your method seems to be a valid solution to your dilemma. After all, when new shipgirls release in the game, certain shipgirls can become more useful in battle when used in combination with some of the newly released shipgirls. In fact, it also sounds better than what I suggested in my previous post for players who are playing the game casually as well.