Test Server Feedback

One aspect that I'm not happy with is how poor crystal management is. It's great that these new weapon tooltips show the damage taken by the loaded crystals, but there are still several problems.


1) The new weapon tooltips only show the damage of the first crystal in the weapon group. If you have a 10% damaged crystal while the others are at 84%, then the game might wrongly tell you that your crystals are only 10% damaged.

Also, you need to actually undock to even see the tooltip.


2) The game will mix up intact and damaged crystals when swapping from Scorch to another crystal type and back. It actually prefers to use packaged crystals first. If you're carrying a second set of Scorch (quite common in PvE) then you'll damage both of them, potentially leading to a situation where one ends up breaking both sets in the same fight (provided that the pilot swaps often enough to keep both sets at similar levels of damage).


3) There is no indicator in the inventory that tells us how damaged a used crystal is. Since we don't know how damaged a crystal is without undocking and looking at the weapon tooltip, we need to carry spare crystals. Due to point 2, these spare crystals will get used immediately on the first swap and once that happens it becomes hard to separate the crystals that have been heavily used from the fresh ones. We end up with a huge pile of used crystals over time that are a hassle to sort out (I throw part of them away just to simplify things).


I've though about solutions to this problem and have come up with the following:

First, change the crystal swapping process to prefer used crystals (as in non packaged ones). Then either

A) Add a small number to the crystal icon/entry (depending on which mode the the inventory is viewed in) that represents how damaged a crystal is.

B) Allow the merging of multiple damaged crystals. Three crystals at 40% integrity would create one crystal at 100% integrity and one at 20%. We should of course be able to repackage the 100% integrity crystal.

Personally I would prefer solution B because it would simplify crystal management the most. It would boil down to undocking with packaged crystals and merging/repackaging damaged crystals when coming home.

I agree with this, at least as far as the 'prefer more used crystals' idea would go and so forth. Would be a nice change to run out of crystals at all approximately the same time before mixing and mashing sets of nearly burned crystals with almost fresh sets.

I had a thread about this that got somewhere close to 100 likes, and I ended up finally getting the attention of CCP Punkturis in this matter. She came back to me and more or less said that it would be too difficult to implement. I didn't really press her on why.

Sorry for being vague. My thread was specifically about displaying the damage state of crystals. The original post was about displaying it in the info window for the crystal under attributes, but I stated several times in the thread I had no real preference as to how it was shown as long as it was some easily accessible option (in space as well as in inventory) that showed which crystal had which amount of damage. Several other posters in that thread put forward interesting ideas as to how it could be done. I'm assuming they were referring to displaying the damage state in the info window.

Not really. The Scorch crystal lists the following info:

Volatility 10%
Volatility Damage 0.0100 HP

How much HP a crystal has is not specified. I believe it's 1 HP but one cannot know for sure without more information.

This bit should read: max shots 1000 (or whatever the actual amount is).

Also, contrary to what the info suggests, no chance is involved in the crystal deterioration process. The crystals in a weapon group will break in the same volley if one starts with an unpackaged set and is careful to never mix them up with other used crystals.

Last time I checked the HP is listed, and it is 1 HP.

And it is chance based. I've had crystals in weapon groups not all break at the same time (without mixing).

This is one of those bugs that has been around forever. Yes, it is annoying. Not only do I carry an extra set of crystals, I carry them in a small secure container in my cargo hold to keep them separate from the ones I'm currently using.

It would be nice if there was some kind of wear-levelling mechanic. For example, I group 2 lasers and load 2 used scorch crystals into the group. One crystal has 6 shots left and the other isn't quite so badly damaged and has 10 shots left. Grouped, they should average out to 8 clean grouped shots (16 total). The way it is now the group will stop firing after 6 shots, often at the worst possible time.