Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hahaha seriously wtf?!

Much change.

So balance.

Very dev.

:2percent:

The problem is not in scorch, or pulses.

The problem is in the ammo penalties.

Autocannons: optimal is insignificant so the range penalties/bonuses of T1 ammo is irrelevant
T2 ammo gives a boost of ~50% range over the "standard" range

Blasters: optimal is important, but a large part of the range comes from falloff so the range penalties/bonuses of T1 ammo don't matter very much
T2 ammo boosts falloff, and returns the lost optimal, its a 40% bonus over the "unmodified" range of the guns, but a larger bonus considering anti-matter as the "standard" since the optimal is not insignificant

Pulse: optimal is very important, so the range penalties/bonuses of T1 ammo very much matter

Scorch ammo gives a boost of 50% optimal range over the "unmodified" range, but considering multifrequency to be "standard" its actually more like 3x

If you look at the stats of the guns themselves, which is probably how the balance started, they seem fine.
But lasers lose massive range when going for high damage ammo, whereas blasters lose only a little, and autos almost nothing.
Further diverging from the stats unmodified by ammo, the already high tracking autos get tracking boosts (no other T1 ammo gives tracking boosts)
The T1 ammo is defective, not the T2 scorch.
On top of this, is the TE/TC which boosts the effective range of autos and blasters far more than it does for lasers.

If high damage T1 ammo has an optimal penalty, but no falloff penalty for projectiles,
then high damage T1 laser crystals should have a falloff penalty, but no optimal penalty.
Hyrbids should have a split optimal/faloff penalty, just like the T2 ammo has a split optimal/falloff boost.

Scorch is not OPd. Either the other T1 ammos are OPd, or the T1 crystals and under powered.

This boosts T1 crystals a little, while leaving scorch mostly alone....
I'd still like to see a complete overhaul of optimal vs fallof vs tracking modifiers.
Then base the guns on that, or make it so all the ammo sleections have similar relative effects to the unmodified stats.

Scorch was fine, not whining about the changes.
Am whining about the focus wasted on this instead of other things

Scorch is quite bad as is, because it mostly does EM damage, other weapon systems do more thermal kinetic explosive damage which is way better than only EM.
It is good against Sansha in PVE, but that's about it.
Try shooting angel cartel with sorch, it takes FOREVER.

i would guess

Put also some love to ammo.
Why Sansha or Blood crystals are worst than imperial navy in all aspects?
Make them the same or at least different.

I'm really curious as to what the thought process behind what needs to be balanced is for the balance team. There are plenty of things in the game that are so obviously and totally broken (is the vigil even a ship?) that I sometimes wonder if the devs are really in touch with the game at all. These little nickle and dime changes to weapons and ships that either don't need changes or need more comprehensive looks are starting to get a little tiring. Tracking enhancers, light missiles, scorch. All these changes just seem like they are meant to make players feel like you guys are doing "something." Where are the iterations on ship balance? And I don't mean the tweaks where you add +3 CPU to the punisher.

I agree with the overall sentiment here.

It would be nice to see some actual data and a more comprehensive balancing of the weapon systems.

By that I mean graphs of things like effective damage at different ranges, vs. different velocities, etc. for all weapons (including drones, sentries).

I'm going to take a guess and say that those numbers would expose some obvious imbalances. For example, compare barrage to null - even though ACs give about 20% more falloff, their DPS is so much lower than the blasters that ACs barely match (and in most cases do less) damage at their max falloff (don't even mention close ranges).

It would also expose things like the huge ranges you can get on some of the larger supposedly short-range guns (e.g. why use beams when you can hit so far out with pulse lasers on a rev, as was mentioned here previously?).

Sentries need re-balancing way more than lasers, probably followed by ACs, then beams and missiles (select-able damage types don't mean as much when most of the ships only get a bonus for kinetic anyway). And hybrids really need a major range nerf, since their only drawbacks right now are no EM/explosive damage option and cap use - pretty much makes them the no-brainer best option outside of sentries. It's pretty ridiculous that hybrids can match AC ranges... I'd say that's a bigger problem than all this scorch stuff.

I'm kinda amazed by how people are calling this a nerf.

MUCH more workable ranges that actually matter: the falloff increases are pretty massive and the optimal bonus is nice, at a total cost of.... 2% derived optimal loss on Scorch (which no one is going to notice and will easily be made up for by the falloff buff). It's a BUFF folks, the only reason that scorch overall loses some optimal is so that they could use rounded numbers with the balancing changes.

As someone who flies scorch ships alot thank you for being gentle with the changes. The balance pass factors in nicely with the release of the confessor and as such will change the fitting meta.

Thank you for your awesome work!

Woah really? Your words are LSD to my mind. I wouldn't have never realized that T1 = T1 if not for your savvy words, thank you sir.
How did you came up with such brilliant convention?