The SV Shield you mean?
What value would be better?
That is a relative statement if you compare it against other structure types or compare it to Plasma or think about the damage, once the shield is gone?
If it’s really a common sense for everyone, I have to rework EWS regarding that and implement on top of “Very Effective” something like “Ultra Effective”
10 seconds is too low for sv/sv fights since svs don’t have turrets to consistently deal damage over time to prevent recharging. This coupled with desyncs creates situations when opponent’s sv gets hit and recharges at the same time.
About pulse laser damage to shields.
Since shields have so much hp and the best weapons against them is non-hitscan plasma, the most common sv build will be the smallest ship possible so it’s rarely hit by it. So while given hp is balanced for normal-sized svs, it will completely unbalance small ones in their favor, just because the only reliable way to hit them is by lasers, and they don’t deal enough damage.
Making pulse lasers the best weapon for taking out shields will balance both types of ships, where big svs have disadvantage of getting hit by plasma more often, but have more blocks and armor in exchange, and, on the other hand, small svs which can be hit only by pulse lasers (and more rarely than a big ship), for exchange of lower armor values.
After several extended SV fights yesterday here’s my verdicts/bug reports/gripes with the system.
Shields in general begin recharge way too fast… This coupled with any pilot who knows how to WASD correctly, you will almost never take any true raw damage to your SV unless several people are shooting at you. It’s very easy to dodge away and begin shield recharge and regen a significant amount of shields before engaging the enemy again.
Time to kill on SV’s is even longer than they were before. Killing an SV is a super long chore unless you have several people concentrating fire on a single ship, and even then, the only real threats are, a recurring issue, dangerous lag clipping that threatens your cockpit. As it stands a single volley of pulse (the most reliable way of dealing with shields at this point as plasma is too slow) only does about 5-6% shield damage. With current damage numbers and recharge rates, I feel this could have about 50% added (raising volleys to 8-10% per hit) without severely impacting gameplay, and bringing TTK to a more reasonable place. Either this or bring Plasma’s projectile speed up to par and make it a readily wieldable weapon against small vessels.
In several of the engagements yesterday, in states both shields up and down, I was taking cockpit damage pretty consistently from splash. I also noticed that Missile shots against shielded targets would occasionally, as we refer to it, popcorn the insides of enemy SV’s. This is 99% the result of bad netcode and nothing we can fix locally as a server-community. Overall I feel like clipping has improved and I was taking far less internal damage than previous iterations of the game, but Still getting reliable cockpit damage (I’m assuming as the player is a consistent renderpoint for the game mechanically) is as upsetting as it ever was.
This is more a bug than anything I’m sure: If at any point during a shield recharge period you change playfield (Warp, atmo dip/re-entry) Your shields will instantly recharge to full. Every time. Tested it extensively yesterday. This is immersion breaking and was being used by both sides pretty repeatedly to ensure maximum uptime of shields. I did it and saw several others do it so I’m not casting blame. It’s an unfortunate side-effect of a poorly sussed out mechanic and will be fixed, I’m sure.
I’ll add more as I test and stress the system more.
All good points. All were issues pre full release on the experimental server (with HWS config) too. Rex has made changes that improve the situation. Initially we couldn’t get each other down beyond 80% in normal fight situations. Ofc throw diamond into the mix now too… we’ll all have to slap gats back on.
CV Fights are amazing Rex. I wouldn’t change anything about them currently, just had an awesome ~6v8 or so (not sure exact numbers) in homeworld space and I have no complaints. SV v SV is pretty good when we’re using ships of sizes that have been meta for past seasons, however when we’re dealing with micro sv it’s pretty cancerous (and I have seen them in game and fought them). I don’t know what we can do to prevent the use of micro sv though. Perhaps changing it so that shields won’t start regening until after 30-45 seconds after taking damage? i’m not entirely sure what the exact number would be. The other thing I’m concerned about is if we adjust numbers to make micro sv less viable we may make sv worse in other situations. It seems only way to shoot down micro sv is with cv rocket turrets currently. (or ba turrets obviously)
CV
CVs currently are still too big, and don’t die in a 1v1 or even a 2v1 fight. I need to compile a more detailed analysis though… but as of right now CV fights still take too long.
Micro SV
Yes, they are hard to kill and hit, but they are extremely vulnerable to any turrets and that includes HV. You can also kill a micro SV with another SV you just need really good aim.
Barnes and I fought 2v1 vs Noob Noob who was already pretty beat up, and after 5 - 10 minutes he just warped away.
No changes need to be made to micro SV, as they are literally only viable when fighting another SV.
Fought a micro SV in my class 1 CV. Was a pointless waste of ammo tbh so i warped. I hit him a few times with pulse lasers got him down to 70% at one point. My shields got down to 60% and a lag shot damaged my cockpit area slightly. This has always been an issue just shields have made it worse. Sweetener for me was I killed his mate and looted his CV
Adjusting projectile speed and accuracy of CV turrets further should help without impacting other areas too much.
Hi Ranzeth. I was using manual pulse fire along with a plasma/flak/cannon loadout. I’ve a strong feeling the alternate choice in each turret family would do better against micro-svs. However, they would likely fare less well against CVs. It’d be a trade off but I may go 50:50.
Agree with Zackey for CV fights - they are in a much better place. Not had any group battles yet but 1on1s much better.