Ignore armor or shield penetration?

[Combatweevil]

As an upgrade, which do you feel is better? Which do you prefer and in what situations? Discuss.

[Helig]

As an upgrade, which do you feel is better? Which do you prefer and in what situations? Discuss.

Shield penetration works on everything, ignore armour really benefits only vs turrets, and occasional (rare) damage resistance-stacking Gunships and Strikers.

[TheWookinator]

I favor armor ignore (from a scout using burst lasers perspective). It let's you two shot turrets (1 shot with a crit). Plus, the other option is 9% shield piercing (compared to 100% armor ignore). Take the 18% bonus to shield damage in the bottom tier and use bypass. I find the 9% negligible and have no issues burning any kind of ship without it.

[Ramalina]

I favor shield penetration, mostly because I'm not sure if the ignore armor circumvents the damage reduction and evasion buffs from armors.

 

If ignore armor does bypass armor based evasion, dmg reduction, and similar buffs then it is potentially very good once shields are down.

 

Assuming that both upgrades have similar utility (probably a design goal, but since I haven't seen hard data on how the mechanics function this may or may not be the case in game) it should depend mostly on your ship setup.

 

If you can take shields down quickly (gunship ion cannon for example) then having ignore armor for the next shot is ideal. It could also become useful if future scenarios have very heavily armored destructible objectives.

 

If you're landing a lot of non-lethal shots on targets that have their shields up, say for example in turning dogfights, then shield penetration is a better choice. Hull damage is what ultimately destroys a fighter, and if a shield has time to recharge between hits then a non-penetrating shot is arguably a wasted shot. Of course you could say the same about hull damage repaired by Hydrospanner, but hull repair is much slower than shield recharge so it's much less likely that the opposition will fully repair hull damage compared to recharging shield arcs.

[Yorumi]

Ignore armor just ignores any damage reduction, it has nothing to do with the armor component.

 

First of all I would argue against the burst laser cannon. It's weaker than the light laser cannon across the board, furthermore since you can't really fight at less than 500m it's actually weaker than every other blaster in the game with the exception of ion on hulls.

 

That said shield piercing is better, hull damage is permanent and it works no matter what you're fighting. A lot of people, even a lot of strikes are building evasion right now and so you don't always run into a lot of armor.

[Gavin_Kelvar]

I favor shield penetration, mostly because I'm not sure if the ignore armor circumvents the damage reduction and evasion buffs from armors.

 

Evasion applies to accuracy of blasters so the only way to counter that is with evasion debuffs/accuracy buffs. armor penetration just applies to any damage reduction applied by armors and/or inherent ship stats (I think strikers get 5% damage reduction by default for example).

 

But yes like others I prefer shield penetration over armor. For one it gives you a kill shot ability by allowing some damage of your shot to penetrate whatever shields a nearly destroyed enemy can muster and possibly kill them. For another it works against all enemies save for turrets.

[Mallorik]

I too thought shield pen would be better than ignore armor, it just seems like common sense. But after trying them both over and over I have stuck with ignore armor.