Damage Reduction Uncoupled from Armor

[Altheran]

RS = Reactive Shield = a Trooper cooldown.

 

Erhmagerd, how did I not understand that ?

 

I'm ashamed.

Edited May 16, 2014 by Altheran

[Zoom_VI]

That's disturbing. I'd like to understand how you'd came to this conclusion but... what the heck is RS ? Nothing on a Marauder or Sentinel can be named "RS"...

 

And Armor Pen given like candy ? Apart from Gore, who have high armor pen ? Definitely not Shadows who can have 9% at most.

 

But hey, let's go back to GSF stuff.

 

RS is Reactive Shield not anything on a marauder. I came to that conclusion due to the fact that I hit things (troopers included) for 9k with gore active. When they are running a DR cooldown such as Reactive or adrenal I cannot hit those numbers.

 

Also see Kuci's post

 

The reason I say armor pen is candy not because people are running around with 100% pen, but because almost every non-dot spec has some amount of passive armor pen and then there are stuff like armor debuffs and such. If those penetration effects applied to DR cooldowns and adrenals I think the PvP community would have figured it out by now.

Edited May 16, 2014 by Zoom_VI

[Zoom_VI]

Perhaps they could do armor pen like they do in the ground game where instead of having a select few weapons have 100% armor pen, you make so most weapons have a moderate amount of armor pen.

[Ramalina]

When GSF first went live my impression from reading the tooltips was that the damage reduction from the base hull armor and deflection armor was ignored by armor piercing effects, but that the damage reduction from crew and from charged plating was separate and unaffected. Partly because shield components and crew abilities, well, they're shields and crew abilities and not armor right?

 

Besides, what sort of game designer would be nuts enough to make a decent defensive stat for defensive components, and then load something that completely negates that stat onto pretty much every popular weapons system? What would be the point after all, of a defensive component that doesn't defend against much of anything if it didn't give some sort of magical godmode OP imbalanced invincibility crap when you absolutely need it in compensation for the generally crappy performance the rest of the time?

 

It does of course, for one ship in one situation. A minelayer on a node.

 

On the whole I think it would have been much better design to make it less amazing (99% damage reduction is sort of absurd) in it's niche and more useful for general application.

 

It's possible that they were thinking of Bomber and Stealth Ship classes when doing math modelling for the DR based defenses, and that there's more GSF evolution that we need to wait for before DR and armor piercing really make sense. Until then though, the binary effect of DR being a path to invincibility in the absence of armor piercing, but total junk in the presence of armor pierce seems like one of those "cool in theory, sucks in practice," sorts of things. Based on how good the underlying mathematical basis for most GSF mechanics has been so far I think this is a case of weird surprising things going wrong with something that they were pretty sure should have worked well and been competitive.

[Altheran]

Besides, what sort of game designer would be nuts enough to make a decent defensive stat for defensive components, and then load something that completely negates that stat onto pretty much every popular weapons system?

 

The same who'd been nut enough to allow Distortion Field to be a 100% immunity.