Let's talk about Strike Fighters

[Linuxizer]

As some know I already take the stance that, some range increase, some engine efficiency increase and DEFINATELY some durability increase would all work wonders for a strike, but that may not be the only way to look at them. This isnt going to have any suggestions just kind of a way I see it and a Way it is with ships.

...

Bombers threat Range is dependent on the ship, but in TDM they usually pack a Railgun drone in their pockets so we can safely check that box of "threat range"

 

These are good ideas for TDM, but they don't help that much in Domination. Whether the Strike Fighter needs to become competitive in both game modes is another question.

 

In Domination, the Minelayer Bomber is strong, but the threat range is not the reason. You could characterize TDM as out-ranging your opponent, but in Domination there is a long-range fight and a short-range fight going on at the same time. The strengths and weaknesses then play out a little differently.

 

T2 Scout at long range: good, due to its speed, as you said

T2 Scout at short range: very good

T1 Gunship at long range: very good

T1 Gunship at short range: good, if it has BLC

T1 Bomber at long range: bad

T1 Bomber at short range: very good, if it is at the satellite

Strikes at long range: below average

Strikes at short range: below average

 

Adding BLC to the Strikes would solve the short range weakness. So that may be combined with the range and speed increases you talked about.

[RickDagles]

Will note only 1 issue with this, its not complete, just adding damage wont make P. Trops good against bombers, a good bomber will LoS it long before its in the air thanks to the extremely long lock time, allowing any ship that sees the slow moving straight flying strike fighter to come over and tear it a new one, or just blast it with an Ion Railgun and call it a day..

 

Eh I dunno I find Protorps are super easy to land on bombers in TDM. You're right about it not being worth the risk for the T1 and T2 to do this...however, the T3 Strike can take the risks because it can actually afford to tank a bunch of damage while achieving the lockon. When the missile is released it can simply do a 180, put shields to rear, power dive to LoS and apply repairs. This tactic already works very well when the Clarion/Imperium has damage overcharge. But it's currently not worth the risk unless you have the DO.

Edited September 6, 2015 by RickDagles

[SWCNT]

Buffing protons would make thermites extinct. Granted, thermites don't exactly play much of a role now, but they'd be really useless if protons did as much damage as you're proposing. Regardless, it wouldn't help the T1 at all and I'm not sure if it would really make the T3 or T2 that much better. It would have a more defined role in TDM, but why not just fly a T1 GS with Ion? For domination, the strike would still be weak since proton locks on a bomber protecting a satellite is very hard. I think the difficulty in finding a role for strikes is that there is no role left for them to fill. The current level of complexity of GSF--the meta if you wish to use that over used word--really only needs 3 ship types. So the strike is forced to be that awkward relative who gets invited to stuff, but no one really understand why he shows up. If you want to crave out a unique role for the strike, it's necessary to radically change the current roles of the other ships, without doing that, I don't see how it will ever be unique like the other classes.

[RickDagles]

Buffing protons would make thermites extinct. Granted, thermites don't exactly play much of a role now, but they'd be really useless if protons did as much damage as you're proposing. Regardless, it wouldn't help the T1 at all and I'm not sure if it would really make the T3 or T2 that much better. It would have a more defined role in TDM, but why not just fly a T1 GS with Ion? For domination, the strike would still be weak since proton locks on a bomber protecting a satellite is very hard. I think the difficulty in finding a role for strikes is that there is no role left for them to fill. The current level of complexity of GSF--the meta if you wish to use that over used word--really only needs 3 ship types. So the strike is forced to be that awkward relative who gets invited to stuff, but no one really understand why he shows up. If you want to crave out a unique role for the strike, it's necessary to radically change the current roles of the other ships, without doing that, I don't see how it will ever be unique like the other classes.

 

True, you'd have to buff Thermites as well. And fix the firing arc bug while you're at it

 

I agree the T1 and T2 would not really improve much. But I think the T3 could be really complement the role of the Ion GS in taking out GS wall/bomber nests. Also, being able to heal teammates on the fly could prove to be a huge asset.

 

I agree that protorps would still be terrible in domination. IMO only cluster missiles and interdiction missile are good in that mode. I also agree that there isn't really a space for a 4th ship type in the current meta, but it would be nice to have a few other options for countering railgun drones/bombers in TDM.

Edited September 6, 2015 by RickDagles

[JasonSzeremi]

True, you'd have to buff Thermites as well. And fix the firing arc bug while you're at it

 

I agree the T1 and T2 would not really improve much. But I think the T3 could be really complement the role of the Ion GS in taking out GS wall/bomber nests. Also, being able to heal teammates on the fly could prove to be a huge asset.

 

I agree that protorps would still be terrible in domination. IMO only cluster missiles and interdiction missile are good in that mode. I also agree that there isn't really a space for a 4th ship type in the current meta, but it would be nice to have a few other options for countering railgun drones/bombers in TDM.

 

Idonno about there being only room for 3 chassis classes in gsf, the ground game manages to have 4 classes with 8 sub-classes many of them using different approaches to the same roles. range dps? Trooper/B-hunter, Sorc/sage. Heals? one sub class per class except for warrior/knight. Close dps? warrior/knight, assassin/shadow, agent/smuggler. There's more overlap in the ground game's roles then in gsf... and in gsf everybody's got 2 main goals: destroy other player's ships, or capture nodes and defend them from other player's ships.

 

Not all members of a chassis perform the same, for example the T3 gunship is a T2 scout with no system ability but virtually the same weapons load-out.

It seems to me the problem is that the weapons ON strike fighters under perform compared to those on say.... scouts, gunships.

What if heavy laser cannons did as much damage as burst lasers?

what if torpedoes took half as long to lock onto their targets?

what if strike fighters could load rocket pods.... I don't see any logical reason they couldn't or why these weapons have a role in recon.... they are a good dps booster for forward firing laser craft like the T1 strike

on the T2 strike rocket pods would mean a very likely multi-role mission: rocket pods and HLC or QLC or torps/missiles.

Burst lasers might help a strike up close against anything that is not a scout, unless they joust.

Perhaps strikes need to just be tougher

If strikes did do more damage, and/or were tougher, they would find their own role.

 

The T3 strike is the toughest of the three, has some of the worst weapons, and has a role mostly as heals/tank.

the weapon swapping strikes could benefit from having better weapons to swap.

 

 

More extremly: if they had the ability to swap between three choices it might help them out.

 

out on a limb: perhaps that third choice could be a system ability like the T3 has, activated by the right mouse button like other secondary weapons are... swap between missiles and a system ability or three missile choices....or lasers and a system ability for the T1

[JasonSzeremi]

If I had to look around and ask what craft don't belong in a star wars movie: it's the gunships

In star wars turbo lasers out class any rail gun weapons, which is why they see so little use.... and lasers move slowly enough to be seen traveling from firing to target.... so we have to lead our targets to hit with lasers.

but rail guns are firing projectiles that should.... be slower requiring more leading to hit a target. Rail guns also use magnetic acceleration to send projectiles so fast and far. Anyone hit by such a projectile.... just might have a magnetic charge for several seconds, the same as the shell that hit it before

So perhaps rail-guns should give a buff to targets they hit, that causes them to be immune to rail gun hits for a few seconds.... or do reduced damage due to partial magnetic deflection and/or perhaps just to strike fighters, who seem to be the primary target of rail guns

So Strike fighters.... who usually survive the first rail gun hit, having a 10-30 second buff applied by a rail gun hit, that reduces rail gun damage to them....

it certainly would encourage dog fighting if strikes are more resistant to gunships.

[Gavin_Kelvar]

Buffing protons would make thermites extinct. Granted, thermites don't exactly play much of a role now, but they'd be really useless if protons did as much damage as you're proposing. Regardless, it wouldn't help the T1 at all and I'm not sure if it would really make the T3 or T2 that much better. It would have a more defined role in TDM, but why not just fly a T1 GS with Ion? For domination, the strike would still be weak since proton locks on a bomber protecting a satellite is very hard. I think the difficulty in finding a role for strikes is that there is no role left for them to fill. The current level of complexity of GSF--the meta if you wish to use that over used word--really only needs 3 ship types. So the strike is forced to be that awkward relative who gets invited to stuff, but no one really understand why he shows up. If you want to crave out a unique role for the strike, it's necessary to radically change the current roles of the other ships, without doing that, I don't see how it will ever be unique like the other classes.

 

While it's true that the meta only needs 3 ship types that assumes the 3 meta classes are all doing only their intended role (and not overlapping with another class's intended role). In terms of strikers that assumes that GS and scouts (but especially scouts) are intended to be as capable at taking down bombers as they currently are. It's entirely conceivable that scouts were intended to be highly inefficient against bombers and be far more vulnerable to bombers than they currently are (I honestly hope that the devs never intended the scout/bomber relationship to be at the same level of ion rail GS/striker relationship but it's entirely possible they had something like that in mind). Point being that if you heavily nerfed a scout's ability to deal with a CP bomber (up to and including removing all AP options; honestly though if they just removed AP from BLC and left pods as the only AP option it'd probably be a sufficient nerf since scouts would have to be much more selective in what they use pods on) and heavily buffed strikers to be second only to a GS in bomber killing (or possibly rivaling a GS in bomber killing, just using different methods) you'd probably give strikers a very clear, important role in the meta.

 

That being said they'd have to give the T3 striker HLC and heavily buff all torps (which I honestly think they should do regardless of whether they intend to give strikers the bomber killing role). IMO what they'd need to do is increase base fire arc to at least 16 which in my experience is the only way to overcome the ninja lock loss (which has the side bonus of not making the fire arc increase an imperative upgrade on thermites which seem to suffer most from that bug), give it the same lock-on as concs (3+ seconds is in theory balanced but in practice too easy to LOS to make the weapon reliable), and possibly consider lowering the reload time. Buffing their primaries would probably also be pretty good in giving them more punch in general but not strictly necessary to make them excel as a bomber killer. That'd probably give them all the AP tools they'd need to be a bomber killer and if they weren't competing with scouts for that role they'd probably have a clearly defined role in the meta.

Edited September 7, 2015 by Gavin_Kelvar

[Danalon]

Taking away AP from Scouts wouldn't help Strikes against CP Bombers. There's more than just AP having influence.

 

Scouts are more agile and therefore less affected by interdiction effects. Scouts have burst, which is extremely important when killing Bombers. Bombers need to be killed fast because the longer they live, the more chance their mines have to do damage.

 

Strikes have two main problems when it comes to killing Bombers. First, they're almost as slow as Bombers and as soon as a Strike gets hit by any interdiction effect the fight's over for him. Second, they don't have any good CQC AP weapon.

 

 

When taking away AP from Scouts then Strikes need a CQC AP option or Bombers will dominate nodes even more than they currently do. While I agree to buff torpedos, I don't think it's possible to make them useful in node fights. Their lockon time needs to be reduced and their firing arc needs to be increased to the point where it's similar to the current interdiction missile. If the reload time doesn't get reduced they still need too much time to kill bombers and if it gets reduced they may become too strong at 10km range.

 

I'm opposed to nerfing existing and well working classes, so I go back to what I said earlier. Give Strikes a bonus to accuracy (and firing arc), making HLC more useful in CQC, and give them some resistance against negative effects, making them less vulnerable against interdiction effects in CQC and less vulnerable against ion rail hits. This has the side effect of Strikes feeling more durable and heavier than Scouts. Probably other things need to be buffed to make Strikes work good. I'm thinking about bigger engine pools or that mechanic with the adjustable blaster frequency (but only up to double damage with half frequency).

Edited September 8, 2015 by Danalon

[Gavin_Kelvar]

Taking away AP from Scouts wouldn't help Strikes against CP Bombers. There's more than just AP having influence.

 

Certainly you're right that there's more than AP at play, you're right in that regards. My point though is that we all assume that scouts were always meant to have their current performance against armored targets. I'm suggesting that, following the line of evidence provided by Tunewalker who dissected exactly what a "strike fighter" is in real world terms, scouts may never have been meant to be good against AP to the point where they could rival or surpass a strike fighter. It's entirely possible that, originally, it was expected that a team would need strikers to deal with armored targets because a scout would be highly ineffective against armored targets (or at least highly inefficient).

 

Now granted if bombers had rolled in without scouts current AP options the meta would be in bad shape since strikers just aren't in practice able to fulfill the anti-bomber role (even though they have a lot of AP weapon options). That being said we're looking at strikers getting buffed so they're actually competitive in the meta so there's no reason to assume that a buff done right means scouts have to keep their AP performance to keep bombers from becoming horribly OP.

 

Scouts are more agile and therefore less affected by interdiction effects. Scouts have burst, which is extremely important when killing Bombers. Bombers need to be killed fast because the longer they live, the more chance their mines have to do damage.

 

Strikes have two main problems when it comes to killing Bombers. First, they're almost as slow as Bombers and as soon as a Strike gets hit by any interdiction effect the fight's over for him. Second, they don't have any good CQC AP weapon.

 

I don't think they honestly need a cqc AP weapon. If you hypothetically buffed HLC to be more bursty (sort of the long range variant of BLC) then they'd have no need to get in close. This would also solve the interdiction vulnerability since they wouldn't necessarily have to get within the range of mines or drones. At least in my experience flying strikers their weapons like QLC and HLC have the range to start taking out mines and drones before they can become a serious threat. (Also if you buffed EMP to actually be worth taking strikers would be able to further mitigate the threat a bomber's pets have).

 

 

While I agree to buff torpedos, I don't think it's possible to make them useful in node fights. Their lockon time needs to be reduced and their firing arc needs to be increased to the point where it's similar to the current interdiction missile. If the reload time doesn't get reduced they still need too much time to kill bombers and if it gets reduced they may become too strong at 10km range.

 

Honestly I think giving them the lock-on/reload stats of interdiction missiles would not be a bad thing (it may in fact be the exact sort of buff they need). Combined with buffed primaries torps would become fairly threatening (albeit maybe not finishers by themselves). In my experience the main problems I have tagging a bomber with torps is the slow lock-on speed giving them too much time to break LOS, the firing arc has minimal impact on that once you get it to 16-20 (depending on upgrades/crew you choose). The main problem with the firing arc is the ninja lock loss but with a buff to a base arc of 16 it'd be in much better shape and once you add in crew passives it'd largely be gone (freeing up the T4 upgrade to be a personal preference choice rather than the firing arc being very strongly encouraged because of the ninja lock loss). When you set up a torpedo run at 10km a firing arc of 16-20 covers a larger portion (or the entire portion) of the node and a striker should have the turn speed to track a bomber at that range (a 10% buff to base turn speed wouldn't hurt though).

 

Again in theory a strikers heavy weapons should be good enough that between torps and HLC it wouldn't have to fight a bomber under the node in CQC but rather snipe at it like a GS does. They certainly seemed designed around the idea of firing at range rather than in CQC and I think it's totally possible to buff a striker so that it wouldn't have to engage a bomber under a node the way a scout does. That strikers should be buffed so they're not cripplingly weak at CQC is probably a good thing but IMO they don't need CQC AP weapons to surpass scouts as bomber killers. They do however need scouts to yield some ground in the AP role if that's going to be the strikers role in the meta. I don't think it's viable to keep the strikers AP weapons at their current performance level so they definitely need to be buffed up to the point where they're in the same league as slug, BLC, and pods but without taking AP away from some things you'll also only make the current binary with armor/AP worse.

 

I don't think it'd be at all bad if torps allowed strikers to provide similar scary threat at 10km that a GS does at 15km. Yes scouts would have to change their tactics up a bit from current meta tactics but I don't think such a meta change would mean they'd disappear.

Edited September 8, 2015 by Gavin_Kelvar

[Ramalina]

If you recall, bombers were much stronger against scouts when they first went live. Part of that was lack of experience in dealing with them, but things like mine damage not respecting LOS made bombers a lot more lethal against anything that got too close. They were a very hard counter against scouts, and that's pretty much their primary role. They got a series of hefty nerfs, and it's possible that this has left them a bit weaker than they should be against scouts and gunships closing to use BLCs.

 

If you judge by initial design, then bombers on the node are probably supposed to counter scouts even harder than the old version of ion railgun punished strikes.

 

I'd also agree on the general undesirability of basically adding BLCs to strikes as a way of making them dedicated bomber hunters. It could potentially work well on a T3, as they have the durability to get in close with a bomber and survive. If they managed to land a thermite that'd also mesh nicely with BLCs in terms of getting a fairly quick kill on a bomber.

 

On the T1 and T2 though, getting close with a bomber is fairly foolish most of the time. That's playing the bomber's game, and the bomber should win by a significant margin (part of why I think bombers could be a bit more deadly to scouts than they currently are). The strike anti-armor weapons are quite happy at ranges of 4.5 to 11 km, and that makes the gunnery easier for the strike and also reduces the danger from the bomber's deployables to almost zero if the strike pilot is paying attention. Some T1 strikes would still want a BLC type weapon, but it'd be for dogfighting purposes rather than going after bombers in most cases.

Edited September 8, 2015 by Ramalina

[RickDagles]

Bombers are already OP vs scouts, don't nerf BLC AP please.

[Gavin_Kelvar]

If you recall, bombers were much stronger against scouts when they first went live. Part of that was lack of experience in dealing with them, but things like mine damage not respecting LOS made bombers a lot more lethal against anything that got too close. They were a very hard counter against scouts, and that's pretty much their primary role. They got a series of hefty nerfs, and it's possible that this has left them a bit weaker than they should be against scouts and gunships closing to use BLCs.

 

If you judge by initial design, then bombers on the node are probably supposed to counter scouts even harder than the old version of ion railgun punished strikes.

 

I forgot about that. But you're right they were a hard counter to scouts. All things considered if they buffed strikers to be a true threat to bombers I think it would be safe to "un-nerf" the bombers (directly through un-nerfs to their pets or indirectly through the reduction of AP options for scouts) a little to make them hard counters to scouts again.

 

The strike anti-armor weapons are quite happy at ranges of 4.5 to 11 km, and that makes the gunnery easier for the strike and also reduces the danger from the bomber's deployables to almost zero if the strike pilot is paying attention. Some T1 strikes would still want a BLC type weapon, but it'd be for dogfighting purposes rather than going after bombers in most cases.

 

That's my experience too. I still pull out the striker for anti-bomber duty when it's impossible to get into range with a scout. I generally feel that the only reason scouts are better anti-bombers right now is because 1) torps are far more difficult to use than they should be, 2) striker primaries need more burst and 3) the Clarion needs HLC (of the strike models it's probably best positioned to be an anti-bomber). There are a lot of other buffs to defense and mobility that would certainly help but I feel that would be of most benefit to them in general rather than problems that directly result in them being unable to effectively counter bombers.

[Danalon]

If you recall, bombers were much stronger against scouts when they first went live. Part of that was lack of experience in dealing with them, but things like mine damage not respecting LOS made bombers a lot more lethal against anything that got too close. They were a very hard counter against scouts, and that's pretty much their primary role. They got a series of hefty nerfs, and it's possible that this has left them a bit weaker than they should be against scouts and gunships closing to use BLCs.

 

As far as I remember interdiction mines were ignoring shields when they introduced bombers. The combination of a seismic and an interdiction mine (both upgraded) was fatal to scouts.

Edited September 8, 2015 by Danalon

[tunewalker]

Personal point on my understanding the real world links for Strikes.

 

 

As some may know I believe "Threat Range" to be the primary problem for strikes. Their best and most effective range right now is not much different from scouts (if a scout takes Burst and Clusters, vs a Strike that takes Ion's Clusters and heavies the Scout has effective range of 1-3K while the strike has an effective range usually of at best 1-5k) which is not enough for the strike to be considered "medium range" or even "long range" fighters as some of the "real world stuff" would have it called (look at heavy fighters) while we dont want Strikes effective range to be = to gunships we do want it to be some where in the middle, and as I have said before effective range is not max range, it is the range at which you can reliably deliver your burst, for a Strike that requires both the lasers and the missiles to be brought to bear and reliable, and that also requires a missile to be fairly reliable against the targets they are meant to be used against. Ideal Effective range for a Strike to me would be around 8 or 9- 3k then it wouldnt need the engines any where nearly as bad as it does now. Its close to that currently with Concussion missiles, but the Conc missiles are not reliable enough (to long a lock time) and the Heavy lasers can only reach 6.9k (max range not "most effective range") with ranged capacitors.

 

For those wanting 1 ship to counter 1 ship only and have all 4 ships in the meta I want you to realize how impossible that truly is. First place 3 dots on a paper, then draw a line from every one of the dots to each other dot, you will notice that you have drawn a triangle as the top dot went to the 2 bottom dots, the left one want to the top and the right, and the right dot went to the left and the top. Now do the same thing with 4 dots.... its a square.... with an x through it, even if we got it to the point where bombers countered scouts, scouts countered gunships, gunships countered strikes and strikes countered bombers... you still have to ask the question what is the relationship between strikes and scouts?, what is the relationship between gunships and bombers? the fact of the matter is Gunships will ALWAYS counter bombers, and always counter them pretty hard core as the 2 ships kits just line up that way. The gunship does not have to get into the bombers range to have to dish out significant damage to the bomber, AND the gunship has better mobility then the bomber, there is no point when a bomber is going to counter a gunship. Finally if Strikes only counter bombers and nothing else, it wont be bringing them into the meta, bombers are a part of the meta, but only barely making strikes good against them and nothing else will just lessen bombers in the meta even further with out touching the other ships at all, which will lead to a larger Gunship and Scout meta largely removing the other 2 from said meta as bombers are now to easy to counter to be an effective counter to scouts.

 

Honestly though as I have said before I believe the real thing we should be shooting for is each ship having effective tools with their identity. Bombers tool kit will always fairly hard counter scouts, scouts tool kit will always fairly hard counter Gunships and Gunships tool kit will always fairly hard counter bombers. Strikes dont need to be a hard counter to all of them, but it needs to counter more then 1 if its going to make its way in, right now its countered by 3, if it can soft counter 2 and be soft countered by 1 it will have its job back. Right now the Square with the x exists already its just all the lines drawn from the strike to the others are in favor of the others, we have the double triangle its just one point on that is vastly weaker then the other 3...

Edited September 9, 2015 by tunewalker

[tunewalker]

As far as I remember interdiction mines were ignoring shields when they introduced bombers. The combination of a seismic and an interdiction mine (both upgraded) was fatal to scouts.

 

Yep, insta death along with them exploding while you ere not in LoS of the mine. I thought the Interdiction change was good as it gave a reason to use concussion mine, not so much the lack of explosion going through LoS.

[RickDagles]

Bombers were annoying as **** back in the day. Quad/cluster worked half decently well until people started using charged plating.

[tunewalker]

Bombers were annoying as **** back in the day. Quad/cluster worked half decently well until people started using charged plating.

 

Which i started using on T2 Strike back when the Shield Bleed through was 50% starting (40% when upgraded) and there WERE no bombers, my server was already swapping away from Quads and clusters because of it, before the buff that brought it down to only 30% bleed through (20% after upgrades) Bombers were not the first thing to bring Charged plating into the meta, at least not on my server, it existed long before that and its counter existed long before that simply because I enjoyed being an annoying person with 97% DR for 19 out of 30 seconds and just go... ya what ev's you shoot me with them pee shooters I dont care.... I will care in about 10 seconds when this thing wears off, then I will Barrel roll away (10 second CD) and go fly around some rocks for like 10 seconds and then go at you all over again laughing at your pitiful damage..... people started to just Railgun me, or ignore me, until they got armor piercing weapons... and I could no longer enjoy my near immunity , bombers came in and started using it, and the counters on my server were largely already in place.

Edited September 9, 2015 by tunewalker

[Gavin_Kelvar]

So I'm pretty sure this was brought up earlier in this thread but I was thinking about how torps really need a buff. Which got me thinking: do any heavy missiles need a reload longer than concs 5.5 reload speed? Unlike railguns they provide a lock-on warning and have travel time giving pilots some time to try to use a break. Railguns however share a similar time to max effectiveness (charge up time) with many missiles (although torps have a longer lock-on time but don't provide the same amount of burst damage).

 

Now I get that a close range missile like clusters needs a reload time since otherwise it'd be crazy spammable. But if you gave concs and torps the same lock-on time with either the concs current 5.5 reload speed or next to no reload speed would it really be broken? They'd have firing arc differences and travel speed differences (plus various AP/Debuff effects) to keep each with their own purpose. No doubt they'd become much more powerful than any of us are used to but would that be a bad thing?

 

I'm also thinking a lot about the utility missiles like EMP. Recently I was in a match where being able to spam ion rail to neutralize a bomber's pets at a sat really helped my team secure the win (<100 points difference close). Now if I'd had EMP I wouldn't have been able to spam it to keep that bomber in check. Which got me thinking how if EMP were spammable it might live up to its purpose as a bomber counter. That in turn got me thinking about the heavy missiles and how they need to be able to be fired often enough to compete with the efficiency of slug rail's ability to take follow up shots. Now I'm not saying they need to be as efficient but it seems heavy missiles need to close the gap a bit between slug rail which is their main competitor in the long range damage business.

[tunewalker]

So I'm pretty sure this was brought up earlier in this thread but I was thinking about how torps really need a buff. Which got me thinking: do any heavy missiles need a reload longer than concs 5.5 reload speed? Unlike railguns they provide a lock-on warning and have travel time giving pilots some time to try to use a break. Railguns however share a similar time to max effectiveness (charge up time) with many missiles (although torps have a longer lock-on time but don't provide the same amount of burst damage).

 

Now I get that a close range missile like clusters needs a reload time since otherwise it'd be crazy spammable. But if you gave concs and torps the same lock-on time with either the concs current 5.5 reload speed or next to no reload speed would it really be broken? They'd have firing arc differences and travel speed differences (plus various AP/Debuff effects) to keep each with their own purpose. No doubt they'd become much more powerful than any of us are used to but would that be a bad thing?

 

I'm also thinking a lot about the utility missiles like EMP. Recently I was in a match where being able to spam ion rail to neutralize a bomber's pets at a sat really helped my team secure the win (<100 points difference close). Now if I'd had EMP I wouldn't have been able to spam it to keep that bomber in check. Which got me thinking how if EMP were spammable it might live up to its purpose as a bomber counter. That in turn got me thinking about the heavy missiles and how they need to be able to be fired often enough to compete with the efficiency of slug rail's ability to take follow up shots. Now I'm not saying they need to be as efficient but it seems heavy missiles need to close the gap a bit between slug rail which is their main competitor in the long range damage business.

 

Concs have a 6 second reload time, not a 5.5 reload time, the 5.5 comes from the crew member 8% reload time reduction. Personally just going to say I am not sure reloads need to be better as much as lock times need to be better. Reducing reloads to low makes there no point for the missile swap system ability on the T2 strike, but ya I dont really see any reason to have reload times longer then 6 seconds. The weapons are already limited by ammo.

[Gavin_Kelvar]

Concs have a 6 second reload time, not a 5.5 reload time, the 5.5 comes from the crew member 8% reload time reduction. Personally just going to say I am not sure reloads need to be better as much as lock times need to be better. Reducing reloads to low makes there no point for the missile swap system ability on the T2 strike, but ya I dont really see any reason to have reload times longer then 6 seconds. The weapons are already limited by ammo.

 

Ah my mistake. I guess I kinda thought the T2's missile swap would become more like the GS weapon swap system. ie not there to by-pass reloads so much as to allow for weapon versatility. As I recall from the Pike's flavor text it seemed to imply the weapon swap is there to allow the Pike to switch from a dogfighting missile to anti-armor missile depending on the target being engaged (much like how a real world strike fighter might carry air-to-air missiles for personal defense and air-to-ground missiles). I do agree that the priority is the lock-on time.

 

Also don't forget they're already limited by firing arc too. Even if torps get buffed to a base 16 firing arc (which they kinda need since that seems the best/only way to work around the ninja lock loss bug) they'll be of limited use in a dogfight which will, presumably, occur at a much closer range.

[JasonSzeremi]

Bombers are already OP vs scouts, don't nerf BLC AP please.

 

I'm afraid when you say bombers are OP vs scouts... what I hear is: Bombers are the rock to scouts scissors, they are supposed to destroy scouts

 

You're a great pilot and a good guy from what I can tell, but if I want to get someone into a tizzy about what's wrong with gsf, esp the balance between scouts and strike fighters all I have to say is:

Scouts get a big gun that does more damage then anything a larger strike fighter can carry

it's an armor piercing shot gun

 

The first I think can be fixed by buffing something.... HLC is coming out as the ideal choice given it's range, although expect to see bombers and even some gunships with them if they become good.

 

the second... I just don't see how it makes sense to have a scatter gun that punches coherent holes through heavy armors... perhaps it was a desperate 'bug' fix by the developers who never intended bombers to take over.

If strikes are to have a role, the ability to 'strike' armored targets is high on my list of possibles without crippling an existing well working classes favorite role: top dog fighter.

 

I also hear..if they did take away AP from BLC (not from scouts who should have some AP left still.... rocket pods are a logical weapon for AP) Then... if they don't buff strikes enough to kill bombers... bombers, not strikes will be the ones getting 'some love' out of this conversation.

[JasonSzeremi]

Yep, insta death along with them exploding while you ere not in LoS of the mine. I thought the Interdiction change was good as it gave a reason to use concussion mine, not so much the lack of explosion going through LoS.

 

I remember 'flying' a bomber then, it was grossly unfair.... I didn't have to fly... I would tuck under a sat and bury my mines into it and when they went off, my kill score would rise dramatically.... Now that you have to have a LOS to a mine to take damage, it takes more strategy and work to clear undesirables (read the other team) from a sat

[JasonSzeremi]

Bombers were annoying as **** back in the day. Quad/cluster worked half decently well until people started using charged plating.

 

how... unfair would it be to swap AP from BLC to quads?

[JasonSzeremi]

Concs have a 6 second reload time, not a 5.5 reload time, the 5.5 comes from the crew member 8% reload time reduction. Personally just going to say I am not sure reloads need to be better as much as lock times need to be better. Reducing reloads to low makes there no point for the missile swap system ability on the T2 strike, but ya I dont really see any reason to have reload times longer then 6 seconds. The weapons are already limited by ammo.

 

Honestly, how long were the reload times in x-wing? I don't recall there being any.

Are these missiles in some kind of magazine launcher? I think the reload times for most of the missiles are excessive, especially the utility missiles. It exists for game balance I suspect... and currently missiles are out of balance.

 

if strikes were to take on bombers, we might want some damage dealing, armor piercing missiles that fired at least as fast as concussion missiles, utility missiles that didn't lock you into flying straight.... should probably reload faster, ones that did should probably reload as long as you are stuck flying straight, so you could dodge/run when they are locking again.

[JasonSzeremi]

Ah my mistake. I guess I kinda thought the T2's missile swap would become more like the GS weapon swap system. ie not there to by-pass reloads so much as to allow for weapon versatility. As I recall from the Pike's flavor text it seemed to imply the weapon swap is there to allow the Pike to switch from a dogfighting missile to anti-armor missile depending on the target being engaged (much like how a real world strike fighter might carry air-to-air missiles for personal defense and air-to-ground missiles). I do agree that the priority is the lock-on time.

 

Also don't forget they're already limited by firing arc too. Even if torps get buffed to a base 16 firing arc (which they kinda need since that seems the best/only way to work around the ninja lock loss bug) they'll be of limited use in a dogfight which will, presumably, occur at a much closer range.

 

there's also a cd/reload time on rail guns.... imagine if it was the same as the one on torps