Let's talk about Strike Fighters

[RickDagles]

Now I do take my fighter out here and there, but only when I look at the starting teams and can tell its an easy match. .

 

This is why you are bad and your opinion should mean nothing.

 

I'm going to write this from the perspective of the only strike fighter I have played in all of my alts and time in space.

 

The Gladiator.

 

You know what? I really enjoy it. My spec:

Ion Cannon - Weapon and Engine drains

Quad Laser Cannon - reduced laser cost and hull dmg

Concussion Missiles - Range and Ship slow

Quick Charge Shield with regen

Retro thrusters with turn rate

Range inc

Regen extender

Turbo reactor

Turning thrusters.

 

What this does is gives my Gladiator the ability to nullify enemy shields almost instantly, switch to Quads to fire

while using lockon of the Concussion missiles to either pacify and slow while burst the enemy down or cause the enemy to try to flee the lock. This coupled with my fast reloading shields makes it so I can go toe to toe with most opponents and bombers have no hope against my ions.

 

I think Burst Laser Cannons would make my strike fighter too strong, but then again so is every other ship so far. Maybe strong is what it needs.

.

 

I like the creativity, but unfortunately your ship build is still bad and would be completely ruined by 1 competent ion railgun player. Trading regen thrusters for turning thrusters means you are better at fighting on satellites, but 1 ion railgun will render you immobile for like 10+ seconds. Quick charge shields helps the mobility a bit, but it means BLC Scouts can melt you in 2 shots (especially since you don't have the mandatory large reactor).

 

I've flown a similar build that uses directional shields and cluster missiles instead. It's pretty good on satellites as long as there aren't any good gunship players in the game. But the battlescout is still quite a bit better at this job.

Edited May 29, 2015 by RickDagles

[Odacervicix]

Thanks for the post, Alex. it's great to hear that Bioware is looking at GSF again.

 

Nemarus' post and Verain's posts provide decent summaries of the problems and have a lot of good ideas. That's where I would start looking.

 

But It seems to me that you have some tough decisions to make. I think you guys have kind of designed yourselves into a corner with distortion field. Right now, the balance between scouts and gunships is pretty good. And a lot of that interplay comes from proper use of distortion field. If you aren't familiar with how important distortion field is to the current meta, I would suggest watching some of Drakolich's recorded games on youtube, particularly the "Super Serious" games that he organizes for the community.

 

Why does this matter? Strikes are very missile dependent in their current form. As others have pointed out, every missile except for clusters is very unreliable. So, naturally, one of the obvious ways to buff strikes would be to buff missiles. But, it seems to me, that doing so would push the meta even further into a narrow "must have distortion field" direction. If missiles are buffed, taking the best shield against missiles would seem to be the easiest and most obvious response. I'd prefer a broad meta where all component choices are viable, and the one you choose involves some interesting tradeoffs of benefits and weaknesses.

 

So what about combining missile buffs with distortion field changes, such as removing or altering the missile break? The short answer is that this would completely disrupt the meta. Gunship/Scout balance is going to be thrown off, and I'm not sure which one will come out ahead. Gunships would be hit pretty hard, as most of them rely on distortion field to compensate for the long cool down on barrel roll. Scouts would be hit hard, as they would no longer be able to brazenly attack relatively fortified areas without being quickly peeled. (And before you think that this would be a good thing, think about how it would encourage more defensive play at the expense of offensive play.) And engine moves would be less likely to be used on offense, because missile breaks just became that much more precious. These are some of the possible consequences, just off of the top of my head. There are probably more. I would guess that if you went this way, it would require multiple rounds of rebalancing, which is probably not what you are looking for. I think you probably should deal with it at some point, but it doesn't sound like now is the time to do so.

 

Plus if you do remove the missile break, inevitably, we will have weeping, tearing of clothes, ashes, and venting on the forums. Somebody will probably quit the game and tell us all about it on the forums. And nobody wants to read that stuff.

 

So if we can't remove the distortion field missile break without completely rearranging the game what can we do? I would agree with others that suggest buffing other areas of the Strike until people start complaining about them. I like the idea of increasing their shields and mobility dramatically. As others have pointed out, ion railgun is very common and it is murder on a strike. Increasing mobility and shields will help.

 

I like the idea of passively buffing their primary weapon damage by a lot. GSF is often played by applying packets of high damage in small time periods. It always struck me as odd that a Scout could pour out way more straight line damage (e.g., jousting damage) than a strike. I would have assumed that a heavier platform like a strike would carry more weapons, and would be something you wouldn't want to purposely engage from the front. But perhaps this is just misconception on my part. I'm not a big star wars lore guy.

 

I don't want to suggest that missiles shouldn't be tinkered with as well. All of them except for cluster and maybe interdiction could use buffs. In particular, the utility missiles are awful. To give you an example, if you took ion railgun, and you removed the engine drain, removed the weapon drain, and removed the final tier choice (slow or energy regen lockout), I'd still pick it over ion or emp missile as the top utility weapon in the game. And if you removed the AOE effect from ion railgun, I'd still pick it over ion missile every time. At that point, emp missile might be a choice, depending on what I was doing. But that's how far behind ion railgun these missiles are.

 

But if you do buff missiles, I would encourage you to also buff the shield defenses available to strikes. Otherwise, without access to distortion field, strikes might become their own worst predators. For example, without distortion field, Strikes have no effective shields to counter torpedo buffs, as those weapons bypass armor and shields. And the game might be narrowed and pushed more towards ships with distortion field.

[Firolas]

They want feedback??

Is this a joke?

Bioware famous for theyre communication and the way they listen to the community..yeah we wish

 

They ignore everything and just hit people with changes that no one asked for and pretend that we all love it.

Going through all the class forums its a epic saga of people pulling hair out due to theyre specs being messed with and left broken.

 

To all GSF players..what ever good ideas you come up with , they will go with something that no one suggested and will pretty much ruin the next 6 months of that part of the game.

[Verain]

I really have no idea what you're talking about, I have never needed more than a weapon power pool on any ship to kill any other ship and I don't see how buffing powerpool would fix any of its current problems.

 

I just saw this while browsing the thread, and I want to point out: YOU don't need more than a weapon power pool, but you have pro gamer response time and fine muscle control. If you were to take a test, you would be as off the charts as an professional athlete would be in their domain. I don't think you need to be as good as you are to share your opinion on weapon pools (I find them adequate on a strike or scout, but they are absolutely lacking on a bomber sometimes, mostly I think because you have to take crap shots, but it's fine for them to be weaker on a bomber).

 

But if some section of the playerbase runs out of mana while shooting, well, that's legit feedback. Unlike a lot of things where a game gets balanced around a lowest common denominator, that doesn't seem like it would ruin balance.

 

 

Strongly agree with your "don't screw up the other classes" thing, however. Component balance is related, but I think a bigger issue isn't that BLC is too strong, it's more like, strikes have one weapon that suites them, the heavy laser, and it's not meant to be good against all ships and at all times. The quad laser is sadly VERY escapable, and not that amazing on a ship without scout like abilities, and the remaining rapid fire laser is stunningly poor. This means that strikes mostly bear quads or heavies, and at least the quads are undertuned for the purposes of a strike fighter. Arguably, the heavies are too, and that's why I like the idea of a magnitude buff for strikes (again, not the only way to fix strikes by any means).

[Verain]

Oh, MOST IMPORTANT!!!!

 

> Rycer looks like a space lawnmower. Quell and Imperium only slightly better.

> Clarion still needs a Ms Pacman bow option.

[Caernos]

Hello Alex

 

First let me say thank you for creating this thread and getting this dialogue going. For me it's great to see such a flurry of activity over one of my favorite parts of SWTOR.

 

Now as to Strike Fighters, these are my favorite ships to fly. On my main, Cynfor Cinderheart, my hanger is all three strike fighters, plus the Jurgoran (armed with missiles, no railgun. Missile-jurg!) and the decimus (or as I like to call it, the dodger bomber). Now while I love flying these fighters, I am not a theory crafter or an expert on game balance and design and as such I would like to stress that the following is my opinion and should not be taken as fact or a representation of the GSF community as a whole.

 

If I was to change one thing about strike fighters, it would be their secondary weapons. Only having access to missiles means that they have some of the weakest damage out there. While a missile completely ignores evasion, multiple missile breaks and the inability to keep a target within their sights for locks upwards of two seconds means that actual damage from missiles is very low.

 

Scouts are able to get around this problem by using their superior speed and mobility to enable their primary weapons more effectively. Gunships have railguns, and while they still require time to charge and are affected by evasion; when they hit they do far more damage than any of the available missiles. Bombers have their mines and drones; mines (except for seekers) apply their damage instantaneously when you enter their trigger radius while drones fire on their targets (or apply debuff in the Interdiction Drone's case) without any kind of warning and are unaffected by accuracy. In comparison against these ships, where they can use their primary weapons for burst damage or their secondary weapons deal instantaneous damage, relying on missiles for that sudden burst of damage means that strike fighters cannot compete.

 

In summary, in my opinion improving a strike's secondary weapons by in general improving missiles would go a long way to making them more reliable fighters to fly. I will also put some additional thoughts in spoilers below. Again, this has all been my opinion. Thank you for your time and for reading, if I think of anything else I will return to add more.

 

On adding some components to strikes

 

 

Honestly I would really only add a few components to the Type 2 Strike, the missile strike as I feel it is the weakest of the three strikes. For the quell I would add BLCs, Interdiction Missile, and Rocket Pods. BLCs would give it more teeth in the short range where I think it currently lacks, having only the spammable cluster missiles. Interdiction missile would give it some useable utility for dog fights. And rocket pods would give it a great strafing weapon that would combine well with HLCs for high burst damage at mid range and in jousts.

 

I know a lot of people would like to see BLCs added to the Type 1 laser strike but I do not as I don't think BLCs synergize particularly well with any of the other primary weapons save HLCs. Furthermore, I also believe that BLCs are currently overtuned and need to be debuffed as anytime you are given a choice between BLCs or any other short range laser you pick BLCs. Rather than put BLCs on the type 1 laser strike I would rather see short range laser options buffed and improved in general, giving more variety and choice across all ships.

 

I really like the Type 3 Command Strike but I think it's systems components need to improve the most. Targeting Command and Slicing don't just provide anywhere near the same benefits that Repair probes do.

 

 

On Evasion and Damage Resistance

 

Evasion and Damage Resistance are two of the ways you can passively/actively mitigate incoming damage and between the two Evasion is a lot harder to over come. While their are multiple weapons that have armor piercing to counter DR, countering Evasion relies on picking specific components or crew skills that increase accuracy temporarily. Even with that temporary increase in accuracy though, you still have to deal with things like tracking penalties and the highest you can possibly buff your accuracy will still not completely negate someone's evasion when they trigger DField and other evasion cooldowns.

 

Now I don't want to nerf evasion. I actually think the initial nerfs to evasion were great and brought passive evasion down to reasonable levels. That said, evasion is still far better than DR in the grand scheme of things as there are just not very many effective ways to counter it unlike DR. I think would be an interesting idea to test, would be to have a health penalty for equipping the lightweight armor secondary component, like -1% per upgrade. This health penalty would mean that while enemy shots would more likely miss, taking a hit would be far more threatening. As such, some pilots would say well that evasion is worth it, I'll take the chance, others would say no thank you, I'll keep dfield but let me put on reinforced armor instead.

 

[Verain]

Since we have a close range specialist (Scout) and long range specialist (Gunship) just make Strikes mid ranged specialists. To this end I think Strikes should get a 30-50% increase on all of their weapons ranges.

 

I had missed this because it's not getting bounced around like some other posts, but I want to point out that this would be pretty massive. A range boost will help accuracy at all ranges, and make strikes actually feel like they can strike things at mid range. The game decision to make some lasers be melee and others be almost melee has definitely meant that the "mid range" a strike excels at doesn't really exist (and not within time to kill). Closing from 15km to 2km is an investment of time and breath, but going from the 7km a strike is good at to the 3km at which he is not is an eyeblink.

 

This would be a great change.

[Verain]

As an aside about missiles:

 

> It seems odd that there's no way to reload outside of healers.

> It really seems superflous that you can run out of protons and thermites, given their other extraordinary targeting restrictions.

> Only rocket pods and double cluster seem like they are actually limited by their ammunition. Infinity of those would feel unfair. Infinity concussions or interdictions seems like it would be a bit powerful, but I doubt it would dent anything currently. Infinity EMP, Ion, Proton, or Thermite wouldn't change anyone's decision about weapon selection. This is interesting.

[Nemarus]

I had missed this because it's not getting bounced around like some other posts, but I want to point out that this would be pretty massive. A range boost will help accuracy at all ranges, and make strikes actually feel like they can strike things at mid range. The game decision to make some lasers be melee and others be almost melee has definitely meant that the "mid range" a strike excels at doesn't really exist (and not within time to kill). Closing from 15km to 2km is an investment of time and breath, but going from the 7km a strike is good at to the 3km at which he is not is an eyeblink.

 

This would be a great change.

 

I agree that this would be a welcome change, and would make Strikes far more viable in TDM.

 

I'm not understanding how it would help Strikes help peel craft off of nodes though. Can someone ELI5? I feel like I'm missing something the rest of you aren't.

 

I mean, I suppose stretching the range of all Strike primaries would also stretch their damage curve, increasing damage at short range. But that doesn't seem enough.

[Nemarus]

Thanks for the post, Alex. it's great to hear that Bioware is looking at GSF again.

 

Nemarus' post and Verain's posts provide decent summaries of the problems and have a lot of good ideas. That's where I would start looking.

 

But It seems to me that you have some tough decisions to make. I think you guys have kind of designed yourselves into a corner with distortion field. Right now, the balance between scouts and gunships is pretty good. And a lot of that interplay comes from proper use of distortion field. If you aren't familiar with how important distortion field is to the current meta, I would suggest watching some of Drakolich's recorded games on youtube, particularly the "Super Serious" games that he organizes for the community.

 

Why does this matter? Strikes are very missile dependent in their current form. As others have pointed out, every missile except for clusters is very unreliable. So, naturally, one of the obvious ways to buff strikes would be to buff missiles. But, it seems to me, that doing so would push the meta even further into a narrow "must have distortion field" direction. If missiles are buffed, taking the best shield against missiles would seem to be the easiest and most obvious response. I'd prefer a broad meta where all component choices are viable, and the one you choose involves some interesting tradeoffs of benefits and weaknesses.

 

So what about combining missile buffs with distortion field changes, such as removing or altering the missile break? The short answer is that this would completely disrupt the meta. Gunship/Scout balance is going to be thrown off, and I'm not sure which one will come out ahead. Gunships would be hit pretty hard, as most of them rely on distortion field to compensate for the long cool down on barrel roll. Scouts would be hit hard, as they would no longer be able to brazenly attack relatively fortified areas without being quickly peeled. (And before you think that this would be a good thing, think about how it would encourage more defensive play at the expense of offensive play.) And engine moves would be less likely to be used on offense, because missile breaks just became that much more precious. These are some of the possible consequences, just off of the top of my head. There are probably more. I would guess that if you went this way, it would require multiple rounds of rebalancing, which is probably not what you are looking for. I think you probably should deal with it at some point, but it doesn't sound like now is the time to do so.

 

Plus if you do remove the missile break, inevitably, we will have weeping, tearing of clothes, ashes, and venting on the forums. Somebody will probably quit the game and tell us all about it on the forums. And nobody wants to read that stuff.

 

So if we can't remove the distortion field missile break without completely rearranging the game what can we do? I would agree with others that suggest buffing other areas of the Strike until people start complaining about them. I like the idea of increasing their shields and mobility dramatically. As others have pointed out, ion railgun is very common and it is murder on a strike. Increasing mobility and shields will help.

 

I like the idea of passively buffing their primary weapon damage by a lot. GSF is often played by applying packets of high damage in small time periods. It always struck me as odd that a Scout could pour out way more straight line damage (e.g., jousting damage) than a strike. I would have assumed that a heavier platform like a strike would carry more weapons, and would be something you wouldn't want to purposely engage from the front. But perhaps this is just misconception on my part. I'm not a big star wars lore guy.

 

I don't want to suggest that missiles shouldn't be tinkered with as well. All of them except for cluster and maybe interdiction could use buffs. In particular, the utility missiles are awful. To give you an example, if you took ion railgun, and you removed the engine drain, removed the weapon drain, and removed the final tier choice (slow or energy regen lockout), I'd still pick it over ion or emp missile as the top utility weapon in the game. And if you removed the AOE effect from ion railgun, I'd still pick it over ion missile every time. At that point, emp missile might be a choice, depending on what I was doing. But that's how far behind ion railgun these missiles are.

 

But if you do buff missiles, I would encourage you to also buff the shield defenses available to strikes. Otherwise, without access to distortion field, strikes might become their own worst predators. For example, without distortion field, Strikes have no effective shields to counter torpedo buffs, as those weapons bypass armor and shields. And the game might be narrowed and pushed more towards ships with distortion field.

 

This is an excellent post and accurately describes the current conundrum, and the various risks of proposed solutions (including some I proposed).

 

My rainbow post shouldn't be considered without also taking the above into consideration.

[Nemarus]

I do want them to make them OP but currently with DO you need one ion hit and one heavy hit to kill most ships in the game. If you gave that DO you'd only need one hit to kill anything in the game. That's simply too much.

 

You conveniently didn't mention the 2 weapons that make strikes good, strikes are actually very bursty if played correctly, the issue is that they need to get too close to get their burst off properly.

 

You mean Ion/Cluster/HLC build? Yes, that is one specific build, available on one of three Strike variants, which can dish out burst damage within 4400m. I think it's quite competitive in Domination, actually. I called that out in my original rainbow vomit.

 

But I would hope this thread would have greater aspirational goals than buffing one specific build of Star Guard. I would hope that the devs attempt to make all three variants of Strike competitive ... perhaps with each variant even having more than one desirable build.

 

If you're referring to some other means of Strike burst damage, then it's one I'm not familiar with, and I hope you'll elaborate!

Edited May 29, 2015 by Nemarus

[Nemarus]

Yes please stop crapping on what already works. I think Nem's idea wasn't to nerf ion railgun against Scouts and Bombers, just to nerf it against Strikes. Which is totally called for, but would also be super difficult to pull off.

 

That is correct. The change to Ion Railgun I proposed would ideally be tuned such that ships with ~2000+ shields would not receive engine energy drain, while craft with under 2000 shields would. Perhaps it could even be tuned such that very lightly shielded Scouts (like DF and Quick Charge) would suffer more dire energy drains than they do today.

 

I know Verain thinks I hate Railguns and Gunships. I really don't. I'm not a fan of Evasion (I think it confuses and frustrates new players). If you must assume I'm coming to this thread with some kind of agenda, assume it's against Evasion, which does post a large obstacle to effective Strikes.

 

Even putting the DF missile break discussion aside (which I am willing to do, since I concede that removing it would destabilize the status quo too much), let's remember that Strikes don't have Targeting Telemetry, and the bulk of their primary weapons have poor inherent accuracy. Without Wingman, a Strike can't hit much.

 

I think that needs to be solved somehow. Either a nerf to Evasion generally (which would hurt Scouts and help Gunships), or a buff to Strike accuracy.

Edited May 29, 2015 by Nemarus

[Verain]

They ignore everything and just hit people with changes that no one asked for and pretend that we all love it.

Going through all the class forums its a epic saga of people pulling hair out due to theyre specs being messed with and left broken.

 

This complaint is levied at the devs of every game. It's true that Bioware doesn't have the same depth to their manpower that, say, Blizzard does, but neither is your opinion neutral in any way.

 

One of the problems with "class forums" is the same problem of "classes" in the games- you simply MUST invest so hard in a single character (who in almost all the wowlikes, has a single class), that a bad implementation for even a week will destroy your fun.

 

In GSF, everyone has every ship, and as you level one ship, the others level a little bit too. I have every ship complete on both factions- this would be the exact equivalent of having every advanced class (on both sides) at max, with every single piece of pvp and pve gear available. That's been the case for a few months now, because GSF isn't a gear treadmill, and making a mastered ship is a sneeze compared to maintaining a fully kitted out ground game guy.

 

There's still guys that are on one side or another- some players focus hard on their scout or gunship- so it's not like we are neutral. But we all want strikes to be better because we all have strikes, and (mostly) we all like playing as them.

 

In the ground game, if you are a Foozle and your friend is a Doozle, and Doozles are underpowered, you might wish they were buffed so that Doozles were balanced, but it's not like you would be like "alright, lemme play MY Doozle, FINALLY" if they get fixed. We are all invested in strikes being good because we all have strikes, and we can't bring them out to play.

 

 

So in this regard, their job is a lot easier here than the ground game.

 

 

Also, coming in off the dev tracker to promise ruin is really low class. The few times we've gotten dev feedback, the discussion has improved greatly, and the few times we've had devs mess with game balance, it's been better. In fact, part of the problems on live are due to unresolved bugs:

 

> Sab probe "snare" talent, if selected, makes the move do nothing.

> EMP Field was buffed in response to player feedback and dev playtesting on stream, to have a bigger radius. A summer patch broke the range back to the old value (the tooltip claims the same value as it did post-buff, but it is not true, we have tested). This hurt EMP field a lot.

> Ion missile has an older version of both its snared duration, and the stated snare duration on the tooltip. This balance tweak was not needed and not communicated, so my *assumption* is, it's a bug. If a dev was like "nope, didn't want a snare that long", then, well, I won't argue (I mean, I disagree, but whatever)- but there was nothing in the notes, so probably a bug.

> The same patch that nerfed EMP Field (but left the tooltip a liar) and Ion missile also broke the tooltips of many moves with duration. Plasma railgun's text is truncated, missing a whole sentence, and the fact that it deals the damage over *6 seconds*. This is why we generally assume that the commit from summer was right when the dev team got distracted by kitten pictures.

> Ion railgun launched with talents that let you pick between "stop enemy regen for 6 seconds" and "snare enemy lightly (40%) for 6 seconds". Then it was changed to "reduce enemy regen by 55% for 6 seconds" and "snare enemy heavily (55%) for 12 seconds". We mostly started using the snare, because it was now playable, and the 55% reduction is meaningless. But NOW (and for several months), the tooltips CLAIM the second set of data, but actually DO the first. I have literally no idea what is intended here. Nominally I'm in favor of the values being set in the middle of the buffed and nerfed versions of each, but honestly, I'd be thrilled just to have the tooltips match the ability, or the ability match the tooltips.

 

 

These bugs impact balance, and they are (at least in some cases) contrary to helpful dev intentions. Your ground game experience isn't going to map over, even if it was unbiased and correct, which I doubt.

Edited May 29, 2015 by Verain

[-GMRZ-Rancor]

Building on my previous suggestion I want to explain somethings.

 

 

 

Accelerant Core passive: You can choose Turning, Accuracy or Speed cores:

Turning Core: Gradually increases turn rate by 1% every 5 seconds at 0 acceleration until capped

at 10% buff.

Tier 1: 1000 ship req

Turn rate increases immediately at 0 acceleration by 5%

Tier 2: 2500 ship req

Maximum Turn speed cap increased to 15%

Tier 3: 10000 ship req

Option1: Ion Contingency:

After reaching max turn cap, if your ship has been affected by ion weaponry

the slow is removed. This effect can only occur once every 30 seconds

Option 2: Plasma Contingency:

After reaching max turn cap, your ship gains Plasma charged Laser bleeds.

25% of the laser damage is added as a 5% bleed that can stack 2 times.

 

Accuracy Core: Passively gain 15% weapon accuracy instantly. gradually increases weapon pool regen

by 1% every 5 seconds at 50% acceleration until capped at 10%.

Tier 1: 1000 ship req

Weapon pool recovers 15 energy immediately at 50 acceleration

Tier 2: 2500 ship req

Weapon accuracy gains 1% accuracy every 5 seconds until cap of 10% buff on top of passive.

Tier 3: 10000 ship req

Option1: Critical Contingency:

After reaching max weaponry cap: When you recover to full Weapon pool, your critical hit chance increases by 5% passively until the stance ends.

Option 2: Targeting Contingency:

After reaching max weaponry cap: Your lock-on targeting time is reduced by 75% on your next secondary

weapon use that has lock-on mechanics. This effect can only be used once every 15 seconds.

 

 

Speed Core: Passively gains 1% Ship movement speed every second when you hit 100% acceleration until cap at 10% buff.

 

Tier 1: 1000 ship req

Ship speed increases immediately at 100 acceleration by 5%

Tier 2: 2500 ship req

Ship speed cap increases to 15%

Tier 3: 10000 ship req

Option1: Pursuit Contingency:

After reaching max speed cap: Your ship movement speed is doubled for 15 seconds

but you begin to lose Engine pool by 5 every second. This effect only initiates when you reach max speed buff cap and is activated only when you have full Engine pool and does not stack.

Option2: Escape Contingency:

After reaching max speed cap: Your hull integrity is increased by 25% and you repair 15 hull every 5 seconds while you are at 100% acceleration. This effect only activates when your shields drop to 0% and does not stack.

 

 

Every strike fighter would come equipped with the default passives those cores provide, for the acceleration.

When your at 0, you'd gradually turn faster, when your at 50% you'd gradually hit better and at 100% you'd gradually go faster. The idea is giving players the ability to buy a component in the form of Speed Core, Turn Core or Accuracy Core that better improves ONE stance. You'd be locked into the enhanced tree for the round in which hitting the particular speed will trigger the better stance but the other 2 would remain unchanged. You'd be basically picking between playstyles before a match like normal.

[Verain]

TI know Verain thinks I hate Railguns and Gunships. I really don't. I'm not a fan of Evasion (I think it confuses and frustrates new players). If you must assume I'm coming to this thread with some kind of agenda, assume it's against Evasion, which does post a large obstacle to effective Strikes.

 

I like the concept of evasion- it's an RPG, the characters should be meaningfully impacting the mechanics by critting and missing- but I hate HATE hate HATE HATE hate hate HATE Hate haAAaaaaaaaate that we can't see when our characters miss, versus when we as the players miss. The lack of this flytext is... UGH. It's the worst thing in the game. If it just SAID MISS, your brain would get the feedback it needs. Players would learn so MUCH faster to distinguish between a correctly targeted shot, and a missed shot, such that their aim would improve. How much faster? I have no idea, but I know enough of learning to guess, VASTLY faster. Top players know ahead of time whether their aim was good, but it takes kilogames to get there. Put this flytext in, and evasion wouldn't be nearly as frustrating.

 

And so while it may need to be nerfed, and is arguably too good, and strangely has no counter except mines and drones, which you can't chase an evasive target with, I think that just seeing hits and misses would be the first step in that fight.

[RAZIM]

Here are my general feelings when it comes to strike fighters.

 

Scouts took their role. Scouts have a lot of burst and mobility when they should have mobility and near endless blaster pools. The harassers that will kill you if you don't get out of their sights.

 

What I think strike fighters need:

• Strikes should be the slower bursty attack ship. They'll lack speed but light you up if you're in range.
  
• Limit their afterburner top speeds but keep their overall engine pools balanced. They'll be slower than scouts overall but won't get engine pool starvation as easily.
  
• Give them shielded systems ( A bit of resistance to subsystem/energy attacks )
  
• Rebuild Directional Shields for Strikes vs Gunships... in some cases Attack Bombers
  (Directional Shields need to supercharge frontal shields [maybe 10-12 second duration? 2m cooldown?] but keep the standard shield mechanics. I'm not sure the current swap mechanics work as well as they should. It should absorb a heavy amount of all damage/effects for the total duration. It should be visible to an attacker so they can tell that jousting with this ship isn't going to be fun.)
  
• Increase the range on the support strike repair/shield abilities.
  

 

p.s. Please correct the Imperial Quell/Rycer selection icon problem, the wing configuration doesn't match the active ship.

Edited May 29, 2015 by RAZIM

[Verain]

[*] Strikes should be the slower bursty attack ship. They'll lack speed but light you up if you're in range.

 

They've got the first part. They need the second.

 

[*] Limit their afterburner top speeds but keep their overall engine pools balanced. They'll be slower than scouts overall but won't get engine pool starvation as easily.

 

Are you proposing strikes get nerfed? They are already way slower than scouts. This nerf is out of line.

 

[*] Give them shielded systems ( A bit of resistant to subsystem/energy attacks )

 

Very cool idea. Nemarus has an idea with ion railgun and shielding to give them a bit of protection from status effects, but if they just cleared status effects faster and/or suffered them in less magnitude and/or lower duration, that would be pretty aces.

 

[*] Increase the range on the support strike repair/shield abilities.

 

The repair feels ok. It's a powerful effect and closing in on enemies is reasonable. The other two systems are pretty lame at this. Combat Command is frustrating because for it to get any extra damage out of your team, there must be a melee ball, and you must be in it at the start of the encounter. Repair probes is just, find people you think are damaged- doesn't matter if they are finishing a fight, heading over to one, or on a node. Combat Command could use a huge range boost, repair probes are fine. Remote Slicing should be much greater in range. I'm sure it has a short range because the effect of it can be frustrating, and there's no greatly obvious effect for new players to show that their systems are mangled (ex, if the engine button got a big red X over it, and an effect played over your ship so you understood insntantly what was going on).

 

p.s. Please correct the Imperial Quell/Rycer selection icon problem, the wing configuration doesn't match the active ship.

 

Please don't change any icons! Ever! I don't want to relearn GUI stuff.

Edited May 29, 2015 by Verain

[Nemarus]

And so while it may need to be nerfed, and is arguably too good, and strangely has no counter except mines and drones, which you can't chase an evasive target with, I think that just seeing hits and misses would be the first step in that fight.

 

Missiles do not take Evasion itself into account. Perhaps missiles were meant to be the counter to Evasion. This is precisely why the discussion keeps looping back to Distortion Field's missile break.

 

Is the Distortion Field the shield that gives you extra Evasion?

 

Or is Distortion Field the shield that gives you an extra missile break?

 

Unfortunately, it's both. Which means the ships with the highest Evasion also are the only ships with two missile breaks. This alone is what prevents missiles from being the true anti-Evasion weapon. And this is why people keep proposing removing the missile break.

 

But I entirely understand your concern about doing that. I just want to make clear this is why it keeps coming up. It's not because the proposers hate Gunships. It's because they want missiles to be effective anti-Evasion weapons.

 

Verain, what would be your reaction if Feedback Shield had the missile break, instead of Distortion Field?

[RebekahWSD]

Yes please stop crapping on what already works. I think Nem's idea wasn't to nerf ion railgun against Scouts and Bombers, just to nerf it against Strikes. Which is totally called for, but would also be super difficult to pull off.

 

One possibility in this regard might be an armor option, exclusive to strikes, that reduces the impact of Ion shots.

[BCGaius]

First, thanks for the GSF love! I can't stress enough how good this part of the game is, it just needs a little attention and support to push it into the realm of being more popular among more players. It's like a really amazing Kickstarter that hit 95% of its funding goal...

 

On the topic of Strike Fighters, I actually really like them. I don't necessarily agree that they need huge buffs. That said, I do see some areas where they could stand to be more effective.

 

As they currently stand, I see them as versatile missile platforms, very capable of medium-long range engagement. The problem is that they rely on missiles and torpedoes to do this, and missile-breaking maneuvers are too common on exactly the sort of targets they need to be hitting. Scouts are fine in this regard - they should break most missiles (although a nerf to Distortion Field's ability to do so might be in order), and a Strike that wants to hunt Scouts can and should equip Cluster Missiles to do so, which are perfectly capable in this role. Shooting at Strike Fighters is similar, with the added advantage of Concussion Missiles being more viable in this role. So against those two, I see no problem currently.

 

That leaves Gunships and Bombers, against whom the Strike Fighter could certainly stand to get a bit of a buff. Currently, missile-break maneuvers are too easy for Gunships to have and use. Start locking a Gunship, and wheee! Away he goes with Barrel Roll. Gunships should not have missile-break maneuvers - those that have them should be replaced with defensive powers more suited to the Gunship play style. This alone would help Strike Fighters in particular who rely very heavily on their missiles to kill targets.

 

Additionally, I'd propose a slight buff to Proton Torpedoes in the form of range. Extending their base range out to 11,000 or 12,000 meters would better allow Strike Fighters (and Bombers who eschew a pure mine/drone setup) to target Gunships and Bombers. Given the extremely long lock time, once you finish your lock you're often getting dangerously close to your target, and it can make the supposed role of Proton Torpedoes difficult to realize in practice. Finally, I'd also suggest a "blast radius" effect doing very minor damage to surrounding targets - just enough to knock out all nearby mines, and damage or maybe destroy drones. Bombers are extremely difficult to uproot once they're established on a satellite or defensible position and often require very specialized Scout builds to deal with. Enhancing a Strike Fighter's (or offensive Bomber's) ability to deal with clustered defensive Bombers and Gunships via a Proton Torpedo buff would do wonders to fix both Strike Fighters and the tepid stalemates that often occur against heavy Bomber/Gunship stacking.

 

I hope this doesn't get lost in this huge thread, and thanks again for listening!

[Karaiblis]

If I could change one thing, it would be the "jack of all trades, master of none" role. Why would you pick a Jack-of-All instead of the Master when you have a bar of ships you can chose a Master from after seeing the opposing team's make up, and have an idea of what's needed, and if they play better or worse or just different tactics than you expect, you can go back and pick a new one all though the same game.

 

There isn't a sustainable place for a not-good-enough-role-filler when you have access to a stable full of Master roll fillers at all times. Jack-of-all has a place in a system like ground PvP where you are stuck with one character and build the whole time never knowing what you will face, but the GSF meta doesn't work with that concept very well.

 

I'd love it to be an X-wing dogfighter, it's just so Star Wars, but even if that wont work in the current meta, it needs a reason to pick it over any other, and "being worse than any other in each area" will never be a reason when you can always pick the best at any time through the game.

[Sylvidre]

No, this is a personal problem - not a gameplay issue. A team of 6 bombers and 2 gunships is easily countered by a team of 3 charged plating bombers with hyperspace beacons, 3 gunships, and 2 battlescouts. Your 2 battlescouts tie up their 2 gunships, which allows your 3 gunships to constantly shoot ion railguns at the enemy bombers. Your bombers eat mines while holding the nodes, and they help kill the bombers via interdiction mines, HLC, and seismic mines..

Yeah ^^ great, the thing is....

We had 2 gunships and one Legion ^^ (I don't count mine as I flew my S-13 << the reason is in the following sentence). So we did with what we had ^^, we moved away from bombers. The gunships eventually followed us and as their bombers friends.. stayed hidden...

Stil, it was boring.

End of the off topic

 

As I see it, the Strikers, are just halfway of being a "counter-bomber" and I think they could do the job properly with some slight changes.

 

Speaking of DF, removing the missile break would be a great mistake, it would throw the game off balance for one type of ship.

Edited May 29, 2015 by Sylvidre

[Lendul]

Idea for the T2 strike. The seismic missile. It does what a seismic mine does with lock on, arc & cooldown of clusters.

[RAZIM]

Are you proposing strikes get nerfed? They are already way slower than scouts. This nerf is out of line.

 

It's more of an attempt at a balanced tradeoff than a nerf. It'd give them better base engine regen, in exchange for a slight afterburner top speed decrease. It should boost their overall range without making them too close to a scout. A straight buff to engine regen rate might be hard to pass off without it, that's all.

 

Strikes shouldn't need to compete with scouts in speed if they have the power advantage. Gunships would be able to deal with scouts at range so strikes don't need to chase them around. If they get too close, the strikes take over.

Edited May 29, 2015 by RAZIM

[SheikShmoove]

I probably spent 75% of my early matches in Strike Fighters, my first mastered ship was a Pike (sad, I know), and the only reason I don't fly Strikes more is their lack of an effective role. So I am very excited by the possibility that Strikes will get buffed in a significant way.

 

My ideas are similar to some of the ideas / feedback already provided, but maybe slightly different in implementation.

 

• Give the Strike Fighter chassis large buffs to Weapon, Engine, and Shield power pools/regen rates/regen delays.
  
• Make those buffs similar or equal in magnitude to the minor components they mimic, and then remove Reactor and Magazine as minor components from Strikes (since you would already effectively have these components baked into the Strike chassis). I'd keep the Thrusters component, since Strikes already lack mobility in their current form.
  
• Create a new, Strike-specific minor component. Let's call it "Targeting" or something like that. Have options that increase primary weapon accuracy, primary weapon range, primary weapon critical chance and magnitude, or missile lock-on/cooldown times. Or something like that -- basically address the big offensive deficit Strikes currently have.
  
• Since the Star Guard would lose two minor components, fill the 2nd missing component with Armor.
  

 

I think this might have some advantages:

1. You increase the offensive and mobility capabilities of the current Strikes while maintaining their defensive niche as "the shield guys".
   
2. You increase the offense of Strikes by buffing primary or secondary weapons in ways specific to Strikes, by buffing through a unique minor component rather than a specific laser or missile. This avoids affecting the balance of other ships, e.g., QLCs on Quad/Pods scouts.
   
3. The stock T1 Strike becomes very strong, making it a good beginner ship -- and since it is one of the two guaranteed starter ships, that is a good thing.
   
4. If the Targeting minor component is done right, perhaps it helps the Strike find niches, like a true mid-to-long range fighter (with increased primary range -- some posts bandied around a 30-50% increase), a missile fighter (with very short lock-on times like current Cluster missiles, but instead with Concussion Missiles or even Proton Torpedoes), or anti-evasion (with a +accuracy minor component).
   

 

I could see this going overboard, but then you could tweak the specific buffs to the Strike chassis, or the values of the Targeting minor component, without affecting other ships and ship types.