Crew Parity between Factions

[Alzim]

Good. Do more of this. Try and get a little more game balance. In other words have a little more fun. Its a video game not chess.

 

I'd say, the more "diversity" you have between the factions, the more difficult the balancing actually becomes. And right now the balancing in GSF is imho even better than in the "standard" PvP (which is an absolute joke/mess with classes, who are so weak compared to others ..., but that's a different topic) of the game - and according to some ppl here probably the best so far since launch of this mod. So, seeing their troubles in balancing even the "standard" PvP, I'm not sure if it would be the right moment to bring more "diversity" - in terms of chosen side and their pros and cons - into GSF ...

 

(I already envy Imp players for Admiral Ranken compared to this uncharismatic Aygo ... )

[phalczen]

I'm just grateful we can even have a discussion about hydrospanner, T2 Strikes, and proton torpedoes, something we wouldn't have been having 24 days ago.

[Verain]

As long as running out of engine power is a massive problem for most ships, and running out of blaster power is at worst a minor nuisance for most ships, you can't really cure the double weapon passives unless you make them do weapon related things that aren't power usage related.

 

We've had threads about redesigning the engineering passives. The buffs were symmetric, and kept the current design.

 

At the end of the day, you don't NEED a "double blaster" companion. There's basically no use where that makes sense- the game won't let you trade efficiency for damage to a degree that makes it worthwhile, and if you whiff so many shots that the extra blaster power matters, you are not being effective anyway. Doing pretty much anything without the "engine efficiency" guy is super difficult to begin with. Basically, "blaster efficiency" is worth taking if you need to modify your weapon power pool, and it's slightly more than a 15% boost over an blaster pool of 100->0 counting regeneration, with even more the more regeneration you fit in your "sub 100%" window. Meanwhile, the large blaster pool helps with railguns, which the blaster efficiency does not. If you take both, you have a seriously enhanced ability to shoot blasters for a long time, but there's no patchwerk to fire at.

 

If we were talking design on this, I'd say that you could roll the blaster stuff together into a single talent, that could increase efficiency by the same amount and boost maximum by some as well- possibly even the current amount. Then you would transform the existing remaining blaster talent into something totally different and usable. At that point, you might have four passives which are all desirable. But I don't know if talking design changes at this level is realistic anyway. I do believe it's the only way to really make it so that all crewmen have some defensible use, metagame wide.

 

 

 

I think Wingman is flat out more valuable for strikes by a significant margin in both modes, but if I were forced to choose Hydro for one mode or the other I think I'd take it for DOM. So far in my tests that's more or less how it has felt to me.

 

The utility of hydrospanner goes up when your death matters (TDM) and goes up when there are no other heals on the board at all. It goes down when there's enough healing on the board. It goes up if the enemies are running shield piercing, which many are right now ("hull meta"). Offensive talents are generally helped when pressing it results in you "winning" either way- for instance, if you press wingman and your opponents don't notice and get hit when they would otherwise not have, or if they do notice and flee or LOS, and that escape helps your team by peeling or pushing them off a node, or deroosting them or whatever. If my goal is to sit on or near a node in Dom, that would up hydrospanner in my book- the odds of me being able to use it to stay alive longer are higher. If my goal is to assault nodes or intercept, then that reduces its use to me.