This thread will become the largest on the forum!

Are there any ships you feel are over or under powered? Which ship(s) and why?

The strikes range from almost ok to terrible.

The type 2 strike (Quell/Pike) needs to use missiles, which require an incredible amount of player permission on the opponent side to literally do anything at all. The missiles themselves are reasonably poor components, and the ship system is just swapping between them- but the missile differences are probably not worth giving up a system component. With just two odd engine components to work with, neither of which helps you actually land missiles (retros pretty much required) combined with the poor handling and engine capability of strike fighters (as compared to scouts, which have the same job as strikes), it is extremely hard to be useful with this ship in any situation. This is generally the worst ship in the game, and many of its problems are related to it being a strike fighter, above and beyond the non-cluster missiles being so mediocre. The weaknesses of this ship are well documented across the forum: this is just a summary.

The type 1 strike (Starguard/Rycer) can switch between weapons that have terrible synergy, probably on purpose. The ion cannon is interesting, but has serious range issues. The ion cannon being so good at tearing down shields at least gives this ship the ability to have some effect on the scoreboard, unlike the Pike, which exists solely to harass noobs. Rapid fire lasers sucks on all ships, but it extra sucks on the Starguard. For a ship whose special is to switch primary weapons, you would expect access to actually good primary weapons. But the real issue is, it's a dogfighter, but it has a terrible set of baseline stats for dogfighting, just like all strikes. A strike fighter is tanky enough and maneuverable enough that it can survive acceptably if flying defensively, but who can it threaten? For a ship based on lining up shots with primary weapons, it sure doesn't have many tools required to make that happen. A baseline buff to strikes is probably needed here, in addition to the fact that so many of its component choices are simply not that great for any purpose.

The type 3 strike (Clarion/Imperium) is almost good. Any baseline strike buffs would probably make this ship playable in the metagame, at least as a utility ship. The power of repair probes, decent selection of shield components, presence of both armor AND shield secondaries, all add up to a ship that is almost a good utility ship. In a land of bombers, you need to be able to do more things on a node than just circle and wait for friends, however.

The type 3 bomber is an odd mishmash of abilities. He's supposed to be some kinda hybrid, with his access to decent missiles and power dive, and lack of access to the all-important (for bombers) armor component. Like the type 1 strike, he has access to charged plating, which is an absolute trap choice. Without the ability to select the damage reduction armor component, this move is TWENTY-ONE TIMES less useful than it is for other ships on the map using it correctly. This ship's generally good access to components, however, makes me think that in a slightly different meta he would see play. He seems to be weak just because of the types of opponents he faces. If my team is fielding three bombers, I don't want any of them to be him.

The type 3 scout (Spearpoint/Bloodmark) is just too damned odd of a ship. Without access to a secondary weapon capable of firing (you won't hit good opponents hardly ever with EMP, Ion, or Thermite), and without any armor penetration on his main weapon, he has a hard time playing the game at all. If the game had a whole bunch more dogfighting, his role as a command scout might actually come into play some, but as it is, you'd never take him over a type 2 scout.

The type 2 gunship (Comet Breaker / Dustmaker) has an odd set of goofball abilities, and seems to be trying to play a game that doesn't exist. For him to have a good time in life, he would need to have something that gives him a unique edge against the other gunships- at the very least, the type 1 gunship, who shares a great deal more with him than the dogfighty type 3 gunship. The ability to switch to a proton or thermite isn't an advantage, because these missiles cannot help you win games, and they cannot strike good pilots. If these missiles were reasonably choices, then this ship would probably be good for free. His lack of distortion is a pretty big deal, but that could be fine if he actually felt like he was able to hit heavily or dogfight or had any real distinguishing ability versus a type 1 gunship. His issues are probably related to the fact that several components (and all lock-on missiles except clusters) that he has access to need some help.

Overpoweredness is harder to describe. I can say this though:

The type 2 scout (battlescout, Sting/Flashfire) is overpowered by ANY definition. The type 1 gunship (railsniper, Quarrel/Mangler) and type 3 gunship (Condor/Jungoranwhatever) are overpowered by MOST definitions.

The battlescout has all the good components. He has the burst laser cannon from the gunship line. He has the quad laser and cluster missile from the strike line. He has all the standard issue scout mobility. He has an amazing set of scout systems to select from, of which targeting telemetry is reasonably meta defining. He also has the amazing rocket pods. He has the highest dps of any ship, and much of his burst can come from huge crits, which his special can boost. The reason he's unquestionably OP is that there are a huge number of builds for him, all of which are good for something, and many of which are superior versions of builds that the type 1 scout or any strike are trying to do. Lots of gunships that you want to burst fast? Consider quads and pods. Need a dogfighter, also great against gunships? Burst and clusters. Need to pop bombers like they are stupid blimps? Burst and pods ignores all their armor, you can kill one in seconds through their defensives. There's a battlescout build for every dogfighting, mobility, or burst dps job in the game. But you can't just nerf this guy! Because....

The two good gunships (type 1 and type 3) define the meta on shipyards TDM. This may be a map issue, but they also define the meta pretty well on Kuat TDM, and are a balanced part of your complete fleet in all other maps. While a scout can lock a gunship down pretty well, and destroy an unguarded one in open space, their range, weaponry, and lack of UI support in identifying them mean that a scout who dives a gunship may have to tank blows from up to SIX other gunships. While this does accomplish the intended goal of making them waste time, energy, and aiming (allowing your presumably four to five allies to close gaps, reposition, or defeat the enemy gunships in some manner), it requires a lot of coordination to get past this sort of thing, and the lead scout is almost a sacrifice. Basically, the way railguns stack is an issue on some maps.

The type 2 scout, and to a lesser degree, the type 1 scout, are able to mount offenses against stacked gunships. If the type 2 scout was recognized as being well above the dogfighting capabilities of the other scouts, along with being good against gunships AND bombers, and as a result nerfed, gunships would become WAY too good. Meanwhile, if you just nerfed the gunships, the battlescout would be too damned good (and possibly also the bombers, who, when stacked, need to be attacked with gunships).

Your entire game balance hinges mostly on the tuning of the type 2 scout, type 1 gunship, type 3 gunship, type 2 bomber, and type 1 bomber, relative to each other. These five ships need to be considered together when making changes to ships or components. The reason we always ask for strike buffs is that strike buffs could change the meta for the better- they don't have a job right now, and they could be given one first, and then other stuff tuned around that.

Are there any ship components that you feel are over or under powered? Which components and why?

Rapid fire lasers. I have complained about this cool but terrible component before. The fast version is, this gun is vastly too weak and has no role. It has the weakest shooting mechanic in the game (rapid fire), and it has no compensatory buffs for this- in fact it has a terrible dps to go along with its huge requirement of holding a cursor on a target, which is the worst mechanic to shoot with. If you, or a dev friend, wants to dismiss this, absolutely do not. Anyone who defends this gun in its current state is totally wrong. Join GSF Discord some night, I will talk anyone's ear off about this, just wind me up. It's not friendly to new players, it isn't the "noob tube" of this game, it teaches players to fly wrong, it has no damned job, and it is a big trick that turns off players by being a default component.

Here's my giant rant about this, it is old but valid:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=7213927

All lock-on missiles but cluster missile and sorta interdiction missile In general, enemy players have to give you permission to be hit by an EMP missile, concussion missile, or ion missile. They need to be just a torso logged into the game to be hit by proton or thermite. The few ships that can be meaningfully struck by these are bombers flying to nodes, and even they have plenty of workarounds. None of these can strike a scout. Hardly any of them can strike a gunship. They don't even work great against strike fighters. If all five of these missiles were added to EVERY ship in the game tomorrow, almost no one would take them over whatever they have now. That's a sign of a bad component: if you performed that hypothetical with clusters or rocket pods or slug railgun or seismic mine, you can bet some builds would use them.

Plasma Railgun - This railgun kinda needs a better job. Missing the accuracy/tracking thing is a big deal, being able to optionally tank most of the dot on your stronger shield half is interesting but does weaken the gun. In general, two gunships have access to this, and there's almost no reason to take it- the cases where it performs better than slug or ion are far and few between. As a gunship, you want to STRIKE your target (so you want accuracy, range, and a big field of effect), you want to DAMAGE your target (so you want raw damage and armor piercing and aoe). The plasma offers ONE of these, but only kind of- it has a big field of effect. That's pretty much it. Each railgun should be offering you some of this pie, but not the whole thing, and ion and slug are pretty good about that- but plama doesn't offer much compared to the others.

Quad laser, laser canon, light laser canon- These are meant to be the meat and potatoes, but they are in fact used reasonably infrequently. A dev reading this might come to the conclusion that burst laser is OP, but are our time-to-kills really too low? These guns are entirely negated by armor choices, and all seem kind of poor when not lined up directly with a target. I'd argue they are too weak.

Converters - While shield-to-engine is precious and interesting, engine-to-shield is only taken when you basically have no other engine choice, and engine-to-weapon is truly terrible. These could be redesigned entirely, or massively buffed, or something.

Remote Slicing - Needs more range.

Overpowered components is also harder to talk about. Again, these are meta defining. A nerf to them will change the game in unpredictable ways. These guys are things like, charged plating, slug railgun, distortion field, burst laser canon, and cluster missile. If you nerf these components more than just barely, you will get an entirely new game, and it might be terrible, or at least worse. This isn't pve: you don't have to bring the top components down unless you are actually trying to raise time-to-kill or disrupt playstyles. You also run the risk of negating learned and loved flying styles.

As an edit: We have threads on changes to make to distortion and quick charge and such, that are not so much nerfs as a bit of redesign to prevent that component from owning missiles as hard. Basically, leftmost duration talent makes you weaker against missiles than any shield component, and distortion rightmost missile break talent makes you stronger against missiles than any shield component, and that seems like an odd choice: if instead there was a passive benefit versus missiles, such as slighty increased lockon time, maybe the break could be removed.

Are there any crew members that you feel are over or under powered? Which crew members and why?

Yea. Do this:

Add 5% accuracy to all weapons. Remove the 6% accuracy crewman ability, replacing it with any of 5% shield penetration, 3% blaster damage, or 3% range to blasters.

The accuracy passive is absolutely mandatory for proper play. Replace it with something that could be a choice. The 6% accuracy is close to 10% extra damage in game, bake that into the weapons and people can choose more offensive companions again.

Engineering is another case where your "max battery" passives are terrible in almost all cases. But it doesn't matter quite as much. Still, since you asked, here's my suggestions for what the four engineering passives should be:

> Efficient Maneuvers: 13% less engine power consumed

> Efficient Fire: Cost of using blasters is reduced by 15%

> Extra Power: Your blaster and engine pools are increased by 10% each.

> Redundant Systems: Reduce the time you spend snared, with reduced regeneration, or unable to use a component by 20%.

The last one is just some pie-in-the-sky thing. Basically, stack both of the engine and blaster pools, and have something interesting or creative for your fourth slot.

There's no such thing as an overpowered crew member. The ones that are too good haven't broken the meta: they've just become mandatory. The game would be worse with 6% less accuracy across the board, in my opinion. The game would be worse if you took down the efficiency passives to match the "extra juice" passives that no one uses. The game would be worse without wingman. Etc.

Crew actives could use some help- the dot one could be stronger, concentrated fire could last longer, the defensive ones could be made relatively stronger than the offensive ones by percent as they are less likely to effect the game state.

Final thoughts:

I'm very glad you posted this. If you guys are going to make GSF changes, please continue to engage with us. Making small changes to a bunch of components and seeing what the meta looks like is way better than sweeping changes that turn the game into a field of one damned ship type. Please focus on changes that increase build diversity without eliminating the playstyles we know and love. Please don't make changes and then go away again. It's very fortunate that the game is as balanced as it is, given the final state of things.

I'll have a long post for this, and will edit it in later on. In the meantime: generally, the game is well balanced outside of strike fighters once you know how the game works. The trouble is seeing how it works.

Will edit this later.

Edit 1: It's going to take me some more time. I want to be sure I get this right!

In general, however, balance is in a good place. Strikes need buffing and some other things need tweaking, and there are some components that are not in any condition usable. But the game as it exists actually does work; everything has a counter which is the best sort of balance we're ever likely to get. I'll add my other thoughts on this today.

Hey folks,

 

This week, we are creating three separate forum threads for GSF discussion. You can head to this thread to get links to each of them.

 

For this thread let's focus on ship balance and how you feel about it. Let us know your thoughts below, here are a few questions to get you started:

• Are there any ships you feel are over or under powered? Which ship(s) and why?
  
• Are there any ship components that you feel are over or under powered? Which components and why?
  
• Are there any crew members that you feel are over or under powered? Which crew members and why?

 

Note that this discussion is not about the addition of new ships, components, or crew members. Just about the balance of existing ones.

 

Let us know your thoughts!

 

-eric

I think that the problem with balance isn't a matter of the balance of the components or crews. I think the biggest problem is we have maxed ships (comparable to a level 70 with The Best Gear In The Galaxy) vs lowbie ships (comparable to a level 10 player without any gear). This creates incredible unbalance in the matches.

My friend and I have discussed this issue at length. We believe that there should be a minimum of two brackets for GSF: one for maxed ships and one for not-maxed ships. Anyone can queue for the latter, but if they have a maxed ship, that ship may not be used in that match and for the bracket with maxed ships, only players who have at least one maxed ship may queue for that, but they may only play the ships that are maxed. I kinda think there should perhaps also be a third bracket, for those ships that have not received more than 2 upgrades to their components.

We believe this would help not only with some balance to the matches, but also would help retain new players to GSF. There is such a huge learning curve to GSF that many people who give it a try decide they don't want to do it again because they're so overwhelmed by not only having to learn a whole new system of movement and attack, but also have to go up against people who are running maxed ships and are killing the newbs over and over just because they can.

The gorilla in the room on balance tends to be strike fighters and how to make them strong in their own right while keeping the other ships and their roles distinctive. The other classes have a nice rock, paper, scissors going on, so adding "Spock" can get awkward.

My suggestion would be to make missiles more threatening overall by

A. lowering cooldowns, lowering lock on times, increasing arcs, increasing ranges, increasing speed (these suggestions do not include cluster missiles, they are in a pretty good place)

B. increasing cooldowns of missile breaks, increasing energy costs of missile breaks

1. component revamps I.E. switch the missile break from Distortion Field to Quick Charge Shield

this could make the component an "interesting choice" of Laser evasion or Missile evasion you can have one

but not both.

2. Have missile breaks have a detrimental effect in the manner of the "converters"

Examples: evasion debuff after use, accuracy debuff after use, speed/manuverring debuff after use

C. Both

Pretty much just try to introduce having to make a choice of being good against lasers or missiles but not both.

I am envisioning a medium range area denial/ peel role. With a chance of being a specialist against singular archetypes.

1. Over-powered ships: None. Underpowered ships:

• All strike fighters. They aren't as mobile as scouts and do not fare as well in close-quarter combat against scouts due to their lack of turning speed. Their range is mediocre at best, and gunships are better at long-range snipes. They aren't as tanky as bombers and do not have similar denial-of-area control that bombers have (due to the lack of mines/drones). So basically, they suck at everything that needs to be done -- node control, long-range sniping potential, close-quarter combat. They were designed with as a jack-of-all-trades ship, so being inferior to a certain ship class in all those areas make sense, but they need a buff in some other area, for example damage output or primary/secondary weapon range, to be worth fielding. On top of that, the following are additional areas each of the strike fighter classes are lacking:
  
  •  
    
  • F-T6 Rycer / FT-8 Star Guard / TZ-24 Gladiator / TZ-24 Enforcer. Their unique weapon is the ion cannon, and its range is too short.
     
    
  • F-T2 Quell / FT-6 Pike. With two secondary weapons this ship seems to be designed with that playstyle in mind. Perhaps give them Rocket Pods and buff their secondaries by improving range or reducing lock-on time.
     
    
  • FT-3C Imperium / FT-7B Clarion. The lack of the Engine Thrusters component hurts.
    
• 
  

2. Over-powered components: In general I think the other components are underpowered. Underpowered components:

• Quick-charge Shield. In order to avoid damage in GSF, you either need to be tanky or you need to have high evasion to avoid the shot in the first place. This component offers neither. Since this competes for the spot of Distortion Field and Directional Shields, either of that are usually taken for evasion or tankiness respectively.

   

• Plasma Railgun. Gunships and Scouts like to stack evasion in the current meta, so the fact that this component does not have an accuracy/tracking upgrade compared to Slug Railgun or Ion Railgun means the probability of landing a shot on an already evasive target is even lower.

   

• Rapid-Fire Laser. In order to get the damage potential out of this thing, one would need to apply continuous fire on the target. Practically, that only works for stationary targets. Since this component has such a short range and pilots usually fly around the map, it misses easily. Add to the fact that this is the default component on all ships that have it and you have new pilots scoring 7% for their shooting accuracy (and that's usually good).

   

• Secondary lock-on weapons that aren't Cluster Missiles, and maybe Concussion MIssiles. Their lock-on times are usually too long when compared to the impact they have. With Distortion Field and Engine Maneuvers being able to break missile locks and missiles having reload cooldowns, it is very easy for a good pilot to avoid missile contact for the duration their cooldowns are up before finding structures to LOS missile lockers.

Hello all,

Thanks Bioware for asking for and taking feedback. I will say I find the most "overpowered" ship to be the gunships. I personally love my scout, and I have no issues taking on other ship classes, and can even hold my own against more skilled Imperial scout/strike fighter classes. However, I would say 75-80% of my deaths come from gunships, especially in Team Death Matches. In fact, I played a TDM the other day and 6-7 of the players on both sides were flying gunships. It becomes a battle of the "snipers" and the dog fighting aspects of GSF went out the window. I end up sitting in the back in my scout waiting for a straggler or loner gunship that I can engage, and many of the times I'm getting one shot from 20,000 meters out before I can even close the distance, and my scout is pretty fast, and I have evasion perks.

I have seen some players suggest decreasing the range of the gunship, which I think would be great, or perhaps even slightly reducing their damage a bit. It becomes quite obnoxious though when the opposing team has 6 gunships posting up in an open area on the map, and I have to hope my scout can close the distance before I'm utterly annihilated by one of the 6 gunships all targeting me, and most of the time in one shot. I like the idea of a gunship, that fighter that can clear out some mines or defense turrets so the bombers and strike fighters can move in, but their abilities to hit fast moving, small targets easily from any distance, especially when the entire team is rolling gunship and basically having an auto-locking rail gun that one shots almost every one my fighter, takes away from the entire idea of a good ol' dog fight.

**Here is a personal wish of mine, and since it didn't fit in any of the specific threads, I'll throw the suggestion in here. While I love the music this game has, I feel GSF needs some classic Star Wars music playing while in these space battles, like the soundtrack during the first and second Death Star battles or even the Battle of Hoth. It would give GSF a more epic feel.**

I think that the problem with balance isn't a matter of the balance of the components or crews. I think the biggest problem is we have maxed ships (comparable to a level 70 with The Best Gear In The Galaxy) vs lowbie ships (comparable to a level 10 player without any gear). This creates incredible unbalance in the matches.

Stop wasting time with this crap. You can master a ship in a day now, or meaningfully master all ships in a week or two. The devs give the gear out for free. The player skill discrepancy is a real concern. Your thinking was wrong before they vastly increased the gearing rate and decreased the cost, as proven by good pilots on totally stock ship farming like crazy, many many times. That thinking is laughable now.

My friend and I have discussed this issue at length. We believe that there should be a minimum of two brackets for GSF: one for maxed ships and one for not-maxed ships.

This idea is bad. It discourages players from gearing their ships, and it makes gear a debuff that splits the queue. Please watch videos of stock pilots owning geared noobs. Your friend, you, and your lengthy discussions are all misinformed and wrong.

The gorilla in the room on balance tends to be strike fighters and how to make them strong in their own right while keeping the other ships and their roles distinctive. The other classes have a nice rock, paper, scissors going on, so adding "Spock" can get awkward.

Man I love when I can agree with a Lendul post. Dogs and cats living together!

I like your suggestions on missiles. I'm not sure about your suggestions on disto, mostly because it's a nerf to a working component, instead of buffing the components that don't work great. Distortion has a missile break because it weakens your max shields, and missiles don't roll to-hit like blasters do, so it already makes you worse against a missile- but it doesn't need to be what it is, which amounts to almost immunity. An older suggestion I had there was, add a passive to distortion that makes missile locks take LONGER by some small amount, and replace the current break with something that maybe adds even evasion based on the distance that the shot is taking place at- basically, make it a choice between a longer disto, and a disto that in better at defending from railguns, while making ships that take it not just be able to hold still and ignore the missile as they do now. I certainly agree that distortion missile break on type 2 scouts and type 1 and 3 gunships is a big part of why missiles are not as good as they should be.

I'd also suggest adding interdiction to clusters in your list of missiles that are pretty much fine. They aren't quite as good as clusters, but they don't need the same love that the longer lockon guys do.

Pretty much just try to introduce having to make a choice of being good against lasers or missiles but not both.

I see your point, but I'd like the shields to not be very rock-paper-scissors. I feel that right now distortion missile clear debuff is a big part of missile play not being very good, and the fact that evasion is the primary railgun defense makes it a very attractive component. The only ship with access to distortion that can meaningfully ignore it is the type 3 gunship, and only if he plans to mostly mate with rocks the entire game.

Still let me add: if your ideas were implemented, I'm sure they would improve the game.

In my own opinion there isnt much that are overpowered, but ships that are needed to get more buffs to match with the rest but the ships themselves are not the problems but rather some of the components that can be.

If you look at each ship type:

Bombers: Sledgehammer/Decimus are arguable the worst bombers in the game, legion/warrcarrier can heal and set up decent sentries, rampart/razorwire and mine layers with hyperspace beacon. Sledgehammer/decimus are meh, the only sentry thats viable is your indirection, and they are stuck with missles/torpedoes for secondary weapons these under preform.

Gunships: Quarrel/Mangler is your base stun and blast ships utilizing ions and slugs. Generally stunning a ship taking out their shields and engines with ion then a burst with slug for a 1 hit or 2 hit kill. If anything needs to be hit it may be the reduction of the amount of engine pool because many people cant escape with 0% engines but thats about it. Condor/Jorgan is a beautiful up close n personal with long range. Basically its a flashfire with a nice big gun. This ship is pretty balanced, its the only gunship that would dare be in close combat with other ships.

Comet Breaker/ Dustmaker; this is the sledgehammer/decimus of the gunships, they are quite underwhelming. Unlike a jorgan/condor you dont have the engines to really engage in dogfighting, dont have bursts, dont have ions, and either has to run plasma/slug combo or its not going to far. If anything maybe adding something special that other gunships don't have that would make this more appealing and performing better.

Scouts: All scouts are pretty viable, you have 2 that are offensive focused with one supportive.

Novadive/Blackbolt: this is an excellent ship and very versatile where you can run either TT or emp field depending on your preference. It has the most varried combinations of components that are viable which makes them quick suprising. No buffs/nerfs needed

Flashfire/Sting: this ship is also very good at what it does, either quads/pods/blaster overcharge or bursts/clusters/TT this ship can annoy gunships like nova/blackbolt can and but out alot of quick damage. Though they are balanced where your power pool does run out fast if you arent careful.

Spearpoint/Bloodmark: this is the support ship, generally running tensor for a quick start for your allies. The only real problem is its secondary weapons, its either emp missle which isnt that good, or thermite. If it had clusters it would make it much more viable, otherwise most people will die on purpose to grab a better ship after the mad dash at the start.

Strike Fighters: Pretty much every strike is very balanced not much improvement needed.

Rycer/Star Guard: This is a well balanced ship and bomber killer swapping between ions and heavy's it will rip apart shields and hulls and a flash. This is a ship thats pretty balanced and wouldnt need buffs or nerfs.

Pike/Quell: Need a big boom? this ship your running protons for nice bypass damage, and usually clusters with heavy's this ship does huge damage in a flash and is pretty balanced.

Clarion/Imperium: this is a mobile healer and is beautiful, if you need to do damage proton's for a nice big burst and rapids, like if a healer and a dps had a baby that did both adequately well. No buffs/nerfs needed.

I like your suggestions on missiles. I'm not sure about your suggestions on disto, mostly because it's a nerf to a working component, instead of buffing the components that don't work great. Distortion has a missile break because it weakens your max shields, and missiles don't roll to-hit like blasters do, so it already makes you worse against a missile- but it doesn't need to be what it is, which amounts to almost immunity. An older suggestion I had there was, add a passive to distortion that makes missile locks take LONGER by some small amount, and replace the current break with something that maybe adds even evasion based on the distance that the shot is taking place at- basically, make it a choice between a longer disto, and a disto that in better at defending from railguns, while making ships that take it not just be able to hold still and ignore the missile as they do now. I certainly agree that distortion missile break on type 2 scouts and type 1 and 3 gunships is a big part of why missiles are not as good as they should be.

 

[...]

 

I see your point, but I'd like the shields to not be very rock-paper-scissors. I feel that right now distortion missile clear debuff is a big part of missile play not being very good, and the fact that evasion is the primary railgun defense makes it a very attractive component. The only ship with access to distortion that can meaningfully ignore it is the type 3 gunship, and only if he plans to mostly mate with rocks the entire game.

Since the two weaker scouts would be pretty crappy without distortion field, there could be a possibility to split into two similar but slightly different versions. One for the smaller scouts, which keeps disto almost as it is today - maybe just a bit less evasion bonus. Another one for T2 scout and gunships, with less impact on shield power, but gives a bit less evasion and no missile break.

In general, stuff that stacks up very close to 100% is a bit too good. Charged plating builds that go to 99% DR are a bit too good. (If they go to 98% they're just half as good!) Evasion that stacks close to 90% with cooldowns is a bit too good (which in turn makes BLCs slightly OP, due to people needing to be in your face to hit you). Stuff that have 100% armor pen is a little bit too good.

Since strikes and long range missiles have no purpose, we could make them a soft counter for gunships by giving strikes missile range boosters and make it easier to lock missiles on gunships. If missiles locked in half the time against charging gunships, long range missiles could at least make them have to move.

Because the GSF community (a passionate and often extremely detail oriented community) has been living in its own lonely echo chamber for years now, you are guaranteed to get a flurry of encyclopedia-sized posts here providing you excruciating detail on every and any component you can imagine. We have analyzed and debated this stuff into the ground, and you are going to see a lot of arguments pulled over into this thread. I hope you can home in on some of the more common points and filter out a lot of the old bickering we are going to bring over.

I'm going to try to be relatively brief here, and as dispassionate and objective as I possibly can be. While I too could go into how I feel every component could be tweaked for the better, I'll try to stay as high level as possible.

Requisition/Gearing is NOT the issue! Especially with the most recent changes to component costs and the rate of requisition gain, this is fundamentally not a problem. GSF is highly skill based, and as the community has repeatedly and consistently shown, an experienced pilot in a stock ship can completely dominate a match. Requisition and gear helps, but it is not a barrier to effectiveness, and we now get it handed out at such an increased rate that this does not need more attention.

• Are there any ships you feel are over or under powered? Which ship(s) and why?
  

Generally speaking, there aren't any overpowered ship classes. The only specific ship that might come close is the Flashfire/Sting, simply because it has so much more flexibility in its builds (and access to nearly all of the most effective components), but I would argue that nerfing this ship in isolation would create more problems than it solves.

Many will (and already have begun) to call out the Strike as underpowered. I hesitate to even touch this, because it's a community hot button and causes a lot of contention and irrationality. I happen to feel that Strikes are not as underpowered as others would say, but even I will admit that if there's a job you need to do in a match, you will almost always be able to find another ship that can do that job better, assuming you are just looking at the numbers. The community has talked potential tweaks to Strikes to death over the years, but some of the most common points that come up are: 1) changes to missiles, whether this be reduced lock on times for Strikes only, or increased radius/effects on EMP or Ion missiles, or any other variety of options; 2) less severe engine consumption, obviously not on par with scouts, but making Strikes a little more mobile couldn't hurt; 3) adjusted ranges on primary components, again perhaps for Strikes only, so that ships like the Starguard/Rycer in particular can be the specialist they were meant to be, able to employ Ion Cannons and other components at better and more synergistic ranges, giving them a more effective threat range between a Scout and a Gunship.

• Are there any ship components that you feel are over or under powered? Which components and why?

Overpowered: Burst Laser Cannons are, in my opinion, the only truly OP component in the game. And I think all you'd have to do to make it less so is remove or just lessen (down to 50% from 100%, for example) its Armor Penetration upgrade. Currently it is OP because it does three very crucial things all at once: massive burst damage, best shotgun spread at close range potential for both dogfighting and clearing satellites, and ignoring the armor benefit that all of the other ships have over it. Right now, if you're going into a Domination match, there is simply no reason (other than your own preference/entertainment/challenge) to fly any other component. That's not ideal.

Underpowered: Rapid Fire Lasers, EMP Missiles, Ion Missiles, Ion Cannons, Quick Charge Shield, Overcharged Shield, Shield Projector, Combat Command, EMP Field. All of these could use tweaks to make them more immediately useful and appealing. For the missiles I would suggest increased ranges and radius/effects, for the shield components I would suggest bumping up the benefits considerably (you need just seconds to annihilate an opponent in GSF and items that give you temporary defensive boosts need to be much more dramatic to actually be impactful) and Combat Command is excellent on paper but functionally its effective radius is inconsequential, that radius would need to be dramatically increased to really be a benefit to the team. The effective radius on EMP field is similarly far too small; it can't even fully encompass the mine field that might be set up around a satellite, because it has to be triggered when you reach the outside edge of a field in order for the ship using to survive, and that means the field almost never extends far enough to really be effective. (Like EMP Missiles, it is a brilliant component in concept, but just needs more oomph to be useful in practice.)

• Are there any crew members that you feel are over or under powered? Which crew members and why?

Nothing jumps to mind here, I think crew members are fine. Certainly some might be a little underpowered, but there are plenty of options to choose from so there's no reason you can't just reorganize to get good benefit.

As a general rule, crew skills that increase your accuracy or decrease your opponent's accuracy are going to be some of the most powerful in the game, so if you want to make some lesser used crew skills more appealing you could add some accuracy boosts to them (in smaller increments than in skills dedicated to accuracy, of course). But generally speaking, I'd say don't fix what's not broken, and focus on other more important balance issues first.

Quick Charge Shield: Perhaps tweak this component to remove the shield % penalty, to make it a viable alternative to Directional Shields. It'll still have less capacity than the Directionals, but gets the slight boost to mobility to make up for it. This might improve Strike builds a little bit without any game-breaking changes.

Ion Cannon: Like others have said here, increasing the range of Ion Cannon (either the base range, or the Tier 4 option at least) to synergize better with with the other blasters of the Rycer/Starguard.

Railguns: as I'd posted in agreement with in the other thread, reducing the range to 10k might help balance out things. In the ground game, "Snipers" have only a marginal increase in range over other rdps (35m vs 30m), so even at 10k, railguns still have double the average range of other ships. And let's not forget gunships still have access to the strongest close-in blasters too, so the shortened distance wouldn't make them much vulnerable than before.

Hey folks,

 

This week, we are creating three separate forum threads for GSF discussion. You can head to this thread to get links to each of them.

 

For this thread let's focus on ship balance and how you feel about it. Let us know your thoughts below, here are a few questions to get you started:

• Are there any ships you feel are over or under powered? Which ship(s) and why?
  
• Are there any ship components that you feel are over or under powered? Which components and why?
  
• Are there any crew members that you feel are over or under powered? Which crew members and why?

 

Note that this discussion is not about the addition of new ships, components, or crew members. Just about the balance of existing ones.

 

Let us know your thoughts!

 

-eric

Thank you so much for posting these threads. Honestly, I'm not going to be able to add much to the discussion that excellent pilots like Verain, Zyrieas, Close Shave, Despon, Ramalina, anyone from SRW, Drak, or any of the other people offering thoughtful constructive insight in the posts above me. I have been flying since beta of JtL in SWG and the beta of GSF as well, and I largely agree with the sentiments of strike fighter underpoweredness and missile underpoweredness, useless rapid fire lasers, etc.

I would encourage you, developers, if you have the logs and metrics, to go back to the time two or three years ago when the tier 3 upgrade to break missile locks on Distortion Field was broken. Review the forum threads and discussions from that time. See how the game played differently in the land of a single missile break among two of the five meta ships. Don't take this as a recommendation from me to remove the tier 3 upgrade, but rather to understand what breaking a meta-defining ability does and how weak missiles are currently in this game.

Rather than speaking of which crew members are underpowered, I'd just echo Verain's sentiments that its really a binary option: there are crew members you take because of mandatory passives or actives and the rest are useless. Crew members with pinpointing are simply must have. Having either a crew member with Running Interference or Wingman is a must have, except for type 1 bombers where having Hydrospanner can be useful. Gunships, and sometimes scouts, utilize Dampening sensors. But when you consider the must haves, that really leaves you with only 5 or 6 crew members you need to unlock and the rest are simply useless. Please also realize that it is inconvenient to have to pay to unlock the crew members a second time once your character goes through KOTFE/KOTET, even if you get those companions back through the story. I'm not suggesting that you should prioritize integrating the Alliance Recruits into GSF with new actives and passives, but you could consider that after you address the existing companions and useless passives/actives.

"Snipers" have only a marginal increase in range over other rdps (35m vs 30m)

(a) Snipers and gunslingers are really casters in this game, with some unique stationary mechanics. They vastly outrange melee, and have a number of range-effecting abilities.

(b) There is no comparing the ground game to this game: this game is much closer to an fps. The 5m advantage is versus wizards or whatever- it's a 30m advantage versus melee.

© A 10k range would effectively delete the gunship class.

(d) Gunship stacking is not actually optimal at top levels of play, even on big open maps like Shipyards 12 TDM. These maps are rare in the rotation. Gunship stacking IS common in a puggier situation, and does happen, and is probably more rewarding than it should be- under specific situations. This should be addressed by meaningful game changes, not sweeping railgun nerfs.

Keeping it simple:

-Strike Fighters are GARBAGE

-Death Matches are Gunship fights

-GSF itself is under powered

Please enhance the game with a SWG style space feature which allows players to fly in their own ships around the galaxy and even in planet zones (added the 8th year of SWG). The pve/pvp space combat was true Star Wars thrill.

A very welcome thread.

I have a few suggestions. First, strike fighters. It would make no sense to make them more like scouts, they need their own niche in the game. So, as a heavy fighter, I think they should have heavier weapons than other dogfighting classes. A possibility is to make quad lasers exclusive to strikes, a bit more powerful, and give them an armor piercing upgrade and maybe an accuracy upgrade to counter evasion. Some people who like to fly T2 scouts with quads and pods would not be happy losing quads, but it would give a reason to fly strikes. Another possibility is to shorten the lock on time for concussion missiles, though not as short as clusters. One final possible strike buff would be to give them a larger engine power pool. Scouts would still be faster, but strikes would be ale to boost longer. Again, that would fit into the heavy fighter idea.

I am considering a possibility for gunships, but I am not sure about this one. Shorten the range of railguns, maybe to 13k. I am not sure because I fly gunships a lot and often need every bit of that 15k to survive when scouts come after me. But it might lead to less gunship heavy matches. A possible problem is that a shorter railgun range might make bombers more powerful, since gunship is by far the best counter to a bomber that is settled in at the area he wants to control.

I am not sure it would be worth it to try to balance the non meta ships. Useful meta ships exist in all the main categories except strikes. The more different kinds of ships you have, the harder it will be to balance them.

My final point is that balance depends a lot on how a team works together. If you have 8 solo queuers with no communication except what you can do in chat (not much in a fast moving match) balance would look a lot different than if you have premade teams on each side with voice communications. A communicating team can make much better use of specialized ships or components, the solo queue person has to be ready for anything and needs a versatile ship. You need to decide what kind of team you are balancing for. Since most people are not in well coordinated communicating teams during a match, I think you should assume that in looking at balance.

Now if we just had voice channels as part of the game...

One final possible strike buff would be to give them a larger engine power pool. Scouts would still be faster, but strikes would be ale to boost longer. Again, that would fit into the heavy fighter idea.

 

I am considering a possibility for gunships, but I am not sure about this one. Shorten the range of railguns, maybe to 13k.

I like your idea about a larger engine power pool for strikes. It would be a nice little non-game-breaking buff to strikes that wouldn't negate the niche of the scouts.

Per Verain's idea in the other thread, slug and ion railgun could have their ranges reduced a bit (maybe 12-13k), while plasma retains full range, to encourage people to consider that as an alternative.

The core problem with any suggestion to nerf railgun range is that everyone is pointing to the same issue: the one of the five maps that tends to have a lot of gunships on it. Shipyards TDM has a vast amount of space that can be protected by railguns, so, the thinking goes, reducing the range will reduce that. But then the reduction has to be massive: the gunships will of course get closer to each other to defend that. Eventually you hit a breaking point where they can't cover each other effectively, and suddenly you have no more gunships on the map that favors them the most. Is that a victory? And what about the other four maps? The gunships as-is are completely fair on those maps.

It's a terrible change. I'd much rather they deleted shipyards TDM than gunships, if it comes down to it. After all, we have four other maps, but only two other ship types (three if you count strikes, which you shouldn't).

Railguns basically need 15k. Maybe slug doesn't need 15k exactly, but anything shy of 13.5k is gonna mess everything up really hard. The amount of time it takes to dive a gunship is already trivial. The only reason I bring slug up here is, as an armor piercing railgun he will have a job even if his range is reduced a tad- after all, nothing else is as good against bombers.

Hey folks,

 

This week, we are creating three separate forum threads for GSF discussion. You can head to this thread to get links to each of them.

 

For this thread let's focus on ship balance and how you feel about it. Let us know your thoughts below, here are a few questions to get you started:

• Are there any ships you feel are over or under powered? Which ship(s) and why?
  
• Are there any ship components that you feel are over or under powered? Which components and why?
  
• Are there any crew members that you feel are over or under powered? Which crew members and why?

 

Note that this discussion is not about the addition of new ships, components, or crew members. Just about the balance of existing ones.

 

Let us know your thoughts!

 

-eric

I'll likely sound like an ******e here... But here we go.

2.5. November/December 2013. GSF Pre-access.

2.6. February 4th 2014. GSF Launch. Bombers are added to the game.

2.7. April 8th 2014. Last ships and map added to the game.

3.0. December 2nd 2014. The patch broke some stuff in GSF, took us two months to get fixes.. Some of the stuff is still broken (Sabotage Probe T5 slow upgrade break the whole probe)

May 28th 2015. Alex Modny post on the GSF forum to get idea for buffing strikes and balancing the game.

June 1st 2015. Second and last post of Alex Modny on the thread. No discussion. Just an empty thank you.

April 8th 2016. 1010 posts later, the thread finally die. How many of the suggestion some of the veteerans took hours to imagine and discuss were even planned? None.

You want idea to balance the game? Go to that thread.. Read Verain's, Drakolich's or even my posts. Don't start another thread you will likely ignore. We gave you tons of idea and feedback. You never even considered it.

Eric. You are a community manager. You don't make the choices. But don't consider us stupid. Just the first 200 posts are full of stuff that could be used. The meta hasn't changed in 3.5 years. Everything you will find is still true. Just bother to actually read it.

Here is a veteran's sincere opinion of your post.

While I share your disappointment in their past actions, I'm of the opinion that their GSF team basically got defunded twice, and they are currently looking at improving the game, and am responding in kind for that. I don't think the devs walked away from GSF, I think they were pulled away by bizops.

A dev walking into that thread will feel overwhelmed. Maybe these players aren't playing any more! Maybe the game is different now! But yes, your point remains: a dev trying to address GSF needs, should read all or most of the strike fighter thread. It will take awhile, but nothing has changed. I feel that many of the ideas from the strike fighter thread will end up copy-pasted into this thread, and for good reason, but it IS reasonable to ask them to read it. We certainly spent enough time writing the damned thing.

Anyway, we are best off assuming that thet devs have always wanted to fix things, and now they are going to be able to do so. That's exciting, at least.

1) Take away gunships abilities to disable other ships. It's bad enough they can snipe you from 15k meters away, but they can also stop you from trying to escape and regroup and just blow you to bits? Garbage.

2) Enforce group make-ups. The biggest problem is that when a team is winning in capture the nodes mode, they just all hop on gunships and bombers and there's literally no way to take back any satellites. Or in deathmatch same thing, they just spread out and gunship you to death with some bombers sprinkled in. Very few Scouts or Strikefighters that anybody mains. I would say enforce a rule where they can only be 1 gunship and 1 bomber per group in an 8 vs 8 (flex it up slightly in 12 vs 12 or 16 vs 16). Enforce one of the ships someone has on their bar is a scout or a strikefighter, and whoever picks the gunship and bomber first get to use it (which would also encourage people to take the queue pops faster so they could pick the ship they want). And then do something where if you die 3 times, it forces you back to your other ship so another person can get a turn in their gunship/bomber. It can also encourage people to be good at different rules and to have conversations in chat....nobody really talks in Ops chat during GSF (hey man, i got a fully souped up bomber, let me get that).

Others have put a lot more into the ship balance than I'd be able to even comprehend, for my 2 cents.

When GSF first came out I played a Strike Fighter, it was the Star Wars Experience. You didn't see Vader in a gunship sniping rebels over the death star he was out there in the thick of it. And it was good for about a month and then it became obvious Strike fighters just couldn't compete so I took up the Scout, it was similar but more burst and more evasion. Things were okay it wasn't the same but it was still in the thick of things.

Then perhaps a month later it became obvious that gunships were where it was at, couple of them tag teaming and you can take most people down before they can get close to you. Then if they do you have full engines and a reflect shield and the like giving you options. A little after this I realized that GSF had been abandoned and there really was little enjoyment to the matches with it being bomber clusters, gunships and the occassional scout.