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ammo drones


Zoom_VI

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I believe ammo reload option is better than shield reload option too.

 

If you are constantly finding yourself without shields and needing shield reload from repair drone then you are probably :

 

  • Being hit with ion railgun which means that damage is splashing to anyone and all drones near you which means drone will end up being killed from splash damage.

 

  • Flying in a straight line all the time and getting hit constantly. no amount of shield repair will help you there.

 

  • Being targeted by more than one players. If you are not doing evasive flying no amount of shield repair will help you here if your enemies' targeting is well.

 

As it has been mentioned before, you can regenerate shields while dodging blaster fire or travelling from one location to another.

 

I do not see self-destruct as a viable way to rearm missile ammunition because even in domination games when you die you give 1 point to enemy teams.

 

Sure you may not want to wait a long time at repair drone when another satellite is under heavy fire but you can always try to do small pit stops whenever the coast is clear.

Edited by Davionix
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Yes, but bombers don't use ammo (except the bad ones with loltorps) so if I rolled a bomber, I would have no need for that ammo refill drone. And if I have no need for that ammo refill drone, then I want to go back to my scout, but then I would need ammo, which would make me want to have a ammo drone....

 

And that's how all pugs feel.

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Ships that need reload are scouts. Which seems to be the main pilots on this thread. LOL! Of course most of the people on the thread think you should use reload.

 

But when I look at the makeup of the teams I am on, it makes no sense to use reload when shields benefits everyone.

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Ships that need reload are scouts. Which seems to be the main pilots on this thread. LOL! Of course most of the people on the thread think you should use reload.

 

But when I look at the makeup of the teams I am on, it makes no sense to use reload when shields benefits everyone.

 

The thing is Shields regenerate themselves. The only time shields are not regenerating themselves is when you are under fire, and if you are underfire you don't have the time to sit next to drone. Thus shield repair is useless.

 

Also ammo is important to both scouts and strikes. The only class that has no use for ammo is gunships.

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The thing is Shields regenerate themselves. The only time shields are not regenerating themselves is when you are under fire, and if you are underfire you don't have the time to sit next to drone. Thus shield repair is useless.

 

Also ammo is important to both scouts and strikes. The only class that has no use for ammo is gunships.

 

While technically true, strikes can take additional ammo, making the need to resupply low. And strike fighters do not have the rapid depletion of their missiles like the scouts with their pods. Again making the need to resupply lower than a pod scout.

 

Anyone dogfighting around where the drone is places will benefit from the shields. Only one type of shield recharges while taking damage. Not everyone has quick charge shields and even if they have them, they do not all have them upgraded.

 

I try to think beyond my own needs to the needs of others. It is funny to me that many people on this thread are just thinking about their own needs and extrapolating that to be the needs of everyone.

 

We all have our opinions. I am just stating mine. I hope the diverse viewpoint makes people think more about their choices.

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While technically true, strikes can take additional ammo, making the need to resupply low. And strike fighters do not have the rapid depletion of their missiles like the scouts with their pods. Again making the need to resupply lower than a pod scout.

 

Anyone dogfighting around where the drone is places will benefit from the shields. Only one type of shield recharges while taking damage. Not everyone has quick charge shields and even if they have them, they do not all have them upgraded.

 

I try to think beyond my own needs to the needs of others. It is funny to me that many people on this thread are just thinking about their own needs and extrapolating that to be the needs of everyone.

 

We all have our opinions. I am just stating mine. I hope the diverse viewpoint makes people think more about their choices.

 

If the dogfighting is around the drone, then I can guarantee you that heal drone won't last more than 10 seconds.

 

Also not all strikes take munitions capacity extender. In fact I question the usefulness of that component on any ship that can take it. A strike with clusters will have the same ammo issues as a scout with them. And clusters have more ammo than any of the other strike secondaries.

 

As I said shields repair themselves, except when under direct fire, and of course under direct fire a heal drone isn't going to save you at all. I have never once had a instance where being given a smidge of shields in a firefight would do anything to change the outcome. however I would need another set of hands to count the number of times where I was compromised by not having ammo.

 

But please do continue gimping your team with garbage upgrades, as long as you feel self-righteous about it.

Edited by Zoom_VI
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It's all situational.

 

On a contested Sat., shield repair could make the difference. (shield regen strikers probably wouldn't notice a difference)

 

On an uncontested Sat., ammo reload would make a difference. (absolutely no need for extra shield rep if you're not being shot)

 

So, if you're rolling with one, and find yourself in the other situation, Oops. Smeg happens.

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But please do continue gimping your team with garbage upgrades, as long as you feel self-righteous about it.

 

I am glad you feel the need to disparage rather than debate. Very classy of you.

 

I neither gimp my team nor am self righteous in my declarations on this thread. But you seem to think your opinion is more valid than mine. LOL!

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Ammo versus shields, there is no correct answer. Only Zuul.

 

As a scout, I spam cluster missiles and get significantly more kills doing so, as opposed to conserving ammo for a kill shot, or as opposed to when I'm out of ammo completely. It's only logical: ammo = more DPS.

 

I agree with someone above who said that, if he runs out of ammo, then the other team is losing badly anyway. In these cases, depending on my mood and my team's lead, it's usually faster to just suicide (or fly more recklessly) than to ask in ops chat for an ammo drone and/or fly across the map to find an ammo drone.

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I am glad you feel the need to disparage rather than debate. Very classy of you.

 

I neither gimp my team nor am self righteous in my declarations on this thread. But you seem to think your opinion is more valid than mine. LOL!

 

You absolutely do gimp your team.

 

Repair drones are not for combat situations. Increasing the usefulness of a repair drone in a combat situation is self-defeating.

 

End of.

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I agree with someone above who said that, if he runs out of ammo, then the other team is losing badly anyway. In these cases, depending on my mood and my team's lead, it's usually faster to just suicide (or fly more recklessly) than to ask in ops chat for an ammo drone and/or fly across the map to find an ammo drone.

Generally speaking I run out or get close to running very low in nearly ever TDM, and of course when that happens all the yellow powerups migrate to the far side of the map.

 

As the above poster mentioned, giving a purely combat focused ability to a drone that lasts no more than 10 seconds in combat is rather pointless.

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Generally speaking I run out or get close to running very low in nearly ever TDM, and of course when that happens all the yellow powerups migrate to the far side of the map.

 

As the above poster mentioned, giving a purely combat focused ability to a drone that lasts no more than 10 seconds in combat is rather pointless.

 

I can see its usefulness in Domination, since it will likely be dropped under a satellite, where it will have a longer life expectancy, and you will likely end up in combat while in range of the drone, so the shield regen will actually be useful. Of course, in Domination, there is no other way to refill ammo (not including suiciding into an asteroid), so the ammo becomes more valuable as well.

 

In Deathmatch, on the other hand, combat tends to be more spread out and take place out in the open more than in Domination, so yeah, any Repair Drones dropped in a combat zone are going to end up dead in short order. They pretty much have to be placed out of the way, in a spot where your team can fall back to if they manage to disengage, or if they're waiting for the enemy to respawn. That makes the shield regen useless, since your shields will regen anyway, and the ammo more valuable.

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Let us assume nobody is able to defend a healing drone for "more than 10 seconds", and we are in a TDM:

 

-Shield drone dropped strategically into a dogfight cluster , heals all nearby shields for 10 seconds, and forces enemies to try and dive the probe to end the advantage, opening their tails up.

 

-Ammo drone refills the few scouts that may be out of ammo and only applies the hull repair for "no longer than 10 seconds".

 

Shields gimping my team?

Or are 2 people who aimlessly spam rocket pods QQing while everyone gets a shield boost because they want more ammo to spam?

 

Shield probe is not gimping anyone, rather the unregulated spamming of ammunition by a select few is causing them to gimp themselves, then point the finger at the nearest drone for not offering up some personally tailored candy.

 

At worst, both are equally useful.

Shield repair is hardly a gimp vs an ammo refill.

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Here's the difference: in order for the shield repair to be effective, it needs to be placed in the middle of combat, where, as others have said, it has a *very* short life expectancy.

 

On the other hand, the ammo refill, along with the hull repair, can be useful even if it's placed just outside of the combat zone, where it will have a much longer life expectancy. That way, if you win an engagement, or manage to escape a pursuer, but take some hull damage in the process, you can swing by the drone to repair your hull and refill your ammo in the process.

 

 

Again, in Domination, the shield refill is more useful because the satellites provide a convenient place to drop the drone where the shield regen will be useful, while providing enough cover that the drone might live longer than a few seconds. In TDM, though, you're better off putting the drone outside of the combat area, where the shield regen won't do much good.

Edited by Delta_V
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Here's the difference: in order for the shield repair to be effective, it needs to be placed in the middle of combat, where, as others have said, it has a *very* short life expectancy.

 

On the other hand, the ammo refill, along with the hull repair, can be useful even if it's placed just outside of the combat zone, where it will have a much longer life expectancy. That way, if you win an engagement, or manage to escape a pursuer, but take some hull damage in the process, you can swing by the drone to repair your hull and refill your ammo in the process.

 

 

Again, in Domination, the shield refill is more useful because the satellites provide a convenient place to drop the drone where the shield regen will be useful, while providing enough cover that the drone might live longer than a few seconds. In TDM, though, you're better off putting the drone outside of the combat area, where the shield regen won't do much good.

 

Depending on proximity, because this assumes that ships make enough regeneration to their shields between engagements to reap no benefit from a shield drone, which begs the question; just how far away is this drone, and is that really more beneficial than dropping drones as the cooldown permits in a heated area as "needed"?

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-Shield drone dropped strategically into a dogfight cluster , heals all nearby shields for 10 seconds, and forces enemies to try and dive the probe to end the advantage, opening their tails up.

 

Don't do this to yourself. The life expectancy of a repair drone that finds itself in combat is about ten seconds beyond what it's already lived, but the life expectancy of a repair drone that's dropped into combat from the start is probably capped by the life expectancy of the bomber that thought it was a good idea to lumber on into the middle of a dogfight he's not designed to participate in.

 

Shields gimping my team?

Or are 2 people who aimlessly spam rocket pods QQing while everyone gets a shield boost because they want more ammo to spam?

 

Here's the thing, though: good players quickly run out of ammo in a TDM. 12 clusters and 50 pods both go by very quickly when you've trained yourself to use missiles on a target whenever you have a target. It's a lot of potential damage if you can get them all off, and you're flat out gimping your killing power if you don't use them frequently and accurately. It doesn't help that the t4 cluster upgrade was fixed at some point, giving most pilots 12 clusters instead of 14, and if I want to increase that, it comes at the cost of two degrees of firing arc from my crew.

 

Shield probe is not gimping anyone, rather the unregulated spamming of ammunition by a select few is causing them to gimp themselves, then point the finger at the nearest drone for not offering up some personally tailored candy.

 

As I said above, not using your ammo as much as possible is gimping your damage and thus contribution to the team.

 

I'd like to point out that this happens even when one is not winning handily. If the other team has a lot of good players, you need to get off as much damage as possible in order to open what advantages you can. I've run out of ammo in close matches as often as I have in runaway matches.

 

I'm certainly not blaming your repair drone for my lack of ammo. I don't go into a match planning for it to be there, and I'm not complaining when it is there. At the same time, one upgrade is pretty obviously useful, and the other is

 

At worst, both are equally useful.

Shield repair is hardly a gimp vs an ammo refill.

 

Gimp is probably a strong word for it, but shield repair is still useless and adds nothing of value.

 

You know why barrel roll and retro thrusters are actually useful compared to other missile breaks? Because they offer the ship something it can't do otherwise. Shield repair vs ammo refill is similar in that regard.

 

And I'm actually kind of disappointed that ammo refill shipped as a choice when both of the high-end GSF guilds I've played with have been looking forward to ammo refill since we knew it was a thing. Now we can get our hopes crushed by newbie bombers that don't understand why shield regen is terrible and pick it over ammo refill!

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LOL you scout pilots are still spewing your "my opinion is better than you and people who don't agree gimp their team and are newbie pilots."

 

LOL! Really. Get over yourselves. Your opinion is no more valid than my opinion on this. Regardless of how many times you spam it.

 

I prefer shield over refill. I am not a newbie. I am not gimping anything. I feel it is worthwhile. Your bullying and punk tactics will not assuage my opinions.

 

LOL!

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Basically:

 

In a group dogfight, the shield one has ludicrous value. This is in any mode, and even if it only survives a few seconds.

 

At the edge of battle, healing shields offers almost nothing.

 

 

In a mode with weapon refills as powerups (TDM), the utility is precisely that a scout or strike with clusters (which run out the easiest when mastered) doesn't have to go humpstering around for yellows. That's a real value.

 

 

 

 

I run shield. I am considering switching to ammo, but honestly, of the two TDM maps, I hate being a bomber on the space one so much (mesas is fine though).

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Basically:

 

In a group dogfight, the shield one has ludicrous value. This is in any mode, and even if it only survives a few seconds.

 

At the edge of battle, healing shields offers almost nothing.

 

I think it works well at the edge of the battle too, at least as a fall back for repairs in TDM. I like to set up my bomber nest with mines and repair drone next to a gunship at the edge of the battle. Allows you to haul *** back to it and heal up. Every kill (or kill prevented by repairs) counts.

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In a group dogfight, the shield one has ludicrous value. This is in any mode, and even if it only survives a few seconds.

 

I don't disagree that the shield upgrade can do a lot of work in that circumstance, but it's a fairly idealized one and I question how often it will come up.

 

In order for the shield repair to do work, there need to be allies in range with shields at less than maximum. Furthermore, the bomber has to be in position to drop the drone near these allies.

 

The number of times I have seen a "group dogfight" (quotes because all of GSF is really a group dogfight, at some level) is very low. There simply isn't enough organization for this to be commonplace. Even in domination matches, it's very common for attackers to stream in single file.

 

Most of the time, if I see more than three ships in an area, the fight is lopsided. Because of the survivability-to-damage ratio the devs have chosen, it's very, very easy for a team to pop a single opponent. Even ignoring damage overcharge, it barely takes more than a second for a solo player to land a lot of his kills. Once other people start throwing damage around, the time to kill drops dramatically. That means there is less than a second for anyone to do anything about their survival prospects dropping from "only taken minor damage" to "man I liked that oxygen why'd you have to take it away from me".

 

Once that starts happening, all the dominoes fall down, and instead of two 3v3 skirmishes you suddenly have a killball rolling around the match.

 

Around a satellite, a battle only really keeps going in one of two circumstances: either everyone is so evenly matched that they can't land kills, or a few people are so evasive that they're not dying. In both cases, there's really not a huge amount of shield damage going around that the ships themselves can't manage, and shield piercing weaponry is generally what makes the difference. You know where most of that comes from? (No, not ammo, it actually mostly comes from mines and slugs. But ammo is a fairly important contributor.)

 

In order to make a difference here, you need to get your big, lumbering bomber into the thick of things (and make no mistake, you can't be "just outside the thick of things" in a bomber -- the thick of things will move to you), fart out a repair drone, and have it heal someone's shields so that they don't die. Bomber engines, repair drone range, and the healing ticks all have to line up very, very nicely for that to actually happen.

 

Of course, it's *********** amazing when it does!

 

Further, shield management can be handled by the player (by dodging and managing cooldowns and what have you). Ammo management cannot -- the player is entirely dependent on the bomber.

 

I dunno, maybe your server is different. Maybe everyone's more evenly matched there. The more common situation I see doesn't support shield repair as a viable option because the circumstance doesn't come up often enough to be worth planning for, whereas depleted ammunition happens in every single match.

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Yeah, and you claiming things makes them true, right?

 

I have said my posts are my opinion. I have not resorted to bullying. Your most recent post is more thoughtful, but some of your posts are just ignorant and punkish.

 

Scout pod pilots seem to want bombers to give them their pods back. Yet, they upgrade their pods to do 30% extra damage whilst depleting twice as fast. Do they bother to run the numbers and see that their potential damage at full load out for pods just went from 115% (choosing plasma pods) to 65% of potential damage? No, they instead decide their pods are depleting too fast and want bombers to refill them.

 

The argument that healing drones should not be used in combat is absurd. That some people feel that they should optimally be put on the outskirts of a fight rather than in the thick of things is silly. There are tactical reasons for placing the drones in or outside combat zones. Neither choice is the best choice in all circumstances.

 

Stating that the lifespan of a healing drone is 10 seconds in combat is a stat plucked from the air. There is no basis for it other than supposition. If someone wants to shoot my drone rather than shoot me, go for it. They can eat my heavy blasters with a bomb chaser.

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