Edit: it's now May 2015. This post originally dates from July 2014, but everything in it is still relevant. I'm putting it back on the main page because we have devs asking for potential strike fighter buff suggestions. This is vastly out of scope for that thread, but it does have some of those in there. Note that it also tries to put strikes in a better position by overall meta changes in addition to direct buffs. Notes in italicized royal blue in a couple spots for update/correction.

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We've spilled a lot of electrons on GSF balancing. The game is mostly better than at launch these days, but I think the meta (the set of ships and strategies that are optimally effective for most players) is narrower than it should be.

With that in mind, I've typed up this document. I've divided it into sections:

1)- Uncontroversial Changes

These changes every, or almost every player is in favor of. The few who would argue against them are generally doing it to be churlish, motivated by some manner of haterade. The devs haven't implemented these, and I will offer guesses as to why, but they absolutely should ASAP.

2)- Verain's Balance Suggestions

These are things that I really think would make for a better game. You will probably not agree with all of them, and that's ok. I would really like the devs to implement these, and I think they would really expand on the list of viable ships and strategies.

3)- Verain's Pie-in-the-sky things

These would be nice, and would add depth to the parts of the game that currently have really trivial answers, such as crewmembers. This would also eliminate some of the very many gearing traps that the game currently has- however, these would mean real design and development and would not be cheap in terms of time.

1- Uncontroversial Changes

1a- “Miss” text when you fire a shot at an opponent and the combat table says it is a miss or evade.

This is the biggest UI change that you could offer that would greatly increase the game's usability for new players, while also being great for veterans, without changing the game balance. With this change, if you shoot off target and the game doesn't roll a die, it would look like live- nothing appears. But if you shoot on target, it would say “miss” or the damage number- just like live, with the addition of the word “miss”. An advanced version of this would actually tell you the difference between “miss” and “evade”, but that isn't nearly that important (the only advantage there is that you would see a lot of “evade” versus scouts or distortion field, and a lot of “miss” versus off target opponents).

Why this hasn't been done: The combat system in this game, which GSF shares, by default will tell you about misses. The fact that it doesn't tell you this is a design choice... but WHY? The likely situations are that this serves to disguise poor client/server interactions, and to disguise the few times when the reticule is not actually where you should be aiming. That's all I can come up with. I don't care though, and neither do the rest of the players- GIVE US THIS INFO!!! It drives me nuts not knowing if I should be aiming differently or not, and it disguises the few times that the reticule isn't the correct place to click on, which is a BUG, not a feature.

1b- “Evade” text (or miss text) when you are FIRED ON. This is just an extension of 1a, but most players don't talk about the severe ramifications of not knowing when you are missed by someone whose aim is good. This is probably a giant part of the problem when a battle scout main comes in, having chosen the most evasive shield component, the most evasive engine component, the most evasive crew member, put them all on the most evasive ship, and then gets angry when they get hit hard- these players often discount, either mentally or because there is no UI, the sheer number of misses that their gearing choices cause, and they don't know what is due to the combat roll and their use of distortion field, versus what is due to their own evasive flying. Just as the game has flytext for damage taken, it should have flytext for evasions. This would allow players to realize they are under fire, and viscerally realize the magnitude of their choices both in flight, in combat, and in gearing.

And yes, this would allow you to see a railgun that misses you without spotting the trail- I doubt this UI enhancement would be much of a nerf to gunships, being that the trail is already present.

Why this hasn't been done: Probably the same reason as 1a, but no one has actually asked before now.

1b- Icons need to change on the cartel ships when the weapon changes.

This is a mild UI change that will up the usability of the cartel type 1 strike, type 1 gunship, and type 2 gunship. For those who don't fly those ships, the problem is this: the icon of the primary or secondary weapon is tied to the graphic 3D of this thing, and the cartel ships don't have more than one. For this reason, many choices have NO way of distinguishing them without firing the weapon. A type 1 strike with quads and ions needs to shoot to tell which one he is on, a type 1 gunship needs to as well (this is a very big deal, as shooting a railgun is an investment), and a type 2 gunship using thermites/protons or slug/plasma can also have this as a problem (a traditionally laid out type 2 gunship doesn't face the problem because the ammo count changes).

This could be addressed with either a different icon swap, or if that is technically challenging, ammo text could be added.

Why this hasn't been done: I think this has just been a low priority, and some of the changes could take a code change.

1c- Cross server GSF. I'll bring this up because the playerbase, and the devs, all know this is the number one thing needed for balanced fights, fast queues, and longevity. Just for GSF this is worthwhile, but the game could use this with PvE and PvP in its ground game as well. This is the most important thing SWTOR needs.

Why this hasn't been done: This is hard and expensive. I'm sure the devs have it as their number one issue, and unlike the rest of this thread, the lack of cross server SWTOR actually really costs them money in a measurable way. So this is just a reminder- we know the devs will be on this when they can. ASAP is probably not all that “soon” in this case, but I bet it's still ASAP.

1d- Scoreboard breakdown damage by source. The scoreboard currently just lists damage done, but it really needs to list more than that. At the VERY least, we should see damage done to ship hull, ship shield, and other. You could further break “other” down into capital ship turret, drone, mine, and satellite turret. Many players “play the scoreboard”, because that's the only metric provided. It's not reality, but some play it as if it were- so any enhancement that lets it break down to something closer to reality would be useful.

Why this hasn't been done: We got a pretty good scoreboard boost, and I think this wasn't really talked about much.

2- Verain's Balance Suggestions

Ok, here we go- the stuff that I think would make the game better.

2a- Distortion Field.

This is the best shield component in general. The few ships that don't run it when they can normally choose something very interesting instead, such as shield-to-engine (type 1 scout only, and a rather overbudget component that would be way overpowered if it was available on many other ships), or repair drone (for a type 3 scout that wants to go full support and plans to hug nodes and escort bombers only).

The problem is... this component really trivializes missiles. The competing shield components all offer you some play versus missiles, by either giving you more shields or giving you faster recharge, or something. Distortion gives you a combat table advantage versus blasters and railguns, but nothing versus missiles- except that missile break.

Verain Suggests: Selecting distortion gives you a passive buff that increases the lockon of missiles targeting you by 0.25 seconds. That's baseline.

The rightmost tier changes from a missile break into “Distortion Dampening: during distortion field's active ability, you gain evasion based on the targets distance from you, starting at 5% (5000m or less) and ending at 20% (15000m or more)”

This would leave a powerful benefit versus missiles, and the benefit would be better versus the low lockon missiles, which are generally the strongest missiles. It would remove the “immunity cycle” gameplay, and allow a distortion field choice that is very strong versus rail snipers, while being an actual choice versus “distortion field increased by 3 seconds”, the current leftmost pick, normally selected by people who went to buy another shield and forgot to change the selection when they picked distortion field and queued for battle. Other suggestions, such as highly ramping the distortion benefit would run the risk of returning us to an earlier patch's meta, while suggestions such as “make missiles deal a lot less damage during distortion” don't have a way to be phrased in the current thing. If it says “you take 50% less damage from missiles”, this needs to be a new mechanic, or it becomes something that proton, concussion, and thermite ignore- worthless. It is also worth pointing out that distortion field should properly offer a bit of sensor dampening for flavor.

2b- Negative Shield Bleedthrough

Shield bleedthrough is an occasionally populated field on the character sheet. It is in all ways treated by the game engine as shield piercing. You can get 30% shield bleedthrough by selecting charged plating, or 20% by selecting upgraded charged plating. The baseline value is 0.

Verain suggests: Strike Fighters have a baseline shield bleedthrough of -5. Directional Shield gives a -5 to shield bleedthrough, or -10 to one side and 0 to the other, when it directional mode. Shield projector grants -5% shield bleedthrough to all ships buffed during the active. Shield to Engine grants -5% to shield bleedthrough. Overcharged Shields give a -5 to shield bleedthrough during their active ability. Abilities meant to entirely ignore shields still continue to do so- seismic mines, proton torpedoes, and any others meant in that mode.

This is a big list of changes, but really it just means that the shields that are chosen for defensive purposes can be a bit tankier. It also allows the devs to become a bit racier when choosing shield piercing values, given that there would be some soft countering going on. Keeping protons and seismics distinct could be done by giving them a large shield piercing value (200%!) or simply stating that they always ignore shields.

2c- Quick Charge Shield

This is a niche shield. It has real benefits and uses, but I feel it is a bit on the weaker side. I also didn't list it above in the shield bleedthrough section.

Verain Suggests: Change the -30% to -10%.

This is a minor buff, and many others would work in its place.

2d- Ammunition Garbage

Ammunition management is not as pleasing as it should be. Debatably, the game could use much smaller ammunition pools that regenerate over time, and this could be used for mines and railguns as well- but that's a big change I won't address here. Right now, the ammunition feels punishing, but this punishment is really spread around oddly. Burst scouts run out of pods trivially, and often kill themselves rather than hunt a yellow or retreat to an ammo drone. Support players who are new often select the shield restore instead of the correct ammo restore, and this can create arguments.

Verain Suggests: Friendly satellites and capital ships now restore ammunition at 1/2 the rate that ammunition drones currentnly do. Repair probes and repair drones now regenerate ammunition baseline, at 1/2 the rate of current. Repair probe and repair drone “ammunition” upgrades replaced with “Power Boost” which ups the rate of engine and weapon regeneration by 5%.

This change reflavors the punishing ammo game and eliminates the ability of new players to have a “trap” option that hurts themselves and their team. Players will no longer be tempted to kill themselves to regain their offensive powers, without the ammunition actually becoming infinite. Ammo replenish I put at 1/2, but honestly it could be even less- the current rate of restore is frankly ridiculous, as the little green beam zips your ammo from 0 to max in seconds.

2e- TDM Powerups

I was personally sad to see the Damage Overcharge (“DO” or “red”) nerfed down to the mere 200% it is on live, but this change was reasonably popular. I really enjoyed learning the spawns from Drako and playing “Pac Man Scout” builds that would tear around and eat powerups whilst being able to deal devastating burst when the DO was found. But the bigger problem is that the powerups are too mixed a bag. This change set makes it worthwhile to get one in your vision without making the players primarily seeking out “the quad damage” instead of focusing on the correct objectives- enemy players.

Verain Suggests: Engine Overcharge is pretty much perfect. Shield Overcharge should last longer- at least 50% longer, and possibly 100%. It could also offer some negative shield bleedthrough- perhaps as much as -10%. As a powerup, this would be appropriate. Weapon Overcharge should probably restore ammunition during its duration instead of instantly- you could end up with full ammo when it wears off in this way. Alternatively, the duration could simply be increased. Additionally, the damage of blasters should be increased during this buff, but not by much- maybe 5% or 10%.

Debateably, even more powerups should exist. You could have a heal powerup, or one that makes you take much less damage from mines, or railguns, or blasters. You could have a powerup that gives you a lot of sensor dampening and sensor, or one that, while active, allows your engine components to be used more often. The problem with these cool powerups is that they risk making the game more about the powerups than the enemy pilots. I think that increasing the durations and possibly effects of the weaker ones should be good enough at making “go powerup hunting” an acceptable choice without it becoming optimal.

2f- Scout Burst Rebalance / Nerf

Scouts remain too bursty, especially in the hands of good players, especially with certain builds. A scout who has a bit of latency on his side (200-500ms) can launch several to-hit rolls of missiles and pods with no UI warning until many of the dice have been rolled (a target on the receiving end can see the damage play back once he has escaped, as a multiplier on the latency of the enemy client). Even without this technical issue, scout burst simply is the highest dps and shouldn't really be up there.

Blaster Overcharge is the biggest burst, but a relatively small window. Targeting Telemetry is the general champion, making for HUGE burst damage some of the time, and stacking insanely well with concentrated fire. Targeting Telemetry really just needs the tier 5 left talent (+25% crit magnitude and +10% crit) nerfed.

Verain Suggests (BO): Blaster Overcharge now passively increases blaster damage by 5% (whether the cooldown is active or not). The base effect becomes +15% haste (from 25% on live), 20% regeneration (from 14% on live). The base duration becomes 12 seconds (up from 9), meaning the talented duration becomes 15 seconds (up from 12). The tier 3 becomes 5% crit (from 8% on live). The tier 4 talent changes to 10% extra regeneration or 5% extra haste (from 14% regeneration or 8% extra haste), and the final tier becomes 5% extra damage or 5% extra range. This means instead of the +50% ish during cooldowns on live and the +16% averaged over time boost, this becomes about 35% ish during the cooldown, and averages out to 16% (it does grant more blaster energy).

Verain Suggests (TT): Targeting Telemtry now passively increases accuracy by 5% (whether the cooldown is active or not). The base effect becomes +5% hit (from 10%) and +5% crit (unchanged), plus the currently-without-merit decloak effect. All talent tiers except precision targeting unchanged, and precision targeting becomes +10% crit chance while active (unchanged from live), losing the 25% crit magnitude. This takes the active boost from 22% to 18%, and leaves the average boost in a similar place- but it definitely destroys the overpowered synergy with concentrated fire (CF seems intended to boost blaster damage by 18% for six seconds, but during TT the increase is closer to 30% on live).

In both of these examples, I tried to keep the “averaged over time” effect the same. In practice, of course, this would be a nerf- no scout is endlessly firing effectively, and a relatively high percent of each scout's offense is spent during cooldowns. The big change is the passive boost- while small, these would give you some benefit when the cooldown is gone. In practice, I think the 16% average blaster damage from BO and the 11% average blasters and pods boost from TT are both higher than they should be, but these changes would solve the most egregrious burst while still allowing these abilities to be desired and good.

2g- Railgun Rebalance / Nerf

My one fear is that some dev will go and implement a railgun nerf without addressing scouts. That's seriously my most feared patch note. Gunships have been nerfed every patch since the game's inception (yes, literally), and the few hints we've seen regarding scouts being addressed are mostly left alone. The changes in this would already nerf gunships, as without the second missile break a type 1 and type 3 gunship would have greatly reduced survival. But if anyone hates the ideas in the scout section above, they should not bother themselves with any railgun nerfs either.

Verain Suggests (All Railguns): All railguns have their critical multiplier set to 1.25 (from 1.50 on live). This means that all critical chance railgun talents would then be doubled to maintain their current effects on average damage.

Verain Suggests (Slug Railgun): Railgun base damage lowered to 1550 (from 1600). Tier five +16% critical chance goes to +35% (32% would maintain the current 8% damage gain, so this represents a small buff). Tier four -10% cost could become something capable of competing with accuracy and tracking, but I have no suggestions here.

Verain Suggests (Plasma Railgun): Change the tier 3 -10% cost talent to the +3% accuracy / -5% tracking talent. Change the 8% critical chance talent to 16% (neutral change, given the railgun critical magnitude change).

Verain Suggests (Ion Railgun): Change the tier 4 leftmost talent (8% critical chance) to either 16% critical chance, or actually replace it with a competitive talent, such as 10% extra damage, or extra energy drained. As it stands, the exclusive use of this talent is to alert you, on 8% of ion shots, as to why everyone seemed to be out of range of the aoe but you swore they were close enough.

Verain Suggests (Concentrated Fire): This could work with railguns if their base crit bonus was halved.

The effects of these changes would be pretty large in their effect on the burst game. On live, the highest railgun burst is 2400 from a slug railgun that crits, and 20% of this ignores shield, and all of it ignores damage reduction- and this crit happens 16% of the time. While crits would happen a lot more often, a 1938 crit is a lot less of an issue, and won't even one-shot the scouts that put everything to evasion. If concentrated fire was fixed to work with railguns, you could see a 2131 during its duration, assuming the gunship pilot chose the right hand tier five choice. This is still a decent amount of damage without getting up to the 2400 we see on live- and of course, it requires the sacrifice of the copilot ability, normally wingman.

The slug nerf is very minor compared to the plasma buff, but plasma suffers a lot without the accuracy talent. Perfectly aimed railslugs miss constantly on live, and miss a centered target with wingman active often enough that plasma railgun feels like a lottery just to collect a normal paycheck. Plasma's theoretical 2028 damage on live has to jump through a lot of hoops to be real, the most significant one of which is the inability to stack the dot. A full charge slug on live can hit for 1760, and a second full charge slug can hit for another 1760. This 3520 damage is often not enough to kill a strike or a bomber, but remains the generally best damage the gunship can do over his 6.4 seconds of sniping. The plasma gunner doing the same thing deals 900 initially. After his 1 second cooldown is over, the dot ticks for 150, and he begins charging again. During the 2.7 seconds of charge, the target takes another 300. If he fires right when charged, he'll deal another 900, and then there will be seven seconds of 150. This is 3432 damage when adjusting for crits, and while still a lot of damage, is also reduced by hull, doesn't pierce shields, and more importantly, is less even versus a target where those two things don't matter, as well as giving the target even more time to make moves.

This keeps all of those weaknesses, but reduces the damage of slug slightly, while also adding accuracy to plasma, such that so many good shots don't go to waste.

2h- Accuracy Copilot Ability.

Most of my copilot stuff is in section three, but this one could be done without having to make larger changes.

Verain Suggests: 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.

Several crewman passives are mandatory or terrible, but this one is the standout. A lot of fun builds lie locked up behind this mandatory passive as well, all designed and intended and totally crappy in practice because they miss such a mandatory skill. This is also a big problem for new empire players, who begin with the worst possible offensive crewman, but whose kit and powers sound pleasing. I've had many players argue with me after asking for advice- they normally require extensive exposure to the game to see the difference, or if they aren't immune to math they can puzzle it out on their own, but this is a GIANT TRAP for new players and a SERIOUS LIMIT for experienced ones. Unlike the other copilot issues, it requires no extensive design- just replace the crewmember passive with something the heck else, and bake in that 5% to every weapon.

2i- Remote Slicing

Verain Suggests: Increase the range on this ability.

2j- Max Snare Magnitude by Ship Type

On live, you can be snared down to 0% movement. Both movement and turning snares stack additively- a 10% snare and a 40% snare become a 50% snare. Different games handle stacking effects like this differently, but I think the one that would work best is...

Verain Suggests: Each ship type has a “Max Snare Amount”. Scouts, gunships, and bombers could have a 70% max snare amount, and strike fighters could have a 60% max snare amount. Any snares beyond this simply wouldn't have any effect.

It would still make sense to stack two snares on someone, but the payoff for a third would be greatly reduced from “entirely immobile and helpless” on live, to something else entirely.

2k- Shield Power Converter and Weapon Power Converter

This section relates to the strike/bomber/gunship engine components, not the “shield to engine” of the type 1 scout (which is a shield component). These components are generally very poor on live- they were clearly meant to be a reasonable engine component alternatives, a different way of flying that is more defensive or offensive but less mobile. We've even seen the CM guys pick these on the live stream, followed by what appeared to be a “live stream” of missile locks

All my ideas here are “give the user a buff when this component is pressed, and the buff lasts a few seconds”. These abilities are fundamentally underbudget because they give you a nice power, but you don't gain an engine maneuver. Even if you ignore the large tactical advantage of moving around rapidly and being able to dive out of line of sight of enemy blasters and rails, the three seconds of missile immunity combined with a missile lock break is just far too much to give up without real compensation.

Verain Suggests (Shield Power Converter): On use, you gain a 6 second buff that decreases shield bleedthrough by 20%.

Verain Suggests (Weapon Power Converter): On use, you gain a 6 second buff that increases primary weapon damage by 30% and secondary weapon damage by 10%.

These could be enough of a reason to actually give these a playstyle of their own.

2l- Charged Plating

It would be nice if this was ok to use without an armor component. The additive nature of damage reduction means that a type 1 bomber can get to 99% hull damage reduction during charged plating, a type 2 or 3 strike can get to 94% hull damage reduction during charged plating, but a type 3 bomber can only reach 79%, and a type 1 strike can only reach 74%. This is essentially a different, and much worse component, for any ship that lacks an armor component- letting through 60 points of damage out of every 1000 is reasonable, but letting through 210 is absolutely not. We all assume that the intention of charged plating is to be essentially immune to non-DR-ignore weapons for 19 out of 30 seconds, most especially mines and light lasers, but the armorless ships aren't losing 20% damage reduction in practice, they are losing a “70% less damage taken” buff.

Verain Suggests: I don't really have much. Charged Plating could simply overwrite the existing damage reduction and always give 90% or 95% damage reduction, regardless of crewmember and armor components, but you'd probably see those ships then ignore the DR secondaries. That's a mediocre idea, but it's still better than the trap components these currently represent on armorless ships.

2m- Strike Fighters

It's no secret that I believe strikes need buffs, and so do many players on the forums and in game. It's not universal, but I really think there's a pretty reasonable consensus. The changes above- specifically, distortion field losing its missile lock- would be a “buff” to strikes, because they don't have access to this powerful shield component. The -5% shield bleed through baseline would also help, as would the buffs to every strike fighter shield component, also detailed above in different sections. Also above was strikes being able to be snared only to 60% max (so they would always have at least 40% of their turning and speed, while other ships could be snared down to 30%).

I think that could be enough, but I'm really not sure. There's a lot of great strike buff ideas in the forums- from 15% off the missile breaks to +5% extra damage to passive low heals. I think if anything were to be needed beyond this, the afterburner activation cost of the strike fighter should be lowered from the 6 value (gunship / bomber / strike) to 5.5 or even 5 (5 is the scout value). This would also then reduce the per-second boost consumption by an equivalent amount.

2015 update: This is the topical part. There's a bunch of pretty good suggestions in the dev thread ( http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=814938 ), but those are meant more for a focused tune.

2n- EMP Missile

Verain Suggests: This missile should not be absolute garbage. I had some ideas in the past, like “it locks on faster to drones” and “reload time not measured in tortoise lifespans”, but honestly, this missile deals bugged damage (2015 update: It does not deal bugged damage, so this part is incorrect. The rest remains true.), is way too hard to lock on given the intended purpose, and has a big perk of “your ally can shoot a real missile at this guy if he's still hanging out, or you could have a shot a real one, but you didn't.” Needs large buffs to compete with ion, and larger to enter the larger world of missiles.

2o- Ion Missile

Verain Suggests: Just drop the reload on this to something reasonable, really. I think we all sort of want it to have a longer range, but we get that it's supposed to not be that great, it's supposed to be a support missile. Even with that, it feels pretty lame.

(2015 May update: Since this was posted, it was confirmed that ion missile had a ninja nerf in a buggy patch, and the snare duration is back down to the 6 seconds of launch- leaving this missile with enough merit, and enough months, to say that it needs larger buffs than I state here)

2p- Rapid Fire Laser

Verain Suggests: Reduce the tracking penalty and/or up the damage and/or up the range. Just really, this weapon isn't noob friendly, the energy feature is silly, and it needs to be buffed. Some combination of buffs. Such a waste of a great laser. For more detail, I have a whole post on this, but it really comes down to “buff this gun”.

(2015 May update: Since this was posted, there's been more discussions on this, such as Nemarus's thread: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=807922 . As before, my initial post-launch rant (February 2014) on the topic remains reasonably relevant as well- http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=723029 )

2q- Light Laser Cannon

Verain Suggests: I feel the tracking penalty could come down a bit on this. This is a cool laser with real tradeoffs, and it's the highest damage laser in the game, but it is a bit frustrating to do much with, requiring a lot of scout gymnastics.

2r- Secondary Component Rebalancing

While Capacitor is pretty well liked, and Armor has some variance in it, and even sensors has some choice to it, the other three have some poor choices.

Verain Suggests (Thrusters): Regen, Turning, and Speed all have fans. Max power is a trap- the max power amount would need to be 30% to make this worth using, but it could be something else.

Verain Suggests (Magazine): The max size should go up to 30%, and for the same reasons.

Verain Suggests (Reactor): Large Shields are vastly superior to the other options. Turbo Reactor reduces the delay by 60% when maxed, but this could honestly be even more. Regeneration Reactor maxes at 20%, and could honestly max at 40%.

These changes will probably get some debate, especially the reactor ones. Experience and math tell me that either large is too good for the slot (and it doesn't feel that way) or the others too weak (and they DO feel weak).

3- Cool Pie-in-the-sky Ideas

I don't think these would be implemented straight up, and they would take devel AND design (the above stuff are mostly devel tweaks). Still, they would really be wicked cool!

3a- More railguns.

The game currently offers only three railguns. A railgun that fires, and then, once two seconds have expired, fires again with the same charge, would be very interesting- the first charge would feel just like any railgun, but would obviously be weaker. The second would require the gunship pilot to stay on the target and the enemy to not dodge, so there would be substantial risk. Obviously, if both connect, the damage would be higher than the single shot railgun. Another railgun could offer a narrow scope, longer range, but give up shield or hull piercing, and have less damage. Other variables include the railgun reload time (1 second baseline) and the charge up (3 seconds baseline, all have the 2.7 second talent). There's a lot of room for longer or shorter range railguns, railguns that are more sustained and less burst, the opposite of that, etc.

3b- UI Enhancement: Ship Types.

Enemies in range are little triangles, but it would be wildly helpful if they could be visually distinguished by ship type or at least ship class. This would allow for a better method of “find the gunship” or “find the scout” than the current method of spam tabbing. The ramifications of this aren't great- mostly you'd be offering more situational awareness than the current system. This could also be on the minimap as well as the circle-HUD.

3c- UI Enhancement: Charging Railgun

It's clear that your ship can detect a railgun charging within sensor range, but it doesn't bother to tell you this unless you are looking at them. While ideas such as “railguns targeting you make a bell ring” are poor for several reasons (it's a massive nerf to gunships, targeting is not needed, you can target someone you aren't going to shoot at), if the red triangles around your minimap, or the targeting computer itself, were to change in brightness as well as become, say, yellow, when an enemy is charging a railgun, a lot of the confusion about gunships might be averted. The ramifications of this are a bit more severe, and gunships might prove to need buffs.

Note: This could also work as an “enhanced sensor” type component, or a glue-on to ships that have sensor components on live.

3d- UI Enhancement: Friendly Health

This would help with the few healers in the game. The “who needs heals / me” call out in mumble makes these ships have a pretty decent purpose, but without that, it can be frustrating. This could be a UI option, a baseline feature, tied to ships that select a healing component, or tied to ships who have a certain sensor component (communications, for instance).

3e- UI Enhancement: Detailed Enemy Status

It wouldn't be trivial to show the moment to moment settings of an enemy, but it would be interesting, particularly if such knowledge came at a cost of some sort.

3f- Ability to enhance satellite cap range

Obviously this shouldn't come without a cost, but it would be very nice to have some control over this.

3g- Domination Turrets

Right now, there is one type of turret, and it spawns thrice. I would recommend that there be three types of turret, that spawn in order. This would reward more than just one type of objective buster.

Verain Suggests: The first turret that spawns should be the same one we have now- “Armored Turret”- tons of armor and a medium cannon you can evade. The second should have a shield generator, and more hull, but not much armor, “Missile Turret”. It tries to lock weaker cluster missiles constantly. The final should be smaller and be seen flitting about in its space, “Sentry Turret”. This one would have strong evasion and no damage reduction, and would shoot blasters that are more powerful than the current one, but have a lower hit chance- say twice as powerful, but a hit chance 25% less than the current ones.

This change would be interesting because you'd approach the satellites a bit differently, and lacking armor penetration wouldn't be nearly as punishing, while simply popping a small cooldown wouldn't just allow you to ignore all of the turrets. They'd still die in a similar amount of time, but it would definitely be more exciting.

3h- Crewmembers

I've made posts in this before, because the crewmembers are not that interesting right now. Powerful, but not interesting. First, I cover the three very relevant passives (tactical is useful, but not overwhelmingly so, and almost all the choice in crewmembers comes from tactical), then I propose a new solution for copilot abilities.

Engineering- these are terrible because there are only two good ones. Make them:

> 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%.

Offensive- Mostly the problem here is that you never want to give up accuracy, because it's basically a whole capacitor component. It is wildly overbudget, and my older post tried to make everything as powerful as it is- instead, I'll assume that all weapons go up in accuracy by 5%, as listed above. As listed above, add 5% accuracy to all weapons. Remove the 6% accuracy crewman ability,a replacing it with any of 5% shield penetration, 3% blaster damage, or 3% range to blasters.

Defensive- These are mostly balanced, with the exception of the shield regeneration one being truly awful. The damage reduction one is also probably weaker than it should be- it has some considerations with charged plating builds, however. I still feel it could go up safely. The shield regeneration one takes 13 seconds of regeneration to tie the +10% max shielding in terms of total shielding provided- and that is just awful. I double it here, but it is still the worst by a lot.

> 10% shield capacity

> 5% evasion

> 12% damage reduction

> 30% shield regeneration

Copilot abilities are one of the very few things that are different between factions, something I'm very much in favor of. I try to keep that distinction- in fact, the above changes would really open up copilots all by themselves, because you lose some of the penalty for not picking the “correct” crewmembers. In this setup here, I assume we can change the cooldown, which the current copilot abilities do not offer.

Wingman, Running Interference- These I use as a baseline. They are useful and good.

Hydrospanner- This could be doubled in duration, or it could become a passive instead of an active. It is massively underpowered on live and needs a large buff. Right now it is a trap to many players, who hate the idea that hull damage is not going to be fixed unless some ally comes along and does it for them.

Concentrated Fire- This could be modified to work with railguns if the railgun change above goes through, but it is still a lot of damage in one cooldown. If the duration went up to 10 seconds the crit bonus could come down to 22%... but as it is, this is an interesting and powerful crew ability. With the TT change above (loss of surge), it wouldn't be overpowered.

Lingering Effect- I still think this should be something entirely different. If it needs to stay like it is, a buff of 50% would be reasonable. This is the worst concept for a crewmember ability, because it can never be balanced properly.

Servo Jammer- This is a great idea, but is generally too weak. It sees a bit of use with heavy snare builds. I think raising it to 35% would be a very solid buff without making it too frustrating to play against.

Lockdown- This ability sees some niche use. I actually think it should turn off engine regeneration for 2 seconds after, and likely it could use a lower cooldown- say, 40 seconds.

Slicer's Loop- Conceptually this shouldn't even be a long cooldown. I would recommend this ability stay the same, but have a 20 or 30 second cooldown instead.

In Your Sights- This ability is arguably fine, but it is a really hard sell over wingman on live. I think that the evasion magnitude could become 25 seconds, or instead, the cooldown could become 45 seconds.

Bypass- This was overnerfed and should be 20% at minimum. Alternatively, the cooldown could simply come down. A very cool power, it is sad to see it nerfed so badly- and with the other changes here, it would no longer be punishing for empire players as it was at launch.

Suppression- This could have a shorter cooldown. It is already a very powerful effect, but single target means that I see very few players running this instead of, say, running interference.

Nullify- This needs a longer duration or a higher damage reduction. It would be entirely reasonable to make it 30% for 15 seconds- taking hull damage is awful, and this doesn't help that much- or to make it 60% for the six seconds it is on live, such that you could simply turn it on and swim through some seismics, depending on build.

Extra Credit Copilot Abilities- Since this is the pie-in-the-sky section, I'll add this here:

When you pick a copilot, the copilot has TWO abilities to choose from. Here's an example:

Risha is an engineering companion who would have Extra Power (10% boost to engine and weapon pools) and Redundant Systems (20% less time on debuffs that snare you or limit regen). She would have two copilot abilites- say, Servo Jammer and Running Interference. When you select her under Copilot, you also select which of the two you are using on that ship. This might create a lot of overlap, so we would want extra copilot abilities:

Fast Telemetry: 1 min CD, 15 second duration, your lock-on secondary weapons have their lockon times reduced by 15%.

Emergency Shield Power: 1 min CD, 15 second duration, your shields regenerate 2% of maximum power per second.

Evasive Signature: 1 min CD, 20 second duration: Opposing missiles and torpedoes have their lockon time increased by 20%.

Piercing Shots: 1 min CD, 10 second duration: Your weapons ignore 30% of damage reduction.

Targeted Slicing: 1 min CD, 6000m range, targeted mine explodes or targeted drone is disabled for ten seconds.

Double Time Reload: 1 min CD, 20 second duration, -50% to secondary weapon reload times.

Boost Tuning: 1 min CD, 15 second duration, your base speed and turning increase by 10%.

Sniper Tuning: 1 min CD, 20 second duration, the range of your blasters and railguns increases by 15%, but the damage decreases by 10%.

These abilities aren't hard and fast- this is the “crazy idea” section- but they would definitely add to the zoo of copilot abilities.

I'm actually surprised that despite we seem rather opposed when debating stuff, I'd agree on a majority of your points. Obviously there are things I'd do differently for the same goal, but rare are things I fundamentally disagree with (one or two at most).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's nothing on BLC ? It's surprising that you didn't lay a word on this.

Well, I'll try to comment with more details later : sleeping time in EU.

Missiles need bonuses across the board to stationary ships. For the most part that applies to gunships and drones.

It could be that certain ships need a "weight" type of value applied to them in regards to how many a team can field in a match. 2 gunships and 2 bombers is plenty enough for any one team. Any more than that and matches become just plain stupid.

For people who can't understand that concept, look at popular sports. In pro football there's only one quarterback on the field on any given down. Last year the top QB amassed 5,477 pass yards and 55 touchdowns. That's a gunship in GSF. The top running back ran for 1,607 rushing yards and just 9 touchdowns. That's a striker in GSF.

Being able to field unlimited numbers of gunships and bombers is like having two quarterbacks and two footballs hiked to them on every down. It's laughably imbalanced.

I'll use another comparison for everybody outside of the USA, soccer. A soccer(ok, football for everybody else in the world) goalie cannot allow a ball to pass through a goal that has an opening of roughly 192 square feet--it's 8 feet high and 24 feet across. He has to defend this opening by himself. Having 2 bombers defending a node is like having 2 goalies in the box at all times. Football/soccer games have notoriously low scores even with only one goalie. Now imagine if there were 2 goalies. That's GSF right now.

I'm actually surprised that despite we seem rather opposed when debating stuff, I'd agree on a majority of your points.

I think when we talk about existing points the conversation is minor- "the territory should be divided this way". Something larger, we share similar goals, so it's more "this much land should arise from the ocean". So I'm not surprised we're in agreement on a lot of the points like that.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's nothing on BLC ? It's surprising that you didn't lay a word on this.

No, actually. I thought about recommending that the BLC have a slightly faster firing rate (same dps, a bit less burst), but honestly, if there are LLC and RFL buffs, that would address the issue pretty well. Since I recommended to buff the weaker options, there's no reason to nerf BLC.

A bigger thing is.. do you really feel BLC is actually too much damage? Or just the better choice compared to the others? At this point, the whole game involves every close range guy having BLC if he can, so a nerf to BLC is a very sweeping nerf to existing dogfighting, but buffing the others to compete... seems better?

Wonderful post, Verain. And solid coloring as well

Would these changes result in a perfect game? Probably not. But I don't think any of them would result in a worse game, and most of them are almost certain to make the game better.

I don't see any risk in the devs implementing any of them, either wholly or individually. The one exception are the Scout and Gunship adjustments, which really should come as an atomic pair.

I am also surprised you didn't mention BLC's specifically, but I know they are tricky. On Scouts, they are too easy to use. But they are vital in giving Gunships a viable way to defend themselves at close range. That being said, even on Gunships they seem far, far easier to use than LLC's. But perhaps if LLC's were buffed, BLC's wouldn't be such an obvious choice.

BLC's are so easy to use that I find it easier to turn a double-missile Jurgoran into what a Quell should be than to actually use a Quell itself. If I could have the same ease of killing things with Rapids on a Rycer or LLC's on a Quell, then that'd be fine too.

Either way, it might be safer to first make the other changes to Scouts, Gunships, Rapids, LLC's and then re-evaluate BLC's based on their own merits. Right now it's hard to judge them in isolation.

But yes... Eric, devs... whoever. Please look at this thread carefully in advance of the "balance pass". I lend these suggestions my full and unqualified support!

I still think there needs to be a systematic rebalance to armor pen and charged plating so that armor is not so binary.

I think that's the POINT of charged plating, at this point. I actually agree (and have brought up before that charged plating should be substantial but not ludicrous DR, with very little bleedthrough), but I think that such a thing would be a full redesign- and right now, the meta does involve charged plating, and it has counters and strategies and such.

It could be that certain ships need a "weight" type of value applied to them in regards to how many a team can field in a match.

No, this won't work. This idea is actually shockingly terrible- there's a million things wrong with it that have been shot down in other threads. Briefly: how do you pick who gets the ship (no, random isn't fair), how do you coordinate, what do you do if you queue with five gunships, ships should be balanced, not designed to be imbalanced, being a gunship isn't like having a powerup, it's just picking a ship, with ups and downs.

Missiles need bonuses across the board to stationary ships.

I think this idea is pretty solid, but I didn't include it because I think that missiles would be MORE than buffed enough with the elimination of disto field missile break.

In pro football there's only one quarterback on the field on any given down.

And when a football team recruits a QB, they recruit a QB- Dan Marino didn't choose between five different bodies with wildly different capabilities each down.

No comparison.

 

 

 

No, this won't work. This idea is actually shockingly terrible- there's a million things wrong with it that have been shot down in other threads. Briefly: how do you pick who gets the ship (no, random isn't fair), how do you coordinate, what do you do if you queue with five gunships, ships should be balanced, not designed to be imbalanced, being a gunship isn't like having a powerup, it's just picking a ship, with ups and downs.

You must not be playing GSF much. I have, and when there's too many gunships on one team they are quite overpowered. It's as simple as that.

Whether a team wins or loses a match usually depends on how many gunships are in the field and whether or not they're able to sit back and pick off opposing targets without being flushed out and harassed. With more than 2 gunships covering each other it's pretty much impossible to engage them.

 

You must not be playing GSF much. I have, and when there's too many gunships on one team they are quite overpowered. It's as simple as that.

 

Whether a team wins or loses a match usually depends on how many gunships are in the field and whether or not they're able to sit back and pick off opposing targets without being flushed out and harassed. With more than 2 gunships covering each other it's pretty much impossible to engage them.

Verain is right you are wrong

/debate

Seriously this has been talked about why its a terrible idea so many times its not even funny.

I agree with the huge majority of this. Excellent post, but there are some points that I feel the need to comment on. Select points below:

1a- “Miss” text when you fire a shot at an opponent and the combat table says it is a miss or evade.

I like the idea, but I'd hope that if this were implemented you could turn on a frequency-limiter option. If I'm firing RFL I don't want to see every evade or miss. With railguns, I'd always want to see them.

1b- Icons need to change on the cartel ships when the weapon changes.

Please fix this. I prefer playing my Mailoc/Redeemer to the uglier alternatives. It's got to be an easy fix and it's mildly annoying to deal with.

2d- Ammunition Garbage

ammunition actually becoming infinite.

I can't get behind this. Rocket pods would need some kind of nerf to compensate, otherwise everyone will be running them all the time (with no ammo limitation they are ridiculously effective). This weakens the reason to select the Imperium/Clarion or Legion/Warcarrier, and they certainly don't need less of a reason to be selected over say, a Mangler, Sting or Razorwire. Right now their presence is a blessing to their team despite their obvious deficiencies at dogfighting. I don't want that to change.

But the bigger problem is that the powerups are too mixed a bag.

The bigger problem is in a team deathmatch, killing and assisting your allies should be more important than playing an arcade game from 1980. You're kind of agreeing with me here but your suggestion seems like a 180. I think players would go for powerups in their current form without any of these changes (although I agree Shield Overcharge could use something to spice it up).

The problem with these cool powerups is that they risk making the game more about the powerups than the enemy pilots.

Again, less of a reason to field a ship or copilot that can heal/replenish ammo/do unique and interesting things if the powerups do all of that for you. I want some Battle of Endor/Yavin-style action, not

Targeting Telemetry really just needs the tier 5 left talent (+25% crit magnitude and +10% crit) nerfed. Blah blah about BO and TT.

Yep. I don't really think BLC needs much of an adjustment, it's these two.

Verain Suggests (All Railguns): All railguns have their critical multiplier set to 1.25 (from 1.50 on live). This means that all critical chance railgun talents would then be doubled to maintain their current effects on average damage.

I'd back this. It's better than all the cries of "zomg gunships are no skill wahhh" or "delete gunships from the game" etc etc. I hate gunship-wall games as much as the next person (although it's amusing from time to time) but I'd like to see them present in the game without being totally useless.

Verain Suggests (Plasma Railgun): Change the tier 3 -10% cost talent to the +3% accuracy / -5% tracking talent. Change the 8% critical chance talent to 16% (neutral change, given the railgun critical magnitude change).

Plasma would need a bit more of a bump for me to want to choose it over Slug. It's hard to say without actually playing with it, but the upfront, instant damage of Slug is still vastly preferable when you take Ion into account.

2i- Remote Slicing

Verain Suggests: Increase the range on this ability.

And any copilot ability that's limited to 5k. It's silly and they are chosen far less often than Wingman or Running Interference.

Verain Suggests: Each ship type has a “Max Snare Amount”. Scouts, gunships, and bombers could have a 70% max snare amount, and strike fighters could have a 60% max snare amount. Any snares beyond this simply wouldn't have any effect.

Does anyone find being slowed to 0% fun at all? Please don't go the way of ground PvP with stuns/slows/roots/etc. This really needs to be looked at.

Verain Suggests (Weapon Power Converter): On use, you gain a 6 second buff that increases primary weapon damage by 30% and secondary weapon damage by 10%.

Can we stop suggesting fixes that are just "increase burst damage" and find something useful and interesting? This seems like a cop out. With DF's missile break gone, strikes don't need more burst damage. Especially not if you're toning down gunships and scouts. The missiles they fire are lots of burst damage and they'll be landing far more often. How about all the converters just come stock on every ship? That would hella cool, fun, require skill to manage, and be reminiscent of TIE Fighter.

2l- Charged Plating

I think DR needs to be evaluated as a whole - it's either too effective or complete garbage. Please revisit this.

2n- EMP Missile

Verain Suggests: This missile should not be absolute garbage.

Given how much minelayers have been toned down I don't think this needs a buff at all. Maybe if mines weren't nerfed in two to three different ways.

On topic but not stated: I think clusters could use some really mild toning down.

A bigger thing is.. do you really feel BLC is actually too much damage? Or just the better choice compared to the others? At this point, the whole game involves every close range guy having BLC if he can, so a nerf to BLC is a very sweeping nerf to existing dogfighting, but buffing the others to compete... seems better?

I think it is too much, yet not at the same time. It's a strange feeling I have about them.

It's rather that I do not agree with the concept of "shotgun" like damage profile.

If I'd were to make it short, I'd just say :

1. I don't think it's fair to need more skill or chance with LLC to get similar results than BLC. BLC is unforgiving, but probably too rewarding. ("You passed the range test, you're now exempted of accuracy problems")

2. Results from the previous point makes BLC gives a disturbing "pro weapon" vibe.

One could say that QLC and LC have a similar relation, but at least a rational reason can be found (mobile targets = LC, tethered targets = QLC). But BLC doesn't seem to have any meaning other that rewarding some kind of skill.

It seems off with the overall vibe of the game that says (or is trying to say - atm) "build your ship at your own convenience" not "use the best ship... If you can use it correctly, that is"

 

 

1b- Icons need to change on the cartel ships when the weapon changes.

This is a mild UI change that will up the usability of the cartel type 1 strike, type 1 gunship, and type 2 gunship. For those who don't fly those ships, the problem is this: the icon of the primary or secondary weapon is tied to the graphic 3D of this thing, and the cartel ships don't have more than one. For this reason, many choices have NO way of distinguishing them without firing the weapon. A type 1 strike with quads and ions needs to shoot to tell which one he is on, a type 1 gunship needs to as well (this is a very big deal, as shooting a railgun is an investment), and a type 2 gunship using thermites/protons or slug/plasma can also have this as a problem (a traditionally laid out type 2 gunship doesn't face the problem because the ammo count changes).

This could be addressed with either a different icon swap, or if that is technically challenging, ammo text could be added.

 

Why this hasn't been done: I think this has just been a low priority, and some of the changes could take a code change.

 

 

Perhaps it would cost less engineering time if they just made each weapon have a different color background. Even if the shape shown is directly harvested from the component's 3D model, the color background could make a big difference.

I know that on my double-torpedo Comet-breaker, Proton and Thermite Torpedo are both represented by little boxes. Even though they are subtly different, it's still very hard to distinguish them based on shape alone. Fortunately, Thermite's background is red (which I link with fire/burning) and Proton Torpedo's background is yellow. This helps a lot.

Same thing on my double-missile Jurgoran. Clusters are a box with red (damage) background. Interdiction are a box with yellow (utility) background.

Surely these icon background colors don't come inherently from the component model, but are instead flagged somewhere in the ship XML. So they should be easy to set, and would go a long way toward solving the problem for Cartel Ships.

Please fix this. I prefer playing my Mailoc/Redeemer to the uglier alternatives. It's got to be an easy fix and it's mildly annoying to deal with.

As Nem says, they could just change the icons.

I'm sure at least some of you have heard my icon rant before. I really think that many seem to have been developed without knowledge of what they were going to be mapped to. We've learned to go based on colors ("Utility is yellow".. for this ship), or very vague shapes ("Ion is box, slug is long"), and that's fine, but with these ships we lack even that. I actually think it's a code change or a data expansion- something like "each object maps to a physical file, and the physical file contains a <icon> whatever.ico </icon> section of XML, among other things, so to make different icons they would have to copy this file and then change the icon section, so what is currently one XML file becomes like three for each ship. That being said... do that, or change the schema, or whatever. I'm sure it isn't just a duck fart of a change, but it really makes these ships terrible to play and needs a fix.

I can't get behind this. Rocket pods would need some kind of nerf to compensate, otherwise everyone will be running them all the time (with no ammo limitation they are ridiculously effective).

I didn't list ideas for infinite ammunition, even in the section 3. You could do, it, of course. An example with clusters would be, you have four cluster missiles max, and every thirty seconds you get another cluster missile. Any time you might get a baseline +25% missiles (say, a crewmember, or two of that from a magazine) you instead get +1 to your maximum, and the cooldown is reduced by five seconds. The flipside to this huge change could be making rail guns and mines work similarly, though likely with more generous numbers.

An example with rocket pods would be similar, allowing for full burst cycles but demanding some space between them. I didn't make this suggestion because it's a really big change. The change in question- allowing ammunition reload at certain places- is pretty reasonable, while also changing the heal things into not binary "you picked ammo, correct, you didn't pick ammo, damnit nub", and removing the very game changing aspect of these things.

This weakens the reason to select the Imperium/Clarion or Legion/Warcarrier, and they certainly don't need less of a reason to be selected over say, a Mangler, Sting or Razorwire. Right now their presence is a blessing to their team despite their obvious deficiencies at dogfighting. I don't want that to change.

The suggested change is a buff to these ships, period.

On live, a correctly specced repair drone will heal your ammo to full in 12 seconds. That's almost nothing- the bigger deal is being near one. In domination they are near a node, in TDM they will be a bit towards the middle. The probes will give you a full allotment in 16 seconds, but the buff is on you- you get 24 seconds per cast, or six ticks. This means that if you are a rocket pod scout with the extra ammo crewmember who has shot ALL your missiles, you will get them all back during the duration of this buff, during which you should actually be shooting at enemies if possible, because you'll actually regen more than your max.

With the suggested change, you'd see this:

1)- You could go to a cap ship to recharge. Since this takes similar time to dying, it is certainly not too powerful.

2)- You could get a yellow to recharge, like on live.

3)- You could dash yourself to death to recharge, like on live.

4)- You could go to a friendly sat to recharge. This is the biggest change, but it would require sitting there for almost thirty seconds- that's definitely not a bad thing, though.

5)- A repair drone at a friendly satellite would stack with the satellite to give you ammo back at the same rate as live.

6)- Repair probes would give you back 75% of your total pool per cast, not 150%- very reasonable still.

7)- A repair drone would not have to spend its top talent on this- there would be two defensive options to choose from, no trap.

8)- A repair probe would not have to spend its top talent on this- there would be two option to pick!

This also means that an unmastered one of these components would be very reasonable to have, as it would be giving you your stuff back.

What I propose is a buff to these ships, not a nerf.

The bigger problem is in a team deathmatch, killing and assisting your allies should be more important than playing an arcade game from 1980. You're kind of agreeing with me here but your suggestion seems like a 180. I think players would go for powerups in their current form without any of these changes (although I agree Shield Overcharge could use something to spice it up).

I don't think you are being very fair to the model, and I don't think modest buffs for yellow and blue would hurt at all.

On live, if you are being chased in TDM, a purple powerup is the best. It's wildly the best, and worth barreling for. Also, if you see a purple on your way to the fight, you'll pick it up.

But if you see a blue that will cost you half a boost bar, you will probably leave it where it lies. Same with a yellow, unless you are low on ammo. That part is poor. If you walk away from the fight to snarf powerups, that should not be the optimal strategy- in the past, you had two booby prizes, a purple which meant "try again", and you could get the crazy red, which could make up for your absence. With a neutered DO, that's not worth it for any ship but the Pac Man Scout, and maybe a harried gunship (where it really just gives you a better KDR, often at the cost of K).

They just feel weak except red and purple. I don't think those changes would make everyone a yellow/blue chaser. They would still be weaker, even with extra duration and other buffs.

Again, less of a reason to field a ship or copilot that can heal/replenish ammo/do unique and interesting things if the powerups do all of that for you.

Yellows already give ammo, but the cost for hunting a yellow is high. Changing it to a replenish model would probably be cooler anyway. The few buffs that the powerups offer don't overlap with the ship buffs anyway.

Yep. I don't really think BLC needs much of an adjustment, it's these two.

I think the real question is, is BLC actually too good. Not "do people pick it", but like, is the game worse because of BLC? And... I don't think so. I think BLC is a big part of how dogfighting happens in GSF. I don't think the time to kill on BLC ships is actually too low. I think BLC is good for getting players off of nodes, and that's good to have a tool for that, and the highest dps and highest burst builds don't actually use BLC. I think the real thing was, when BLC got put on a scout, the game had to shift to accommodate that. That simply can't change at this point I don't feel- I certainly wouldn't want MY battlescout to lose BLC, or effectively lose it.

On live, the choices are basically:

Burst Laser Cannon ignores armor, does the damage in a wad (and so is always best in a flyby), has a low dps, has a high accuracy at close ranges, and a very low tracking penalty. The armor ignore is enough for some players to swear by the move, the "snap shot" feature is powerful, etc.

Light Laser Cannon is the highest dps in the game, but lacks most of those advantages. It has the second highest dps off angle of the close weapons (BLC will exceed its dps at odd angles, RFL never really will), but that second highest is still generally recognized as poor- as you yourself say, you have to fly LLC quite differently, pulling your ship's nose on to the target to get a shot, meaning you spend a decent amount of the time correcting (such that your reticule isn't on the target), then open up.

This, I think, could be relaxed. LLC could become something where you can click and do damage a bit. It won't be as much damage as BLC in an off-target situation, by any means, but it could still be hits.

At a 30 degree setup at 1000m, LLC has:

116 accuracy (500m with crewman) - 20/5 (you lose 20% accuracy between 500m and 3000m, but we are only a fifth of the way on that journey) - (30-5)*1 (every degree past the first five costs you 1%) = 116-4-25=87%. Since your target normally has evasion, you can see how this will rapidly become poor.

BLC under the same:

123 accuracy (500m with crewman) - 30/5 (you lose 30% accuracy between 500m and 3000m, but we are only a fifth of the way on that journey) - (30-5)*0.5 (every degree past the first five costs you 0.5%) = 123 - 6 - 12.5 = 104.5.

This much more reasonable number is 17.5% more accurate- a HUGE difference. You'll notice that while the dropoff with accuracy is much sharper, it starts much higher- losing 6% accuracy from 123 is 117, way nicer than losing only 4% accuracy from 116, and then the rest of it behaves as you'd expect with the tracking penalty.

So... if we buffed LLC to have a 0.8% tracking penalty, would that help much? It would be +5% under this circumstance. I think that would be something for sure. The real thing is that even if you COULD hit that shot, picture that in your head- there you are flying behind an enemy who is 1000m away, but is towards the lower left of your circle. If you hold your cursor on him, you will get a couple shots with your LLC, but he'll probably gain range or turn, as you aren't turning properly.

It won't make LLC take BLC's role there, but it will make it less frustrating while still keeping its king of the hill role versus non-DR targets who are under the center and close.

RFL? A lot of people talk like RFL is good at angles. I debunk that plenty, but just for the record:

BLC starts at 123, and drops 30% over 2500m (when it gets to 3000m)

LLC starts at 116, and drops 20% over the same distance.

RFL starts at 116, and drops 25% over the same distance.

116 accuracy (500m with crewman) - 25/5 (you lose 25% accuracy between 500m and 3000m, but we are only a fifth of the way on that journey) - (30-5)*0.8 (every degree past the first five costs you 0.8%) = 116 - 5 - 20 = 91%

This 91% is only a DASH more than LLC at this range- 3.5% to hit difference. But LLC has 1100 dps (before counting final talent) here, and RFL has 980. LLC has 12% more damage, but 3.5% less hit. That's a trivial difference on hit, and a LARGE difference on damage...

And of course, if you put the target dead center the LLC destroys the RFL.

RFL is just crap. It starts way lower dps on an on-target enemy, and then it decays from there. Even though you might hope that RFL is better at angle shots than LLC, it really never is. The 0.8 and 0.5 tracking penalties are very close, and at almost all distances RFL has a crap accuracy- it starts the same, and decreases much faster. In practice, if you have a target at 33 degrees and 500m, you'd much rather roll the die with an LLC shot that could matter than an RFL shot that definitely won't even should it hit- and in BOTH cases, that's the only shot you get before the target is somewhere very different.

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

This is my thread about that. I have a bunch of ideas in there.

But briefly:

You could take the tracking penalty down on BOTH of these weapons. You could take the RFL penalty down way more- even all the way to zero- and it would still not be an optimal weapon (but it would have a niche, and it does not on live). On live, the RFL begins poor and gets worse, and that's the issue. The apparent intended feature of RFL is that it is generous to the weapon battery, and that's not a very desired feature.

Other ideas in the thread include making the RFL good against certain things- for instance, ignoring a portion of enemy evasion. This would make it great to get some damage, no matter how small, on a scout. Another idea is to make the range longer- the RFL requires you to hold a bead anyway, and that's almost impractical unless the target is both close and under your reticule, and every other laser is better under that situation.

Plasma would need a bit more of a bump for me to want to choose it over Slug. It's hard to say without actually playing with it, but the upfront, instant damage of Slug is still vastly preferable when you take Ion into account.

I don't think plasma needs enough of a buff to make YOU take it. I think it needs enough of a buff for SOMEONE to take it without it being a pretty bad choice. I think if you value burst damage (and you do, and should), then plasma is just not your railgun. I mean, HALF the damage is a dot- that's pretty silly. With that idea, the plasma / slug delta would be a LOT closer. The big thing is removing that huge hit penalty- even a perfectly aimed plasma is 3% less accurate on live, which is not unreasonable, but the 5 degree shot (and it's very easy to be off by five degrees) is 28% less likely to hit than the equivalent slug. In fact, that 28% penalty is present anywhere in the scope but the dead center, and almost no railgun shots are at less than 3 degrees anyway, even the ones that look centered. 3 degrees is still a 18% hit delta.

So with that thing fixed, and the small nerf to slug's dps, you'd be choosing the larger value but with the penalty that it doesn't ignore shields, doesn't ignore armor, and doesn't burst. Would you still take the slug? Probably. I didn't try to pick values that would make everyone's gearing choices invalid, I tried to make the others something you could pick without hating life.

And any copilot ability that's limited to 5k. It's silly and they are chosen far less often than Wingman or Running Interference.

Agreed in full. It's like they went through some efforts to be sure that gunships only had like three choices on crewman abilities.

Does anyone find being slowed to 0% fun at all? Please don't go the way of ground PvP with stuns/slows/roots/etc. This really needs to be looked at.

I agree, but I don't think that's a good argument. I mean, does ANYONE find being sniped or missile locked fun? I mean, losing isn't fun in pvp. I think the thing to look at is whether the control loss is acceptable, and whether the opponent had to work for that level, compare the joy of snaring to the pain of being snared... and ultimately decide based on what is making for a more solid experience.

And there's just no way it's that infinite snare jive on live. Even the 30% or 40% minimum speeds are still very slow, 30% in particular.

Can we stop suggesting fixes that are just "increase burst damage" and find something useful and interesting?

No one seems to have any idea on WPC besides "ignore it". Sure, it should have been baseline- the idea came from the flight sim series which let you do this. A strike with this power would be burstier (just with lasers), but would not be able to go places very effectively compared to barrel roll, get a missile lock like retros, break missiles like any of those things...

I mean, if selecting WPC gave you INFINITE weapon energy, it would STILL suck. Like, literally, you select the component, the yellow bar disappears and you can just shoot at full all the time with the F1 bonus, but you don't have a three button at all. That's the problem it faces, and that's why I figured a buff would be appropriate. Plus, scouts have all manner of burst damage AND the ability to get in and deal that damage- I just don't think it would matter much.

What would you do with WPC? I admit that just +damage isn't great, but what's the answer then?

How about all the converters just come stock on every ship? That would hella cool, fun, require skill to manage, and be reminiscent of TIE Fighter.

I'd like this. I think that the two converters you could do this with would be weapon and shield- that is to say, turning engines into either of these things- and their rates would be lower and such.

BUT- you'd still need to fill two component slots with something else then. What should those two components become? And please remember, the "gets a buff after using it" is on my list because it's a damned tweak that would allow ships that are, on live, absolute garbage, to instead have a job. Your idea involves designing two engine components from scratch- clearly a lot more effort.

I think DR needs to be evaluated as a whole - it's either too effective or complete garbage. Please revisit this.

A real issue. The DR ignore weapons all have the lowest dps, and they are all very good regardless of the dps. Meanwhile, DR feels totally silly to pick as an addendum- the crewmember, the armor component- unless you are choosing charged plating, at which point it mostly stacks to "you take 1% or 6% of all incoming damage, and wow do you not care about your shield at all". I didn't put redesigns in my balance section, but this really could be changed to a lot of nicer things.

Given how much minelayers have been toned down I don't think this needs a buff at all. Maybe if mines weren't nerfed in two to three different ways.

EMP missile needs to not be garbage.

EMP missile's ability to destroy mines is not even its only purpose, is my point, and some of the other things could be emphasized. I mean, the missile could, for instance, deal damage.

On topic but not stated: I think clusters could use some really mild toning down.

I didn't really list it because with those changes there would be a mild nerf to them, in the form of anyone using distortion would be a bit harder to target with them- but I generally agree. I think cluster missiles are incessant and annoying and generally too effective for their lock investment. I've had a few nerf ideas, but none I was happy enough with. I also don't feel that clusters are as big a deal as a lot of the other things. If you wanted to tone them down, a good place would probably be the reload time, which is pretty absurd. I've said before that the reload times shouldn't vary with missile payload- the lock on penalties are more than enough, and the concussion reload time is generally the best feeling one anyway.

Still, dunno. Pretty big scout adjustments in there already.

Yellow Powerup

One simple fix that would make the Yellow power-up more appealing--make it give a +10-20% Accuracy bonus (the exact value should be equal to the Evasion bonus Purple currently gives).

This would make Gunships and Scouts go after it for sure.

As for Strikes and Bombers, maybe have it decrease Secondary lock-on and/or reload time.

Damage Reduction

I think a simple start to making Damage Reduction/Piercing less binary would be to halve all Damage Piercing from 100% to 50%, except for Proton Torpedo and maybe Thermite's debuff.

That way, Deflection Armor and Charged Plating always do something, and armor piercing on Slugs/HLC's/BLC's/Rockets/Concussions becomes a soft counter to DR instead of a hard counter.

It would also make satellite turrets a bit hardier against non-torpedoes, which I think is a good thing.

I just wanted to add something that I think was overlooked a bit (since we have a nice consolidated thread). I think the one specialty weapon on the type 1 strike, ion cannon, could use some tuning. If I recall correctly, the suggested changes were:

1. Fix weapon swap ability so you don't stop firing

2. Increase the range to 5k meters

3. Increase damage to hull to 0.5*laser cannon damage instead of 0.25*laser cannon damage

Any buffs to RFL will make this cannon a better choice, but it needs to be a good enough of a choice to compete with Large laser cannon.

For my personal opinion, the debuffs the cannon offers could easily be increased. As it is, they don't do enough damage to weapon or engine pools to matter before the shields are stripped and you need to switch.

For a crazy idea (with very little thought to balance), what if they function as they did in many of the other Star Wars fighter games? Once the shields are stripped, the ion canons start applying damage directly to the weapon and engine pools and start adding a speed debuff (but do 0 hull damage).

I just wanted to add something that I think was overlooked a bit (since we have a nice consolidated thread). I think the one specialty weapon on the type 1 strike, ion cannon, could use some tuning. If I recall correctly, the suggested changes were:

 

1. Fix weapon swap ability so you don't stop firing

2. Increase the range to 5k meters

3. Increase damage to hull to 0.5*laser cannon damage instead of 0.25*laser cannon damage

 

Any buffs to RFL will make this cannon a better choice, but it needs to be a good enough of a choice to compete with Large laser cannon.

 

For my personal opinion, the debuffs the cannon offers could easily be increased. As it is, they don't do enough damage to weapon or engine pools to matter before the shields are stripped and you need to switch.

 

For a crazy idea (with very little thought to balance), what if they function as they did in many of the other Star Wars fighter games? Once the shields are stripped, the ion canons start applying damage directly to the weapon and engine pools and start adding a speed debuff (but do 0 hull damage).

Of the four Ion weapons in the game (Slug, Cannon, Missile, Mine), I think cannons are okay at this point. When combined with Cluster Missiles, they are pretty darned devastating, in fact. In the time it takes to lock on a Cluster Missile, you can strip the shields of absolutely any target, leaving the hull bare for > 800 Cluster Missile damage.

I also have had no problem swapping to HLC's to finish off the target, and I don't buy the argument that the swap results in some huge loss of DPS--and even if it did, sustained DPS does not reliably occur in GSF unless you are farming newbs. All damage against real targets is done in short, intermittent windows of opportunity. In the first window of opportunity, a short sub-second burst of Ion drops almost any target's shields, which is something that only close range BLC's can come close to doing. If I manage to get a Cluster Lock during that first window, the target suffers ~800 points of hull damage--it's as if they'd been hit with a Proton Torpedo. Then in the next window of opportunity, I finish them off with another Cluster Missile or HLC's, since I'll have had ample time to switch primary weapons between windows.

Sure, if a target just sits there, it might be faster to just melt them with LLC's or Quads. But no one I care about beating just sits there.

Also, when I'm flying my super-shielded Directional/Turbo/E2S Clarion tank, Ion Cannons are pretty much the only Strike weapon I fear. Nothing else can get my shields down fast enough before I LOS around a satellite and regen to full.

Sure, Ion Cannons could maybe use a small buff--longer range would be nice. But Ion Cannons are in a far better place than Ion Missile (hard to use) or Ion Mine (utterly worthless).

Of the four Ion weapons in the game (Slug, Cannon, Missile, Mine), I think cannons are okay at this point. When combined with Cluster Missiles, they are pretty darned devastating, in fact. In the time it takes to lock on a Cluster Missile, you can strip the shields of absolutely any target, leaving the hull bare for > 800 Cluster Missile damage.

 

I also have had no problem swapping to HLC's to finish off the target, and I don't buy the argument that the swap results in some huge loss of DPS--and even if it did, sustained DPS does not reliably occur in GSF unless you are farming newbs. All damage against real targets is done in short, intermittent windows of opportunity. In the first window of opportunity, a short sub-second burst of Ion drops almost any target's shields, which is something that only close range BLC's can come close to doing. If I manage to get a Cluster Lock during that first window, the target suffers ~800 points of hull damage--it's as if they'd been hit with a Proton Torpedo. Then in the next window of opportunity, I finish them off with another Cluster Missile or HLC's, since I'll have had ample time to switch primary weapons between windows.

 

Sure, if a target just sits there, it might be faster to just melt them with LLC's. But no one I care about beating just sits there.

 

Also, when I'm flying my super-shielded Directional/Turbo/E2S Clarion tank, Ion Cannons are pretty much the only Strike weapon I fear. Nothing else can get my shields down fast enough before I LOS around a satellite and regen to full.

 

Sure, Ion Cannons could maybe use a small buff--longer range would be nice. But Ion Cannons are in a far better place than Ion Missile (hard to use) or Ion Mine (utterly worthless).

I certainly wouldn't argue that they're worse than the Ion missile. I do think they need some kind of minor buff though (perhaps because I've been running torps on my starguard and not clusters). To be honest, I think my prefered buff for them would be the range increase to 5k.

I'm in agreement with nearly everything Verain posted, I think such changes would definitely encourage more diverse builds that are competitive and fun to fly. Thanks for posting such a long and detailed analysis / recommendation.

I definitely would like to see Ion Cannon boosted to 5k range. I'd ignored it for a long while in favor of more powerful options, but decided to try it out more extensively in recent matches. Getting into range and staying there long enough to be useful was too much of a pain to justify using the Rycer over a more effective ship. As for Grahame's other suggestions, fixing the weapon swap is a no-brainer. I would prefer a slight boost to their debuffs over a boost to their damage, but I'd be fine with either. I think those changes would make them a valid choice vs. other laser types.

I would even like to see a Heavy Ion Cannon that has greater range, maybe unique to the Imperium (though I really gave no thought to balance on that, I just think character-wise it would fit the ship). Adding a range-upgraded Ion Cannon to the Bloodmark's arsenal might be interesting, as well. As 'support ships' I think that would fit their role.

It'd be great to see RFL not be awful, too. I really like the idea that it could uniquely ignore Evasion. That would make it a more worthwhile choice situationally, if you wanted to build a scout-killer. There'd be plenty of reasons to use other lasers, but that would give it a reason to exist.

Having any real reason to use EMP or Ion Missile would be fun, just for diversity's sake. Giving Ion Missile 9k range and a reload time that isn't measured against the movement of glaciers would be enough to make me give it a look again. And I've never found myself in a position where I thought to myself 'I sure wish I had EMP Missiles instead of these Concussion Missiles / Thermite Torpedos"

There seems to be a pretty clear path to improving the game.

- Despon

2a- Distortion Field.

This is the best shield component in general. The few ships that don't run it when they can normally choose something very interesting instead, such as shield-to-engine (type 1 scout only, and a rather overbudget component that would be way overpowered if it was available on many other ships), or repair drone (for a type 3 scout that wants to go full support and plans to hug nodes and escort bombers only).

 

The problem is... this component really trivializes missiles. The competing shield components all offer you some play versus missiles, by either giving you more shields or giving you faster recharge, or something. Distortion gives you a combat table advantage versus blasters and railguns, but nothing versus missiles- except that missile break.

 

Verain Suggests: Selecting distortion gives you a passive buff that increases the lockon of missiles targeting you by 0.25 seconds. That's baseline.

The rightmost tier changes from a missile break into “Distortion Dampening: during distortion field's active ability, you gain evasion based on the targets distance from you, starting at 5% (5000m or less) and ending at 20% (15000m or more)”

 

This would leave a powerful benefit versus missiles, and the benefit would be better versus the low lockon missiles, which are generally the strongest missiles. It would remove the “immunity cycle” gameplay, and allow a distortion field choice that is very strong versus rail snipers, while being an actual choice versus “distortion field increased by 3 seconds”, the current leftmost pick, normally selected by people who went to buy another shield and forgot to change the selection when they picked distortion field and queued for battle. Other suggestions, such as highly ramping the distortion benefit would run the risk of returning us to an earlier patch's meta, while suggestions such as “make missiles deal a lot less damage during distortion” don't have a way to be phrased in the current thing. If it says “you take 50% less damage from missiles”, this needs to be a new mechanic, or it becomes something that proton, concussion, and thermite ignore- worthless. It is also worth pointing out that distortion field should properly offer a bit of sensor dampening for flavor.

This I feel needs to be done.

2b- Negative Shield Bleedthrough

 

Shield bleedthrough is an occasionally populated field on the character sheet. It is in all ways treated by the game engine as shield piercing. You can get 30% shield bleedthrough by selecting charged plating, or 20% by selecting upgraded charged plating. The baseline value is 0.

 

Verain suggests: Strike Fighters have a baseline shield bleedthrough of -5. Directional Shield gives a -5 to shield bleedthrough, or -10 to one side and 0 to the other, when it directional mode. Shield projector grants -5% shield bleedthrough to all ships buffed during the active. Shield to Engine grants -5% to shield bleedthrough. Overcharged Shields give a -5 to shield bleedthrough during their active ability. Abilities meant to entirely ignore shields still continue to do so- seismic mines, proton torpedoes, and any others meant in that mode.

 

This is a big list of changes, but really it just means that the shields that are chosen for defensive purposes can be a bit tankier. It also allows the devs to become a bit racier when choosing shield piercing values, given that there would be some soft countering going on. Keeping protons and seismics distinct could be done by giving them a large shield piercing value (200%!) or simply stating that they always ignore shields.

This when combined with the previous or on its own would also be wonderful for balance

2c- Quick Charge Shield

This is a niche shield. It has real benefits and uses, but I feel it is a bit on the weaker side. I also didn't list it above in the shield bleedthrough section.

 

Verain Suggests: Change the -30% to -10%.

 

This is a minor buff, and many others would work in its place.

Basically do all of the shield things and

2d- Ammunition Garbage

 

Ammunition management is not as pleasing as it should be. Debatably, the game could use much smaller ammunition pools that regenerate over time, and this could be used for mines and railguns as well- but that's a big change I won't address here. Right now, the ammunition feels punishing, but this punishment is really spread around oddly. Burst scouts run out of pods trivially, and often kill themselves rather than hunt a yellow or retreat to an ammo drone. Support players who are new often select the shield restore instead of the correct ammo restore, and this can create arguments.

 

Verain Suggests: Friendly satellites and capital ships now restore ammunition at 1/2 the rate that ammunition drones currentnly do. Repair probes and repair drones now regenerate ammunition baseline, at 1/2 the rate of current. Repair probe and repair drone “ammunition” upgrades replaced with “Power Boost” which ups the rate of engine and weapon regeneration by 5%.

 

This change reflavors the punishing ammo game and eliminates the ability of new players to have a “trap” option that hurts themselves and their team. Players will no longer be tempted to kill themselves to regain their offensive powers, without the ammunition actually becoming infinite. Ammo replenish I put at 1/2, but honestly it could be even less- the current rate of restore is frankly ridiculous, as the little green beam zips your ammo from 0 to max in seconds.

The good: making ships that have heals replenish a small amount of ammo normally (I would probably drop that down to 10%-25% instead personally)

The Bad: other sources giving ammo further trivializes Yellow buffs and heals, such a suggestion should only be done under circumstances when th Yellow buff and the ships with heals were to be done....

2e- TDM Powerups

 

I was personally sad to see the Damage Overcharge (“DO” or “red”) nerfed down to the mere 200% it is on live, but this change was reasonably popular. I really enjoyed learning the spawns from Drako and playing “Pac Man Scout” builds that would tear around and eat powerups whilst being able to deal devastating burst when the DO was found. But the bigger problem is that the powerups are too mixed a bag. This change set makes it worthwhile to get one in your vision without making the players primarily seeking out “the quad damage” instead of focusing on the correct objectives- enemy players.

 

Verain Suggests: Engine Overcharge is pretty much perfect. Shield Overcharge should last longer- at least 50% longer, and possibly 100%. It could also offer some negative shield bleedthrough- perhaps as much as -10%. As a powerup, this would be appropriate. Weapon Overcharge should probably restore ammunition during its duration instead of instantly- you could end up with full ammo when it wears off in this way. Alternatively, the duration could simply be increased. Additionally, the damage of blasters should be increased during this buff, but not by much- maybe 5% or 10%.

 

 

Debateably, even more powerups should exist. You could have a heal powerup, or one that makes you take much less damage from mines, or railguns, or blasters. You could have a powerup that gives you a lot of sensor dampening and sensor, or one that, while active, allows your engine components to be used more often. The problem with these cool powerups is that they risk making the game more about the powerups than the enemy pilots. I think that increasing the durations and possibly effects of the weaker ones should be good enough at making “go powerup hunting” an acceptable choice without it becoming optimal.

The only thing that REALLY needs to be done with power ups is help the blue power and the yellow one to a degree. The yellow would be helped with an increase in duration, and the ideas for the blue buff are great, much more then that seems a little over the top.

2f- Scout Burst Rebalance / Nerf

 

Scouts remain too bursty, especially in the hands of good players, especially with certain builds. A scout who has a bit of latency on his side (200-500ms) can launch several to-hit rolls of missiles and pods with no UI warning until many of the dice have been rolled (a target on the receiving end can see the damage play back once he has escaped, as a multiplier on the latency of the enemy client). Even without this technical issue, scout burst simply is the highest dps and shouldn't really be up there.

 

Blaster Overcharge is the biggest burst, but a relatively small window. Targeting Telemetry is the general champion, making for HUGE burst damage some of the time, and stacking insanely well with concentrated fire. Targeting Telemetry really just needs the tier 5 left talent (+25% crit magnitude and +10% crit) nerfed.

 

Verain Suggests (BO): Blaster Overcharge now passively increases blaster damage by 5% (whether the cooldown is active or not). The base effect becomes +15% haste (from 25% on live), 20% regeneration (from 14% on live). The base duration becomes 12 seconds (up from 9), meaning the talented duration becomes 15 seconds (up from 12). The tier 3 becomes 5% crit (from 8% on live). The tier 4 talent changes to 10% extra regeneration or 5% extra haste (from 14% regeneration or 8% extra haste), and the final tier becomes 5% extra damage or 5% extra range. This means instead of the +50% ish during cooldowns on live and the +16% averaged over time boost, this becomes about 35% ish during the cooldown, and averages out to 16% (it does grant more blaster energy).

 

Verain Suggests (TT): Targeting Telemtry now passively increases accuracy by 5% (whether the cooldown is active or not). The base effect becomes +5% hit (from 10%) and +5% crit (unchanged), plus the currently-without-merit decloak effect. All talent tiers except precision targeting unchanged, and precision targeting becomes +10% crit chance while active (unchanged from live), losing the 25% crit magnitude. This takes the active boost from 22% to 18%, and leaves the average boost in a similar place- but it definitely destroys the overpowered synergy with concentrated fire (CF seems intended to boost blaster damage by 18% for six seconds, but during TT the increase is closer to 30% on live).

 

In both of these examples, I tried to keep the “averaged over time” effect the same. In practice, of course, this would be a nerf- no scout is endlessly firing effectively, and a relatively high percent of each scout's offense is spent during cooldowns. The big change is the passive boost- while small, these would give you some benefit when the cooldown is gone. In practice, I think the 16% average blaster damage from BO and the 11% average blasters and pods boost from TT are both higher than they should be, but these changes would solve the most egregrious burst while still allowing these abilities to be desired and good.

 

 

 

2g- Railgun Rebalance / Nerf

 

My one fear is that some dev will go and implement a railgun nerf without addressing scouts. That's seriously my most feared patch note. Gunships have been nerfed every patch since the game's inception (yes, literally), and the few hints we've seen regarding scouts being addressed are mostly left alone. The changes in this would already nerf gunships, as without the second missile break a type 1 and type 3 gunship would have greatly reduced survival. But if anyone hates the ideas in the scout section above, they should not bother themselves with any railgun nerfs either.

 

Verain Suggests (All Railguns): All railguns have their critical multiplier set to 1.25 (from 1.50 on live). This means that all critical chance railgun talents would then be doubled to maintain their current effects on average damage.

 

Verain Suggests (Slug Railgun): Railgun base damage lowered to 1550 (from 1600). Tier five +16% critical chance goes to +35% (32% would maintain the current 8% damage gain, so this represents a small buff). Tier four -10% cost could become something capable of competing with accuracy and tracking, but I have no suggestions here.

 

Verain Suggests (Plasma Railgun): Change the tier 3 -10% cost talent to the +3% accuracy / -5% tracking talent. Change the 8% critical chance talent to 16% (neutral change, given the railgun critical magnitude change).

 

Verain Suggests (Ion Railgun): Change the tier 4 leftmost talent (8% critical chance) to either 16% critical chance, or actually replace it with a competitive talent, such as 10% extra damage, or extra energy drained. As it stands, the exclusive use of this talent is to alert you, on 8% of ion shots, as to why everyone seemed to be out of range of the aoe but you swore they were close enough.

 

Verain Suggests (Concentrated Fire): This could work with railguns if their base crit bonus was halved.

 

The effects of these changes would be pretty large in their effect on the burst game. On live, the highest railgun burst is 2400 from a slug railgun that crits, and 20% of this ignores shield, and all of it ignores damage reduction- and this crit happens 16% of the time. While crits would happen a lot more often, a 1938 crit is a lot less of an issue, and won't even one-shot the scouts that put everything to evasion. If concentrated fire was fixed to work with railguns, you could see a 2131 during its duration, assuming the gunship pilot chose the right hand tier five choice. This is still a decent amount of damage without getting up to the 2400 we see on live- and of course, it requires the sacrifice of the copilot ability, normally wingman.

 

The slug nerf is very minor compared to the plasma buff, but plasma suffers a lot without the accuracy talent. Perfectly aimed railslugs miss constantly on live, and miss a centered target with wingman active often enough that plasma railgun feels like a lottery just to collect a normal paycheck. Plasma's theoretical 2028 damage on live has to jump through a lot of hoops to be real, the most significant one of which is the inability to stack the dot. A full charge slug on live can hit for 1760, and a second full charge slug can hit for another 1760. This 3520 damage is often not enough to kill a strike or a bomber, but remains the generally best damage the gunship can do over his 6.4 seconds of sniping. The plasma gunner doing the same thing deals 900 initially. After his 1 second cooldown is over, the dot ticks for 150, and he begins charging again. During the 2.7 seconds of charge, the target takes another 300. If he fires right when charged, he'll deal another 900, and then there will be seven seconds of 150. This is 3432 damage when adjusting for crits, and while still a lot of damage, is also reduced by hull, doesn't pierce shields, and more importantly, is less even versus a target where those two things don't matter, as well as giving the target even more time to make moves.

 

This keeps all of those weaknesses, but reduces the damage of slug slightly, while also adding accuracy to plasma, such that so many good shots don't go to waste.

Doing this along with the prior changes to shields would put the game in an excellent situation I think, but these 2 nerfs MUST be done together, lest GS or Scouts rule the world....

2h- Accuracy Copilot Ability.

Most of my copilot stuff is in section three, but this one could be done without having to make larger changes.

 

Verain Suggests: 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.

 

Several crewman passives are mandatory or terrible, but this one is the standout. A lot of fun builds lie locked up behind this mandatory passive as well, all designed and intended and totally crappy in practice because they miss such a mandatory skill. This is also a big problem for new empire players, who begin with the worst possible offensive crewman, but whose kit and powers sound pleasing. I've had many players argue with me after asking for advice- they normally require extensive exposure to the game to see the difference, or if they aren't immune to math they can puzzle it out on their own, but this is a GIANT TRAP for new players and a SERIOUS LIMIT for experienced ones. Unlike the other copilot issues, it requires no extensive design- just replace the crewmember passive with something the heck else, and bake in that 5% to every weapon.

 

2i- Remote Slicing

 

Verain Suggests: Increase the range on this ability.

 

 

2j- Max Snare Magnitude by Ship Type

 

On live, you can be snared down to 0% movement. Both movement and turning snares stack additively- a 10% snare and a 40% snare become a 50% snare. Different games handle stacking effects like this differently, but I think the one that would work best is...

 

Verain Suggests: Each ship type has a “Max Snare Amount”. Scouts, gunships, and bombers could have a 70% max snare amount, and strike fighters could have a 60% max snare amount. Any snares beyond this simply wouldn't have any effect.

 

It would still make sense to stack two snares on someone, but the payoff for a third would be greatly reduced from “entirely immobile and helpless” on live, to something else entirely.

Do this K thanks......

 

2k- Shield Power Converter and Weapon Power Converter

 

This section relates to the strike/bomber/gunship engine components, not the “shield to engine” of the type 1 scout (which is a shield component). These components are generally very poor on live- they were clearly meant to be a reasonable engine component alternatives, a different way of flying that is more defensive or offensive but less mobile. We've even seen the CM guys pick these on the live stream, followed by what appeared to be a “live stream” of missile locks

 

All my ideas here are “give the user a buff when this component is pressed, and the buff lasts a few seconds”. These abilities are fundamentally underbudget because they give you a nice power, but you don't gain an engine maneuver. Even if you ignore the large tactical advantage of moving around rapidly and being able to dive out of line of sight of enemy blasters and rails, the three seconds of missile immunity combined with a missile lock break is just far too much to give up without real compensation.

 

Verain Suggests (Shield Power Converter): On use, you gain a 6 second buff that decreases shield bleedthrough by 20%.

 

Verain Suggests (Weapon Power Converter): On use, you gain a 6 second buff that increases primary weapon damage by 30% and secondary weapon damage by 10%.

 

These could be enough of a reason to actually give these a playstyle of their own.

As a few friends have pointed out they don't like the idea of "just add damage" as a solution for things like Weapon power converter, so rather to counter scout evasion, I make the suggestion that we instead add accuracy with it.

Also with the other "shield bleed through" ideas I feel the Shield power one would be nearly worthless unless it worked on proton torps and the like, simply because we don't have that much Shield pierce in the game right now.

2l- Charged Plating

 

It would be nice if this was ok to use without an armor component. The additive nature of damage reduction means that a type 1 bomber can get to 99% hull damage reduction during charged plating, a type 2 or 3 strike can get to 94% hull damage reduction during charged plating, but a type 3 bomber can only reach 79%, and a type 1 strike can only reach 74%. This is essentially a different, and much worse component, for any ship that lacks an armor component- letting through 60 points of damage out of every 1000 is reasonable, but letting through 210 is absolutely not. We all assume that the intention of charged plating is to be essentially immune to non-DR-ignore weapons for 19 out of 30 seconds, most especially mines and light lasers, but the armorless ships aren't losing 20% damage reduction in practice, they are losing a “70% less damage taken” buff.

 

Verain Suggests: I don't really have much. Charged Plating could simply overwrite the existing damage reduction and always give 90% or 95% damage reduction, regardless of crewmember and armor components, but you'd probably see those ships then ignore the DR secondaries. That's a mediocre idea, but it's still better than the trap components these currently represent on armorless ships.

 

 

 

 

2m- Strike Fighters

 

It's no secret that I believe strikes need buffs, and so do many players on the forums and in game. It's not universal, but I really think there's a pretty reasonable consensus. The changes above- specifically, distortion field losing its missile lock- would be a “buff” to strikes, because they don't have access to this powerful shield component. The -5% shield bleed through baseline would also help, as would the buffs to every strike fighter shield component, also detailed above in different sections. Also above was strikes being able to be snared only to 60% max (so they would always have at least 40% of their turning and speed, while other ships could be snared down to 30%).

 

I think that could be enough, but I'm really not sure. There's a lot of great strike buff ideas in the forums- from 15% off the missile breaks to +5% extra damage to passive low heals. I think if anything were to be needed beyond this, the afterburner activation cost of the strike fighter should be lowered from the 6 value (gunship / bomber / strike) to 5.5 or even 5 (5 is the scout value). This would also then reduce the per-second boost consumption by an equivalent amount.

If the other changes on these lists were done I would find doing either of these largely unnecessary. While the Charged plating one has a good heart behind it, the "solution" seems to cause as many problems as it has now, thus it would be just more solutions. That one is going to take time and as Verain points out it IS currently part of the Meta, so I feel for the most part it isn't entirely needed at the moment..

2n- EMP Missile

 

Verain Suggests: This missile should not be absolute garbage. I had some ideas in the past, like “it locks on faster to drones” and “reload time not measured in tortoise lifespans”, but honestly, this missile deals bugged damage, is way too hard to lock on given the intended purpose, and has a big perk of “your ally can shoot a real missile at this guy if he's still hanging out, or you could have a shot a real one, but you didn't.” Needs large buffs to compete with ion, and larger to enter the larger world of missiles.

 

2o- Ion Missile

 

Verain Suggests: Just drop the reload on this to something reasonable, really. I think we all sort of want it to have a longer range, but we get that it's supposed to not be that great, it's supposed to be a support missile. Even with that, it feels pretty lame.

 

2p- Rapid Fire Laser

 

Verain Suggests: Reduce the tracking penalty and/or up the damage and/or up the range. Just really, this weapon isn't noob friendly, the energy feature is silly, and it needs to be buffed. Some combination of buffs. Such a waste of a great laser. For more detail, I have a whole post on this, but it really comes down to “buff this gun”.

 

2q- Light Laser Cannon

 

Verain Suggests: I feel the tracking penalty could come down a bit on this. This is a cool laser with real tradeoffs, and it's the highest damage laser in the game, but it is a bit frustrating to do much with, requiring a lot of scout gymnastics.

Again do it...... my suggestion for light's bring it down to .8 per degree, for Rapids, Up the accuracy 3% further as well as drop tracking down to .2 (ya I said it make its tracking amazing) this way it would distinguish itself from higher damage lasers by being very accurate.

2r- Secondary Component Rebalancing

 

While Capacitor is pretty well liked, and Armor has some variance in it, and even sensors has some choice to it, the other three have some poor choices.

 

Verain Suggests (Thrusters): Regen, Turning, and Speed all have fans. Max power is a trap- the max power amount would need to be 30% to make this worth using, but it could be something else.

 

Verain Suggests (Magazine): The max size should go up to 30%, and for the same reasons.

 

Verain Suggests (Reactor): Large Shields are vastly superior to the other options. Turbo Reactor reduces the delay by 60% when maxed, but this could honestly be even more. Regeneration Reactor maxes at 20%, and could honestly max at 40%.

Thursters: agree

Magazine: it gives 50% right now bringing it up to 80% might be awesome... though it might be overboard as well... eh do it we will see it after it is done, can always revert

Reactor: Turbo has the odd use here and there I feel, but a slight buff to it wouldn't hurt.... Regen... oh 40%... to small I would almost have to call 80% before most moved off Large for it, but that might be to big I am big on the Over buff aspect and then scale down personal flaw.

Finally I like some of the ideas for the crew member stuff from the wall of crazy. The rest seems..... uneeded or just kind of nice or I just don't want.....

By the way, I propose that "negative bleedthrough" should be called "shield hardness".

no new name is required for them, its not a "new mechanic" its adding negative numbers to the already present Shield bleed through stat...