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PILE DRIVER - Type 1 Strike Fighter Burst Damage Build


Erurainon

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Here is a cool weapon configuration I figured out and have been working on it since the patch came out. It evolved from a once-in-while burst damage to continual burst damage.

 

Heavy Laser Cannons, Quad Laser Cannons, and Weapon Swap Rotation.

 

Below is a short (1 minute) video showing the build and rotation.

 

https://youtu.be/j022_MKlMcg

 

Narrative of the video:

Pile Driver is a burst damage build that utilizes quads and heavies in a specific rotation. In patch 5.5 the primary weapon cannons on the type 1 strike fighter can now be fired holding down left and pressing 1 (weapon swap ability) without having to re-click. This allows you to do a continual barrage of primary weapon damage on your target.

 

What I discovered while doing this weapons swap, is that if you time it correctly you can have a heavy shot and a quad shot fire at nearly the exact same time. This lead to figuring out a specific rotation to get the highest amount of burst damage in the least amount of time.

 

Here is the rotation we figured out:

Set your primaries to heavy laser cannon.

Fire one heavy shot and then immediately press 1. When you do a heavy and quad will fire at nearly the exact same time. Once the second quad shot fires, swap your weapons again.

Continue to press 1 off of cooldown and you will get the maximum burst damage.

 

Strike Fighter Ship builds (Starguard/Rycer)

 

DOM

Primary Weapon #1: Heavy Laser Cannon (Armor pen/Shield Piercing)

Primary Weapon #2: Quad Laser Cannon (Reduced cost/Hull damage)

Secondary Weapon: Concussion Missiles (Range/Ignore Armor)

Shield: Quick-Change Shield (10s less Cooldown)

Engine: Retro Thruster (turning)

Capacitor: Damage Capacitor

Magazine: Regeneration Extender

Reactor: Large Reactor

Thruster: Turning Thrusters

Copilot Ability: Salana Rok/Lieutenant Iresso (Wingman)

Crew (Republic)

Offensive: Qyzen Fess (6% Accuracy/2 Degrees arc)

Defensive: Doc (10% Power to Shields/15% Shield Regeneration and Delay Reduction)

Tactical: Lieutenant Iresso (3500m Sensor Focus/2000m Sensor Dampening)

Engineering: Yuun (13% Blaster efficiency/13% Engine efficiency)

Crew (Empire)

Offensive: Jaesa Willsam (6% Accuracy/2 Degrees arc)

Defensive: Writch Hurley (10% Power to Shields/15% Shield Regeneration and Delay Reduction)

Tactical: Salana Rok (5000m Communication/3500m Sensor Focus)

Engineering: 2V-R8 (13% Blaster efficiency/13% Engine efficiency)

 

TDM

Primary Weapon #1: Heavy Laser Cannon (Improved Tracking and Critical Chance/Shield Piercing)

Primary Weapon #2: Quad Laser Cannon (Reduced cost/Hull damage)

Secondary Weapon: Proton Torpedo (Empire - Arc/Range | Republic - Speed/Range)

Shield: Quick-Change Shield (10s less Cooldown)

Engine: Barrel Roll (Turning)

Capacitor: Damage Capacitor

Magazine: Regeneration Extender

Reactor: Large Reactor

Thruster: Speed Thrusters

Copilot Ability: Qyzen Fess/Gault (Concentrated Fire)

Crew (Republic)

Offensive: Qyzen Fess (6% Accuracy/2 Degrees arc)

Defensive: Nadia Grell or Tanno Vik (5% Evasion/10% Shield max)

Tactical: Elara Dorne (3000m Sensor Radius/3500m Sensor Focus)

Engineering: C2-N2 (15% Power to Engines/13% Engine efficiency)

Crew (Empire)

Offensive: Gault (6% Accuracy/12% Reload Cooldown)

Defensive: Vector (5% Evasion/10% Shield max)

Tactical: Scorpio (3000m Sensor Radius/3500m Sensor Focus)

Engineering: Blizz (15% Power to Engines/13% Engine efficiency)

 

Enjoy

-Audson

Edited by Erurainon
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I am often holding down S with my left hand and controlling the mouse with my right, to get better turning when dogfighting. I'm guessing you just let it ride at default throttle?

 

Do you keep power in F1 because you are continuallly firing, or F4 so you can turn better?

 

With the amount of sustained left mouse button pressing, have you tried or noticed a difference using Freq Cap instead of Damage Cap?

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I am often holding down S with my left hand and controlling the mouse with my right, to get better turning when dogfighting. I'm guessing you just let it ride at default throttle?

 

The game will accept unlimited key inputs at once: in my case, my "decelerate" button is one of my mouse buttons under my thumb. I'm not sure how Audson rolls on this topic. I will say that you are NOT doing this while you are in some tight turn fight. The speed of a heavy laser is different from that of a quad laser, which means that the reticule will leap in position quite dramatically when you swap between weapons, if you aren't lined up correctly. It is pretty much impossible to meaningfully piledrive under that kind of tight turning situation.

 

Do you keep power in F1 because you are continuallly firing, or F4 so you can turn better?

 

During the portion where you are shooting, you definitely want to be in F1. When you line up for a run on this, you are playing like quads and pods for a bit, and you have to be pretty straight. I will offer this: the turning gain from F4 versus F1 or F2 is really hard to measure in a strike fighter, and I don't recommend it. We are still gathering data on this, but on one of Drako's recent streams he actually times this. The older data was for the battle scout, which at the time basically everyone had to play- we have a bunch of ships and builds to test out. After all, F4 never made any sense for this purpose- it seems like it is some effect of whatever the movement equations are or something.

 

With the amount of sustained left mouse button pressing, have you tried or noticed a difference using Freq Cap instead of Damage Cap?

 

This build uses damage capacitor. Math (and a little bit of experimention) show that the frequency capacitor doesn't reduce the rates to below the quad laser swap point, and I think it will take a bit longer for a piledriver rotation to benefit from frequency capacitor versus damage capacitor.

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All those poor Gunships that don't have spacial awareness are about to get absolutely melted. More burst then Quads and Pods with no cooldown requirements!

 

Also after my testing of the difference between F4 and F1 turning I'll never use F4 again. The difference is so minor it's never worth losing the regeneration of the correct type of power imo.

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As far as frequency- kinda in theory but not really.

 

The regular (non-piledriver) case for frequency capacitor over damage capacitor has always been that you need to be on target for quite awhile before you pull ahead for real. For heavy lasers dealing N, for instance, which shoot every half second, fcap opens up at .1N underneath dcap. Then, at 0.435 you suddenly pull ahead by .9N. Then 65 milliseconds later, at .5s, damage pulls ahead again by .2N. Then at .87s, frequency is again in the lead by .8N. Then 130 milliseconds after that damage is again ahead .3N. This cycle continues until around 3.5 constant seconds of firing, at which point fcap is ahead of dcap all of the time, though for some time after the amount of time fcap spends ahead of dcap by an entire shot is very small.

 

Here's the dcap piledriver, with a rotation that seems to be possible much of the time:

0: Heavy1

0+small: swap, Quad1 (at this point you are waiting with your finger over 1)

0.37 Quad2, swap, begin spamming 1

0.5 Heavy2

0.67ish, the spammed swap happens

0.74, Quad3

.97ish, the spammed swap happens

1.00, Heavy3. This is the end of the normal piledriver burst window. But if we continue following:

1.11 - quad comes off cooldown, but you are stuck on heavies.

1.27, the spammed swap happens, firing Quad4

1.50 - heavy comes off cooldown, but you are stuck on quads

1.57, the spammed swap happens, firing Heavy4

 

In theory, with frequencies, you could pull this stunt:

0: Heavy1

0+small: swap, Quad1 (at this point you are waiting with your finger over 1)

0.32 Quad2, swap, start spamming 1 so you don't miss your window

0.43 Heavy2

0.62 the spammed swap happens, stop spamming 1

0.64 Quad3

0.87 heavy comes off cooldown, but don't swap yet

0.96 Quad4,swap when you see it

0.96+small Heavy 3 - in theory here you have woven an extra quad in, maybe

 

 

In theory this does 4 Quads and 3 Heavies in about a second, whereas the dcap case does 3 Quads and 3 Heavies (which have a 1.1 boost). There's a lot of reasons to think that this won't really help. In the dcap case, you wait for the second quad shot and start spamming 1. There's reaction time there: if you miss it by more than 30 milliseconds (basically guaranteed) you are cutting into your Heavy3 time. But honestly, you won't miss it by that much, and you will still be landing Heavy 2 and Quad 3 at exactly the same times.

 

If you try this trick with fcap, however, you have two failure points- you could induce a delay after quad 2, just as in the normal case, but also after quad 4. Your potential gain is .7Q - .3H, which is not much, and you pay more energy for it. You will go out of energy with this build.

 

There's another issue: you could want to continue piledriving. In the dcap case above, you can see how the swaps don't line up quite as nicely, even though they still add dps at the cost of your totally hosed energy pool. In the fcap case it gets goofy, because you start with heavies selected and the following ideal situation if you somehow had no lag or reaction time to worry about:

1.26 swap comes off cooldown

1.28 quad comes off cooldown

1.39 heavy comes off cooldown

So you need to wait for the 1.39 heavy, again visually, then spam swap which will fire the quad that was waiting, and then you are at 1.39 with 5 Quads and 4 Heavies. The dcap case gets you to 4 Quads and 4 Heavies by 1.5 seconds in, and you spent most of that time hammering 1. Your fcap case is ahead by a tenth of a second if a robot living in Reston, Virginia was doing it, but in practice you are probably at greater than 1.5 seconds when you get here, and have one extra quad to show for yourself, versus 8 other shots with a 10% bonus. Because half of those shots are heavies, which are more damaging than quads on a per-shot basis, I suspect you are actually either behind or basically tied on damage- but you had to land a bunch of timed button presses and paid more energy to be here.

 

If frequency lowered quads to below the cooldown of the swap, it would make the rotation easier to run. Instead, you either run the same rotation, but with less damage in the same time, or you run a hard rotation that I don't think is practical, in exchange for a negligible amount more damage that you pay a lot for. Frequency capacitor doesn't seem to reduce the cooldown of swap, which we are pretty sure is 0.3 seconds.

 

By all means experiment, but I'm pretty sure you'll get the best results by a lot with damage capacitor. This assumes an opponent sits around for a full second: many will simply not. In many cases, the value is in the first swap, or at most, the second, and being less reliant on precise server timings will serve you much better than hoping that they sit around until some breakpoint in time where you've done a fraction of one more laser in power's worth of damage

Edited by Verain
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Also worth noting that at least for the initial two shots this should work with any cannon comb to get a "bonus" first shot.

 

With the timing Ion cannon should also be a usable substitute for Quads, though you'd want to stick with HLCs once the target's shield arc got down to the damage done by one HLC shot.

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Also worth noting that at least for the initial two shots this should work with any cannon comb to get a "bonus" first shot.

 

True, but getting the occasional set of two shots mostly simultaneously mostly seems like a nice bonus of the ship, and less like a purpose built technique. Your gain is also smaller when you are talking about the small per-shot damage of rapids or hull ions.

 

With the timing Ion cannon should also be a usable substitute for Quads, though you'd want to stick with HLCs once the target's shield arc got down to the damage done by one HLC shot.

 

It's more complex than that- for instance, you would probably prefer to land two ions and a heavy versus one ion and one heavy, regardless of their shield state, especially if the heavy will fire at the same time in both cases. Maybe someone will do that kind of analysis on the fly and have good results.

 

One interesting thing is if you are using quads and ions, you can go into a pattern where you fire, swap, fire, and then repeat that the moment you see another shot go off. I didn't spend a lot of time on this setup, but the rotation is pretty simple because the quads and ions both have the same rate of fire. I think it is less damage though.

 

The problem with ions is that you basically lose access to the rotation when you are on hull. Given the monster shield dps ions do, and the tiny hull dps, you are not going to gain as much by doing it. With Audson's technique, you have a good amount of shield damage from the heavies already, and your dps when you break through to hull is much more lethal. Still, it would probably be worth doing the per-target math, especially if you want to try it out.

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Any mistake in aiming or range, or a target with a lot of evasion, is punished with a great deal of lost energy. The case where you are actually hitting your target is no less energy efficient than any other blaster, you are just emptying your tanks quite a bit faster, and it is noticeable because your regeneration is unchanged. I certainly end up with energy management issues when playing it, and I think that is pretty common?

 

The unique weakness of the build is that the "projectile speed" of each blaster shot changes where the reticule is on a target with any lateral motion relative to your line of assault. This means that swapping your weapons will cause an abrupt jump in where the reticule is on the screen, and if you are attempting to get the double shot when that happens, it will fail because the second shot and the first shot, which happen almost simultaneously, need to be aimed at two different points, and you can't aim at two places at once. You just can't piledrive a target that is translating laterally relative to you, and it seems to me that it is generally a loss of energy and positioning to even try.

Edited by Verain
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It's more complex than that- for instance, you would probably prefer to land two ions and a heavy versus one ion and one heavy, regardless of their shield state, especially if the heavy will fire at the same time in both cases. Maybe someone will do that kind of analysis on the fly and have good results.

 

I'm not sure it really needs extra complexity.

 

The technique is already a bit niche in that the target needs to be pretty much centered and not moving across your field of view in order to prevent reticle jump.

 

So within that, knowing that you're basically finding a way to more or less use both primary weapons at the same time for the duration of the piledriver, it's just a matter of knowing more or less how much shield strength the target has.

 

For a scout or most gunships you'd probably use a half second piledriver before sticking with HLCs, for a heavily shielded target stationary or jousting a directional strike you'd go for the full one second rotation. Basically gets you the equivalent of 1.5 or so the amount of time on target plus a bit of possible shield piercing compared to just stripping the shields with Ions alone.

 

I take the view, at least for myself, that pilot limitations are going to prevent true optimization in practice, so knowing either "normal shields" or "lots of shields" to get in either 2 extra shots or 3 extra shots is going to cover the vast majority of combat encounters where this is usable. For extreme ticking targets running optimization out to two seconds might provide a modest gain, but it's not common enough for me to think it's really worth knowing past a decision tree for either a half or full Ion Piledriver.

 

The more interesting question is that now that we may have moves called the Piledriver, and the Ion Piledriver variant, do we need to get brightly colored sequined spandex flight suits (and possibly also feather boas) in order to be properly dressed for GSF SMACKDOWN!?

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Have you done the math for the ion/heavy? I have not. Have you tried it out yet, and compared it to the piledriver yet?

 

The nice thing about the piledriver setup when leading with HLCs is that you don't drop any HLC shots compared to just using HLCs, so the big worry, Ion to hull, isn't really a loss of anything other than weapon energy if it happens.

 

For shields that are up, at a range of a bit more than 4.5 km, Ion gains about 230 damage per shot over Quads, and then loses in the vicinity of 270 per shot if it hits bare hull.

 

Total possible gain is about 460 damage for 1/2 sec piledriver, 700 or so for 1 sec piledriver, against a target that's heavily shielded.

 

Against a target with shields down it basically just turns into a horrifically energy inefficient version of HLCs.

 

Assuming the shields are full at the start and all your shots land:

 

For targets with less than 400 to 430 shield points Ion piledriver is a complete waste of energy.

For targets with less than 1500 shield points in the arc it will waste some energy.

For targets with at least 1500 shield points a 1/2 s Ion Piledriver is a dps gain over Piledriver until the shields are down.

For targets with around 3000 shield points a 1 s Ion Piledriver is a dps gain over Piledriver until the shield goes down.

 

In the cases where Ion is a DPS gain on shields it takes two or three Quads shots to catch up and/or exceed with damage to the hull.

 

The regular piledriver should be superior vs low shield targets and against high hull targets, ion piledriver has an edge against targets combining high shield with low to moderate hull and against targets that move before you finish the hull portion of the piledriver.

 

TLDR version: Ion piledriver for full shield feedback and directional gunships, maybe for jousting strikes, Quad piledriver for everything else. Also if you make a habit of hunting for wounded hulls Ion picks up utility because Quads don't have as much time to catch up on hull damage.

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For GSF Smackdown, I'm wearing a red and white loincloth with that antlers helmet.

 

I have a question - on the Dom build, you're using concs instead of torps. Wherefore?

The lock on time is almost the same, but... not the damage.

 

The lock on time might be close, but the Arc isn't. It's much easier to land a Conc while node fighting because of the bigger arc. The increased lock speed is minor but it actually does make a difference too.

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  • 3 weeks later...
TBH any decent t2 scout build will wreck this... otherwise it's pretty good

 

This is a pretty silly comment on the build, ofcourse the T2 Scout will wreck this in a 1v1, the T2 Scout wrecks everything in a 1v1 it's what it does. However the T2 Scout is awful in Deathmatch right now because it's just so easy to peel it off any target.

 

It's like saying oh man Quads and pods is a good build unless you fight a T2 Scout with Burst/Cluster.

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  • 1 year later...

There's been some talk about this technique and build lately so I decided to look into it further and found this old thread. I think others need to read it but also watch the short video so they understand fully that what they are calling a Hack, isn't one, it is WAI since Bio hasn't done anything to change it.

 

Also, I have a quick but probably stupid question. I see it in many guides, some new and some old, of different builds depending on if it is a DOM or TDM and it always confuses me. We're only able to have one build active on a ship at a time and since we have no idea which map we'll get, or even if the map will be a DOM or TDM, do people just decide to only do one build and use it for only one of those instances and ignore it if a different map comes up? Or, are you able to make changes to your ship before a match starts but once you know what map you're playing? I don't believe the latter is possible, but maybe it is and I'm just not aware on how to do it?

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It’s not possible to change your components once you queue up.

Many people will do two different piledriver builds, one for DOM and one for TDM, because there are two type 1 strikes: the Rycer/Starguard and the cartel market version (TZ-24 i think?).

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There's been some talk about this technique and build lately so I decided to look into it further and found this old thread. I think others need to read it but also watch the short video so they understand fully that what they are calling a Hack, isn't one, it is WAI since Bio hasn't done anything to change it.

 

Also, I have a quick but probably stupid question. I see it in many guides, some new and some old, of different builds depending on if it is a DOM or TDM and it always confuses me. We're only able to have one build active on a ship at a time and since we have no idea which map we'll get, or even if the map will be a DOM or TDM, do people just decide to only do one build and use it for only one of those instances and ignore it if a different map comes up? Or, are you able to make changes to your ship before a match starts but once you know what map you're playing? I don't believe the latter is possible, but maybe it is and I'm just not aware on how to do it?

 

You are absolutely correct you can't change builds once you're queue'd up, but with 5 ship slots it's very easy to have 2 ships for DOM, 2 ships for TDM and maybe one that's ok in both or some other kind of combination like that.

 

Having specialized ships for doing certain jobs is important in team games, it lets you focus on one thing and do it really well, while your teammates focus on a different thing, this makes your team more powerful then if you were both just trying to do everything. We even have certain strategies and ships we only use on certain maps, instead of just the different game modes.

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It’s not possible to change your components once you queue up.

Many people will do two different piledriver builds, one for DOM and one for TDM, because there are two type 1 strikes: the Rycer/Starguard and the cartel market version (TZ-24 i think?).

 

Ok, that makes sense to me. I guess the ships that offer different component builds, and there isn't another duplicate ship option from the CM, they're just giving the information depending on your preference for flying that ship - I know some people prefer to fly Bombers only in DOM and not TDM, as an example.

 

You are absolutely correct you can't change builds once you're queue'd up, but with 5 ship slots it's very easy to have 2 ships for DOM, 2 ships for TDM and maybe one that's ok in both or some other kind of combination like that.

 

Having specialized ships for doing certain jobs is important in team games, it lets you focus on one thing and do it really well, while your teammates focus on a different thing, this makes your team more powerful then if you were both just trying to do everything. We even have certain strategies and ships we only use on certain maps, instead of just the different game modes.

 

Yes, I understand that, but was more trying to understand why the first post was offering different builds depending on TDM or DOM when we can't change our ships once the match is set, as it was for the same ship. But I got it now, the CM option or just using that ship for one particular match type.

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