Guess I'm thinking about it too much from a scout's point of view.

what you have yet to experience is firing Clusters and light lasers at a guy with charge plating up, eating all the way through his armor and then watched as he laughed at your 3 damage a shot.

what you have yet to experience is firing Clusters and light lasers at a guy with charge plating up, eating all the way through his armor and then watched as he laughed at your 3 damage a shot.

Well, yeah, because why would I want to use light lasers without sab probe?

How do you figure? 3% crit is 4.5% damage, -5% tracking penalty is +0.1% accuracy per degree... on a weapon you should be using from maximum range with minimal tracking penalty. That's tiny.

Heavy lasers are 2% penalty per degree. A degree isn't very big, so you'll quite often be getting 5% to hit off of these things. If your hit percent on the target was, say, 80% to begin with- not unreasonable as a guess- getting up to 85% is over 6% right there. If you were going from 60 to 65, then you have an 8% boost. That's before the crit even shows up to play.

Heavy lasers have massive tracking penalties compared to every other laser. A talent that gives essentially +5% to hit on all shots is a very good talent indeed.

You, uh, haven't flown scout-to-scout against many very good pilots, have you?

Don't start with this personal attack crap.

In a game where one pilot -- one single pilot -- is holding nodes by virtue of the fact that he's on it and people can't get him off it, attrition damage is literally the only way to free up the node.

Two coordinated scouts or strikes worked wonderful before. Certainly we didn't feel the need to hope someone wandered by with shield bleed through :/

20% of all damage taken is reduced by up to 99% (I must have mathed wrong somewhere when I said 96% or whatever -- 10% inherent, 20% armor, 9% crew, 60% cd). -20% damage is not starman material. And, of course, 39% is up all the time, so you're looking at 7.8% constant damage reduction.

No, it's absolutely invincible. The shield damage is not relevant almost ever, but definitely not versus a charged plating build. Essentially no damage goes through.

The irony here is that charged plating is hampered by its t1 upgrade; the more damage that goes through to hull, the less total damage you take.

No, that is not how shields work. Damage to shields is not damage to you. You can live with no shields, but not no hull.

Also, you forgot about slugs and pods.

Of course other attacks go through. My point is that you are invincible to dogfighting unless someone has BLC or HLC. Clearly a slug will tear you up, or a proton, or whatever. Those are pretty choreographed though- no one surprise slugs you unless you were distracted, no one surprise protons you unless you were tricked, etc.

Well, yeah, because why would I want to use light lasers without sab probe?

If your sab probe is set to disable shields you may yet get the last laugh here, but the damage LLC does to a charged plating build is truly balls when the plating is active- even if they are stationary.

For what it is worth, I'd like to see charged plating designed differently, and then the armor ignore stuff could get nerfed some, and armor could have some more meaning. But when one guy runs around totally immune to a lot of the weapons, that seems odd to me.

It's like 10% damage on that laser to lose that. It's a VERY powerful tradeoff, but one everyone is willing to make.

3% crit is worth 1.5% damage. In order to get full value out of the 5% tracking penalty reduction you have to be at least 10 degrees off. Even if you get the full value all the time, your hit chance has to be 60% for this to come out as 10% damage.

5-6%ish is a better estimate, and is on par with the baseline benefit of armor pen against normal opponents that don't stack any additional DR - add in the fact that some people do stack DR, and turrets exist, and the armor pen option is clearly dominant.

No, it reeks of overtuning. What I'm saying is that the basic concept behind BLCs is not flawed, simply the implementation.

Your notion of "overtuning" is impressively broad.

yeah but I hate quads :<

Yes, and that's why all of your posts have an air of "the one build of the lone ship in the only class that I play had better be TEHBESTEST against everything".

BLC are best at certain things, and so should be worst at other things, and when you want to do those other things you should feel sad.

There seems to be some confusion over the way charged plating works, oddly, so I will summarize it here:

The baseline DR of a DR-stacking bomber is:

10% innate

20% armor component

9% companion

For 39% DR. This means that (normal) attacks do 100% damage versus shields, and 61% damage versus hull.

In addition, charged plating provides a passive 20% shield bleedthrough. This means that technically speaking, an attack with no additional shield penetration AND no armor penetration does 80%*100% + 20%*61% = 92.2% of its base damage, with 80% of that hitting the shield and 12.2% of it hitting the hull. This is kind of irrelevant though because you're always going to prefer taking 100% of the shield damage than any hull damage.

When the charged plating active ability is active, DR is boosted to 99%. When your shields are down, this means that attacks without armor penetration do only 1% of their base damage. You are effectively invincible versus things without armor pen. Charged plating has an uptime of 19 seconds out of every 30. So, yes, that needs to be fixed - but it is just the natural other half of the terrible armor meta where DR is an utterly dominant strategy versus non-armor-pen weapons but a completely dominated strategy versus armor-pen weapons.

The reason you may be seeing non-single-digit damage numbers against targets with charged plating active is that they may still have shields up, so you are still doing normal damage to their shields.

3% crit is worth 1.5% damage. In order to get full value out of the 5% tracking penalty reduction you have to be at least 10 degrees off. Even if you get the full value all the time, your hit chance has to be 60% for this to come out as 10% damage.

Only BLC would need to be 10 degrees off to benefit the whole 5%. But here it was about HLC, which only need to be 2.5 degrees off to benefit from it... Meaning almost all the time.

Only BLC would need to be 10 degrees off to benefit the whole 5%. But here it was about HLC, which only need to be 2.5 degrees off to benefit from it... Meaning almost all the time.

For some reason I thought we were talking about the value to BLC. Yes, you're right regarding HLC.

It happens sometimes...

As how to not make Charged Plating an invincibility skill, I can see a simple fix : make it a second layer DR instead of plain DR added to the passive value. (Like Shadow Respite on the ground game that reduce damage but is not part of DR)

As a second layer of DR it won't be ignored by armor ignoring weapons either.

One stone, two birds.

It could even give up its Bleedthrough part as it loses its almost perfect defense property.

Or just change the numbers. Say 30% instead of 60%. They already tweaked charged plating once.

but for that to be the case it would have to work against armor peircing weapons. As it is now, its a good skill because it is vulernable to some and very strong against others. As such it has the right amount of give and take. I dont think it or armor pen need reworking currently as they both are counters to different things.

I feel other parts of the meta need help.... Strike mobility in comparison to scouts or gunships (having much close to gunship mobility then scout mobility not splitting the difference well at all) EMP Missiles only doing 180 instead of 360 like they are supposed to thus the 5% damage upgrade on them is pointless, also its lack of negative effects that truly disable. Ion blasters and Missiles being much to useless, EMP feild being only good for the 3rd missile break.

but for that to be the case it would have to work against armor peircing weapons.

No ****. This entire discussion is within the context of a broad nerf to armor penetration.

As it is now, its a good skill because it is vulernable to some and very strong against others.

No. No no no no no no. No. No.

No.

This is not how good game balance works. Who wins an encounter should not be preordained at the ship selection screen. Calvin was wrong about men's souls and doubly wrong about game design.

While I'm of the opinion that charged plating rework would be in the context of an armor pen nerf, I will say this:

The idea that charged plating is very effective against certain builds and ineffective against others is not inherently bad design. The idea that you "lose at character select" is actually ok as long as:

1)- The "you v. him" conflict isn't actually produced by the game.

Ex: If you take a ship that is one shotted by any gunship, that would be the game mostly creating the situation.

Ex: If you are in a solo deathmatch or a duel, that would be the game actually creating the situation.

cEx: If you are part of a team where everyone has different roles, that would NOT be the game creating the situation. That's your ego telling you that you should be able to shoot down anyone.

2)- The "character select" is rectifiable.

Ex: If your rogue can't solo an afk protection warrior because he his spiky armor, then that's an issue because rerolling is too much to ask.

Ex: If your sniper is not viable in rated pvp, then that's an issue because rerolling or being unable to progress on your main is too much to ask.

cEx: If your optimized ship is very poor towards a thing it is not optimized against, then would NOt be an example of this, because you get to bring a hangar of five ships. You have four more chances to have a ship that DOES handle that situation better.

So there's nothing INHERENTLY wrong with it. But I do agree that it feels dumb to have an LLC scout unable to damage a charged plating strike, instead of merely being bad at it. Though it is rare, two ships have a choice between burst and lights, and both almost always avoid lights- in big part because of this (the two guns have OTHER tradeoffs that would normally be interesting, but this one really shines).

I also think it feels cheesy to just have damage reduction stack linearly up to 99%. Like, why would it do that? If all of these were multiplicative, they could all be bigger numbers and more meaningful. Hull wouldn't be capped at 20, crewmember REALLY should be higher anyway, and charged plating would be something that is generically useful instead of a hard counter to some and not a thing to others.

It's also a bit of a problem if the game includes rock and paper, but not really scissors. Like, there's no strike fighter build that laughs at burst laser cannon (ex: you are immune to shots taken from less than 3k), and the things that defend you from it effectively ALSO work against light laser cannon and DEFINITELY rapid fire laser cannon. It seems like if you did want to have something that shuts down all of the options but one, then you should have something that is better at the other option, OR that other option should pay in utility.

Thus far that is not the case.

Not for burst laser cannon, not for slug railgun, not for heavy laser cannon. Only the torpedoes seem to be playing this fair, really- it even feels odd on the pods and concussions.

If BLC were to keep the armor pen, I think it would be interesting to make it baseline but reduce the damage of the gun a bit (so that it would still net a nerf versus a non-armor pen target). In that world, HLC could be treated similarly, and you'd probably want either a new railgun to keep the armor ignore, or move it over to plasma, letting slug keep the shield piercing (and possibly even increasing it slightly).

I think that the devs wanted the charged plating build to play different and have very strong weaknesses and strengths. But I think it could have that even without numbers like "99% damage reduction" and "ignores 100% of damage reduction".

And if we ARE talking about charged plating, I would argue that charge plating should offer a small heal- say, 6 hit points- every second. This would make the bleed through not feel as punishing, because you would at least in theory be able to heal to full from a minor mistake as a normal ship would, even if it would take you much much longer.

But I'm cautious when talking about heals on a forum that openly defends hydrospanner in a non-charged plating situation. Some folks are so in love with the IDEA of not dying, the IDEA of being able to come back from near death to full, that they value the smallest of heals as FAR higher than they should, and would think this idea is broken or mandatory just because they would feel that about ANY heal.

Well, that's still WAY more than enough. But...

Boy bomber- 99%

Pike/Quell- 94%

Clarion/Imperium- 94%

Starguard/Rycer- 74%

While in theory the Type 2 and 3 strikes take 6x damage, in practice both are invincible. The bigger issue is the Starguard / Rycer who may as well not even have the component compared to the others. He's actually take 26% of damage dealt to him- he will absolutely not be able to live through the same kinds of encounters without a hull to fix him up.

Yaknow I'm almost scared to talk to sammyG in game anymore for fear of it becoming the next day's forum topic.

I'd like to note a strike only gets 94% damage reduction. Only 5% passive. 99% would be the less maneuverable bomber.

Its only 94%, I mean that's not much compared to 99% right?

While I'm of the opinion that charged plating rework would be in the context of an armor pen nerf, I will say this:

 

 

The idea that charged plating is very effective against certain builds and ineffective against others is not inherently bad design. The idea that you "lose at character select" is actually ok as long as:

 

1)- The "you v. him" conflict isn't actually produced by the game.

 

Ex: If you take a ship that is one shotted by any gunship, that would be the game mostly creating the situation.

Ex: If you are in a solo deathmatch or a duel, that would be the game actually creating the situation.

cEx: If you are part of a team where everyone has different roles, that would NOT be the game creating the situation. That's your ego telling you that you should be able to shoot down anyone.

GSF supports teamwork, but it doesn't require teamwork and should be playable (at some level) by a basically disorganized mob. A single player, simply by choosing to fly a particular ship, should not force substantial teamwork by the opposing team to take him down.

Right now the ubiquity of armor penetration prevents that because 1) it means you probably have armor pen and 2) even if you don't, the enemy probably isn't running charged plating because it's bad.

If we want to make armor pen non-ubiquitous (and we do) then charged plating has to be fixed as well.

2)- The "character select" is rectifiable.

 

Ex: If your rogue can't solo an afk protection warrior because he his spiky armor, then that's an issue because rerolling is too much to ask.

Ex: If your sniper is not viable in rated pvp, then that's an issue because rerolling or being unable to progress on your main is too much to ask.

cEx: If your optimized ship is very poor towards a thing it is not optimized against, then would NOt be an example of this, because you get to bring a hangar of five ships. You have four more chances to have a ship that DOES handle that situation better.

That's not an acceptable solution at the level of rock/paper/scissors implied by charged plating in its current form.

Actually for brief period most strikes can reach 99% DR and a type 1 strike can reach 95% if a starguard and 99% if a rycer.

The trick is to take a companion with the nullify active as copilot. Works well Imp side because Broonmark gives both the 9% passive and the 30% active. Republic side you have to choose one or the other, most will probably choose the passive, unless they're planning on clearing minefields by boosting through them at 99% DR.

With Broonmark having the 30% active gives you the choice of changing your 63% uptime 37% downtime to 63% uptime, 10% Partial, 27% downtime or using it to stack to 99% for brief periods on a strike.

Heavy lasers have massive tracking penalties compared to every other laser. A talent that gives essentially +5% to hit on all shots is a very good talent indeed.

The thread is telling me that the -5% tracking penalty is just flat out "the first -5% accuracy does not apply" instead of "your tracking penalty is reduced by 5%, thus 2% per degree becomes 1.9% per degree", which seems really unintuitive to me but is certainly a hell of a lot stronger.

Also, I have no idea why my finger hit 4.5% instead of 1.5%.

Don't start with this personal attack crap.

It's not a personal attack -- it's about experience. If you've never been in a match like that before, you probably shouldn't talk about them.

No, it's absolutely invincible. The shield damage is not relevant almost ever, but definitely not versus a charged plating build. Essentially no damage goes through.

 

 

No, that is not how shields work. Damage to shields is not damage to you. You can live with no shields, but not no hull.

Yeah, I talked about this before. I just wasn't thinking of it from the right mindset (that inexperience thing again!). My dumb.

For what it is worth, I'd like to see charged plating designed differently, and then the armor ignore stuff could get nerfed some, and armor could have some more meaning. But when one guy runs around totally immune to a lot of the weapons, that seems odd to me.

I dunno, I don't honestly see a problem with charged plating giving 100%+ damage reduction, since it's already pretty close to that (and I'm not sure, but I think you can stack nullify with charged plating for 0% damage to hull, not that there's any reason to). There shouldn't be a technical issue behind it, either; if (armorMult < 0) armorMult = 0;

Allowing that would allow passive armor to stack higher than 39%.

Your notion of "overtuning" is impressively broad.

I have always defined "overpowered" as "numbers too big", "underpowered" as "numbers too small", and "broken" as "concept is inherently unbalancable and/or does not work properly in its context". Those are all very broad statements; they kind of have to be, if I'm only going to use three terms to define problems. (There's also grey areas where mechanics need to be added or subtracted to balance something that isn't necessarily broken, e.g. seismics with 100% shield piercing, but I don't really have a descriptor for that.)

Yes, and that's why all of your posts have an air of "the one build of the lone ship in the only class that I play had better be TEHBESTEST against everything".

If it's coming off that way, one of us is doing something wrong. My basic philosophy is that, since GSF is essentially a game with lots of 1v1s happening in a single battlefield, every ship should have a good chance at 1v1 against other ships, with benefits and drawbacks to certain matchups based on class and upgrades. I don't think any build should be hard countered (i.e. facing a nigh-impossible matchup given equally skilled parties) by any other ship, because that's just frustrating.

BLC are best at certain things, and so should be worst at other things, and when you want to do those other things you should feel sad.

I disagree. I think since BLC is the best at certain things, they should be worse at other things -- not necessarily the worst. Likewise, because other weapons are the best at certain things, they should be worse at other things -- again, not necessarily the worst.

The current problem is that BLC is too good at too many things. They are...

• The best at close range combat (high damage, high accuracy, low tracking penalty)
  
• Very good at removing turrets (outdone by HLCs, which have similar TTK but superior range)
  
• Very good at burst damage (outdone by superior burst and range from slugs)
  
• The best when weaving around cover (takes best advantage of short firing opportunities without disrupting flight paths)
  
• Decent at sustained fire (low DPS, especially at range, but armor penetration helps)
  
• Decent at sniping mines (can outrange and one-shot mines with range capacitor, but has to get much closer than HLCs/QLCs/LCs/ion railguns). Poor at sniping mines without range capacitor (you're practically asking to get hit).
  
• Decent to poor at removing drones (this is arguable; BLCs themselves are not necessarily poor at removing drones, but the ships they're mounted on don't want to get that close to drones)
  
• The worst at mid- and long- range combat (enormous dropoff and limited maximum range)
  

This is definitely too many things they're good at, and removing armor penetration would reduce things from "very good" to "decent" and from "decent" to poor.

I don't think it's a problem that BLCs are the best at two things -- which is to say that I don't think an appropriate change would be to make them very good at close range combat and weaving around cover, and indirectly make another weapon better at those. I think specialized weaponry is OK.

If what you're saying is along the lines of "BLCs are the best at two things, so they should be the worst at two things to compensate", I flat out disagree that BLCs should be changed to be the worst at, say, sustained fire, sniping mines, or removing drones.

There's more of this thread I could be reading and replying to, but it's nap time.

I dunno, I don't honestly see a problem with charged plating giving 100%+ damage reduction

Sorry to quote only this sentence, but I want to point that it's similar to what Distortion Field did. It was problematic.

Charged Plating isn't worth at moment because many weapons simply ignore what it does, but once that concern is solved and Charged Plating used again, it will become as broken as Distortion Field against all builds that don't ignore armor.

The thread is telling me that the -5% tracking penalty is just flat out "the first -5% accuracy does not apply" instead of "your tracking penalty is reduced by 5%, thus 2% per degree becomes 1.9% per degree", which seems really unintuitive to me but is certainly a hell of a lot stronger.

This wasn't clearly stated in the original tooltips but at some point they were updated. If you actually select the -tracking penalty option and look at the weapon tooltip it will show the tracking penalty as "X% per degree, minus 5%" or something like that.

I disagree. I think since BLC is the best at certain things, they should be worse at other things -- not necessarily the worst. Likewise, because other weapons are the best at certain things, they should be worse at other things -- again, not necessarily the worst.

Fine, I'm willing to concede that it might be OK if there is some option somewhere that is theoretically worse than them at some role - but the general spirit of my point remains, viz. "maximum optimization of your ship towards a particular goal should make you suffer painfully with respect to most other goals". This should especially be true if you optimize towards a very frequent goal (e.g. dogfigthing).

The current problem is that BLC is too good at too many things. They are...

 

• The best at close range combat (high damage, high accuracy, low tracking penalty)
  
• Very good at removing turrets (outdone by HLCs, which have similar TTK but superior range)
  
• Very good at burst damage (outdone by superior burst and range from slugs)
  
• The best when weaving around cover (takes best advantage of short firing opportunities without disrupting flight paths)
  
• Decent at sustained fire (low DPS, especially at range, but armor penetration helps)
  
• Decent at sniping mines (can outrange and one-shot mines with range capacitor, but has to get much closer than HLCs/QLCs/LCs/ion railguns). Poor at sniping mines without range capacitor (you're practically asking to get hit).
  
• Decent to poor at removing drones (this is arguable; BLCs themselves are not necessarily poor at removing drones, but the ships they're mounted on don't want to get that close to drones)
  
• The worst at mid- and long- range combat (enormous dropoff and limited maximum range)
  

I'm going to quibble with this a bit. A lot of these "weaknesses" aren't really. The theoretically poor DPS is not realized in practice because of the value of burst and the low tracking penalty. Burst damage increases effective time on target increases effective DPS.

(You've used the same argument, more or less correctly, to rebut my point that slug railgun has far lower dps than any blaster.)

Mid- and long-range combat just don't really matter as "weaknesses". It is extremely hard to force you into a longer engagement range than you'd like (boost means you can close the extra few km in negligible time). The exception is vs bombers, but IMO that's subsumed into the point about mines.

Meanwhile "best at close range combat", "good at removing turrets", "good at burst damage", "best when weaving around cover" represent about 80% of the game. If BLCs are going to be the best weapon 80% of the time, they have to really suck the other 20%.

This is definitely too many things they're good at, and removing armor penetration would reduce things from "very good" to "decent" and from "decent" to poor.

Yes, and it would breath some life into the other scout weapon choices.