MMO's have a vastly more complicated system to handle than ED does, ED balance is entirely tied to ship balance and the pve is related to exactly the same thing. You guys give the devs way too much leeway to dodge responsibility for balancing, they barely change anything I'd find it hard to believe they actually care at all lol. It was pointed out at the very beggining of WoW btw that you can't balance PvE and PvP content in a game like that on the same skills, blizzard just avoided accepting the idea until now.
They could literally gimp the current meta in one patch note and it wouldn't effect 99.9% of players, in WoW everytime you changed an ability it had knock-on consequences because you had to do PvE with the same character you PvP'd with, Nobody in ED does PVE in a 5 rails silent running FDL, because its about as far away from the PvE meta as you can get
Changes to silent running / rails would have extremely limited impact in pve or if approached from the buff instead of nerf angle, increased bullet velocity / missile usefulness would just make more things viable than currently are.
It comes down a lot to the time involved in PVP vs PVE.
If I can last 5 minutes in a PVP battle, I am having a great day.
If you had to restock every 5 mins to go back to the PVE Grind, you would complain.
The Mechanics are no different.
Its a real shame that FD is still incredibly poor at balancing in general.
I do not have beta access but speaking to players that do, it seems after almost every patch all the feed back about what was going to happen ( regarding ship/weapon balance) was mostly ignored.
There is a video somewhere of one of the famous early twitch steamers taking on an Anaconda in an Eagle running dumbfire missiles.
He wins and it is done with great skill and using what was once a powerful weapon ( Was also a worry in 1984 Elite ).
Some players realised how strong these were and they became the go to weapon, it was awesome and it actually gave T6's some teeth.
Even though fun they needed a balance, the simple option would have been to make them useless on shields and leave it at that.
FD went insane. Made them weak against shield and hull, then for extra salt in the wound gimped the fire rate.
( Same with heat seekers, mines, cannons )
The current meta has made Torpedos a waste of time as well.
Before HRP, they were a challenge to make it but when they did... OH boy!
Now it takes 2 Torpedos to take out a reinforced eagle.
I once put 8 torpedos, into a Hull FAS and knocked it down to 40% hull.
Pre reinforcements, 3 would destroy a battle conda ( If you could land the shots )
Next we have the new C3 and C4 Multicannons coming, I cannot wait to see the imbalance they produce.
My expectation of the new patch is that the new weapons will be strong as hell, because everyone wants them to be and has been asking since launch for bigger dakka dakka.
I expect they will change the HRP's so that they are much less OP on smaller ships, which is a great thing.
At the same time this will have a knock on effect to the larger ships, of which they were really designed for.
Large ships now which have lower shield strength because of the need for heatsinks to compensate for the SCB heat production.
Meaning that the larger ships are not at all scary because their damage output is far lower because they cannot risk having 4 pips to weapons for long and the TTD after the now weaker shields drop will be quicker. (SCB spamming is still achievable but only on a few ships)
The above will get picked up the first night in Beta testing but will FD listen or just roll out what they think will work.
Majinvash
The Voice of Open
