Target Lock Breaker spamming needs adjusted ASAP
- Thread starter Miko
- Start date
Probably one of the dumbest things I've read on here. Banks are immensely important to the shield strength of big ship, offering more regeneration potential than there are shields in the first place; removing feedback rails would make for nigh-unkillable bigs. Large ships need counters, otherwise they never die; even now they're a pain to fight.
And the whole notion of "have a mod to make guns to +150% to shields and -50% to AP" is asinine. Any good big will have a hell of a lot of armor under the shields, so what happens when you burn through your ammo knocking shields down after they bank 5-6 times?
I do agree that TLB should have some cooldown, but most of the griping in this thread can be solved by
1. Not straight lining in fa on
2. Not sitting 4-0-2 in pips and actually being dynamic
3. Not relying on gimbals and turrets
Exactly... So many people have to jump on the discussion and bring tons of arguments that have nothing to do with TLB, really annyoing. And yeah, a Corvette should easily hold its own against two medium ships, and quite a while against 3 at least. It does anyway NOT have an "i-win-button", since its slow and can never catch them when they just boost away...
TLB just makes it even almost impossible to even try to fight back with most builds, which is stupid.
Are you kidding me? Not everyone is a 14 years old teenager who spends 24 hours a day in Elite by doing nothing for school, getting every expensive tool for the PC paid by their parents.
Some of us have a real life and can not afford every technology to improve the play. So sometimes the keyboard is the input device of our choice where you can simply forget about flight assist off.
Being dynamic does not help anyithing in one of the big three when a bunch of Fer-de-Lances with target lock breakers faces you.
ALL weapons should do their work in some way, but Frontier nerved gimballs and limited turrets into the ground, giving dozens of options to make them useless. Maybe they should just remove them if they don't want us to use them.
I totally agree.
TBF if ED was true to Any Space Combat Game/Sci Fi Source material we'd have NO Gimballs and (defensive only) Turrets...
Which would be a not unwelcome modification to Combat...
I guess I was bound to disagree with you sooner or later, Truesilver. Please don't even consider nerfing TLB until nerfing the godlike tracking arc of gimbals and ridiculous amounts of possible shielding to the big three is also on the table. Until then, TLB as is is a suitable counter. As far as downsides go, you said it yourself; they're not effective for every ship you're likely to encounter, and I'll add to that that they are a high skill weapon that only rewards it's user for excellence in flying and steady targeting.
You probably shouldn't expect to 1vX when X is greater than one and your opponents are kitted out for PvP. Even in a big ship. Conversely, you should do fine with being able to escape. The biggest ships in the game will never be best for PvP, as big always equals slow. PvP tends to favour ships that have very few obvious weaknesses.
This is probably the only suggestion I've heard that would be practical at mitigating TLB's effectiveness without destroying it's utility entirely (as past 'fixes' have done with things like thermal shock and thermal cascade).
Though, instead of a cool down, I'd scale the build-up, as we see with scramble spectrum. Something as simple as sensor integrity vs. the damage done by a TLB weapon could be very effective. Small ships would suffer a lock break from one or two successful hits, while a large ship could need two large or huge PA hits, or three or four mediums (in a short period of time) for TLB to be effective.
Of course, this would do little to help those who desire to regularly prevail against entire wings of medium ships with a single large ship, but this is not a reasonable expectation anyway.
Keyboard+mouse is probably the control method that benefits the most from FA Off (though there are times to use and not use flight assist with any and all control setups) and a great number of very skilled PvP pilots use keyboard & mouse.
Patently false.
Gimbals and turrets have their uses and are fairly well balanced against fixed weapons, except at extreme ranges, where the microgimbal/snap-lock effect of fixed becomes profoundly dominant.
TLB is also less of a counter to gimbals and turrets than it is to projectiles in general; it's certainly far less of a counter than chaff or dispersal field.
Without the existence of counters, gimbals become largely dominant, even when all involved are comfortable aiming fixed weapons.
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I find myself expressing the same sentiment; had to disagree with you eventually
I have always said "balance the imbalanced; don't balance the balanced to the imbalanced". TS has given a very accurate analysis of why TLB is disproportionately effective, and that should be independent of whether big ships are OP (which they are).
It doesn't make TLB a suitable counter for two reasons: when in use, it is unengaging for reasons TS describes, and requires a loadout largely dedicated to countering TLB to succeed. Counters to tools are one thing; rock paper scissors is conversely the worst kind of combat. Secondly it reinforces rock paper scissors for the smaller ship too; if it doesn't carry TLB, for reasons you describe (inflated shield HP) it is just as unengaging for a small ship to fight a monsterously engineered big ship that compensates for its size with FA Off and gimbals.
Luckily I saw you mention "until" so hopefully you at least agree TLB is a tad, well, silly, and just perceive big ship as a larger issue. Which to some degree is true. So perhaps we don't disagree so much after all.
If nothing else we all seem to agree sensors should play a larger part in one's loadout, both for gimbal assistance and resisting sensor based debuffs.
Fair cop - I missed that point. BUT if you were running away - why are you complaining about Target Lock Breaker? This does not affect your ability to run away one jot.
Perhaps you didn't run away fast enough?
And FYI - I have failed to run away quick enough many times - and died. It's a game. There should be risk. There ought to be risk of dying. Otherwise where's the challenge?!
I do accept there is a cohort of players who think there should be no risk, no challenge etc. I just don't think their voice should carry much weight...
This entire thread adds up to "Why isn't my big ship an automatic win for me against everything smaller. Please nerf all the things that make it possible for a well flown medium to give me a rough time." Getting jumped by a wing of 3-4 FDLs should put a vette on the ropes relatively quickly. Being attacked by a pilot exponentially more skilled, with a good build should also end in you being handed an L, no matter what ship you are in.
Seriously, learn to fly your damn ship. Moving away from 4-0-2, reverse, gimballed big ship laziness is the answer to half the complaints. Running a turreted vette? You deserve to get your kicked by an FDL with TBL, chaff and bank rails.
But no, remove bank rails, remove TLB, remove everything that keeps a big ship from totally masking a lack of skill. That's obviously the right answer.
Seriously, learn to fly your damn ship. Moving away from 4-0-2, reverse, gimballed big ship laziness is the answer to half the complaints. Running a turreted vette? You deserve to get your kicked by an FDL with TBL, chaff and bank rails.
But no, remove bank rails, remove TLB, remove everything that keeps a big ship from totally masking a lack of skill. That's obviously the right answer.
To throw ideas out there, perhaps TLBshould be more a debuff than instant effect; it has a duration once applied, and during that period has a chance to make the affected target lose lock, almost like malfunctioning. Hitting a big ship with a single C2 TLB PA might not make it lose lock once. Hitting an iCourier with a C4 TLB PA would have it dropping target at random every couple of seconds for a period of time.
By putting a cap on the amount of effect that can be added you then prevent wings making larger ships incapable of targeting - then can hit it with the effect much as they want but aren't directly making it lose lock, so much as sustaining random lock breaks every couple/few seconds.
Spoken like a man with a true lack of understanding on the topic.
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Got an explanation for why I'm wrong, or just an out of hand dismissal?
Read TS's post.
I am always 100% anti-iWin buttons. It doesn't make every mechanic that disadvantages larger ships perfectly balanced.
Some of you guys are over-exposuring again. Not sure if you do that just to feel excellent or to fake importance.
Nobody asks for an I-win-button, nobody requested immortality.
We are talking about TLB, an effect that in addition with chaff can make you close to 100 % of the time unable to return fire successful. And that is far from what you mention to us in your cockyness...
Nobody asks for an I-win-button, nobody requested immortality.
We are talking about TLB, an effect that in addition with chaff can make you close to 100 % of the time unable to return fire successful. And that is far from what you mention to us in your cockyness...
Its nothing to do with stopping your return fire - its two specific Electronic Warfare effects that impact on automatic targeting systems...creating an overloaded electronic environment in which fixed rather than computer controlled weapons are accurate...neither of which are 100% effective...both fade off after sensors "burn through" their effect, DOESN'T seem unreasonable to me in the context of 30th Century abilities!
I don't disagree that it could use a nerf. A cooldown wouldn't be a bad thing, along the same lines as the FSD reset munitions, but much shorter. But you can't claim with a straight face that the conversation didn't rapidly turn into people crying about everything that makes their big ship less than godly, and complaining that more is required of them to win a fight than lock on, throw it into reverse, hold the trigger and bank every now and then (but no hitting those with bank rails, god forbid you have to chew through anything less than their entire overinflated shield pool).