Reverb torps do take shield integrity into account; vettes can take 4-5, cutters take 6+
Would be cool to see TLB become slightly less effective with subsequent hits as a fight goes on
Target Lock Breaker spamming needs adjusted ASAP
- Thread starter Miko
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Reverb torps do take shield integrity into account; vettes can take 4-5, cutters take 6+
Would be cool to see TLB become slightly less effective with subsequent hits as a fight goes on
I've heard otherwise. There was no way for me to tell since fdev doesn't like to document anything about their game. If that's the case it's alright. I would still prefer a weapon that didn't just bypass shields but at-least its not totally broken.
Obviously he does not understand. There is no need to demonstrate anything to you. Especially not TO YOU.
Jason is lovely (for a
The difference is, when I can have a lot of something that's very very good; I am naturally going to gravitate to the notion that that's really fantastic, which might make me ponder if that's actually objective. Because Frontier isn't objective. In the slightest. Just really, hilariously not at all.
And so I pause on the notion that 100% uptime on anything that can proc, may not be ideal. If it hits, and 100% will proc, every time, then it's optimal as all get out; but maybe that's not ideal. This is where we differ. Because I'm less convinced this is 'good' and more 'possibly just a tad-bit busted'.
And it saddens me greatly that we disagree (slightly) but there we are.
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Now I'm going to go to bed sad.
It's pretty well documented, ask GCI if you still don't believe it
Doesn't matter what you've heard, this is easily testable.
Reverberating cascade torpedoes do ~40 integrity damage per hit to to the shield generator; mines are about half this. Depending on shield used and the mods on it, it's often not practical for one ship to take out the shields on one of the big three and still have enough firepower remaining to do anything else.
An A rated or prismatic shield generator with thermal resistant mods usually means it will take five or six torpedoes to knock out the shield gen on a Corvette or Anaconda. An 8B shield generator on a Cutter, T-9 or T-10 can be made to withstand nine with a good integrity secondary.
The ability to bypass shields via some method is a critical counter to the ability to achieve otherwise impossible to breach levels of shielding. The problem isn't that a method for this exists, it's that reverberating cascade is now the only viable method for this. It's a niche, all or nothing counter, far too much like rock-paper-scissors for compelling gameplay. We used to have thermal load attacks that could also be a counter, but since they were nerfed, reverberating cascade is it...there is simply no other way to bring down the shielding of a well padded large ship before it's able to leave or log out.
While it's true that reverberating torps/mines are currently the only useful method to bypass shields directly (phasing sequence is too weak for that), there's another counter, though... feedback cascade. Although it doesn't bypass or destroy shields directly, it seriously reduces a big ships ability to keep its shields up, as they usually tend to have most of their total MJ stored in SCBs. Being deprived of their SCBs, the big three can't really stay much longer in a fight, than pre-engineers. If their staying-power was reduced any further they would soon become completely useless in wing combat, which is their only sensible role in PvP anyway, IMO.
There are other ways to deal with super shields though. Nerfing shields directly is one way, buffing weapon damage and hull strength to be in line with super shields is another, adding an engineering blueprint that gives a massive damage increase but slashes armor piercing is yet another. All of those would allow you to take on a ship with supershields without just pretending they don't exist.
Super shields are the result of bad game design. They shouldn't be fixed with more bad game design. Another game I played went down this path of introducing brokenly OP content and then trying to introduce more op crap to counter it. It didn't go well. It's better to bite the bullet of players throwing a fit about losing their godmode right now but come out the other end with a well balanced game than to keep introducing crazy weapons that violate all notions of balance in an attempt to bring op shields down a notch.
And again, there is usually a massive amount of hull strength under those shields
Soooo....
Say I was an aspiring PvP'er who is still in a Sidey...
In order to compete in this wondrous sport I would have to unlock every engineer and fit out a Fer de Lance minimum, say 250 million credits plus several hundred hours of fedex for the engineer unlocks. As the PvP community say no unengineered ship stands even a semblance of a chance.
However... By the time I've done this the last Sword of Awesomeness has likely been nerfed and a new Sword of Awesomeness exists. Which probably needs grinding for.... And the number of people competing in said sport seems to be dwindling... Because of the grind needed to be even remotely competitive.
It isn't.... particularly compelling..
Call me an idealist but shouldn't a good pilot stand a chance in just about any reasonable tub?
(note that the author reserves the right to start a plz nerf thread if and when he buys a Cutter / Corvette / New Sword of Awesomeness and finds his turrets don't instawipe engineered PvPs who dared to use chaff and other spells)
Say I was an aspiring PvP'er who is still in a Sidey...
In order to compete in this wondrous sport I would have to unlock every engineer and fit out a Fer de Lance minimum, say 250 million credits plus several hundred hours of fedex for the engineer unlocks. As the PvP community say no unengineered ship stands even a semblance of a chance.
However... By the time I've done this the last Sword of Awesomeness has likely been nerfed and a new Sword of Awesomeness exists. Which probably needs grinding for.... And the number of people competing in said sport seems to be dwindling... Because of the grind needed to be even remotely competitive.
It isn't.... particularly compelling..
Call me an idealist but shouldn't a good pilot stand a chance in just about any reasonable tub?
(note that the author reserves the right to start a plz nerf thread if and when he buys a Cutter / Corvette / New Sword of Awesomeness and finds his turrets don't instawipe engineered PvPs who dared to use chaff and other spells)
One of the myriad reasons why engineering being so extremely powerful and "upgrade-y" is bad for the overall health of the game.
Engineers broke the game and made the gap so huge between stock and engineered that even with exceptional skill a person doesn't stand a chance of bridging it
And guess what.
they made the maximum rolls higher
That means you were fighting poor pilots. A wing of 4 good, well coordinated medium pilots should beat any large pilot. TLB is not the reason you lose a 4v1.
You're displaying your ignorance here. FSD reset munitions do have a cooldown period, controlled by a timer on the target. It's impossible to get more than one reset on a fleeing target, as the time to reset the FSD and charge a new high wake is less than the cooldown. I agree that TLB could use a cooldown as well, but it would have to be much, much shorter than the roughly 35 seconds that the FSD reset munitions have.
And you're also displaying your ignorance. There's testing and documentation, not to mention the damn patch notes, and the torpedos themselves are also not an easy munition to hit with, between arming distance and very low travel speeds. Any competent big ship pilot can hear the missile warning, boost away, FA off flip, and target and kill the torps relatively easily.
This is why I can't take half the people crying for a nerf seriously. Coming in here, posting videos of the exact kind of terrible 4-0-2 flying with poor throttle control we're talking about and trying to hold it up as an example of why the nerf needs to happen, complaining about other special effects while being objectively wrong about how those effects work. You're coming in here asking for things to have changes made that existed from the start, as in the case of FSD reset (as seen in Sandro's comment here https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/290929-Containment-missile-FSD-breaker/page2), or have already been implemented, as in the case of torps. It used to be a much smaller number of torpedos, (as you can see in the patch notes here https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/295657-Beta-2-2-Update-5).
As I've said, I do agree TLB could use a short cooldown effect. But seriously, get your facts together and learn to fly your damn ship before you come making objectively wrong statements, and holding up blatant falsehoods as justifications for your arguments.
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We speak of TLB as if it is the only way for a wing of medium ships to kill or chase away a large ship. A wing of not so fast icouriers with biweaves and long range fixed weapons could do it as well I believe, and it could even be more frustrating knowing that your big 3 ship has no chance of ever catching up. Instant H-Jump.
It just happens that specific ship builds are particularly good against certain other builds. If a big 3 has a 50-50 chance to win over a wing of 2 med ships that to me sounds balanced. If against 4 you can easily escape 95% of the time, then I would argue that is unbalanced in the loner's favor. A big 3 heavily engineered ship should not be an instant iEscape button vs 4 equally engineered, well built ships, designed to hunt the big 3. The fact that a big ship can easily escape that makes me think the wing ships did something wrong or not optimal, as they all went with TLB and noone had a role of limiting escape.
So yeah a wing picked a weapon effect to have their fun driving big ships away, but they won't be killing anyone above competent I guess, so what's the harm?
It just happens that specific ship builds are particularly good against certain other builds. If a big 3 has a 50-50 chance to win over a wing of 2 med ships that to me sounds balanced. If against 4 you can easily escape 95% of the time, then I would argue that is unbalanced in the loner's favor. A big 3 heavily engineered ship should not be an instant iEscape button vs 4 equally engineered, well built ships, designed to hunt the big 3. The fact that a big ship can easily escape that makes me think the wing ships did something wrong or not optimal, as they all went with TLB and noone had a role of limiting escape.
So yeah a wing picked a weapon effect to have their fun driving big ships away, but they won't be killing anyone above competent I guess, so what's the harm?
But you dont equip TLB especially for that purpose, it is good against almost everything, and overpowered against big ships. Simply as it doesnt have any downsides as many other effects have (or had, FDev seems to reduce downsides more and more...), so everyone using plasmas just has it.
I keep saying this since the first feedback requests for the engineer rework that they should reduce the power creep and time requirement (grind) for ship engineering considerably for the overall health and longevity of the game but it has fallen to deaf ears.
FDEV tries to appeal to their established playerbase way too much and they don't care so much for potential new players.
It is what it is.
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Had a little session High Zoning yesterday and my little friend (iEagle) doesn't need target lock to keep hammering the red blips. Just have to keep eyes on target and not shoot the wrong one! As far as mechanics go, I like the TLB then - causes a rethink. Fine if it gets dialed back some but for goodness' sake don't kill it.
Actually pretty much every analogous special, from drag to dazzle, does have a short cooldown immunity phase. It's just that usually the immunity is briefer than the likely gap between hits, so nobody notices. As others have said, FSD interrupt is a much longer example.
But if we take the most obvious parallel of Dispersal (the other targetting disrupt, also available on plasma), it has always worked on a straight 5 seconds uptime, then 5 seconds downtime, effect/immunity cycle.
I have little doubt that the reason for this distinction between TLB and Dispersal is that Dispersal, unlike TLB, is also available on cannons. Because the latter have (almost) no draw and no heat, Frontier didn't want 100% Dispersal uptime to be a thing.
It seems clear from their occasional responses that 100% TLB uptime was an oversight. I'm guessing that it was caused by failing to anticipate the combined effects of distributor modding with efficient weapon modding.
I have no doubt that the special will be tweaked at some point. Personally I hope, for the reasons already given in my second post, that revision bears some relationship to the 'two variables' model of weapon strength and target integrity, already in place for feedback cascade, which is probably the most sophisticated game design here.
However, I would emphasise that the effect still needs to be instant. The reason for this is that TLB was released at the same time as the missile buff and as I understand it, it was primarily intended to offer hull tanks or bi-weave hybrids with a defence against auto-aim seeker/packrat spam.
That is a noble objective. For it to remain possible, any revised TLB would still need to break lock instantly on hitting and to have a cooldown sufficiently short to permit a second lock again to be broken ... with good timing.
While I agree that was probably FDev's intent with the effect, surely they saw the slight problem of having the counter to homing / auto-aim weapons... be tied to the likely hardest to use weapon.
How is that a problem? You either use a weapon with a higher skill floor to deal with the issue, or you sacrifice utility slots that you could be using for other things to do it for you. In this example, you either learn to use PAs effectively to deal with seeker missiles, or you sacrifice shield boosters or chaff to get a point defense or ECM.