High Yield Shell Nerfed, Cytroscrambler Buffed, Nothing more on PA thermal load

[Truesilver]

Thought about putting this in PvP but really it's for everyone who likes guns.

Quotes from 3.0 Patch Notes.

High Yield Shell Nerfed

"Significantly reduced the damage and radius within which the High Yield Shell applies damage to internal modules"


​

Cytoscrambler Buffed

"Reduced the jitter on Cyto-scrambler burst lasers by about half"


​

Nothing as yet on PA thermal load secondaries


... but here's hoping ...

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My take on the above after three years of PvP and avid weapons-nerding:

- HYS was buffed for Beta 3.0. The bit about buffing it remains in place. I have quoted the new bit (the nerf, for Live 3.0).

- The HYS nerf was necessary because Frontier have clearly stated that they wish to move the game towards greater parity between full-shielded and hull-tank or bi-weave-hybrid builds. Without this nerf an FDL with the 'full cheese' loadout of reinforced prismatic + 6 x HD boosters could simply have fitted 5 x gimballed HYS cannons and killed literally three PvP Chieftains or FAS in a row, merely pausing only to reload, even if the targets brought 4 x chaff (chaff wouldn't have saved anyone, at closer ranges enough gets through).

- However, we don't know the extent of the nerf yet. I hope HYS isn't made useless. All specials should have a place. The Developers have put time into them.

- I'm glad it was a HYS nerf not a Super Pen rail nerf also, because although Super Pen is very strong, unlike HYS it requires careful aim and comes with an opportunity costs in terms of Distro Draw and heat (even with -40% thermal load). Because cannons have (almost) no draw and no heat they could simply be fired continuously. My long range gimballed cannons in Beta, which I usually fired at less than 1 km (ironically) basically destroyed irrespective of chaff.

- Whether HYS is now, after both a buff and a nerf, better or worse than in 2.4, remains to be seen...!

- The Cyto really needed some more buffing love. Personally I think that if modded for long range, at 2 km even half of the current jitter may prove too great but at least the options are starting to open up. I do predict some funny Cyto vids incoming.

- About the PA's, I was really hoping we'd see them get the Beta 3.3 rail treatment ... but from Sandro's comments in the most recent Livestream (not today's, not aired yet) it should still happen. Couldn't come soon enough because this is the major area of grandfathered legacy advantage. Burst lasers etc, yes, valid points but not as important imo.

o7

Truesilver

 

[Jynessa Loraeyn]

Thank you so much for picking up on this and the analysis to go with it.

I also hope the HYS hasn't been made useless - I do understand why it needed toning down from the beta.

I imagine chaff might actually have made things worse at close range - it spreads the HYS hits all over the ship, which could mean losing modules left, right and centre. At least if they all hit roughly in the same place, there's a limit on which modules their area of effect can actually reach.

But I mainly fly a Cobra and use a medium gimballed cannon with HYS as an adjunct to aiming with a PA on the other medium hardpoint... since neither is centreline, I decided to concentrate on aiming with one, and since the shot speed is the same, you don't end up with two different lead indicators... I can try to steady the wobble of the cannon gimbal over the same lead indicator while aiming with the fixed PA dot - quite a few times, the HYS has saved my bacon by knocking out the subtarget when I fluffed the shot with the PA.

And yes, be interesting to see what news there is on the PA thermal load secondaries - it did sound like it's being worked on.

The proof is in the pudding, so we'll see how it goes once live is back up!

 

[Sylow]

.
So just to be sure: you say that something which clearly was designed for short range engagements doesn't work well at very long range and that's a problem? In that case, frag cannons also urgently need a buff, no matter how much you mod them for long range, they are not great weapons for targets 5 km away from you.
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It might be just me, but the Cyto for me always spelled "get close, then unleash its fury". With the new reduced spread it should now also work when not sitting right on your targets tailpipe. (As far as we can tell, before the patch is live and we can test it. ) Based on this, i would consider the Cyto to be where it should be.
.

 

[Truesilver]

.
So just to be sure: you say that something which clearly was designed for short range engagements doesn't work well at very long range and that's a problem? In that case, frag cannons also urgently need a buff, no matter how much you mod them for long range, they are not great weapons for targets 5 km away from you.
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It might be just me, but the Cyto for me always spelled "get close, then unleash its fury". With the new reduced spread it should now also work when not sitting right on your targets tailpipe. (As far as we can tell, before the patch is live and we can test it. ) Based on this, i would consider the Cyto to be where it should be.
.

Frags have massive damage, are effective to about 450m, and wreck both shields and hull, whilst causing no heat and using no draw. Furthermore they are available fixed, gimballed and turreted and via truncation of reload times using Rapid Fire and Screening Shell can be further buffed to unmatchable DPS.

Cytos have massive damage against shields for a c1 weapon, are effective to about 800m (range 1,000 m but fall-off), do no damage to hull, are fixed only and impose considerable draw on the distributor (approx. equivalent to a c3 fixed Pulse Laser).

Yes, I agree with Frontier's decision to buff Cytos.

 

[Sylow]

Yes, I agree with Frontier's decision to buff Cytos.

.
I accept that they buff it. But your statement at least for me reads as "and it's most likely not enough". That's where i disagree, i think the Cyto has a very specific task. It's a pirates tool, not a PvP tool, and for the one actual player pirate we have (yea, the one and only who pirates with a cargo bay on his ship!), it probably did the job.
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I understand that you, from a PvP Ppint of view, would consider it to still need a buff. But i don't see it as a PvP tool, and due to how it is made, it's almost impossible to make it useful in PvP without making it mandatory. That's why i think that we better wait and see.
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For somebody in a fast ship, who wanted to grab cargo without destroying the target, it was a good tool already before, it'll be even better now. For any other purpose, it's polarity of high shield damage and no hull damage makes it close to impossible to get it balanced. It's either worthless or mandatory, the line between would even be only a few molecules wide without Engineers wearing it down.
.

 

[Truesilver]

.
I accept that they buff it. But your statement at least for me reads as "and it's most likely not enough". That's where i disagree, i think the Cyto has a very specific task. It's a pirates tool, not a PvP tool, and for the one actual player pirate we have (yea, the one and only who pirates with a cargo bay on his ship!), it probably did the job.
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I understand that you, from a PvP Ppint of view, would consider it to still need a buff.

Fair enough. In serious PvP the reality is that long range is so powerful a thermal/rail mod (because it not only doubles range but also removes fall-off, whilst imposing no jitter) that it's hard to counter. A c1 6 km rail with no fall-off versus a c1 1 km Cyto is basically just a 'GG'.

But like I said, I do predict that we are going to see some Cyto fun on reddit soon...

 

[jasonbarron]

Truesilver, when this patch goes live, what are your testing priorities?

I just logged back into ED for the first time in months on Saturday, and went on a mad dash to purchase a FAS and get every module on it to g5 with one roll each, no specials, so I could re-roll everything starting from g4 in the new system. I've never used one before, so I just shamelessly ripped off Rinzler's blueprint (g1 single click for g5 results) and I'm very curious about those high yield specials.

 

[Truesilver]

Truesilver, when this patch goes live, what are your testing priorities?

I just logged back into ED for the first time in months on Saturday, and went on a mad dash to purchase a FAS and get every module on it to g5 with one roll each, no specials, so I could re-roll everything starting from g4 in the new system. I've never used one before, so I just shamelessly ripped off Rinzler's blueprint (g1 single click for g5 results) and I'm very curious about those high yield specials.

Probably Jason, in truth looking to take a break from the science and just enjoy flying a ship 'organically' looking for trouble again! I'm actually quite keen to get back into Powerplay PvP and will be going quite non-meta, not just in terms of ship choice but I mean like having a fuel scoop and good jump range, that sort of 'fer real' stuff, not just 'ah transfer mah CG/duelling build' lol.

In that vein the only thing I'm actually planning to 'test' personally as such in the short term is the new Powerplay C&P interaction:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/409069-The-Powerplay-3-0-C-amp-P-Thread