Responce to Yamiks Shield Video.

[philngraves]

Before 3.0 dropped, I was trying out some of the Pirate Hunt missions. Grabbed a half dozen (no clue why they were so abundant) and headed off. Finished up 3, jumped to the next system. Interdicted by one pirate, then went for the next. This is where it became dicey. Last 2 were elites, and I tracked one to a planetside USS. As I drop it, the interdiction game pops. No biggy. Start working on Pirate 1 and his vette, with 2 deadly conda wing-mates. Well, Pirate 2 was apparently the interdicting party with bad timing, and drops in on me 20 secs into the fight with Pirate 1. Now the count is 2 elite vettes, 1 elite conda (pirate 2's wing) and 2 deadly condas. Manged to scrap the lot of em in my vette with ~4500 Mj and 50+ resist all.

This fight alone made me realize just how absurd shielding is. I still had 30% shields after all that... Between the vomitus of hardpoints and that nearly all (maybe all, too chaotic) had fighters, I should have either be forced to run, or had a nice cosmic dirt nap. Nah. Now the shields are even more abusrd? Pssh, gonna go mulch me up some Farragut pie with a nice Chianti and some fava beans.....

 

[Truesilver]

May I ask the veterans here how you are doing in your overpowered ships versus Thargoids (not scouts) in solo and how versus NPC wings of 6-7 ships when soloing a wing terrorist massacre mission?

In my personal experience Thargoids are end game content and very difficult to solo even in a highly overpowered player ship.

Terrorist wings in solo are highly challenging.

Personally I have only done a few of the Wing Missions - I was hoping to do more this week but 3.0.3 broke assassinations (spawn issues, bug forum).

My own first impressions are that in a PvP build I found killing all of the terrorist wing, without kiting and long range (so being shot at by the whole lot at once), to be roughly in the right place ... but just killing the mission target from the get-go and leaving to be far, far too easy.

About Thargoids, I have never fought one because nowadays I only do things directly relevant to PvP.

True, what I want to know IS. Are fixed cannons viable yet.

You mean, for PvP duelling?

Nothing really has changed. They have their awesome DPE and thermal load as ever, High Yield Shell was buffed, then nerfed, Dispersal is nice. Good DPS and APV, tiny ammo pool but basic synthesis is effectively free now, via Mats Trader.

The problem with cannons is that as the opponents become more skilled and the ships become smaller, the projectile velocity becomes increasingly limiting. Cannons do not have the burst damage of PA's and require similar Time-on-Target to a multi-cannon. Hence if up against a skilled opponent in a fast ship, without long range you may struggle to maintain ToT and with long range you would probably have been better off with a multi and a different mod.

A combination of long range cannons and regular multis does make for some very tasty set-ups, with enough hard points, though...

 

[XW_Ziggy]

I'd be happy to see diminishing returns on shield boost percentage just like we have diminishing returns on resistance boost percentage.
I'll even go one further and say that I'd like to see diminishing returns on SCB capacity too.

Strong shields are good, but I can take a ship that clearly comes with a weak shield and strong hull, like the Alliance Chieftain, and then completely ignore its hull-tanking design by spamming it with engineered shield boosters and SCBs. It makes PVP pretty dull, IMO. If FDev want to encourage people to think about canopy damage, module damage, hull strength and resistances etc - they need to stop the insane stacking of shields. RC torpedos aren't really an answer to extremely high-MJ effective shielding either, since anyone who has been torpedo'ed once is going to learn from that mistake and either outrun them in future or EMP them.

My barely-armed CG trade Anaconda has a big fat prismatic with 6 boosters and two EMPs. The only real risk to being ganked at the mailslot is torpedos and the ridiculous 12000MJ shield makes it utterly impervious to damage for the 30s or so that it takes me to get through the mailslot, and all of that is from a lowly 5A shield that dents the cargo capacity by just 32T.

Someone tried to gank my PVE Corvette the other day and since both of us were vaguely competent at PVP the Corvette obviously beat the FdL 3-0 but what I found tedious was how long it took my Corvette's 120dps to burn through what I can only assume was at least 10000MJ of shield on the FdL. At least that is what my FdL has, and I doubt a ganker would be configured much differently when a shield of such ridiculous size is possible for a ship that has a default hull integrity of just 405hp. Of course the minute I dropped the FdL's shields he'd fly away at 550m/s - out of range of all but my one long-range laser within a matter of seconds. Into SC for him and very rapid shield regeneration commences for both of us, only to repeat the whole fiasco again for the interdiction that came a whole 20 seconds later :\

 

[Auronio]

Personally I have only done a few of the Wing Missions - I was hoping to do more this week but 3.0.3 broke assassinations (spawn issues, bug forum).

My own first impressions are that in a PvP build I found killing all of the terrorist wing, without kiting and long range (so being shot at by the whole lot at once), to be roughly in the right place ... but just killing the mission target from the get-go and leaving to be far, far too easy.

About Thargoids, I have never fought one because nowadays I only do things directly relevant to PvP.



You mean, for PvP duelling?

Nothing really has changed. They have their awesome DPE and thermal load as ever, High Yield Shell was buffed, then nerfed, Dispersal is nice. Good DPS and APV, tiny ammo pool but basic synthesis is effectively free now, via Mats Trader.

The problem with cannons is that as the opponents become more skilled and the ships become smaller, the projectile velocity becomes increasingly limiting. Cannons do not have the burst damage of PA's and require similar Time-on-Target to a multi-cannon. Hence if up against a skilled opponent in a fast ship, without long range you may struggle to maintain ToT and with long range you would probably have been better off with a multi and a different mod.

A combination of long range cannons and regular multis does make for some very tasty set-ups, with enough hard points, though...

Thanks a lot for your feedback.

I truly respect your thoughts and insight shown in this (and other) threads.

Still I'm not sure whether the issues described are mainly issues for only the - say 1% - veteran Elite part of the community and not the majority of players cause they lack both the end game ships and the end game skills.

That does not question the statement of the game being partially imbalanced requiring currently some buffs to allow the major player base to still successfully progress. But I honestly doubt majority of casual players feel the overpowerment as much as superior players like you do.

o7

 

[pzykozomatik]

I also think shields, SBs and SCBs need a nerf, or let's say, a handicap. To make alternatives like hull tanking more viable and get rid of ridiculous 5000MJ+ murderships that can hold their own against several NPCs in the same class of vessel without breaking a sweat. Make people have to compromise their build, to ponder where to put their power plant's limited MWs.

 

[PeLucheuh]

I'm not holding my breath. This issue was apparent shortly after engineer release already. If this was of concern, it should have been fixed already.

There have been many attempt to fixe it already. The best one was the 2.3 beta 1 balance which was perfect but did not get implemented because some players were complaining about not being invincible anymore and could not afk farm CZ anymore.

Regarding shields, skill booster stacking & balance in general the game was way better before 2.1

 

[GODofDUTY83]

A high power usage shield killing weapon is the way.

Shields over say 2.5k take the damage. Shields under 2.5k are immune.
When the weapon is fired it completely drains the PD and requires a full PD charge to fire, creates 200% heat rise and strips away 1 full ring of shielding aswell as adding 30% damage to the weapon itself. Once the weapon reaches 10% health after 3 shots fired its humped. 3 shots only, fully fixed, no gimbal, no turrets.

 

[pzykozomatik]

A high power usage shield killing weapon is the way.

Shields over say 2.5k take the damage. Shields under 2.5k are immune.
When the weapon is fired it completely drains the PD and requires a full PD charge to fire, creates 200% heat rise and strips away 1 full ring of shielding aswell as adding 30% damage to the weapon itself. Once the weapon reaches 10% health after 3 shots fired its humped. 3 shots only, fully fixed, no gimbal, no turrets.

Please, no more of this. Fixing something broken by adding something new that will surely turn out equally broken and taking months of buffing/nerfing while the forums continue to whine either way...

No. Just fix the shield mechanics. Limit the strength. Increase power draw. Have diminishing returns for Heavy SBs and increase those for resistance augmented ones. More penalties for SCB use. Make shiedless builds more viable.

Yes, I realise the salt will flow nonetheless.

 

[Truesilver]

Just fix the shield mechanics. Limit the strength. Increase power draw. Have diminishing returns for Heavy SBs and increase those for resistance augmented ones. More penalties for SCB use. Make shieldless builds more viable.

Wow. Repped for what is pretty much the most concise and accurate summary on this I've ever seen.

In actual fact, though, Sandro has made clear that it will be completely new aggressive mechanics (e.g. anti-booster specials and weapons) because 'Nerf Ye Not!' is apparently the thing in Cambridge now.

So basically, a bit like 'stealth taxes' and the voter's wallet, I would not be at all surprised if a year from now the end product is a nerf ten times as hard as the straight rebalances that you set out ... but without the average shield-jockey realising something's up until it's too late ...

... which could be quite amusing, at least, I'll admit.

 

[nathdixon92]

Wow. Repped for what is pretty much the most concise and accurate summary on this I've ever seen.

In actual fact, though, Sandro has made clear that it will be completely new aggressive mechanics (e.g. anti-booster specials and weapons) because 'Nerf Ye Not!' is apparently the thing in Cambridge now.

So basically, a bit like 'stealth taxes' and the voter's wallet, I would not be at all surprised if a year from now the end product is a nerf ten times as hard as the straight rebalances that you set out ... but without the average shield-jockey realising something's up until it's too late ...

... which could be quite amusing, at least, I'll admit.

i wish they just sucked it up and went along with the shield booster and hull hardness changes.

 

[Susanna]

Dear Cmdr Yamiks, Open Letter.

I recently saw your video about shields and while I respect your opinion, I must disagree with your current stand on shields.

First off: As you stated at the start, Shields are currently fine the way they are in PvE. I will add that it is also okay in PvP environments, save for engineered equipment which you claimed to be OP. Maybe, then again, wasn't that one of the goals of the engineer's mechanic?: to give Cmdrs a means to conjure something to give em an edge over potential threats (such as...what gamers refer to as Gank Squads for example). Now I get it that you're just arguing that Shields should be toned down (or countered some other way) a little bite. However, history has shown that whenever someone finds a little game mechanic that could benefit from a slight debuff somewhere, FDEV simply targets the whole thing (and everything related) and bring upon it Thor's Hammer; now that particular game mechanic is totally useless. Remember what happened with the 3.0 Skimmers missions?

Second: if anything, ships actually need a shield buff instead; or at least half the ships in the fleet do. See, according to third party sites like Coriolis.com for example, most ships start out very weak shields; it doesn't take much to crack those eggs. Of course shields can be upgrade with bigger sizes, higher quality, and boosters (I'm purposely leaving out engineers on this portion BTW). Even so in many cases it is not enough.

In most SciFi generas, Deflector Shield tech should advanced enough to be able to produce a forcefield strong enough to match the estimate hull/structural integrate of whatever it is protecting, give or take a little margin of error; a 1/1 shield strength to hull integrity ratio if you will. With that in mind, I've taken the liberty of comparing potential shield strength/hull integrity of different vessels; the formula used here is that each ship is equipped with largest Class-A Shield Generator it can use (depends on largest optional internal slot available), plus no more that 3 Class-A boosters available: no engineers involved. In my research, I found that while some ships do meet the 1/1 ratio standard (and a few like the Icourier for one, have a significantly greater than 1/1 ratio) roughly half of the ships available have a less than 1/1 ratio (some like the FAS are even closer to .7/1 ratio) of course some of these vessels are made to be hull tankers, but not the majority of them. Don't believe me, go ahead and do you're own research on whatever third party sites you choose; you'll see what I'm talking about.

Third: While standard (unengineered) Shields seem okay for most Cmdrs, I will admit that engineered shielding can be a bit much. But that's not because of the Deflector Shields themselves. It seems to be the case of Cmdrs' preference of the Heavy Duty type engineered Boosters; one can argue that they are overpowered, with their 56% boost in shield strength (not the 70% as you claim BTW). If I had a say at Frontier, I'd propose the Heavy Duty engineered boosters only produce roughly about 30-40% boost. Furthermore, I'd also propose to limit the number of booster to no more that 3 per ship, assuming they have that many utility slots available. That should all but solve your OP Shield problem, don't you think?

That's all I'm gonna say. To recap...Shields are fine (some, but not all, ships may actually need a buff instead), Don't want FDEV to bring down Thor's Hammer again, # of boosters on a ship should be limited to 3 and engineered HD boosters need to have their % multiplier in shield strength reduced.

Anyway sorry if I was disrupting any activity you were doing and thank you for your time.

Sincerely.
Cmdr Soundest.

P.S. +++REP for your vids; liked and subscribed.

All subjective option. Shields and Shield boosters are fine. Leave it alone! I'm sick to the back teeth of he endless meddling!

 

[Muetdhiver]

Please, no more of this. Fixing something broken by adding something new that will surely turn out equally broken and taking months of buffing/nerfing while the forums continue to whine either way...

No. Just fix the shield mechanics. Limit the strength. Increase power draw. Have diminishing returns for Heavy SBs and increase those for resistance augmented ones. More penalties for SCB use. Make shiedless builds more viable.

Yes, I realise the salt will flow nonetheless.

Indeed, hardcounters would be a terrible way to solve it.

Say you encounter a ship with ubershields : well either you have the weapons and you win, or you don't and you lose.
It's as balanced as rock paper cisor is : you have certain victory 1/3 of the time. Instead of having such things as skill and
other such non-sensical notions involved.

IMO a soft cap @+100% and hardcap at @+150% would not be too bad.
Especially if resistances would be hard capped at vanilla value +50% or an absolute +75%, which ever is lower.
That would mean +30% at most vs thermal and +75% at most for kinetic, meaning that thermal will still be 2 to 2.8 times better than kin vs shields.
(So that thermal keeps its edge against shields, and lasers are not just worse multicannons)

Couple that with armor from HRP being treated like a buffer that need to be ablated before doing hull damage and breach damage and we might get somewhere.
(e.g. the higher the armour HP's the lower the breach chance, at zero armour, breach chance reaches "vanilla" value).
If said armour (HRP's) could be repaired by AFMU's like MRP's, then armour tanking in PvE would be fine : fight, take damage, repair for a while, get in the fray again.
Hull damage would still stick though, and losing armour would mean that you start to be in serious trouble.

In addition to that, FD could at least thing about shields offering only partial protection once the first ring is gone.

As for thargoids in solo : While shields are important, tactics and armour are more so. Since a lot of their damage bypass shields to some extant,
going full shield tank is very unwise

 

[Stigbob]

Actually, no, Mr Stigbob:

My numbers were using unengineered multis to be indicative of NPC DPS if using a popular PvE weapon (as a comparator to the position of a player).

If you run the same numbers using unengineered lasers, it would actually take considerably longer to down that shield, due to Distributor constraints.

Then if you say, 'OK let's engineer for efficient, then' - all you do is emphasise the gap between player and hapless NPC yet more.

The advantage of any kind of energy weapon against shields is the lack of ammo wastage on something that's regenerating itself. I save kinetics for the hull meaning less trips for reloads or synthesizing, that's what I mean by daft.

Like I said I don't doubt your numbers. I just don't care about min-maxing DPS.

 

[Herbrand]

Please, no more of this. Fixing something broken by adding something new that will surely turn out equally broken and taking months of buffing/nerfing while the forums continue to whine either way...

No. Just fix the shield mechanics. Limit the strength. Increase power draw. Have diminishing returns for Heavy SBs and increase those for resistance augmented ones. More penalties for SCB use. Make shiedless builds more viable.

Yes, I realise the salt will flow nonetheless.

Agreed. What need to happen is a massive nerf to Shield Boosters (and HRP) - at least 50% of their current effect.

 

[Yamiks]

Dear Cmdr Yamiks, Open Letter.
...........

OK where to start.
1st off : this is 1st time someone took time to make smth like this - I love it!
2nd : let's go thru your points!

#1 : the fear of me mentioning will get thiungs NERFED.... ok when did I become such authority and do you really think DEVS are so blind or dumb they'll listen to me word for word?
....hmmm actually you might have a partial point here! =}

#2 In this game shields are set in 3 categories more or less : Hull-tank (a ship who has small shields but huge hull HP), Balanced (about equal amount of shield to hull HPs more leaning to hull) and Shield tanks(lot's of shields, low hull) you have to understand which ship is made more for what and generalizing that some are easy to crack means rather little if you are talking about something like FAS!

#3 ....oh man.. what kind of math is this?! So base shield boost is 20% -> engineered G5 boost is 73% now tell me what is the IMPROVEMENT!?
My video stated that ENGINEERING..specifically HEAVY DUTY modification is TOO GOOD!
Take HRP(hull reinforcement package)for example : Heavy duty version will boost it almost 90% , while Shield booster gains >350% !!!
What other engineered upgrades grant you THIS huge of an improvement!?
If it was up to me I'd reduce Shield booster max boost to 80% improvement bringing down the shield booster to 36% boost at max (do you get it?! 20% x 180% = 36% boost) And that would make cutters shields be dropped to 6.3k which still is more than 2x of non-engineered shields (base is 2.4k). So do you think that perhaps would be more fair?!

See while I like the idea of shields and that protection, the fact of the matter is : engineering is NOT balanced at all and even devs know that shields are too strong, but because of this sort of backlash, change is not possible!

I really want to have the choice between shields & hull when it comes to combat and not feel like I miss out if I go full mode on someone!

 

[Maka Gucci]

Dear Cmdr Yamiks, Open Letter.

I recently saw your video about shields and while I respect your opinion, I must disagree with your current stand on shields.

First off: As you stated at the start, Shields are currently fine the way they are in PvE. I will add that it is also okay in PvP environments, save for engineered equipment which you claimed to be OP. Maybe, then again, wasn't that one of the goals of the engineer's mechanic?: to give Cmdrs a means to conjure something to give em an edge over potential threats (such as...what gamers refer to as Gank Squads for example). Now I get it that you're just arguing that Shields should be toned down (or countered some other way) a little bite. However, history has shown that whenever someone finds a little game mechanic that could benefit from a slight debuff somewhere, FDEV simply targets the whole thing (and everything related) and bring upon it Thor's Hammer; now that particular game mechanic is totally useless. Remember what happened with the 3.0 Skimmers missions?

Second: if anything, ships actually need a shield buff instead; or at least half the ships in the fleet do. See, according to third party sites like Coriolis.com for example, most ships start out very weak shields; it doesn't take much to crack those eggs. Of course shields can be upgrade with bigger sizes, higher quality, and boosters (I'm purposely leaving out engineers on this portion BTW). Even so in many cases it is not enough.

In most SciFi generas, Deflector Shield tech should advanced enough to be able to produce a forcefield strong enough to match the estimate hull/structural integrate of whatever it is protecting, give or take a little margin of error; a 1/1 shield strength to hull integrity ratio if you will. With that in mind, I've taken the liberty of comparing potential shield strength/hull integrity of different vessels; the formula used here is that each ship is equipped with largest Class-A Shield Generator it can use (depends on largest optional internal slot available), plus no more that 3 Class-A boosters available: no engineers involved. In my research, I found that while some ships do meet the 1/1 ratio standard (and a few like the Icourier for one, have a significantly greater than 1/1 ratio) roughly half of the ships available have a less than 1/1 ratio (some like the FAS are even closer to .7/1 ratio) of course some of these vessels are made to be hull tankers, but not the majority of them. Don't believe me, go ahead and do you're own research on whatever third party sites you choose; you'll see what I'm talking about.

Third: While standard (unengineered) Shields seem okay for most Cmdrs, I will admit that engineered shielding can be a bit much. But that's not because of the Deflector Shields themselves. It seems to be the case of Cmdrs' preference of the Heavy Duty type engineered Boosters; one can argue that they are overpowered, with their 56% boost in shield strength (not the 70% as you claim BTW). If I had a say at Frontier, I'd propose the Heavy Duty engineered boosters only produce roughly about 30-40% boost. Furthermore, I'd also propose to limit the number of booster to no more that 3 per ship, assuming they have that many utility slots available. That should all but solve your OP Shield problem, don't you think?

That's all I'm gonna say. To recap...Shields are fine (some, but not all, ships may actually need a buff instead), Don't want FDEV to bring down Thor's Hammer again, # of boosters on a ship should be limited to 3 and engineered HD boosters need to have their % multiplier in shield strength reduced.

Anyway sorry if I was disrupting any activity you were doing and thank you for your time.

Sincerely.
Cmdr Soundest.

P.S. +++REP for your vids; liked and subscribed.

I always find it funny that people are quick to call Reverb Cas Torps, a gimmick. When 5kMJ is just as cheesy.

My cutter has 4.5kMJ and I've never lost em in PvP or PvE. The only way someone in a small or medium ship could take em down is with sustained accurate use of feedback cascade over the course of 30/40 minutes, while popping (poormans) grom bombs, PA's and probably having to synth half way through. Failing that Reverb Cas Mines or Torps. That's it.

As a hull tanker generally, players have a myriad of ways to mess up my plans. Super Pen Rails, Missiles to drives, Cannons to modules, Pulse Laser experimentals. It's hardly balanced.

That said, I think better than nerfing would be to add alternatives similar to Feedback Cas. Those flack launchers, if they did more reliable damage could possibly work, though that could easily be OP, since most shield tanks OC the PP and forgo integrity mods.

This is definitely a topic for debate. (I know its been debated, but that is no excuse to not further debate it.)

o7

 

[biohazard15]

Someone wants to mess with mega-shields again?

Let me remind you that we, mega-shield owners and admirers, brought down in flames both FD's attempts to nerf our shields. First was in 2.2.03, second was in 2.3. We are always on watch for the third.

Hands. Off. Our. Shields!

 

[CMDR Zadian Lichtfrost]

…
In actual fact, though, Sandro has made clear that it will be completely new aggressive mechanics (e.g. anti-booster specials and weapons) because 'Nerf Ye Not!' is apparently the thing in Cambridge now.
…

The problem with the special effect or special weapon approach is, that it keeps exaggerating the problem of ship imbalance.

Every addition that actively reduces the defenses hurts already weak defenses more than it hurts the high defenses.

The way engineers mods and SBs are implemented - percentage increase of a base value - is the core problem.

 

[Maka Gucci]

The problem with the special effect or special weapon approach is, that it keeps exaggerating the problem of ship imbalance.

Every addition that actively reduces the defenses hurts already weak defenses more than it hurts the high defenses.

The way engineers mods and SBs are implemented - percentage increase of a base value - is the core problem.

I agree with you in principle, I just don't seem em indulging that approach in practice.

 

[Valen Zendaris]

See while I like the idea of shields and that protection, the fact of the matter is : engineering is NOT balanced at all and even devs know that shields are too strong, but because of this sort of backlash, change is not possible!

Absolutely agree there.

Changes that add balance without the need to downgrade engineered shield boosters could look like this:

1. Limit the amount of shield boosters to 1 per ship. (You want heavy duty? Fine. You prefer kinetic resistance? Okay.)

2. Move shield boosters to optional modules (and military slot compatible).

3. Add/significantly increase HPS output for when shields are struck if your boosters are online.

The best option IMHO: (Which would require a downgrade of engineered shield boosters though)

3. Move shield boosters to hardpoint placement. (this takes a more logical approach to: Do I want high DPS or high defenses?)