There was a (now closed, for unrelated reasons) thread recently which featured polarized opinions about the effectiveness of packhounds. Some people, many of them quite experienced with the weapon, expressed extreme skepticism about my position that it was entirely plausible for an SLF with 30 shield to shrug off four salvos of packhounds without taking hull damage. I argued that this was entirely plausible.
My rationale:
Much math was bandied about as were conflicting personal anecdotes (and, contrary to some statements, I am not remotely inexperienced in fighting CMDRs using packhounds or with using SLFs).
Wanting to see if my initial impressions had any basis, I found an acquaintance who was willing to throw six packhound racks on an Anaconda and shoot them at one of my ships. I used a hybrid Viper with it's PDT and shields disabled, both because there is a really annoying bug that is preventing me from switching ships currently (not that being trapped in a PvP Viper III that has an 8ly jump range isn't interesting), and because I wanted a fixed pool of health that would be easy to calculate damage done to.
Anyway, the uncut video of my quick and dirty test is currently uploading and will take a bit to process, but the results will show that my Viper took approximately 751 total hull damage (after roughly 50% hull resistance) from one-thousand one-hundred fifty-two individual packhounds fired at it while it was outside minimum arming distance.
I dodged a fair ammount of the initial two volleys (at close range, not by running them out) to simulate the movements of an SLF that is attacking (once they get within weapons range NPC crew try to avoid face tanking and will continually strive to flank their targets) and then absorbed most of the hits after losing my Viper's flimsy sensors (and a glorious dodge fail on my part) made timing the boosts difficult.
Both my acquaintance and I noted that many of the packhounds were destroyed by the splash damage from others, and from the paltry damage my ship recieved (~1300 raw damage dealt, from a total potential of nearly 8000) that most of the munitions must have been dealing only splash damage, if they hit at all.
My tentative conclusion is largely unchanged from the prior thread. Packhounds do not deal anywhere near as much damage as the raw figures would suggest, especially against smaller targets which are likely to be at the edge of the blast radius of some of the missiles of a salvo that have been detonated by the first to reach that target. This effect is likely to be even more pronounced against smaller vessels, like SLFs.
After I can switch ships again, I'll check on the average number of salvos required to down an attacking SLF. I suspect it will be greater than four, except in the case of the GU-97, which suffers form both a low boost speed and very poor shields.
I will post the videos as they become available, so anyone that cares to can point out anything I may have missed.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evpkDC4Kp3s
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwmweZ4EBSA
My rationale:
Much math was bandied about as were conflicting personal anecdotes (and, contrary to some statements, I am not remotely inexperienced in fighting CMDRs using packhounds or with using SLFs).
Wanting to see if my initial impressions had any basis, I found an acquaintance who was willing to throw six packhound racks on an Anaconda and shoot them at one of my ships. I used a hybrid Viper with it's PDT and shields disabled, both because there is a really annoying bug that is preventing me from switching ships currently (not that being trapped in a PvP Viper III that has an 8ly jump range isn't interesting), and because I wanted a fixed pool of health that would be easy to calculate damage done to.
Anyway, the uncut video of my quick and dirty test is currently uploading and will take a bit to process, but the results will show that my Viper took approximately 751 total hull damage (after roughly 50% hull resistance) from one-thousand one-hundred fifty-two individual packhounds fired at it while it was outside minimum arming distance.
I dodged a fair ammount of the initial two volleys (at close range, not by running them out) to simulate the movements of an SLF that is attacking (once they get within weapons range NPC crew try to avoid face tanking and will continually strive to flank their targets) and then absorbed most of the hits after losing my Viper's flimsy sensors (and a glorious dodge fail on my part) made timing the boosts difficult.
Both my acquaintance and I noted that many of the packhounds were destroyed by the splash damage from others, and from the paltry damage my ship recieved (~1300 raw damage dealt, from a total potential of nearly 8000) that most of the munitions must have been dealing only splash damage, if they hit at all.
My tentative conclusion is largely unchanged from the prior thread. Packhounds do not deal anywhere near as much damage as the raw figures would suggest, especially against smaller targets which are likely to be at the edge of the blast radius of some of the missiles of a salvo that have been detonated by the first to reach that target. This effect is likely to be even more pronounced against smaller vessels, like SLFs.
After I can switch ships again, I'll check on the average number of salvos required to down an attacking SLF. I suspect it will be greater than four, except in the case of the GU-97, which suffers form both a low boost speed and very poor shields.
I will post the videos as they become available, so anyone that cares to can point out anything I may have missed.
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