Chaff Hate

[Bigmaec]

Actually gimballed weapons (e.g. multicannons) are pretty powerful as they are. Not even doublechaffing opponents are completely safe from them, as long as you can stay really close. Instead of asking "nerf chaff" so that you can keep hitting your opponents with your favourite low-skill weaponry how about just gitting gud in range control?

This. I love my gimballed 5 booster chaff FdL, if my enemy doesn't use double chaff I pretty much always outdamage them due to how strong gimbals are.
Nerfing chaff would make gimbals even stronger.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

I lost one beluga to the station gunners that way... blooming eagles...


Fill it with HRP's, fit 5 Pack hounds, ram the shields from your opponent than set fire to their graphics chip with 3 salvos of missles (the 4th will melt your Beluga...)

I kept getting the fins stuck it the cage and shot down

 

[Sylow]

And on what i use: mix and match, as usual. When carrying both energy and ballistic weapons, at least one kind has to be gimbaled. It's quiet rare that a fixed beam and a fixed MC can hit the target at the very same time, only when you're directly on your targets tail or right in its face.

Also, for some reasons, the rails i almost always carry are fixed. And somehow i would advise everybody to always have some railguns. Reliable damage, useful engineering effects, not affected by chaff even if you don't unlock the target, hitscan even, what's not to like about it?

 

[zimms]

There was once a discussion of linking gimbal quality to sensor class. But people didn't like using heavy sensor modules and instead of lowering the weight, the proposal went the same way as all other balance overhauls: into the bin. (Huge simplification on my part).

I personally would have loved to see all/most of the proposed changes make their way into the game.

If you want to see for yourself, here is the closing statement.

(Wow, that was 3.5 years ago already....)

edit: Just wanted to highlight this part, because it made me sigh in a sad way.

The feedback we received for these changes was, in the round, extremely positive. But In the end, we felt that we didn’t get enough of it, or the time to finesse the changes further at this point to risk pulling the trigger on such a significant change.

We believe that it’s on the right track though, and we’re likely to look into it again in a future update, when we can add to the feedback we already have, and plan for more tweak time as part of the beta.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

Sorry, I'm not going to be popular here, but I got fed up of NPC chaff back when I used my Cutter for bounty hunting. A huge fixed beam and 2 large PAs sorted it. It was a far more enjoyable build too.

 

[Sylow]

There was once a discussion of linking gimbal quality to sensor class. But people didn't like using heavy sensor modules and instead of lowering the weight, the proposal went the same way as all other balance overhauls: into the bin. (Huge simplification on my part).

Sad truth: Those people who actually went into the beta and tried the changes liked them. But many players who did not even try it were afraid that they would loose and started complaining about it, till FD gave in did not roll it out. Quite similar to the story where FD tried to ever so slightly nerf stacking engineering effects on shield boosters. Just like any other game, EDs playerbase also has some inert part which opposes any change and proclaims so loudly. And unfortunately FD seems to be unable to distinguish between a thread where 500 players voiced their complaints and a thread where the very same three people were nagging around for several hundred postings in a row.

Edit: I just now read the closing statement. It was actually the same beta, where they didn't dare to do any of the nerfs. They opted out of both the nerf of shield booster stacking and out of the gimbal rework there. I thought it were two different betas where that happened, but yes, it was years ago. (I also think they tried to nerf stacking engineering effects on shield boosters more than once, but either time on the last moment didn't roll it out. But again: take that with the grain of salt that it's my old dusty brain and I can be wrong. )

 

[galahad2069]

Balancing and nerfing are two different things and not everyone flies a spaceship with a Kb/m.

The advantage of KB+M is largely a myth. FYI, the very best ace wingfighter (amongst the currently active players) is a joystick user.

BTW I was talking about range control, which has nothing to do with the preferred input method.

 

[Just Paul]

Balancing and nerfing are two different things and not everyone flies a spaceship with a Kb/m.

With a less effective chaff gimbals need to be balanced to turret or lower damage output. Or if you buff fixed weapons you have the other extreme with 1 shot-kill fixed weapons. Without or re-balanced chaff gimbals ToT always out-damage fixed weapons. If you are just jousting with gimbals you doing something wrong. Keep the nose on target and fire away, no real skill in targeting required (FAoff is your friend). Is chaff annoying, yep. In that time just work on your positioning and/or use the gimbals as fixed weapons. I love my Z4, that thing is just fun, dakka-dakka forever.

I use a gamepad and fixed weapons on almost all my combat ships. I'm not San Tu level good, but I'm not hopeless either.

 

[kaelys]

Fixed plasmas really aren't that hard to hit with. Especially if you engineer them as Focused (increases the shot speed). When I started playing with them I hit about 1 in 3 shots. After a couple of weeks I'm at about 8 in 10 shots, and I didn't even know about the little targeting circle until about 5 minutes ago. I feel that at least 1 of your weapons should be fixed.