Nerfing the FDL by X% is not equivalent to buffing just one ship by X%.
Will FdL ever get nerfed/brought in line with other ship?
- Thread starter Phoenix13
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Nerfing the FDL by X% is not equivalent to buffing just one ship by X%.
The Python was nerfed well before the FDL was buffed (wasn't it nerfed before the FDL was even released?) because it was comically overpowered. It was still potent in 1v1s because it it's a bigger ship with a more powerful distributor, more SCBs, and more weapons, but it was never particularly good in wings.
The FDL was narrowly the best all-round combat ship from it's introduction in 1.2 through 1.4, before it was buffed in 1.5. It became the combat ship from then on.
It never stopped being an issue.
Some examples from 1.3-1.4:
And a few from 1.5-2.0 (though I was still using class 5 PP in most cases, cause mass actually mattered pre-Engineers):
There was a radical difference in PvP vessel demographics between pre and post FDL buff. There was a good mix in 1.4 and earlier (where the FDL was extremely competitive, but not the singular clear choice), but after 1.5 everything quickly switched to 80%+ FDLs, and has remained that way to this day. In 1.5 and 2.0 there were still stealth FASes in abundance, but the Clipper, Python, Vulture, et al were increasingly noncompetitive. 2.1 killed stealth combat and the FAS along with it. You'll occasionally see some competitive outliers in 1v1s, but the FDL is far and away the most common, and in wing combat is very difficult to match.
If something is over represented, there is a reason for it, and the FDL is significantly over represented. If the medium combat vessels were balanced, we'd see maybe 15% of people using medium combat vessels in FDLs, but there are at least five or six times that in any situation where combat performance really matters (mostly PvP). The FDL is far and away the most popular PvP vessel and probably the most potent wing combatant in the game.
My ship was the FDL. I spent almost two thousand hours in it from 1.2 through 2.0 and it was most enjoyable when it was more of a preference, and less of a given.
Buffing other ships might restore some semblance of balance, but purely inflationary balance has serious issues and tends to blur things together, erasing much of the distinctive character of the ships. As Jukelo notes, it's also much harder to balance every other ship in the game against the FDL than it is to simply reign in the FDL to make it more competitive with other ships in it's class.
Most medium ships are multi-purpose. The FDL is distinctive because it was purpose-built as a superiority fighter and suffers severe drawbacks in other areas. You're speaking paradoxically. What about it's distinctive character? Does that not matter?
Nerfing things aren't always the answer. To be clear, I'm not even sure we have a problem here in the first place.
Fifteen medium ships. FDL, Mamba, FGS, FAS, FDS, Alliance 3, and Keelback were all made specifically for combat (according to in game descriptions). That's over half.
FDL is the most expensive medium combat ship, and I don't care if it is the best for PvP. I don't care if it gets nerfed a bit either to be honest. I don't think the problem lies with the FDL though, but rather ships being designed/balanced around ever changing metrics that have haphazardly evolved to a point that what once may have been logically traded off in favor of something else would now make no sense at all. That's the game in general too, not just ship combat, as the game evolves some things rise with the tide and other things are left behind to drown.
This is incorrect. We have 15 medium ships in the game, and 7 of them are combat ships - it is actually the most common medium ship type. Especially if you consider 2 more of them also have combat purposes.
7 Combat
1 Combat explorer
1 Combat freighter
5 Multipurpose
1 "pure" freighter
It’s not that OP anyways, it’s just more of a case of the “average” FDL tends to be better at combat than the “average” other ship, but it’s hardly a rule set in stone.
At least it sucks at pretty much everything else. That in itself is a “balance”.
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Kornelius Briedis summed things up pretty well:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWez230kbt0
The FDL was originally positioned as more of a luxury bounty hunter, not a warship. This still holds to a degree, as it's not a military vessel, isn't found in any NPC navies, and wasn't present in CGs at all until the introduction of spec ops.
Regardless, even in the current game, the FDL is far from the only medium combat vessel and being overall better than any of the other medium combat ships isn't part of it's character, it's just statistical reality.
I was speaking mainly of it's flight model and combination combat trade-offs. Originally, it was similar to a super Viper. It had modest rotationals, but the best vertical/lateral thrusters in it's class, giving it a very different flight model from most medium ships; it could not be flown the same way without crippling it's performance. Likewise, it was power constrained, which forced significant trade offs and made stacking SCBs, boosters, and power heavy weapons impractical...these aspects had to be balanced against each other, you could just pick them all.
After the buff, it became much more viable to use in a manner similar to most of the other rotational focused combat ships. Combined with the power plant upgrade, one stopped needing to make trade-offs or focus on working around it's weaknesses...because it didn't really have any. Engineers exacerbated this even further. The only thing it lacks, from a combat perspective, is the ability to pile on the hull and module protection...which are all but meaningless concessions in the current state of the game. It has a competitive distributor, solid hardpoints, the best shields, better than average speed, good rotationals (including out-of-blue-zone), still the best vertical/lateral thrusters, best or second best boost multiplier, good ENG pip slope, etc.
When there are many things that are more or less fine, and one outlier that stands above them all, nerfing that outlier is the answer.
The FDL was originally positioned as more of a luxury bounty hunter, not a warship. This still holds to a degree, as it's not a military vessel, isn't found in any NPC navies, and wasn't present in CGs at all until the introduction of spec ops.
Regardless, even in the current game, the FDL is far from the only medium combat vessel and being overall better than any of the other medium combat ships isn't part of it's character, it's just statistical reality.
I was speaking mainly of it's flight model and combination combat trade-offs. Originally, it was similar to a super Viper. It had modest rotationals, but the best vertical/lateral thrusters in it's class, giving it a very different flight model from most medium ships; it could not be flown the same way without crippling it's performance. Likewise, it was power constrained, which forced significant trade offs and made stacking SCBs, boosters, and power heavy weapons impractical...these aspects had to be balanced against each other, you could just pick them all.
After the buff, it became much more viable to use in a manner similar to most of the other rotational focused combat ships. Combined with the power plant upgrade, one stopped needing to make trade-offs or focus on working around it's weaknesses...because it didn't really have any. Engineers exacerbated this even further. The only thing it lacks, from a combat perspective, is the ability to pile on the hull and module protection...which are all but meaningless concessions in the current state of the game. It has a competitive distributor, solid hardpoints, the best shields, better than average speed, good rotationals (including out-of-blue-zone), still the best vertical/lateral thrusters, best or second best boost multiplier, good ENG pip slope, etc.
When there are many things that are more or less fine, and one outlier that stands above them all, nerfing that outlier is the answer.
The other “combat” mediums can do other roles significantly better than the FDL so it wouldn’t be fair to expect them to be as good at combat as the FDL. The FDL is really horrible at everything but combat.
Even then, some of the others can certainly go up against the FDL with even a decent pilot.
Not most of the Alliance ships. Also, the other combat mediums, even some of the multii-purpose mediums, are worse than the Python and Krait at essentially everything, including combat. Balancing combat ships by saying they can suck slightly less than the FDL, at some non-combat things that they're still horrible at, is no balance at all.
Thanks!
I'll watch all of them - it is good to see things as they were prior to my joining in the fun!
Regarding the “80%+ FDLs” statistics, it could be argued that it’s not necessarily because the FDL is way OP. As a game’s life cycle matures and becomes more popular, more guides come out, more game mechanics data gets published, and more META information becomes available.
As new players join, especially if they are into PVP, they want to get competitive as quickly as possible. They look at all the info and the stats and all the META and just go with that. The FDL could just be 5 or 10% better at fighting than other combat ships but that’s all it takes. Competitive players, especially ones newer to the game, will go after every edge they can hoping that META stats can overcome the lack of experience.
As new players join, especially if they are into PVP, they want to get competitive as quickly as possible. They look at all the info and the stats and all the META and just go with that. The FDL could just be 5 or 10% better at fighting than other combat ships but that’s all it takes. Competitive players, especially ones newer to the game, will go after every edge they can hoping that META stats can overcome the lack of experience.
True, although I'm a total scrub, I can throw it around much better now than when I first flew it, one day I may graduate to mediocre
No.
Nerf it!! If only for the salt 
You can’t just consider PVP, and if you consider PVE as well I don’t think it’s so clear cut. For example one can argue the Chieftain is a better AX fighter than the Krait because of its superior agility.
You can only truly balance combat ships if you only take a look at the combat aspect specifically. If a ship can do other things reasonably well then it’s no longer a pure combat ship and can’t be expected to perform exactly as well in combat as a pure combat ship.
Even within the realm of combat there are different types of combat and some ships might be better at one type of combat vs another (like AX).
I’d sooner take a Vette into a faction war zone than an FDL, but I wouldn’t take a Vette into a wing PVP fight.
How specific of a scenario do you want to balance for?
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Asp Scout "combat explorer" LMAO. If by "combat" they mean can physically equip weapons....okay then sure.
Okay man you can go by some Wiki descriptions all you want of the ships, that's cool. They are all over the place with that, it's entirely subjective. The Krait II is listed as "multipurpose" and it's better than half the "combat" ships in the game at killing stuff.
Most pilots who try to break out of that meta just wind back up in the FDL because the metas are what they are for a reason. Other ships have situational advantages, but the FDL is the most reliable choice.
It doesn't take a huge advantage over peer-vessels to make something way OP. The FDL got a ~15% boost to pitch rate, ~10%+ to roll/yaw, and a size larger PP. This was enough to go from essentially equal odds of seeing a PvPer in any of a half-dozen ships, to them being in that FDL over two-thirds of the time. Engineering skewed things even further by depreciating hull/module defenses in favor of shields and making prior buffs even more relevant.
I would have assumed that the idea behind having all these ships is to have some variety and some real options. 1.5s buffs to the FDL took away from that.
Everything looks more or less the same in PvE because there are few NPC challenges to accentuate the differences between ships. Even AX combat suffers from this.
Using PvE combat for balance arguments is like choosing a CPU based on how well it handles web browsing.
The most general possible. Ships of similar design goals and market segment should be roughly equally represented, in tasks that push them to the limits of that intended goal, if they are balanced. This is less the case now than before, which implies balance has suffered.
They better keep their filthy hands off my Mambas!
While we're on the subject of ships I'd love to see some new Zorgon Peterson ships, perhaps in different sizes.
I love the ridiculous "sports car" designs and would love some new options to rinse my credits on...just putting that out there...