Of course if it was up to me all combat would start well outside visual range and consist of lobbing missiles and torpedoes at each other and watching the PDC and flak lightshow try and shoot them down, probably because I’ve watched too much of the Expanse. Of course, I’m fully aware that even if that was the case I’d still be terrible at it and fewer people would enjoy it
It's a good game. But a different one. In the end, EVE is just that, for example.
They don't. Hull reinforcement spam made lasers almost useless. Guess why the MC is the universal solution? Low distributor draw, multipurpose damage. But only when engineered. The bullet sponge is real and TTK went way up with vanilla gear.
in my experience the only thing that still reliably did damage was ramming. The rest was nerfed to near uselessness. Ammo-based weapons I had already classified too under near useless back then because of the hassle with reloading.
I use a mix of weapons since launch. Pure laser setups at all times suffered from reduced damage against hull. So yes, of course my setups included things like cannons, multi-cannons or frag cannons, mostly depending on the speed and agility profile of the ship i was trying out.
And if reloading once every few hours is too much of a hassle, then yes, by all means you then have to limit yourself to lasers and suffer the low killing speed.
Sidenote: i even got the impression that there's a tier in NPCs, where lasers currently are sometimes MORE effective against their hull than they were before engineers came aorund. These NPCs have their hull and shields engineered the same way as we do it, when we even out our resists. But they are at G1 or G2 instead of full G5, which means that they still pay a price for the increase in kinetic and explosive resist on their hull: they give up a lot of the thermal resist. (Once the target is dangerous or above, their engineering actually seems to be high enough to offset this, though. )
Anyway, based on the fact that (as described about) i at some time took and take non-engineered weapons to battle and they perform well enough, i stick to my point of view: in terms of offense, engineers did not break the game. It's the crazy defense stacking, which NPCs still don't use to the same level as players, which is the real issue. And i am still convinced that if FD would put NPCs defense to just 80% of what players can achieve, the community would go crazy and we'd be drowning in rivers of tears, asking for defense to be nerfed.
