Let me preface this with that I almost never post here, and I am not quite certain this is the right location. I originally had this on Reddit, but frontier support asked me to cross post this.
Additionally, I am just talking numbers. Not feelings or impressions. A lot of people here are going to think I am wrong in this coming wall of text. Feel free to argue about it, I would love to see other numbers.
I will preface this with you will not see large ships in organized PVP. It will be nothing larger than FDLs, and here is why.
Engineering.
So everyone whines and complains about Big 3 shield tanks, and for pve they are 100% correct, the big 3's bloated EHP pools are ridiculous. PvP, not so.
Let me crunch some numbers. Let’s do the bigger hammer approach first. FAS vs cutter. A literal perfect roll for frag munitions is 416 damage for a C3. For a whole FAS this is 1432 DPS under 500 meters. Obviously this is largely gated by reload time as the fire rate is 7.5 shots per second, so let’s call that .5 seconds to fire. Ish. And a 5 second reload.
So for ACTUAL dps we get 3 damage * 12 rounds * 6 shots for the meds and 4.6 damage * 12 rounds * 6 shots for the larges, and two of each. Total: 1094 damage, perfect dmg modifier 10% for 1203. 5.5 Sec fire cycle, 219 dps. For all mags w/o synth ammo (which makes this SUPER silly if it works at the moment, I can't recall) this is 6.5k damage in the clips in thirty seconds. With a OC setup 144 dps with cycle 8.7k total in 60 seconds.
With all pips to shields and 50% resistances an absolute maximum total shields cutter (6A shield, 2 8 SCBs, it's a dumb build for pvp because frag burst will own you and you get owned by scb busters) you have 34K EHP shield. You can afk booster spam against 4 ships till they are out of ammo! Right?
Wrong.
1.8k shield recharging with perfect double banks for 134 shield per second is shield failure at 102 seconds. You will have almost no TOT due to not being able to afford pip to engines, as a bonus one of them is a drag frag. And in reality you are going to lose 1/3 (~2 sec at 1-2 pips) of your shield before you realize how you are and scb take 5 sec to spin up while you perfectly shift to 4 pips, that's another 400 dmg. That's about 48 seconds till shield failure. With 2 ships that's 11 seconds. GG no re. You lose all 2v1 ON INTERDICTION.
8A prisms for 3.3k net shield + 1 8A SCB. Same as the last you lose ~1k shield before "oh" with 1 SCB, time to shield failure is 76 seconds. With two ships that's 31 seconds. With 3 ships you can't hardly low wake at 22 seconds with shields if 1 player restarts your drives courtesy of Yuri for a 15 second delay, better not have your FSD offline in combat to save power. This is dependent a lot on wake entrances.
I have it on good authority that the 6A build lasts about 10 seconds after the first shot. I lost 1/2 my shields before I got pips to shields. I boosted, called for them to wait and attempted to turn report crimes off to duel with new builds. Each volley (from both) did about 10% of my hull at 36.5% resistance and 3.4k hp. I survived because when they interdicted a second time I managed to line up the high wake while mid interdiction. I think the only reason I survived the initial attack of the double fas gank was the 200% hardness or whatever it is at the moment. 195 I think.
Long intro.
Next up. 3 passes from a hull tank cobra. Woops, they have long range super penetrators and Reverb mines (x2 he said). I saw him coming in straight no shields and rammed him for about 20% hull. I lost 88% of my shield HP (142 HP total) in three passes. With mod reinforcements, although I don't think they affect mines. Only reason I survived that is that the cobra was slow. If he had brought another mine with the slow on it I would have died, as I just was able to outrun him for some reason.
Third. Reverb torps. They do about 22-25% to my shields HP. It's a matter of numbers with no way to reinforce their HP. either the opponent can catch you or they cannot, and if they can your shields die if they do it perfectly. Otherwise 2 ships is just fish in a barrel if you cannot outrun or wake. Oh, and bonus points if it's 2 FDLs with 3 torps each for 12 shots. Large fixed cannons do the rest for drives. And that last hardpoint on each? Take a slow missile and a Yuri missile. Guaranteed victory even if the first thing you do is try to highwake.
Hum, what else.
Fourth. Efficient PA/rail combos annihilate shields 1/4 on an FDL. You can get up 41% thermal load reduction with sturdies, or 100% range, or -30% power and distro draw on rails. With PAs you get that sweet 50% effective damage boost due to it being true damage. For PAs 100% shot speed and range are a thing, as is the same 30% power and distro draw, and -41% thermal load reduction, but let’s be real -71% thermal load efficients with a -46% Distro draw take the cake. These assume perfect rolls. Which a pvper is going to have at least a few of, or at least something that is 90% of the buff. I got a -70% efficient C4 PA in beta. It is hysterical how much you can fire it.
If you are just being shot at by multis/pulse of c1-2, you just totally shrug it off with your enhanced hardness. I am not doing any calcs because math is hard and I have the flu. However, anything with a sturdy mount and a corrosive still penetrates all the way as do rails/PA, they have 200 Peirce. Your ability to duke it out with a foe that doesn't sub target (npcs) and into pve combat in general EHP is increased quite nicely due to hull buffs if the majority of your HP is in your SCB and not your shield. This really only works well on the cutter/clipper/anaconda/corvette as they can get away with undersizing their shields and still have enough HP to do a full bank with colossal size 7-8 scb.
Cutters are actually the best post 2.3 for shields by miles and miles and miles since so much HP is in their SCB. I only lost ~600 shield on a 6 booster build because I did something odd with my shields. I took a heavy duty shield upgrade (increases optimal multiplier) and then stacked thermal boosters + resists + 1 heavy duty until I got to the same 50-60% resists. As far as I can tell that is the new optimal build for shield tanks. With perfect rolls you can hit caps of resistance and HP with 5 boosters, but I got tired of feeding engineers fish.
So, Wall of Text.
Conclusions.
The proposed beta changes are very good overall from a pve perspective. They reward decision making while shooting at the big 3 in pve. Pop the shields snipe the drives/pp, because unless you are in a rail/plasma/something big yourself your time to kill just plinking at the hull is going to suck. It makes pve just a little harder to survive by dropping shield maxes by about 25%. I am 100% for anything that increases difficulty in the game.
From a pvp perspective it is a total and complete failure. The big three need their base shield values to be huge to survive burst, and banks are countered by rails. 4000 HP shields are NOTHING if you come with a modded imperial hammer. Engineers have from day 1 of 2.1 been the counter to other engineers and with the engineer weapons now more fully fleshed out in 2.3 the only op thing left is heat cannons, but that is another discussion. The tools to take out 2.2 shields are in game. You can kill cutters/corvettes with cobras with little risk (shout out to Na'Qan) 1v1, and armor is meaningless with subtargeting, or just massive damage. A single huge cannon will DECIMATE drives even with MRPs, although the hardness changes do seem to well protect PPs of a corvette.
Dedicated builds wipe out good players. PVE needs fixing yes, due massive shields and little to no risk or decision making, but just give NPCs some g pvp weapons and purpose built engineering rather than random mods with random crap rolls. When was the last time a npc shot a torpedo at you, or interrupted your SCB charge, or had the same silly shields that we do, or was able to outrun your dirty drives? I get that low level rookies would get stomped, but just put these elite NPCs in High CZ, Haz res and vs seriously wanted criminals. Give them 1-10M bounties for a full wing of elites if they are criminals themselves, and make us sweat for those kills. I would give anything to take a 10 million mission to kill a pirate lord in my Cutter, and have all my friends deploy in fighters to swarm this colossal foe. Or a 40M mission where you are given coordinates on a random planet 40 ly away where there is a fallen data cache pertaining to the home base of a pirate clan. You deploy fighters near the surface and comb the area until the cache is found, which the mothership can scan. You jump 2 systems away to the new location and get in the fight of your life against 4 elite anacondas, who are patrolling near one of the Arena assets, all engineered to the absolute gills.
TLDR: If you moan about engineered shields being too strong, bring some weapons that are meant to defeat them. I would like to get some videos that are more easily consumable than this, if anyone is available to assist in beta.
Additionally, I am just talking numbers. Not feelings or impressions. A lot of people here are going to think I am wrong in this coming wall of text. Feel free to argue about it, I would love to see other numbers.
I will preface this with you will not see large ships in organized PVP. It will be nothing larger than FDLs, and here is why.
Engineering.
So everyone whines and complains about Big 3 shield tanks, and for pve they are 100% correct, the big 3's bloated EHP pools are ridiculous. PvP, not so.
Let me crunch some numbers. Let’s do the bigger hammer approach first. FAS vs cutter. A literal perfect roll for frag munitions is 416 damage for a C3. For a whole FAS this is 1432 DPS under 500 meters. Obviously this is largely gated by reload time as the fire rate is 7.5 shots per second, so let’s call that .5 seconds to fire. Ish. And a 5 second reload.
So for ACTUAL dps we get 3 damage * 12 rounds * 6 shots for the meds and 4.6 damage * 12 rounds * 6 shots for the larges, and two of each. Total: 1094 damage, perfect dmg modifier 10% for 1203. 5.5 Sec fire cycle, 219 dps. For all mags w/o synth ammo (which makes this SUPER silly if it works at the moment, I can't recall) this is 6.5k damage in the clips in thirty seconds. With a OC setup 144 dps with cycle 8.7k total in 60 seconds.
With all pips to shields and 50% resistances an absolute maximum total shields cutter (6A shield, 2 8 SCBs, it's a dumb build for pvp because frag burst will own you and you get owned by scb busters) you have 34K EHP shield. You can afk booster spam against 4 ships till they are out of ammo! Right?
Wrong.
1.8k shield recharging with perfect double banks for 134 shield per second is shield failure at 102 seconds. You will have almost no TOT due to not being able to afford pip to engines, as a bonus one of them is a drag frag. And in reality you are going to lose 1/3 (~2 sec at 1-2 pips) of your shield before you realize how you are and scb take 5 sec to spin up while you perfectly shift to 4 pips, that's another 400 dmg. That's about 48 seconds till shield failure. With 2 ships that's 11 seconds. GG no re. You lose all 2v1 ON INTERDICTION.
8A prisms for 3.3k net shield + 1 8A SCB. Same as the last you lose ~1k shield before "oh" with 1 SCB, time to shield failure is 76 seconds. With two ships that's 31 seconds. With 3 ships you can't hardly low wake at 22 seconds with shields if 1 player restarts your drives courtesy of Yuri for a 15 second delay, better not have your FSD offline in combat to save power. This is dependent a lot on wake entrances.
I have it on good authority that the 6A build lasts about 10 seconds after the first shot. I lost 1/2 my shields before I got pips to shields. I boosted, called for them to wait and attempted to turn report crimes off to duel with new builds. Each volley (from both) did about 10% of my hull at 36.5% resistance and 3.4k hp. I survived because when they interdicted a second time I managed to line up the high wake while mid interdiction. I think the only reason I survived the initial attack of the double fas gank was the 200% hardness or whatever it is at the moment. 195 I think.
Long intro.
Next up. 3 passes from a hull tank cobra. Woops, they have long range super penetrators and Reverb mines (x2 he said). I saw him coming in straight no shields and rammed him for about 20% hull. I lost 88% of my shield HP (142 HP total) in three passes. With mod reinforcements, although I don't think they affect mines. Only reason I survived that is that the cobra was slow. If he had brought another mine with the slow on it I would have died, as I just was able to outrun him for some reason.
Third. Reverb torps. They do about 22-25% to my shields HP. It's a matter of numbers with no way to reinforce their HP. either the opponent can catch you or they cannot, and if they can your shields die if they do it perfectly. Otherwise 2 ships is just fish in a barrel if you cannot outrun or wake. Oh, and bonus points if it's 2 FDLs with 3 torps each for 12 shots. Large fixed cannons do the rest for drives. And that last hardpoint on each? Take a slow missile and a Yuri missile. Guaranteed victory even if the first thing you do is try to highwake.
Hum, what else.
Fourth. Efficient PA/rail combos annihilate shields 1/4 on an FDL. You can get up 41% thermal load reduction with sturdies, or 100% range, or -30% power and distro draw on rails. With PAs you get that sweet 50% effective damage boost due to it being true damage. For PAs 100% shot speed and range are a thing, as is the same 30% power and distro draw, and -41% thermal load reduction, but let’s be real -71% thermal load efficients with a -46% Distro draw take the cake. These assume perfect rolls. Which a pvper is going to have at least a few of, or at least something that is 90% of the buff. I got a -70% efficient C4 PA in beta. It is hysterical how much you can fire it.
If you are just being shot at by multis/pulse of c1-2, you just totally shrug it off with your enhanced hardness. I am not doing any calcs because math is hard and I have the flu. However, anything with a sturdy mount and a corrosive still penetrates all the way as do rails/PA, they have 200 Peirce. Your ability to duke it out with a foe that doesn't sub target (npcs) and into pve combat in general EHP is increased quite nicely due to hull buffs if the majority of your HP is in your SCB and not your shield. This really only works well on the cutter/clipper/anaconda/corvette as they can get away with undersizing their shields and still have enough HP to do a full bank with colossal size 7-8 scb.
Cutters are actually the best post 2.3 for shields by miles and miles and miles since so much HP is in their SCB. I only lost ~600 shield on a 6 booster build because I did something odd with my shields. I took a heavy duty shield upgrade (increases optimal multiplier) and then stacked thermal boosters + resists + 1 heavy duty until I got to the same 50-60% resists. As far as I can tell that is the new optimal build for shield tanks. With perfect rolls you can hit caps of resistance and HP with 5 boosters, but I got tired of feeding engineers fish.
So, Wall of Text.
Conclusions.
The proposed beta changes are very good overall from a pve perspective. They reward decision making while shooting at the big 3 in pve. Pop the shields snipe the drives/pp, because unless you are in a rail/plasma/something big yourself your time to kill just plinking at the hull is going to suck. It makes pve just a little harder to survive by dropping shield maxes by about 25%. I am 100% for anything that increases difficulty in the game.
From a pvp perspective it is a total and complete failure. The big three need their base shield values to be huge to survive burst, and banks are countered by rails. 4000 HP shields are NOTHING if you come with a modded imperial hammer. Engineers have from day 1 of 2.1 been the counter to other engineers and with the engineer weapons now more fully fleshed out in 2.3 the only op thing left is heat cannons, but that is another discussion. The tools to take out 2.2 shields are in game. You can kill cutters/corvettes with cobras with little risk (shout out to Na'Qan) 1v1, and armor is meaningless with subtargeting, or just massive damage. A single huge cannon will DECIMATE drives even with MRPs, although the hardness changes do seem to well protect PPs of a corvette.
Dedicated builds wipe out good players. PVE needs fixing yes, due massive shields and little to no risk or decision making, but just give NPCs some g pvp weapons and purpose built engineering rather than random mods with random crap rolls. When was the last time a npc shot a torpedo at you, or interrupted your SCB charge, or had the same silly shields that we do, or was able to outrun your dirty drives? I get that low level rookies would get stomped, but just put these elite NPCs in High CZ, Haz res and vs seriously wanted criminals. Give them 1-10M bounties for a full wing of elites if they are criminals themselves, and make us sweat for those kills. I would give anything to take a 10 million mission to kill a pirate lord in my Cutter, and have all my friends deploy in fighters to swarm this colossal foe. Or a 40M mission where you are given coordinates on a random planet 40 ly away where there is a fallen data cache pertaining to the home base of a pirate clan. You deploy fighters near the surface and comb the area until the cache is found, which the mothership can scan. You jump 2 systems away to the new location and get in the fight of your life against 4 elite anacondas, who are patrolling near one of the Arena assets, all engineered to the absolute gills.
TLDR: If you moan about engineered shields being too strong, bring some weapons that are meant to defeat them. I would like to get some videos that are more easily consumable than this, if anyone is available to assist in beta.
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