rootsrat
Volunteer Moderator
In your humble opinion
Dear Fdev: Can you stop nerfing the thargoids in every way?
- Thread starter Firehawk894
- Start date
...so do you want the maths again, or...? Not sure where you're going with this.In your humble opinion
Maths... The answer to everything, which is why I never make public the ship configurations I use, because, in mathematical terms, they are very sub-optimal, but are great fun, for me.
It isn't all numbers, unless one's enjoyment is solely numbers, surely?
Don't worry, I've done so.
Back at the start of the war, I kitted out a vulture with 2x large plasma chargers and went to kill a Cyclops. Worst fight of my life. Uses all your power even with 4 pips to weapons, and doesn't seem to offer the damage in exchange.
Likewise, my first Basilisk solo was with unmodified shard cannons. The damage is there, but the spread, unfortunately, is so wide it is almost impossible to get all the pellets to hit the heart, even at point blank range. Once you get the first heart down you can abuse the lightning to just unload into the next hearts, but it's just not worth it.
And regrettably, neither is terribly effective against scouts. Shard cannons run into the problem of spread again, so by the time you miss three-quarters of your pellets, you're going to be better off using multicannons, even before gimballed ones existed. And Plasma Chargers have poor damage per energy, and slow enough projectile speed to make getting hits chancy at best with the erratic movement of scouts.
It's not like they're unusable, it's just that there's no reason TO use them, and the math backs that up.
Shards are actually good tho against targets that are big and immobile like the core. They're slightly better against glaives than missiles since you get less damage on target and can just dump a whole clip fast.
Non-azimuth plasma is still terrible and the only reason to use that is to have a fun build with enough to try to gib a scout at full charge or something, assuming you can hit the slower shots against dodging scouts somehow. If the low damage wasn't an issue the heat still would be.
rootsrat
Volunteer Moderator
Where I'm going with this, is context. They're only "bad" or "not worth using" if you're bothered about maximising your damage output.
Not everyone cares about min maxing. This might come as a shock, but some of us play just for the fun of it.
There is no one universal truth here. Threads and videos like this are the reason people think Elite is a grind, that all the planets look the same, that you should only get your mats at Dav's Hope and that SCO is a useless addition that nobody should use.
Well guess what? "It's just like your opinion man", to quote a classic.
While true, this IS the hardest content in the game. If you want to maximize your performance and achieve the greatest power possible, this is where you are going to come.
And, perhaps more pertinently, over something like 5 years of having thargoids before the war, virtually nobody used them.
If they were bad and lots of people were using them because they're really cool and fun to use, that's one thing. But if they're not only bad mathematically, but also vanishingly rare to see used, that indicates a problem.
And I say this as one of the players who DID use them! My first basilisk solo was with shard cannons, after all.
rootsrat
Volunteer Moderator
True, but it's all about presentation. Words are important.
"They're just bad and are not worth using" sound completely different to "If you want to maximise your damage, you should look elsewhere" as an example.
One is presenting your opinion as if it was a fact. The other is presenting of an actual and undeniable fact.
People act like they are the Oracle of Everything just because they did some math or they have gazillion views on TwitTubeTok. And I say that being a content creator myself.
rootsrat
Volunteer Moderator
Haha lol, don't worry, I'm personally done with this thread nowDear lord, what have I started
(And that's a fact!)
In your opinion.
rootsrat
Volunteer Moderator
No, that's an actual fact.In your opinion.
I'll take that. Its probably the only thing that might get me interested in doing Thargoid stuff.
"Get thee to a nunnery, begone!"Dear lord, what have I started
There will always be differing opinions between the folk who play just to enjoy themselves, and those who play for 'efficiency' above everything else.
It would be a terribly boring world if we all thought exactly the same as each other, after all!
In your opinion.
That might depend on who we were all thinking the same as.
