loading a diamondback scout with torpedoes and waiting outside the station in silent running? That'll never work, nobody was ever ganked that way.
Do reverberating cascade torpedoes need an adjustment?
- Thread starter amadeus1171
- Start date
Torps are incredibly slow, and very easy to dodge.
I honestly don't think they're in a bad spot, aside from the fact point defense is totally useless against them.
I honestly don't think they're in a bad spot, aside from the fact point defense is totally useless against them.
A small fiberglass boat full of ordnance can incapacitate a US Navy destroyer.
USS Cole bombing - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
As pointed out before, that's exactly what torpedoes are designed to do, take out larger vessels.
U-Boats did very, very well during WWII.
And get destroyed themselves.
Torpedos are HUGE heavy things, you know.
You're trying to make this personal so you can make a personal attack by saying to me "get gud" or some nonsense like that. I thought you would have taken the hint that I'm not biting. But I guess I have to explain this to you.
Nope. Just trying to ascertain whether you had any actual experience with the PvP change you were suggesting. Many people have been posting here lately about PvP without actually having done any, for instance about drag munitions.
Statistically, my ED corvette has a higher survival rate against torpedo attack and a higher kill rate against torpedo attackers than one would expect in a similar real-world scenario.
Indeed, the last time my CMDR lost his large ship to an attack that featured torpedoes (which was, purely coincidentally, the last time I lost the ship in combat), he shot down the ship carrying them three times in the same fight (station was pretty close so he just came back with more while I was fighting his wing).
An single small torpedo pylon in ED is 4000kg and can do almost nothing to a 2000 ton ship.
A 21-inch mark 20 torpedo is ~900kg and can readily sink 10000+ ton ships in one hit.
Bob Lighthouse
Banned
Yes, point being you don't even need a topedo, nor torpedo boat in fact, to take out a warship.
It's a LOWER bar to suicide bomb it with a tiny fiberglass boat.
Lol.
Really, I should be able to kamikaze a Sidey full of explosives and kill a Cutter.
Examples of torps taking out warships are numerous, and a given.
Ok, the discussion about reverberating cascade torpedoes needing an adjustment shifted to just torpedoes. How the heck did that happen?!
Let's focus on the reverberating cascade portion itself.
Let's focus on the reverberating cascade portion itself.
Reverb torps are generally only a problem if you are
A: Asleep
B: Inexperienced
I’ve been torpedoed a couple times myself. The one instance I remember the best was a 1v2 situation in my Anaconda. The torp bomber had to leave, repair/rearm, while I continued to fight his friend. I’d managed to shoot most of the torpedoes down with missiles during the first half. Their second torpedo attack finally took out my generator, during a severe lapse in situational awareness. The FDL I was occupied with was exceptionally difficult to hit, and I had some serious tunnel vision going on. I wasn’t quite the pilot that I am now back then, either.
Situational awareness is the best defense against torpedoes. Check builds, watch your sensors, it’s not difficult. If you know they’re present on the field, it’s easy to be prepared. Just boost in the opposite direction— all ships except maybe a T9 should be able to cruise faster than torps.
Flip in FA off and continue engaging your attacker as you drift if you choose. Just keep moving away from the torpedo and you should be fine. They will run out of fuel and self destruct after some time if you don’t have a way of shooting them down.
A: Asleep
B: Inexperienced
I’ve been torpedoed a couple times myself. The one instance I remember the best was a 1v2 situation in my Anaconda. The torp bomber had to leave, repair/rearm, while I continued to fight his friend. I’d managed to shoot most of the torpedoes down with missiles during the first half. Their second torpedo attack finally took out my generator, during a severe lapse in situational awareness. The FDL I was occupied with was exceptionally difficult to hit, and I had some serious tunnel vision going on. I wasn’t quite the pilot that I am now back then, either.
Situational awareness is the best defense against torpedoes. Check builds, watch your sensors, it’s not difficult. If you know they’re present on the field, it’s easy to be prepared. Just boost in the opposite direction— all ships except maybe a T9 should be able to cruise faster than torps.
Flip in FA off and continue engaging your attacker as you drift if you choose. Just keep moving away from the torpedo and you should be fine. They will run out of fuel and self destruct after some time if you don’t have a way of shooting them down.
It already takes a significant proportion of your hardpoints to blow out a shield with reverbs. A corvette using them against another corvette will have to give up their smalls as well as either their large or both medium hardpoints to render their opponent shieldless, leaving them to fight with only 3 or 4 of their 7 hardpoints for the rest of the battle. And god help them if their opponent manages to reboot when they've got no torps left.
The only problem here is that gigantic god-shields are so good and so unbalanced compared to any other defensive measure that anything that counters them seems overpowered.
The only problem here is that gigantic god-shields are so good and so unbalanced compared to any other defensive measure that anything that counters them seems overpowered.
Bob Lighthouse
Banned
Torps are not OP, if anything they are way too slow.
If anything, all these balance discussions are about the effect that defences can have on the meta.
Imagine a fantasy RPG where fire spells do more damage than lightning or ice. Because they do objectively more DPS, the meta is fire spells. So of course everyone stacks fire resistance. Everything becomes fire spells versus fire resistance until one day some sneaky notices the defence meta and wades in with a lightning build - he's doing significantly less raw DPS than his opponents, but with an attack they haven't made themselves immune to. This doesn't make lightning OP.
This is a noticeable thing in E
too - plasma accelerators in PvE are honestly not that great against NPCs and unengineered ships compared to just packing a cannon. Sure they're good but they're not an absolute gamechanger, offering a decent damage/AP increase at the cost of power/distro draw. Solid but far from overpowered.
Since engineering came along and people started stacking upwards of 50% resistance to everything though, that marginal damage increase turns into an outright doubling. Now they're the hot must-have weapon, and it's purely because of the balance changes that have been made on the defensive side rather than any changes made to the weapons themselves.
Imagine a fantasy RPG where fire spells do more damage than lightning or ice. Because they do objectively more DPS, the meta is fire spells. So of course everyone stacks fire resistance. Everything becomes fire spells versus fire resistance until one day some sneaky notices the defence meta and wades in with a lightning build - he's doing significantly less raw DPS than his opponents, but with an attack they haven't made themselves immune to. This doesn't make lightning OP.
This is a noticeable thing in E
too - plasma accelerators in PvE are honestly not that great against NPCs and unengineered ships compared to just packing a cannon. Sure they're good but they're not an absolute gamechanger, offering a decent damage/AP increase at the cost of power/distro draw. Solid but far from overpowered.Since engineering came along and people started stacking upwards of 50% resistance to everything though, that marginal damage increase turns into an outright doubling. Now they're the hot must-have weapon, and it's purely because of the balance changes that have been made on the defensive side rather than any changes made to the weapons themselves.
They are inseparable because the only thing of note a torpedo can do is deliver reverberating cascade, so virtually all torpedoes are reverberating cascade.
The base damage was once very impressive, but it's remained the same while defenses have inflated by a full order of magnitude. They do less practical damage to most targets than a single large PA shot. So, their damage is now irrelevant given how few of them can be carried.
Likewise, there aren't any other torpedo specials that are worth a damn, even though they are fairly potent in relative terms, because they are hard to deliver (torpedoes are slow) and can only be delivered a few times (torpedo pylons have small ammo pools) before the hardpoint is spent.
Reverberating cascade is fairly potent, because if it were not, there would be even fewer than the tiny handful of counters to shields we already have and because with out a potent effect, torpedoes would vanish from use entirely.
The effect is about as weak as it can be and still remain valid. It takes three medium hardpoints of reverberating torpedoes to pose a serious threat to most heavier combat ships.
Honestly this conversation can't go anywhere because the entirety of the disagreement is not about the effect but about what kind of game Elite should be. One camp thinks that successively larger ships should be treated like successively higher levels in an RPG, where more always equals better and once you've grinded enough you have earned the right to be immune to lower level attacks. The other camp thinks that larger and larger ships should be treated as successively more powerful and complex tools, with a greater range of capabilities and a correspondingly greater level of skill and attention to deploy those capabilities effectively.
People in camp 1 don't think it should ever be possible for a "low level" ship to take down a "high level" ship, no matter the disparity in skill or tactics employed by the pilots involved.
People in camp 2 don't think that any amount of equipment or outfitting should be enough to negate the importance of skill, planning, and tactics.
That's the only real conversation there is. Everything else is a rhetorical proxy war.
People in camp 1 don't think it should ever be possible for a "low level" ship to take down a "high level" ship, no matter the disparity in skill or tactics employed by the pilots involved.
People in camp 2 don't think that any amount of equipment or outfitting should be enough to negate the importance of skill, planning, and tactics.
That's the only real conversation there is. Everything else is a rhetorical proxy war.
I've decided to pick up torpedoes again and start practicing with them to see what the practical limits of their effectiveness can be. Right now, I'm mostly dumping them into Spec Ops ships in CZs (it's a fun way to do BGS work) so I can get a feel for the basics before I move on to PvP scenarios.
Goal, of course, is to minimize time between launch and an armed impact, as well as attempt to get all the torpedoes required to knock out the shield generator in question to land as simultaneously as practical...in order to minimize reaction time.
I've reliably got it down to ~4 seconds between the first launch and the impact of the second salvo from two pylons, at least against Elite NPCs in Python or FDLs.
Example:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R0hbN6c3J4
Of course, things will be more difficult against CMDRs who know what they are doing and I will have to adjust tactics (and fire groups) to not telegraph the attack so obviously, but I have high hopes.
Goal, of course, is to minimize time between launch and an armed impact, as well as attempt to get all the torpedoes required to knock out the shield generator in question to land as simultaneously as practical...in order to minimize reaction time.
I've reliably got it down to ~4 seconds between the first launch and the impact of the second salvo from two pylons, at least against Elite NPCs in Python or FDLs.
Example:
Of course, things will be more difficult against CMDRs who know what they are doing and I will have to adjust tactics (and fire groups) to not telegraph the attack so obviously, but I have high hopes.
Why not introduce an OC mod for PD fire? Or, base reverb damage on the amount of boosters installed-so, if you have x8 boosters you get x8 the damage, while a 'normal' shield gets only the base damage?
Lol, a torpedo at speeds lower than ship speeds? I can't facepalm enough about the armchair dev opinions here. You know what needs rework? The power juice that forces you to shoot 4 torpedos at a ship to get a chance to finally scratch their hull.
Isn't that the point of a small ship stacking torpedoes? To be highly effective against big ships (and consequently, useless at literally everything else? )
If FDev were actually going to rip off the bandaid and rework engineering effects to address hitpoint inflation, that would probably be low on the to-do list. That said, I do like the idea of reverb weapons attacking shield boosters as well as the shield generator itself. It would open the possibility for reverb weapons to be less of an all-or-nothing tactic, if an attack that doesn't destroy the shield gen still blows out some or all of the shield boosters, leaving the target with a working but substantially weaker shield.