Module Reinforcement Package Boost, Seeker Missile Nerf for All Classes, Overall Boost to Hull Tank Builds

Hull tanks are in a very bad position with regards to combat, and this is all due to shield stacking ships such as the Mamba and FDL. These ships not only are faster than most hull tanks, but are overpowered when equipped with seeker missile racks (and when they fly in reverse).

  • Module reinforcement packages don't really do much to protect ships from module damage, especially when the other ship has seeker missiles as they can just spam these over and over again to damage thrusters, weapons, and other modules. This can end fights very quickly. To fix this, I suggest boosting the module reinforcement package health by maybe twofold or threefold.
  • Seeker missiles can be spammed repeatedly to damage modules like stated above, to the point in which point defence and ECM (electronic countermeasures) become useless. Internal damage should be reduced.
  • Hull tanks in general need a boost. They're OK in duels, but during wingfights these are generally the first ships to go down due to how easy it is to disable them with seekers and super penetrator rails.

More than one of you must be bored of flying in, or flying against, FDLs and Mambas. These ships should've been nerfed or re-balanced a long time ago. Heck, reverse flying speeds should probably be nerfed too. At this time, hull tanks really stand very little chance against shield stacking ships, and this needs to change.
 
Here's a suggestion I've been cooking up for missiles, to make them a bit less overpowered.

Split guided missiles in to two separate groups.
Fire and Forget (FAF) or Precision Guided Munitions (PGM).

Fire and Forget
These would be the current missile mechanics, you lock on, fire, and they do the rest. These should have a significant blast radius, damage, and tracking nerf.
Their onboard guidance takes up valuable warhead space, so damage is reduced.
Once the missile loses its target, it should seek out the closest and hottest target.
This means they're easy to use, but risky, and fairly weak.

Precision Guided Munitions
These would be a whole new class of guided missile. The warheads themselves have very little onboard guidance, and rely entirely upon the ships guidance to reach their target. This means they have much higher damage, and blast radius, and better tracking.
The downside is the lock needs to be maintained the entire time the missile is in flight in order to guide the missile in. Loss of target will make the missiles just fly straight until a lock is reacquired.
Unlike FAF missiles, lock is immediately lost if the target leaves the forward sensor cone.
This makes them harder to use, and your target has more ways to avoid them, simply by breaking target lock, but successful hits will do more damage.
Packhounds should be converted to only be available in the PGM variant, using the logic that the more numerous, but much smaller warheads simply have no space for their own guidance systems. This would make them much harder to use, and just as lethal and fun, but with more counters to allow hull and hybrid ships to defend against them.
 
Here's a suggestion I've been cooking up for missiles, to make them a bit less overpowered.

Split guided missiles in to two separate groups.
Fire and Forget (FAF) or Precision Guided Munitions (PGM).

Fire and Forget
These would be the current missile mechanics, you lock on, fire, and they do the rest. These should have a significant blast radius, damage, and tracking nerf.
Their onboard guidance takes up valuable warhead space, so damage is reduced.
Once the missile loses its target, it should seek out the closest and hottest target.
This means they're easy to use, but risky, and fairly weak.

Precision Guided Munitions
These would be a whole new class of guided missile. The warheads themselves have very little onboard guidance, and rely entirely upon the ships guidance to reach their target. This means they have much higher damage, and blast radius, and better tracking.
The downside is the lock needs to be maintained the entire time the missile is in flight in order to guide the missile in. Loss of target will make the missiles just fly straight until a lock is reacquired.
Unlike FAF missiles, lock is immediately lost if the target leaves the forward sensor cone.
This makes them harder to use, and your target has more ways to avoid them, simply by breaking target lock, but successful hits will do more damage.
Packhounds should be converted to only be available in the PGM variant, using the logic that the more numerous, but much smaller warheads simply have no space for their own guidance systems. This would make them much harder to use, and just as lethal and fun, but with more counters to allow hull and hybrid ships to defend against them.
I like this. I'm always a bit of a sucker for 'semi-active homing' mechanisms.

On a side note, can we get this with torpedoes too please?
 
  • Module reinforcement packages don't really do much to protect ships from module damage, especially when the other ship has seeker missiles as they can just spam these over and over again to damage thrusters, weapons, and other modules. This can end fights very quickly. To fix this, I suggest boosting the module reinforcement package health by maybe twofold or threefold.
  • Seeker missiles can be spammed repeatedly to damage modules like stated above, to the point in which point defence and ECM (electronic countermeasures) become useless. Internal damage should be reduced.
  • Hull tanks in general need a boost. They're OK in duels, but during wingfights these are generally the first ships to go down due to how easy it is to disable them with seekers and super penetrator rails.

Simply increasing MRP integrity values will make module targeting completely worthless more often than not, which would be bad for combat depth. Splash damage hits multiple modules at once, which is why it depletes MRPs so quickly.

Seekers don't damage internals, only externals (torpedoes, penetrator dumbfires, and high-yeild shell cannon are the only sources of explosive splash damage that can penetrate the hull). MRPs also only offer half the the damage resistance to externals...which is probably a good thing, given how fast they can be depleted by splash damage.

I agree that hull focused vessels are at a disadvantage, but rather than rendering module targeting irrelevant and nerfing missiles into the dirt, I'd rather see: reductions in the effectiveness of shielding (the 2.3.10 beta changes that didn't make it through should be pushed through, along with a general reduction in magnitude of the positive effects of most BPs, and forced conversion of all legacy modules); reworking of certain effects, namely emissive and corrosive, which are both too powerful; introduction of some damage falloff to the long range mod; and the removal of the fixed weapon micro-gimbal effect.
 
Using double (or even tripple if you dare) ECM works fine. They all fire and recharge separately.
The big beef I have is with snap-to convergence and emissive mods. Not having distance-based convergence throws skill expression out the window and makes module sniping an easy-to-use hard-counter. Emissive nullifies all thermal mechanics, effectively replacing a handful of combat decisions with one: Wake away. Thermal shock would do the job just fine with heatsink cooling rate nerfs. It might not be perfect, but certainly a lot better than a hard counter.
 
Simply increasing MRP integrity values will make module targeting completely worthless more often than not, which would be bad for combat depth. Splash damage hits multiple modules at once, which is why it depletes MRPs so quickly.

A quick and easy fix for this could be: if several modules are hit by the same splash damage, they get the regular MRP protection but the damage is only taken away from the MRP once. Insert some random handwavium of MPRs being hardened and thus being extra good in deflecting explosion damage and done.

I agree that hull focused vessels are at a disadvantage, but rather than rendering module targeting irrelevant and nerfing missiles into the dirt, I'd rather see: reductions in the effectiveness of shielding (the 2.3.10 beta changes that didn't make it through should be pushed through, along with a general reduction in magnitude of the positive effects of most BPs, and forced conversion of all legacy modules); reworking of certain effects, namely emissive and corrosive, which are both too powerful; introduction of some damage falloff to the long range mod; and the removal of the fixed weapon micro-gimbal effect.

Mixed feelings on the last one. I understand why you'd remove the micro-gimbal, but removing it would also hurt some ships a lot, which currently are considered viable do to their hardpoint placement and micro-gimbaling fixing the rest.

On the other changes you mentioned: i absolutely agree. The SB nerfs from 2.3.1 were actually even just a start. More shield reduction and especially reduction in resist stacking would be necessary. Those who actually went into the beta and tested the changes found them to be good, often even supporting stronger nerfs. It's really too bad that once again a very vocal minority, some of them openly stating that they never entered the beta while others being console players and having no access to it, opposed the change till FD caved and canceled the nerf. (While leaving the buffs, which were supposed to soften the nerf effects in place, resulting in yet again more defense stacking. )

So yes, it's shields, especially engineering on shields and shield boosters, which need to be strongly reduced. I really think that this would help the game a lot, even from a PvE perspective. It would reduce the power creep, reduce the gap between beginner ships and fully engineered ships and would allow challenging content to be more available, without requiring all hard content to be opt-in and hidden behind several barriers.
 
Rather than making hulltanks tankier, I personally feel the problem is shieldtanks being too tanky. Engineered ships are already bulletsponges.

Personally I'd like to see shield boosters changed to boost regen rate rather than their raw strength - likewise with the heavy duty blueprint. The raw strength of your shield would be capped upon what you could get on the generator, which would bring combat-focused ships back into line with shielded noncombat ships somewhat, and likewise allow people to use utilities like kill-warrant scanners without drastically reducing their health pools. Regeneration rate would be effectively capped at the ship's SYS distributor, making stacking 6 HD boosters rather pointless.

With standard shields, you'd fit however many boosters you need to get the regen rate up. Biweaves would then become more of a "sacrifice overall health pool so I don't have to spend utilities on regeneration" choice, with prismatics occupying the "even multiplying it with boosters isn't going to bring this massive shield back any time this week" slot.
With guardian boosters you could get a larger effective health pool, but that comes at the direct cost of an optional internal slot that you could be spending on hull/module reinforcements, so the only way to increase your shield health pool would come at the opportunity cost of reducing your potential hull strength.
Shield cell banks are another matter since unlike guardian boosters they typically provide more effective HP than the hull HP they'd be replacing at the relatively minor cost of some extra power draw and a single hard-counter.
 
The problem is that even tripled up ECM isn't going to save you from missile spam, or even worse, missiles fired at short range.
The latter part would be way more useful if it could be set to automatically fire. Maybe even with the same restrictions as turreted weapons (ie. keep it out of your firegroup and it needs to be fired manually, put it in a firegroup to automatically go off when an incoming missile or hostile limpet is detected)
 
Shame you can't make stealth pay in this situation, make use of clean drives, low emissions etc. So, the colder you are the harder it is to target you, regardless of weapon discharge- low emissions for stealth would self balance since you are using sub optimal engineering for mano a mano.
 
Shame you can't make stealth pay in this situation, make use of clean drives, low emissions etc. So, the colder you are the harder it is to target you, regardless of weapon discharge- low emissions for stealth would self balance since you are using sub optimal engineering for mano a mano.
It'd be neat as hell if your signature affected the time it took to get a missile lock.
 
Mixed feelings on the last one. I understand why you'd remove the micro-gimbal, but removing it would also hurt some ships a lot, which currently are considered viable do to their hardpoint placement and micro-gimbaling fixing the rest.

Fixed convergence distances (say half of maximum range), or simply altering some loadouts to compensate, should be solution enough for these ships. As it is, the ranges at which the microgimbal effect can let something like the large hardpoints on a Clipper or Mamba, or the medium hardpoints on a Corvete, converge on a smaller target are so high that I don't consider it's loss much of a problem.

The latter part would be way more useful if it could be set to automatically fire. Maybe even with the same restrictions as turreted weapons (ie. keep it out of your firegroup and it needs to be fired manually, put it in a firegroup to automatically go off when an incoming missile or hostile limpet is detected)

Would be prone to going off too soon. If all three of your ECMs fire in rapid succession to deal with a couple of rapid fireseeker racks, you'll have at least a 5-6 second window where they are all on cooldown. I suppose if it was an option, one could refrain from using it, but I think having to toggle it like a turret would be more UI/control clutter for marginal utility.
 
It'd be neat as hell if your signature affected the time it took to get a missile lock.

I imagine it as a skill of keeping your emissions as low as possible, like a submarine with sound. So rather than instant detection on weapon hit the weapon dumps heat pushing your signature up- so you either have stealthy weapons (one shot or otherwise) or hot running, power hungry ones.

Before people say "what about the kinder?" they could use stealth as well. So a stealthy fast trader could run for it.
 
Fixed convergence distances (say half of maximum range), or simply altering some loadouts to compensate, should be solution enough for these ships. As it is, the ranges at which the microgimbal effect can let something like the large hardpoints on a Clipper or Mamba, or the medium hardpoints on a Corvete, converge on a smaller target are so high that I don't consider it's loss much of a problem.
I suggested this as a setting in outfitting a while back but the thread didn't go anywhere.
 
Shame you can't make stealth pay in this situation, make use of clean drives, low emissions etc. So, the colder you are the harder it is to target you, regardless of weapon discharge- low emissions for stealth would self balance since you are using sub optimal engineering for mano a mano.


This is currently a thing, except for the firing of weapons part. The colder you are the harder you are to detect. I have run tests with buddies to see what what distance I completely drop off their scopes, without even a ghost signature. With medium to small ships, at 14% heat output you become a ghost somewhere between 2-3km, and can drop off completely the further out you go.

I created a build like this some years ago (before Grade 5 Low Emissions), that also included the weapon effects Target Lock Breaker, Dazzle Shell, and Dispersal Field. Here it is in action:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9UcjxbZn-M
 
This is currently a thing, except for the firing of weapons part. The colder you are the harder you are to detect. I have run tests with buddies to see what what distance I completely drop off their scopes, without even a ghost signature. With medium to small ships, at 14% heat output you become a ghost somewhere between 2-3km, and can drop off completely the further out you go.

I created a build like this some years ago (before Grade 5 Low Emissions), that also included the weapon effects Target Lock Breaker, Dazzle Shell, and Dispersal Field. Here it is in action:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9UcjxbZn-M

:D I did something similar with my FAS, with clean drives, no shield, low draw weapons etc but the weapon hit = you light up just killed it. It takes far too long for you to become unresolved for stealth to pay in a dogfight. It is highly satisfying though with torpedoes creeping up on grandma

137553
 
Clean drives are rather crap as, in addition to the lower speed, they have higher standing power consumption, actually increasing idle thermal load as well as making them, and other critical modules, harder to power through PP malfunctions.
 
Clean drives are rather crap as, in addition to the lower speed, they have higher standing power consumption, actually increasing idle thermal load as well as making them, and other critical modules, harder to power through PP malfunctions.

I meant to infer as well that FD tweak modules as well to make thermals and power consumption make sense. When I made my silent runner stealth I found it was a bit pants- hopefully FD will go through the modules and make them make sense....(well, you can dream right?)
 
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