Yeah - I'd be fine with it having blistering speed, amazing agility & shields for days if it had tin foil for a hull.
Nerf the FDL for pvp’s sake
- Thread starter Cmdr Jim S Walter
- Start date
The hull rating is one of the older ED specific lore pieces about the FDL...it was always supposed to be unusually resistant to smaller weapons as reflection of the higher quality materials it's constructed from.
For better or worse, it's also essentially irrelevant as a balancing factor, for numerous reasons...enormous shield pool and the prevalence of weapons that have higher than 70 APV, to name most obvious two.
For better or worse, it's also essentially irrelevant as a balancing factor, for numerous reasons...enormous shield pool and the prevalence of weapons that have higher than 70 APV, to name most obvious two.
it's not small issue, especially against bankless fdl's with over 2k hull, frags do no damage, you are forced to take corrosive and still dont match armour value, even large lasers have sirious damage loss, every time i m against frag builds in fdl and i lose shields only thing i m afraid of are rams, as damage from frags cost me like 1% hull per pass, on ~1k hull ship, also lowered AP value is not toxic, even 50 intead of 70 for lore reasons is sufficient,and for reasons i mentioned earleir, incendiary multi/frag become stronger vs fdl overall, and this is good.
I don't worry about frags when flying the FDL either...because it's very hard to land a majority of the pellets on one. If you are taking ~10 damage a pass, cutting the FDL's hull rating by 20 (which would increase the damage it takes from medium and large frags by 40%), still isn't going to make a frags a particularly viable loadout against agile ships.
If there are frags in play, I assume one will be corrosive, and most meaningful loadouts that aren't all in on rails and PAs can afford to take corrosive somewhere. Most frags or lasers against a hull with corrosive in effect will do more damage against a 70 hull rating ship than they will against a 50 hull rating ship absent corrosive because of that flat 25% damage increase on top of the APV augmentation. Corrosive doesn't become appreciably less useful for frags against a 50 armor rating than it is against a 70, and as it works now, it even amplifies ramming damage quite nicely.
Ultimately, I think the hull rating of the FDL was a fairly unique attribute that added some character to the ship, but has become largely meaningless as shield inflation outpaced that of hull, and as the vulnerability of hull and modules increased. I'd rather see it worked around than used as a token balacing point that would amount to very little in the current state of the game.
Biggest issue with changes to FDL is thats it's OP only in large wing fights, 1vs1 is more or less builds contest than ship contest, and bank tank kraits and pythons are better IMO, Vulture is very cheap and competetive against most FDL builds, Chief and Challanger are still strong, but in wing fights thx to big base shields Mamba is only real competitor, it's partlially becouse how some weapons effect work, lack of cooldown on emmisive, very strong scramble even on c1 weapon, broken conopy equals lost fight, ships are much more vulnurable without shields, to nerf FDL, best would be to change enviroment, rather than change FDL itself, and in pve FDL with very limited range is in good place as it is.
A standard Meta-de-Lance fully engineered has the option to Boost every three seconds or so.
Sometimes referred to as "PermaBoost".
When such an FDL boosts, it'll get a 78°/s pitch and a 186°/s roll. You can check this yourself by making such a build in Coriolis.
The GU-97 Imperial Fighter, the most agile ship-launched fighter, has an identical pitch, but a slower roll.
So there's the issue at heart.
And it needs to get resolved not just for the FDL but for the entire fleet of ships available to us, otherwise you'll keep bailing water without plugging the hole...
Sometimes referred to as "PermaBoost".
When such an FDL boosts, it'll get a 78°/s pitch and a 186°/s roll. You can check this yourself by making such a build in Coriolis.
The GU-97 Imperial Fighter, the most agile ship-launched fighter, has an identical pitch, but a slower roll.
So there's the issue at heart.
And it needs to get resolved not just for the FDL but for the entire fleet of ships available to us, otherwise you'll keep bailing water without plugging the hole...
Slightly OT from FDL, but I've always found it really weird that boost has any effect on pitch and roll.
This is one of biggest diffrence betwean small and medium ships, distributor capacity that is multiplied by charge enhanced engineering.
Kraits are flagrant OP, with the same power distributor than a T-10 and two extra pips for multicrew, I guess they can perma fire perma boost and perma two pips to shields while deploying two SLFs. Who said meta.
I hate multicrew.
I'm sure it's very nice for the 30 seconds before it desyncs the instance.
nothing we suggest here will ever matter.
We've had slf's for how many years now and we still have big ships dogfighting like they're ww2 era planes... what makes you think fdev has any interest in balance?
We've had slf's for how many years now and we still have big ships dogfighting like they're ww2 era planes... what makes you think fdev has any interest in balance?
-We blow up in everything, all day. If we don't want to, we can always wake. Even with an increased rebuy, the FDL would be worth it.Right now if you want to pvp there is only one choice of ship that’s remotely viable and that’s the Fer De Lance , if you disagree you can take your “pvp corvette” into a cg system and see how long you last in the ocean of FDLs. I counted 12 Fdls in one instance the other night, no other pvp ships in sight
The FDL is way to op and needs more of a draw back, Here are some of my ideas:
-triple the price of the FDL,the increase in price could make dyeing in pvp less desirable due to a rebuy
- make the FDL slower but don’t touch the manoverablity
- buff the Mamba, why did you make this ship usesless fd?
-Remove a utility slot from the fdl
I know pvp/combat isn’t a “new feature” so fd is just going to ignore it , but I feel better posting this on the forums.
-A PvP fit FDL boosts generally around 550 m/s. An FAS does similar, and a Chieftain isn't far behind. The Mamba sometimes breaks 600. If anything needs a nerf bat, its the Cutter, boosting 500+ despite its size lol. Even then, I'm opposed to nerfing the speed of any ship.
-The Mamba is the second strongest medium ship in terms of wing fights, just after the FDL. To me, it's 'slightly worse, but faster FDL'. It doesn't need buffing.
-Leave the utility slots alone, but please, for the love of god, let's nerf shields a little bit.
The game is so heavily biased against anything that isn't shield-stacked, it makes so many ships pretty awful in combat against the FDL. Nothing moves like the FDL, and I think it's ridiculous that a ship that size can have over 3000 shields lol.
Even with a fraction of the shielding, the FDL in the right hands would still be plenty competitive.
I do fairly well with a little 500mj biweave on mine, and I know I'm losing quite a few fights because of the massive HP disparity, but I feel it's a little more sporting than stacking 3k and plasma ramming every other ship in the game out of existence. Either I fly well, or I die.
I'd like to see more variety out there, you know?
you can have over 3k shields on Vulture, 4k on chieftain, over 3k super fast regen on challanger, around 5k on krait, even more on python, we are not addressing fdl shields, just shields in general, if you decrease FDL base shields it become even worse in 1vs1 leaving hybrids still inferior to those i mentioned, what is wrong is that prismatic shields are requirement for pvp, thx to 3.0 engineering of reinforced SG and heavy duty boosters mods.