Nerf the FDL for pvp’s sake
- Thread starter Cmdr Jim S Walter
- Start date
If I had anyone to wing up with, I'd sure try it out.
Unfortunately, arranged duels aren't really a good example of organic pvp, that can happen in either bgs or pp originated conflicts. I suppose the wing fight meta (in the rings, more specifically) favors the fdl, logically. But that ship has its limits as well. I personally found the mamba to be a straight update from the Lance, in the conflicts we find ourselves in.
It was a wingfight what I was talking about, not a duel.
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For a playstyle hardly anyone cares about or engages is, you want to nerf one of the most expensive and coveted medium ships in the game. I would think the lack or merit is obvious.
The FDL trades ALL utility and usefulness for pure combat potential. Shove your "rebalance", that IS the balance.
Gunship or alliance ships not?
If you call needing a buddy a solution.. No. Limiting boosters per ship would fix a lot of scenario's. Including the FDL.
I'd say that is utterly incorrect, perhaps you consider the 'average' PvE player so incompetent that the game could be changed around them with no effect?
Then wonder why when PvP 'balance' is brought up, again and again, it isn't welcomed with glee pretty much by other than PvP players...
Degenerate solutions to degenerate problems, yay !
The only reason reverb torps are used is because of god-shield made possible by engineering.
Silver bullet balancing is a clear indicator of a poor balancing.
I am going to guess that the majority of people who dislike the FDL fly mostly in Open Space and fly mostly FA ON. Those of us who "worship" the FDL in contrast, fly mostly fa OFF and have done a great deal of fighting within dense asteroid fields, i.e. organized PvP. I want to emphasize WITHIN the rings. The best pilots will force attackers to stay within the rings because of the lethality of rocks at upwards of 550m/s. Lesser pilots, especially under pressure will flee to above the asteroid field. Dense rocks also make FA OFF almost a requirement because of the increased maneuverability and turn rate. Below is a video of perhaps the best pilot in game evading a hard two man focus using fixed rapid fire multicannons in a meta fdl.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-ym15piiss&feature=emb_logo
It requires tens if not hundreds of hours flying the FDL to be considered "dangerous" in organized PvP, mostly because of the necessity of FA off. Yamato, of the above video, probably has thousands of hours invested. There are exceptions, but most of us who love the FDL have spent hundreds of hours practicing it because the challenge of controlling the FDL is so engaging and satisfying.
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It requires tens if not hundreds of hours flying the FDL to be considered "dangerous" in organized PvP, mostly because of the necessity of FA off. Yamato, of the above video, probably has thousands of hours invested. There are exceptions, but most of us who love the FDL have spent hundreds of hours practicing it because the challenge of controlling the FDL is so engaging and satisfying.
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Just a quick note:
The peak performance of a g5 engineered module before experimentals is usually between 150-170% of the performance of the base module.
For heavy duty shield boosters it is 328%.
The peak performance of a g5 engineered module before experimentals is usually between 150-170% of the performance of the base module.
For heavy duty shield boosters it is 328%.
When the FDL was balanced, there was significantly more variety in ships you'd encounter in the hands of credible combatants. In 1.4, the FDL was still extremely popular...but you'd see almost as many FASes, and a fair mix of Clippers and Python, with the odd Dropship, Gunship, or Vulture mixed in. That balance changed with 1.5's unwarranted buff to the FDL and shifted even more dramatically with Engineering.
It's not about removing a "meta" it's about ensuring that no single one becomes broadly more effective than all of the others. This is easy to gauge by looking at what people are actually using...if it's one kind of ship 80%+ of the time, for a given activity, something is very wrong.
This 100%
Meaningful and unimportant are mutually exclusive things.
I'd also argue that neglecting the lessons of PvP is directly responsible for the sorry state of the game's PvE combat.
Indeed. Many of us who love and fly the meta fdl are deeply aware of how over-powered and singular the FDL is. In competition, the FDL is always nerfed, usually with a four booster limit. In addition, we also have exclusively hulltank tournaments due to "FDL fatigue." The current RoA league tournament specifically outlaws Mambi and FDLs.
Nevertheless, FDev gave us crack cocaine in the guise of the FDL. I am practicing for the RoA hulltank league in a Chieftain and the longer boost cycle, larger size, sluggish laterals and inferior weapon convergence have me screaming more than usual.
Which is why I didn't actually use the term "unimportant" - that is all your own machination .
Is there another dedicated medium fighter? Certainly the Federal bricks and Alliance 'British tanks' do not appear to meet that description. Perhaps, rather than 'nerfing' an excellent dedicated fighter because it is the only true one in its class other manufacturers could produce similar dedicated ships instead, Odyssey may bring new ships, who knows?
Perhaps when ED becomes a PvP focussed game such debate would be viable, as it is currently it remains essentially a PvE game and has astutely ignored the 'lessons of PvP' in order to provide recreation for as large a segment of the playerbase as possible, sound business sense currently - which may change if the proportion of PvE players to PvP changes significantly.
It would probably be better for the health of the game if the gap between the dedicated and multirole ships were not as high as it is.
But, by definition, a Fighter isn't a multi-role ship, and a multi-role wouldn't compare to a fighter!
Having a single dedicated ship, then calling for it to be 'nerfed' to multi-role bland is a little odd. The FDL excels in its role, it needs similar competition that is missing from the current game.
I'll rephrase, though I'm not sure how "unimportant" differs from "not 'important'" here.
PvP being meaningful would be incompatible with it also being not important. The idea that the game's vision could feature both meaningful and not 'important' PvP is nonsensical.
There are five ships that fit that arbitrary collection of criteria better than the FDL.
There are currently eleven ships (Clipper, FAS, FGS, Dropship, Chieftain, Challenger, Crusader, Vulture, Python, Krait MkII, Krait Phantom), other than the FDL, that either were, or would have been (had they existed at the time), nominally competitive with the FDL across a broad range of combat tasks (PvE and PvP) prior to the FDL buff.
How do you figure that?
It never should have been buffed in the first place.
It's like FDev went "hey, it looks like we have six combat vessels around the same price/capabilities and the FDL is arguably the best of them...let's make it significantly better then depreciate the mechanisms that make the FAS a viable alternative!". It was the most inexplicable balance adjustment I've ever seen in this game, and this game is full of questionable balance changes. It was as weird as it would be if FDev decided to cut the hull mass of the Anaconda in half...and that's not even hyperbole.
They already did and I am not at all fond of the inflation treadmill this game is on. The last thing it needs is a slew of new FDL competitors/clones.
The entire premise of my statement is that PvE players are getting the short end of the stick here.
What makes you think more variety of NPC behavior and a higher threat ceiling would do anything other than expand the portion of the player base that could find recreation in PvE combat content?
Should we also nerf the jump range of dedicated explorers (don’t mention the Annie’s magic bulkheads...), or the maximum cargo capacity of dedicated bulk traders too?
I think a number of people have already suggested the FDL have its PP reverted back to a 5 instead of a 6. Doing so curtails the shield bloat and gripes from the PvP community while keeping the FDL a supreme PvE fighter. A couple of minutes of tinkering and I came up with an FDL PvE build with a smaller PP, QoL improvements for getting around the bubble and more than enough firepower/protection for all non-ax PvE content.
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A lot of people see increasing the PP size as a mistake. Calls to undo that mistake or at least review it I feel are appropriate even with the concerns you raise. For the record, I agree that the game shouldn't be balance entirely around PvP. But, I also feel PvE players can make due with far less then the 3K shields and 2k hull regularly seen in PvP.
Probably shouldn't buff them.
A good analog for the FDL's uniquely advantageous combination of attributes, except there aren't any exclusive CGs rewards that can make other ships broadly competitive (not that this is a good fix for anything).
I'd be ok with the T-9 and T-7 buffs being reverted as well. The problem was never that they couldn't carry enough cargo, or weren't durable enough. It was that the pseudoeconomy had been neglected too long (depreciating all of the reasons to use these cheaper vessels) and the game never provided any situations that taught traders the advantage of a small HRP.