I do like the idea of damage bleedthrough and the longer I play (and the more potent shields get) the more I like it. Having shielding block a proportion of hull damage relative to it's current integrity level and angle of attack, perhaps adding a corresponding degree of jitter as well, could be an interesting dynamic.
In my view there should be multiple counters to everything; universal defences are boring.
how about buffing lasers?
I feel it's the repeated augmentations to railguns and PA that are the real source of this issue.
Reducing damage drop off and improving hitscan weapons like lasers, just further encourages static, long range, shine-your-weapons-on-each-other-until-the-ship-with-inferior-damage/durability-folds, sort of gameplay.
... I little wonder why you guys always use as example just this one clearly unbalanced overpowered ship (cutter). Try your counts versus other normal ships
With how easy a Cutter is to get, it is a normal ship.
Regardless, the increases Engineering brought to shields applies to everyone, and anyone can build a ship that is largely immune to NPCs.
The problem is no matter how much you buff hull stats to soak damage, if you want to fly any of the Big Three (especially in Open, and against thargoids to a lesser extent especially against basilisk and medusa, the latter of which ripped my corvette to shreds) then you need high levels of shields.
Not really.
With the current way modules take damage the moment shields drop, things like Elite NPCs gain the ability to Module Snipe, and if you fly in Open that leaves players open to actually attacking and destroying you as you sit there with no powerplant and no thrusters or FSD due to something like High Yield Shell on Cannon.
Only if you are running low integrity internals with poor hull resistances and no module protection. The ships most vulnerable to high yield shell are also those that tend to be better at evading cannon fire and even basic levels of shielding will still enable one to escape.
Unless something has changed very recently, NPCs don't deliberately target modules either (though it would be nice if they did), even at Elite rank.
Reducing the relative potency of shields also works against both sides in a fight.
Stationary Cutter with an AFK CMDR?
*launches barrage of Reverb Torpedoes*
Need quite a few reverb torpedoes to bring down some of the bigger shield gens.
Perhaps there should be a hard limit to shield strength across all ships - similarly, you can then decrease the rabidly powerful weaponry like frag cannons, railguns, plasmas etc.
I really dislike hard limits and vastly prefer systems that discourage overspecialization via organic means.
Actually here's an interesting question : what is the ideal average time to kill a ship, whether in PvE or PvP? Is it seconds or minutes we're talking about here?
That's going to be highly subjective and situational.
I think the TTK was about right with smaller ships early on in the game's history. Fights could be quite protracted if one was evasive enough, but small ships could destroy each other in seconds if one was caught unawares, with defense generally scaling faster than offense as ships got larger and slower.
For me it's less about the time itself than the end result making sense. As it stands, with the arms race of offense vs. defense being almost unassailably in favor of defense currently, one would expect radical changes to military strategy and tactics...but the game doesn't behave that way. We'd also see the one reliable counter demonstrated so far (ATR's reverberating lasers) start to spread to other forces and other markets, until shielding was rendered completely obsolete. We'd thus come full circle and offense would be ascendant until defense caught up. The real world history of arms and armor are filled with such cycles.
![[VR] Enexemander](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/119/119036.jpg?1621636716){kind=avatar}
