Shield Regeneration Lasers

This is super promising. This is the alpha counter shield tanking wing builds needed.

It's never going to be overpowered, because either you all never deal damage or one ship is always vulnerable. Plus very few ships are optimal with beam lasers for max DPS considering the high cap draw. I think the optimal ship to have this on would be a vulture: big cap/HP ratio, can rush about to heal allies, and can dodge alpha itself due to small size, good flight model and ability to silent run
 
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I don't dislike the idea of a medic, but the implementation does not fit the idea of a believable universe the game was built upon. What's next, thrusters which offer maximum efficiency *outside* of the blue zone and FSDs which bypass supercruise?

They could have made some sort of additional shield being deployed by the medic ship, which would have had the job to cover his wingman. Precision flying to help the wingman, not pew pew to heal him.
 
This is super promising. This is the alpha counter shield tanking wing builds needed.

It's never going to be overpowered, because either you all never deal damage or one ship is always vulnerable. Plus very few ships are optimal with beam lasers for max DPS considering the high cap draw. I think the optimal ship to have this on would be a vulture: big cap/HP ratio, can rush about to heal allies, and can dodge alpha itself due to small size, good flight model and ability to silent run
I think maybe the biggest fear some PvP'ers will have it is prolonging fights, and their current ships are basically set up for alpha strikes, and they might think such setup's will become weaker, when it really really will depends on what the one's they are fighting have of setup...and given how dynamic battles can be, I really don't think there needs to be that much worry, just an awareness of it existing so they can counter.
 
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Well, from a purely PvE perspective I see no problems. And given the majority of content is PvE centric......I still see no problems.
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But for PvPers, I could well understand some misgivings on that front if the balancing is not right. But then, balancing such things to suit both PvE and PvP is always problematic. Will be interesting to see how things work in beta - and that's what beta is for, right?
 

Goose4291

Banned
Could be interesting. Let it play out and frontier tweak it accordingly before the usual entitled brigades turn it into.an i-win stick.

I suspect this is as close to combined arms as frontier can offer with this network frameworknow :)
 
The MMO tropes of tanking, dps, healing and CC already exist in the game. This just adds another option. I think it will be fine and everyone will adjust. Will add more complexity and options for configuration. new tactics will emerge. Counter-tactics will follow. There will be analysis of playstyles and metrics and new modules will emerge.

The more important point is that we haven't seen anything else yet. What if there's a mod for ECM module that allows it to block this healing feature? etc. Let's see how the full picture develops.
 
But for PvPers, I could well understand some misgivings on that front if the balancing is not right. But then, balancing such things to suit both PvE and PvP is always problematic. Will be interesting to see how things work in beta - and that's what beta is for, right?
Yeah, but the balance isn't exactly right currently either if you ask me in terms of PvP, but they are adding more then this thing obviously so we will see what happens.
 
That's not how it works in almost all cases, unfortunately. For a "healer" to feel useful they have to heal for a significant amount. If they can heal for a significant amount, they are obviously incredibly useful, and become the cornerstone of any group PvP or PvE encounters. This means that the designers have to design with the expectation that group will have a healer. Which means, effectively, that groups without a healer are gimped by the new PvE or PvP design, and you've ended up hugely limiting player choice.

It's amazing how even a basic understanding of game design can tear this entire healing-laser idea down, isn't it?

I am not excited about this idea at all. When I first read about it I thought it was a joke; once I realised it wasnt, I just shook my head.
 
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That's not how it works in almost all cases, unfortunately. For a "healer" to feel useful they have to heal for a significant amount. If they can heal for a significant amount, they are obviously incredibly useful, and become the cornerstone of any group PvP or PvE encounters. This means that the designers have to design with the expectation that group will have a healer. Which means, effectively, that groups without a healer are gimped by the new PvE or PvP design, and you've ended up hugely limiting player choice.
That isn't really how Elite works though in terms of combat, especially being procedural in nature, I could imagine coop missions based around this, but that really is about it. For procedural generation you generally don't rely on 'maybe these people have this setup' and rarely give one single type of scenario, I think you worry over nothing, there are plenty of other games that work just fine in combat with or without a healer.
 
It helps that people can have powerful self-heals (aka SCBs). That's usually the case in MMOs that successfully made bringing a healer optional.

Shields are already basically magic; I don't see why designing a laser to reinforce them is any less believable than having them in the first place. Special shields that absorb certain types of incoming damage instead of being weakened by it are a common trope, and this is a more believable version of that.
 
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It's amazing how even a basic understanding of game design can tear this entire healing-laser idea down, isn't it?

I am not excited about this idea at all. When I first read about it I thought it was a joke; once I realised it wasnt, I just shook my head.


I genuinely checked the date to see if it was April 1st. Seriously.
 
It's never going to be overpowered, because either you all never deal damage or one ship is always vulnerable.

The experience of DPS/Healer vs DPS/DPS groups in basically every game ever disagrees with you. It's very, very easy for a group with a healer to be overpowered compared to a non-healer group.

I will agree that it doesn't HAVE to be overpowered, but if it's enough healing to "counter" a high-alpha setup, it's by default going to be the new meta, and almost by definition be able to dominate "average" groups that are neither set up for high-alpha or healing.

I don't think there's a way to have enough healing to satisfy people who want it as a high-alpha counter without it automatically becoming the new default PvP meta. The worrying thing is how much more a healing meta will carry over to PvE. Group PvE content designed for groups without a healer would be pretty trivial to groups with one, and you'll see demand for "harder" content that demands a healer. If that content comes, everything just spirals down from there until you have spaceships circling Lave repeating "LFG, need healer!"

I'm not sure there's a way to avoid creating a new required meta without making people like you, who want a high-alpha counter, feel cheated in the healing implementation. That's not meant as an attack on you, btw. If we could find a medium, that would be great, but I don't think people are considering how healing that's strong enough to be useful in PvP will dominate all group content.

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That isn't really how Elite works though in terms of combat, especially being procedural in nature, I could imagine coop missions based around this, but that really is about it. For procedural generation you generally don't rely on 'maybe these people have this setup' and rarely give one single type of scenario, I think you worry over nothing, there are plenty of other games that work just fine in combat with or without a healer.

It's not all procedural. I'm not concerned about things like Resource Extraction Sites, I'm concerned about the coop missions you can imagine being designed for this and where that will logically flow in the coming years.
 
We have one picture with a description that loosely describes a "healing" laser, no specific details..

No real conclusions to their effect on the game can really be drawn based on that..

This is just like Power Play modules all over again, they added a bit of flavour, nothing hugely game changing.
 
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