When I was editing, I was noticing hulls dropping to 75%-90% depending on how fast the shields went down.
Coming back to this finding. I just went through your first 13 kills in your video, noting the % of hull damage your phasing weapons did just before shields collapsed.
They were as follows:
89% - Viper 4 ==> 11% Phasing damage done
92% - Anaconda ==> 8% Phasing damage done
92% - FdL ==> 8% Phasing damage done
98% - Dropship ==> 2% Phasing damage done
96% - Python ==> 11% Phasing damage done
94% - Python ==> 6% Phasing damage done
~ synthesized +30% damage ammmo ~
78% - Asp Scout (
target started at 79% hull before you started attacking him; presumably he had been fighting with other NPCs before you found him) ==> 1% Phasing damage done
76% - Python (
target started at 80% hull before you started attacking him; presumably he had been fighting with other NPCs before you found him) ==> 4% Phasing damage done
95% - Cobra III ==> 5% Phasing damage done
94% - FdL ==> 6% Phasing damage done
91% - Eagle ==> 9% Phasing damage done
95% - Python (his shields were damaged a bit prior to attacking him, so you may have been able to get him down to ~93% had his sheilds been full) ==> 5% Phasing damage done
94% - FdL ==> 6% Phasing damage done
=====
Take-aways: I did not see
any instances where you took a ship with 100% hull and 100% shields to below 89% hull before shields dropped. Unless it happened on a clip that got left on the editing room floor, I'm going to say you misread a couple of results, specifically the Asp Scout and Python kills that came immediately after rolling the +dmg MC ammo. As noted above, you found both of those ships with significant hull damage already done to them, presumably by a previous NPC vs NPC battle.
These numbers are in line with my own findings between the Beta and live versions with my ships. NPCs simply don't have very impressive shields. As a consequence,
a CMDR is only ever really going to get somewhere between 5%-11% extra hull damage on a target using Phasing Sequence (on average). In the case of your video, amping the damage of your Corrosive MC actually served to neuter the effectiveness of your Phasing sequence weaponry because the corrosive rounds were making shields come down even faster! Unintended but interesting to see nonetheless.
The question a pure PvE CMDR must ask themselves is whether or not that free 5%-10% of hull damage is the best effect investment for them compared to other effects. Personally, I would argue that it is not and that mixing effects would provide you with a better overall PvE experience. For example, I'd probably rather have at least 1x Grade 5 C2 Scramble on board than the extra 1%-2% hull damage a 4th Phasing is going to give me. Sometimes those malfunctions can be quite handy. Taking a step further back, for the pure PvE CMDR raw damage on the pulses is probably better for killing NPC ships...meaning (again) you'll probably kill ships faster with Grade 5 rapid pulses with no special effect (or with effects that give no damage penalty) at all than you would with Phasing Sequence/Heat on all hardpoints because of the damage penalty.
For a CMDR who is doing a mix of PvE and PvP, I think this setup offers enough damage to allow you to not feel like you have to have hot swap between 2 completely separate loadouts all the time. You could just use this more or less all the time (though you may want to swap something out for a feedback rail and/or an emissive). It's *good enough* for PvE while being pretty solid for PvP.
Pure PvP CMDRs in an FdL would probably want to either go "all in" with Phasing on all hardpoints, or only a couple of them with the rest being something like Heat weapons (eg. 2x C2 phasing, 2x C2 heat, 1x C4 heat perhaps). The all-in phasing strat would probably skip the feedback rail because the full phasing CMDR doesn't really care about your shields going down in the first place. They're trying to kill your hull over time.
$0.02
Does the corrosive apply the penalty if it hits the shields?
I knew rapid-fire was disgusting from Beta. Getting an effect on a level 5 upgrade for each weapon with the engineers is a pain though, to gain back those levels with them (without even thinking of the materials!).
No, it does not. Corrosive applies to the hull only. Only thing I am not clear on is if they changed corrosive to do more damage based on hardpoint size or not. It used to be a flat increase no matter what size your hardpoint, but I'm not 100% sure if this is true in 2.2 or not.
![[VR] DDM_Reaper20](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/44/44021.jpg?1588332101){kind=avatar}
