With the Type 10 unleashed (and upgraded in 3.0), is The Big 3 now The Big 4?

[Muetdhiver]

...wasn’t this thread about the Type-10 being added to the Big 3?

Why do you think people are speaking about cascade rails and SCBs? It has everything to do with the T10 missing it's spot in the big toy list.

 

[Flimsey]

It seems to me that, if at all possible, any fix to these specials should somehow be aimed at preserving their current benefits against evasive targets whilst reducing benefits against near-immobile ones. Thinking caps on...

What about setting effectiveness efter rail size and scb size. Small rail do max damage to the smallest scbs and min damage to the big scbs, medium rails do max damage to small and medium scbs and low damage to big scbs.

And i realt like Frentox idea with a rechargeable scb.

*Have not decided yet if i think t9 and t10 is big, a big ship should take more then 50% of the landing pad.

 

[Sylow]

In that regard, I Wonder if something like this would work for SCB's :

• All SCB modules only provide one charge.
• SCB's work like a very large capacitor : overflow from the sys capacitor is used to refill it if the SCB is empty. Once refilled, can be triggered again.
• Rework feedback cascade in some way
• Use E to A grades as a way to choose between fast charge rate - low capacity or low charge rate - high capacity.

i.e. that would make them work like boosting with engines, but on a way longer time frame, limiting their use in PvP combat to once/per, while in PvE they could be
recharged over a long enough duration or while flying in SC.

.
I'd fully welcome that change. It would even make sense that a recharging SCB would put additional drain on SYS, but that might also be contraproductive for gameplay.
.

 

[V'larr]

Except it's not true... NPCs never use feedback rails or any other special effects for that matter. This means SCBs are available in PvE but practically unavailable in PvP.

My undersanding is they do...but very rarely. That's part of what I'm saying though: the *balance issues* that are so apparent in PvP also affect PvE, because it means the wider the power creep gap is, the more of a pushover normal NPCs will feel like because they *have* to be set at a level that can be handled by incoming newer players.

If feedback cascade didn't exist, the T-10 would probably be a somewhat viable choice for PvP, because it could make up for its lack in base shield strength with its C8 SCB, when using a C7 shield generator. Unfortunately it does exist, so SCBs have basically been removed from the game in PvP, especially for big ships which have no hope to ever dodge a railgun shot.

Personally I think feedback is way OP and should be either entirely removed or capped at a 20-25% reduction in SCB effectiveness. Until then the T-10 is not even remotely competitive with the big three. It's fine for PvE, but since everything is fine for that, it's not enough.

I would flatly remove special effects, personally.

Just simplify things: get rid of the hard-counter gimmick of Feedback Cascade, re-balance SCBs instead (along with a full balance pass to address the ongoing hitpoint inflation problem), and roll any neat, non-hard-counter special effects into the base aspects of the weapons available (e.g. autoloading becomes a part of all ammo-based weapons, or plasma accelerators use fuel for ammo). Sure would make weapon choice more interesting and significant, more so than the currently more important "Which special effect gimmick did I pick at the Engineer?".

--

This ^^ is literally word for word what I thought when I learned of the release of the T-10.

I don't think that feedback cascade is inherently OP. It's not OP at all against Courier or even Fer-de-Lance, both of whom, properly flown, will probably suffer little or no SCB loss in a 1v1, even at current values.

Being able to completely nullify the use of an SCB, which without feedback cascade is also just flatly OP, is definitely OP. Imagine if Corrosive negated the benefits of any installed HRPs. That'd be a bit broken, right? But HRPs are also pretty broken with how much armor and hitpoints they add for much cheaper than upgrading the ship bulkheads.

It honestly makes me a bit mad that someone at Fdev thought Feedback Cascade would be a better solution than simply adjusting SCBs to not be so damn powerful. (And it'd be a good reason to not make them heat hogs, too, which is a downright annoyance.)

It's just one of several weapon effects, other obvious examples being TLB and dispersal, that Frontier completely failed to balance across target sizes. Basically every single time someone hits a Courier, they deserve to get a powerful special effect to trigger as their reward. Every time they hit a T-10? Not so much.

It seems to me that, if at all possible, any fix to these specials should somehow be aimed at preserving their current benefits against evasive targets whilst reducing benefits against near-immobile ones. Thinking caps on...

That's taking gimmicky things and trying to make them even more gimmicky, I think that's the wrong direction to head.

__

The problem is that without feedback, SCBs are too strong (and just generally unsatisfying gameplay). Their use in PvE and PvP is wildly different, too. For PvP, you can practically (without feedback cascade) just tack the total MJ value of the cells onto the base shield value. It's all getting used for one fight, and all part of the huge boring wall of safety that needs to be chipped through to actually start doing damage. In PvE, those cells need to be stretched out over several fights. They're more of an "oh shi-" reserve for when things go south. You have to ration them out, because you don't have that many.

FDev needs to change them such that the number you have available in a given fight (and the strength of their effect in that fight) is far more modest, but the endurance of the module (how many fights it will be useful in) is much much higher. Until then, the fundamentally different use cases for PvP and PvE will make them impossible to balance.

Agreed.

Yet another case here where, if they wanted, they could add by reduction: remove SCBs entirely and simply add a base functionality into all shield generators: a SYS-charged 'impulse' recharge-boost, somewhat similar to current ENG-boosting but spread out over a much larger period of time, and with a similar penalty of increased heat - just nothing that's crippling without use of a heatsink. (And yeah I realize this is very similar to what's already being suggested in the thread, just a sign that we're all thinking the same thing - which hopefully means it's something Fdev can pick up on!)

 

[Truesilver]

Except it's not true... NPCs never use feedback rails or any other special effects for that matter. This means SCBs are available in PvE but practically unavailable in PvP.

My undersanding is they do...but very rarely. That's part of what I'm saying though: the *balance issues* that are so apparent in PvP also affect PvE, because it means the wider the power creep gap is, the more of a pushover normal NPCs will feel like because they *have* to be set at a level that can be handled by incoming newer players.

About NPC's having specials, this is a widespread misapprehension but it's never happened.

Not counting the C&P changes in 3.0, NPC's have never had access to specials since they were completely removed from them in 2.1.1.

Occasional engineering upgrades at higher combat ranks, sometimes ... but specials, never.

If it were otherwise, I and the hundreds of thousands of players with vid software, amongst the two million purchasers, would by now have been able between us to make one video of an NPC causing a special effect to trigger on a player. Specials such as reverberating cascade, dispersal, target lock breaker, thermal cascade, phasing, scramble spectrum and many others cause unique and noticeable effects, including but not limited to the icon that appears on the victim's HUD. Even something like corrosive causes an icon.

But there are no vids, not even of the icons, because it's never happened!

...wasn’t this thread about the Type-10 being added to the Big 3?

I understand why the SCB thing may seem a perplexing diversion but it is at the heart of why some of us think that we're still in "Big 3" ... not "Big 4" ... territory.

Of course what follows is relevant only to PvP for the reasons in my response to V'larr above. (Although that begs the question of whether it was healthy for PvE players to fight special-free enemies for nearly two years. It was not Frontier's original plan for only the players to have the specials.)

Anyway, where relevant, for big ships:

(A) Shields down all too frequently means death. Hull tanking cannot be relied upon in a big ship due to the threat of module destruction by super penetrator rails or high yield shell cannons. Also the hulls are only about twice as strong themselves as ships with a tiny % of the hit box, so...

(B) Shields ideally need to be kept up, and...

(C) SCB's cannot be relied upon to keep shields up due to the ease of hitting a big ship with feedback cascade, therefore...

(D) Base shield is king, but...

(E) The T-10 has a low base shield multiplier.

It's the chain of reasoning above that for those of us with experience of, or even just interest in, PvP precludes the T-10 becoming part of a Big 4, without major revisions to at least some of the above. It all comes back to the base shield.

You can see some the problems posed by feedback cascade and super penetrators to a big ship in my recent vid thread here:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/406874-Turreted-Corvette-Guy-interdicts-5-x-Rail-Cutter

In that regard, I Wonder if something like this would work for SCB's :

• All SCB modules only provide one charge.
• SCB's work like a very large capacitor : overflow from the sys capacitor is used to refill it if the SCB is empty. Once refilled, can be triggered again.
• Rework feedback cascade in some way
• Use E to A grades as a way to choose between fast charge rate - low capacity or low charge rate - high capacity.

i.e. that would make them work like boosting with engines, but on a way longer time frame, limiting their use in PvP combat to once/per, while in PvE they could be
recharged over a long enough duration or while flying in SC.

An interesting idea, TY. Haven't really mulled it over properly yet but I certainly think that something other than the binary application of specials is the way we should be going, because binary is too hard on the big ships.

All that said, of course feedback cascade isn't completely binary at the moment, ever since the 2.2 changes...

On truesilvers rail question. Could it be solved by scaling the scb amount cancelled directly to weapon damage. Say each feedback cascade cancels damage×3 (complete guess) scb recharge. That way smaller ships using smaller modules are still cancelled in 1-2 hits bit big ships with big scbs need to be hit multiple times. Make it so that the effect only cancela one scb at a time id multiples are chained.

This is actually already in game! Just in a slighter form.

Feedback cascade has had three iterations:

(A) In Beta 2.1 any hit during the SCB spool up caused the immediate and complete drop of the target's shield (!!)

(B) In Live 2.1 this was dialled back to any hit from any size rail (e.g. a c1 rail) to any size SCB causing 90% of recharge to be lost.

(C) In 2.2 this was dialled back again, to the present position. Now, the game calculates damage (by c1 rail, c2 rail, or portion of Imp Hammer triple burst) and applies it against notional SCB 'health' by size of SCB, c8 being of course the largest. The maximum attack is 2 x c2 strikes, which will cause the full 90% of any size of SCB, even c8, to be lost. A smaller SCB can be negated by a smaller attack. A smaller attack against a larger SCB will negate a smaller than 90% proportion, etc.

The problem of course as ever with ED is stacking. One guy with 2 x c2 rails negates everything on a big ship. A wing negates everything on a big ship under focus fire. Conversely a Courier will probably never be negated at all.

So I suppose we could say Frontier have gone in the right direction on this but simply need to find a way to scale things to a greater degree.