I believe it is the space plane paradigm that has weapons and other things misaligned. It was not uncommon for a battle ship to oblirate a target with the first volley fired for affect. When we correctly apply the space SHIP paradigm, things more properly align with way most people would find believable and acceptable. The fighter jet jockeys will have nothing of this though because in their minds a small fighter should always be able to bring down a bomber. I for one do not believe things will change. I hope I'm wrong.
WTB better C4 Plasma Accelerators / Cannons
- Thread starter Soothsayer
- Start date
I'll have to break my FDL out of storage and try it sometime. Just didn't like it enough to fly it much.
The C3 multi cannons were confirmed, but new C4s are not yet confirmed. It was in the 6 hour long live stream for horizons launch.
I've heard the FDL can more effectively utilize huge hardpoints by virtue of its decent maneuverability, which makes for easier subsystem sniping. I've never flown an FDL, but from my experience, C4 weaponry just doesn't work at all for the Anaconda.
Last time I tried A4 PA on Anaconda, I couldn't hit anything. Later, after buying the Corvette with A4 PAs, I had the same difficulty until I switched to Leading Target Indicator. I had been using the Trailing Target Indicator on the Vulture as it made things easier. Not so with PAs. After switching, I'm now quite good at hitting targets at 1km but I usually strive for 400-800km as the ideal range. I'll bet that if I went back to the Anaconda, I'd have the same success with the PA. I must stress that it takes 500 to 1000 shots before you start to get proficient. After a few thousand shots, I can honestly say that the Anaconda's problem was the pilot, not the PAs.
This is the exact reason why FD has made projectiles unlrealistically slow. They deliberately made the weapons unrealistic to radically boost up the fun factor. If they were realistic, lasers would have the longest range and highest shot velocity. 99% of the combat would be at such extreme range, the human eye couldn't see them. You could target and kill them way before visual range. Modern attack helicopters already do this.
But it is WAY cooler and more fun to watch your combat opponent thrusting and boosting around while you try to line up shots.
The huge hardpoint placements on the Corvette seem to be much better, and the Corvette is obviously a more maneuverable ship than the Anaconda. My main problem with the C4 PA on the Anaconda was how difficult it was to guess where my target was located relative to where my PA shot would travel due to my ship's nose, as well as how drastically low the hardpoint placement is on the ship. Overall, I highly doubt the PA could approach a C3 weapon in terms of killing efficiency -- the on-paper DPS just isn't high enough, not by a long shot, to compensate for how long it takes to properly line up shots. Oh, and there's of course the fact that it drains a quarter of your capacitor per shot, which significantly decreases the amount of uptime (and, by extension, DPS) from your other hardpoints.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=140240 is a good thread illustrating the underwhelming nature of PAs.
Funny thing is it isn't. The Anaconda cant actually point its nose at stuff slightly faster than the Vette when both are fully combat fitted. The only thing the Vette has a leg up on the Conda is that it does not drift no where near as much.
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this would still be true if the larger pure projectiles were twice as fast, even 33% faster would be a great improvement. it would still be avoidable wit erratic flying at the same distances. It would just be more satisfying to fire the things.
The PA i don't mind being the speed it is. but the damage is incredibly underwhelming. 3 Gimbled med pulse lasers shot 3x does some where in the same ball park damage as a huge fixed PA shot 1ce. And in the time it takes to line up a fixed weapon and for it to actually hit the target, you could have done twice the damage with the pulse lasers.
So i find them incredibly underwhelming.. I understand they do hull and shield damage but they should be quite a bit more destructive IMO.
The damage for kinetic cannons etc i could live with if they had a higher velocity.
So its just a tiny bit of balancing they need to do to make these weapons seem like something that is worth having for the user. Whilst still keeping them avoidable by the opponent.
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I totally agree that more balancing is needed. I recently tried out some C2 gimballed cannons (I'm playing on a gamepad, so fixed weapons are VERY hard to line up) and the hit rate was abysmal. I carefully timed shots to when my target was barely moving, and missed a lot. Back to multicannons.
Frontier did recently make some progress during the Horizons update. They probably don't want to make radical changes all at once, but rather try to "creep up" on the perfect balance. They're already pretty close.
Honestly, I think there's a bit of common-sense balancing that ought to be done to make more weapons viable in more situations, like increased hull damage and velocity for cannons at the expense of armor penetration and increased velocity / DPS for C4 plasma accelerators -- again, perhaps at the expense of a moderate reduction in armor penetration to discourage cheesy, instant kills. The pulse / beam laser / multicannon meta is unbelievably boring, but it works extremely well against all ships.
While we're on the subject of weapon balance, missiles are also fairly terrible in most situations, since their alpha damage is decidedly terrible for an alpha damage weapons platform.