Discovery Gaming Community

Light fighters are the class that gets the least balance attention. The main reason why that's the case is because with every change implemented there's a high chance it breaks the class due to how volatile and unpredictable they are. Generally that's why no one wants to attempt anything with them - the effort to make them a perfectly viable but somewhat balanced is too big. Balance within the class is nonexistent, with the most extreme cases and differences in stats. For instance a Liberator is a couple times smaller than a Griffin. Although they're all over the place, they can generally be grouped into "overpowered" and "useless" with a few in between that received a lot of balance changes which are completely out of their class (Scimitar and Sea Serpent received insane amount of bots and a shield that's closer to VHFs than LFs). That alone says enough about the problem of balancing LFs. If you balance a ship in one class but give it stats of a class 2 levels higher, what's the point of keeping them in a class they aren't meant for?

Those that are overpowered are super small (Liberator, Wyrm, Neko) and generally not hittable with regular guns. As for why almost no one flies them actively, it's simply because it's not worth it. You constantly have to pay attention to everything around you and have the inevitable anxiety that at any moment you can explode, regardless of whether you had shields or not. They're less rewarding, more punishing, require constant focus and you can be doing incredibly well for 10 minutes just to make 1 mistake, get nuked, and you're gone from the fight. The effort required to fly them properly isn't rewarding enough for people to bother with them when they can just take a Guardian and have much less stress flying it while probably doing more anyways because of higher DPS and a more aggressive flying style.

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But perhaps we don't have to try to make them a dps-reliant PvP class. Discovery snub PvP is high paced with VHFs alone. Throw in some HFs and you get even higher paced combat, and the LFs are bringing it to an extreme. Imagine if everyone flew Liberators for a second. It'd become awful for all participants pretty soon due to how fast and small it is. The only solution would be mine trapping which already is the case - there is no "draining LFs of bots", it's either instakill or no instakill, be it a mine like in 90% of scenarios or a mini razor/missile. The only difference is how bad the person flying them is or how hard time you have taking the shield down. This is generally bad and brings bad experience to pretty much everyone involved, except the person getting refilled with bots. Here's my proposition how to fix them:

Make LFs a utility class. The only proper support ship we have right now is the repair ship, which is situational and can be great in some scenarios but is bad in most. Apart from the overpowered ones mentioned above, LFs haven't been viable since the 900m/s meme that turned out to be disastrous (again, 1 change that completely broke the class). Why are we pretending they are? Why not make something useful with them instead of ignoring them for the longest time? That's where the utility part comes in. They'd become proper support ships with tons of utility and ability for those who aren't great at shooting stuff, especially in a snub, to be useful. They'd be very newbie-friendly and accessible to everyone.

The exact concept would be something like this:

Couple all this with what LFs currently have over others - they cruise the fastest (425m/s) and have the highest turn rates, which makes them be able to move around the fight easily. If they receive the changes I propose, they'd be able to sit somewhere at the sidelines and overlook the fight, something that's very underrated in this community as coordination and proper shot calling/communicating can win you fights even if you're worse than the enemy or outnumbered. You could call cap targets, snub targets, CD everything you see, disrupt someone when you hear a cloak, and even slowly repair a wounded battleship. I think it'd be a great way to make them have a clear purpose, and be a unique class they've always been but actually viable on the battlefield. Thoughts?

I think these changes might fix the class entirely. Although they sound they have too many uses - it is compensated by the fact that they are easily instakillable. Although I would argue that the small LFs mentioned above (Liberator, Hayabusa, Kusari LF) would need to be looked at more in-depth, considering that one of those ships in the hands of a good pilot can survive indefinitely shieldrunning.

I'd suggest increasing radar effectiveness had I any experience in modding the game files to know how feasible that would be.

Minor Edit for Clarification: By effectiveness I mean suffering less interference from nebulas and such.

I am not sure I want the repair ability on a ship class that pretty much can evade endlessly and can never be taken down if it does not come at you or do anything that might result in a mine-trap hit.

The rest sounds really good, imo.

As I am probably the person here who is known for piloting LFs (while being average at most while doing so) I wouldn't want any of the suggestions. I fly them because they are incredibly fun to fly, basically the extreme opposite of battleships who are slow and tanky, while an LF can be mine-slapped instantly. That's a risk I take. I like being able to run away from fights while not being able to deal much damage. Basically, I only managed to kill stuff using HAMMERFALLs from FP11 or FEUERBALLs since they are available to LFs. To be honest, I avoid shieldrunning and died quickly in PvP, but always to mines only, and only in one single instance to the natural fisheye of Protege.

I guess if someone like Wesker would use an LF, especially with FEUERBALLs, that'd be frustrating, especilly if they are on a Liberator. I recall one instance of Kreuzberg using a Hussar with Hammerfalls to wreck five Corsairs. Would taking away their DPS fix it? I don't think so. A tiny barely unhittable ship with two HAMMERFALLs or FEUERBALLs can still deal a lot of damage while dodging. I think upscaling the ship hitboxes would only do so much, maybe adjusting all their sizes to a similar level. The Liberator is the extreme here as it is as tiny as the Hayabusa while the Liberator can mount more weapons. The Hayabusa only three.

Changing the class entirely? I think that'd go along well if there was a specific need for interceptors, and only then. Right now, any cruiser has the same CD-abilities as an LF. Why? If Cruisers, in my book, would have CDs at all, then only about 20 and only for torpedo-defense. Something like mini-flaks, guided but with huge AoE. Right now however cruisers are just as effective in CDing as LFs or anything else are - except battleships.

Creating a new class works only if there is a need for it. However with Cruisers being "omnipotent" in those regards, why would you need interceptors at all?

Could just delete them and increase the cruise speed on HFs I guess

The Sea Serpent and Scimitar are a good standard. Can current LFs just not be upscaled?

The suggestions in the OP seem like good ideas. Just not feeling too confident if it's the right answer for LFs.

I do like the concept of a utility ship. Very much so, in fact, what with everything being so combat-oriented.
I'm just not sure LFs are the best fit for it : all the time reading your post, I thought "Yeah, that sounds like what a freighter would do !", including the sitting by a big fight, acting as a command & control unit.
Packing so many systems in ships designed to be small and evasive seems counter-intuitive, as opposed to the larger freighters, which would have stronger power at their disposal to handle all the fancy tech.

That being said, I'm extremely in favour of an in-depth rework of the LF class. I love HFs, I've come to terms that they didn't need to be anything other than more agile and zippy versions of VHFs... Which leaves LFs in an unfortunate, redundant and fairly all-or-nothing position as you've described. Going the utility way is definitely the right path as I see it, and making use of PoB-manufactured stuff is certainly a good idea.

I would rather have the LFs fulfil their role as a proper support ship. A LF-only CD that has no ammo limitation, a LF-only scanner with 20k or more range and an internal component which is present on all LFs that can be assigned a coordinate scanner function via flhook.

Lanakov and Sombs raise some good points, but on the whole I think Antonio's suggestions sound very interesting. There may not be a specific need for an interceptor class, but there certainly would be room for it. I really like tactical variety it could enable.

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This is of course not necessary, but would it be possible (and/or desirable?) to rename the ship class? Because after Antonio's revamp, they wouldn't really be "fighters" anymore, but rather... "Interceptors", or "Scouts", or "Light Support Craft", or something.

(And then the current HFs can be renamed, because they would be the lightest Fighter class; VHFs become the new HFs; and SHFs (which is a weird descriptor anyway) are renamed VHFs. Again, it's not necessary, but is it desirable?)