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Full Version: Corona still not being nerfed is a joke
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After multiple threads and an overwhelming majority in the community requesting Corona to be nerfed, 2 months later after a big patch came including a lot of balance changes there's no mention of the Corona. I'm going to try to explain it one last time for those who still don't get why the weapon is overpowered in hopes of stopping the madness that the balance team is doing with bombers.

Corona is an anti-cap beam. It has 32000 m/s velocity and has a fixed arc meaning the weapon cannot be dodged and it's all on the bomber to position himself to aim rather than the capital ship doing evasive maneuvers (except one - see paragraph 7). Due to cockpit view existing, any difficulty the weapon has against smaller caps where shooting the weapon directly from 3D view wouldn't suffice is essentially removed. Damage varies per class and is described here. Damage is not the issue, if anything damage against BCs needs to go up to 4300 because battlecruisers are closer to battleships than cruisers. Auto hit mechanic, as much as it seems to be inevitably broken, can be fine because we have a plugin that changes damage to specific ship classes, so as long as the damage isn't too high and the opponent has an ability to defend himself from the auto hit mechanic it would work fine. That's where the problem comes - ability to defend oneself from it, or in other words - counterplay.

Right now the Corona has 1200m range. To clear up a mistake people often make regarding range calculation - no matter what the range indicator shows or when the crosshair shows up, the weapon will travel 1200m after being shot. If the crosshair against an enemy cap shows up at 600m, it's actually at close to 1200m (some range is inevitably lost because when the crosshair first appears you have to go slightly closer). Range calculation is a bit counter-intuitive in Freelancer but that's how it works, weapons don't "lose" range because of what it says on your screen. This goes for any weapon, not just the Corona.

If snubs are doing any kind of movement that isn't flying directly in a straight line, they can't and won't be hit by any capital ship weapon from 1200 meters - even solarises of all cap classes miss from that range. That's where the fundamental flaw of the weapon comes - hitting something while them not being able to do anything in return. Optimal use of the Corona is approaching the cap to about 1k-1.1k effective range (100-200m after your crosshair appears), hitting the reverse button and strafing in all 4 directions while shooting the weapon. Optionally you can enter cockpit view to see better. Pretty basic concept, nothing complicated or requiring a lot of skill.

You might say wait a second, how is that different from a SNAC or a Nova being shot from max range? Because in order to have any realistic chance of hitting the cap with a SNAC/ASURAS, you have to come much closer than what the maximum range is otherwise you will simply miss (as close as 200-300m from a gunboat, 400-500m from a cruiser, etc.). At that range you can be damaged by a solid number of capital ship guns and even die if you're not careful. As for Novas, they can be CDed, CMed, flaked or simply dodged. That's 4 different ways of doing something in return. You cannot hit the enemy snub, but the enemy snub won't hit you either. That's fair game, there are many interactions between weapons and classes like that where it's essentially a stalemate (ex. 2 battleships sitting at 4.5k from each other, one has mortars and the other has no weapon with more than 3k range. Even though the former outranges the latter, the latter will simply dodge any mortars shot from such a high range which makes the fight a "stalemate"). Coronas hit everything from max range, and that max range is too high to get hit back.

In order to fix that, the easiest and by far the best solution is to reduce the range to ex. 800m. 800 seems like a decent enough place where you don't have to risk getting instakilled every time you go for a Corona run but more importantly allow the enemy cap to hit you back or bait you into closer range through reversing or flying at you.



Now for some counters people like to bring up. The only thing a capital ship can do is delay the inevitable by flying directly at the bomber shooting the corona. By doing that he reduces the range between himself and the bomber to have a chance damaging it back and also take less damage because the window of opportunity for the bomber to dish out damage is reduced. That works alright on gunboats, but on cruisers and especially bigger caps the problem is that they're simply too slow to do this consistently. Even if they were fast enough to be able to turn against every corona bomber targeting them you can only turn towards 1, usually bombers work in numbers which is the optimal way to utilize them. Not only that, but there's an even bigger reason why this doesn't work - the Corona bomber can simply turn back if the situation is too hot.

Gunboat weapons hit snubs from about 400m effectively, which can go up to 600m against heavy bombers. If that gunboat is closing distance from 1.2k and going straight at you, it would be ludicrous to assume that you're gonna keep sitting still and allow the gunboat to come closer than 600m, at which point you will start taking a lot of damage. The optimal solution in that scenario is to simply turn back, reposition and try again. Due to how maneuverable bombers are against caps, you will always be able to approach the cap from a favorable position at some point. If you have other bombers, which you often do, you can allow them to do a Corona run while you turn away from the cap. What I'm getting at is that you can choose to disengage at any point, you don't have to sit still and allow yourself to take unnecessary damage. The range window of opportunity is so big that you can almost always disengage in time.

Then there's the VHF argument. "It's fine, just bring a bunch of VHFs and they will kill the bombers". That doesn't solve the fundamental issue of the weapon written in bold white text above. If A counters B and you bring C to counter A, A will still counter B. By encouraging this you're basically telling what, that caps should log off every time they see bombers? That's definitely not the way to go, especially when the solution to fixing the Corona is as simple as changing 1 line in the Corona entry.

Another thing people bring up is changing other stats such as damage. Sure, you can absolutely make the weapon useless by heavily hitting its damage, but that again doesn't solve the fundamental issue of the weapon. When you use it (if at all because the weapon will be useless), you will still shoot it from max effective range and the cap still won't have a chance to do anything back. It's yet another workaround that solves little and goes around the core issue rather than addressing the core issue itself.

I've yet to see a better fix than hitting the range. We once thought beams are always going to be unbalanceable because they'd insta hit snubs as well as caps, but then we got the plugin that provided a workaround. It opened up a whole new world of balance possibilities, which is sadly being misused at the moment of writing this thread. For example, the Scorcher bomb has a bit more efficiency and damage than the Corona but has 2 times less range and much less speed. Scorchers work fine, so why is a weapon that has 114 times more velocity also having twice more range? It's counter-intuitive in every way. We're not even asking for massive overhauls or nerfing the weapon into the ground, just 400m range loss.



That coupled with the terrible SNAC nerf which still wasn't addressed and makes SNAC essentially useless because not only is it useless against snubs but other torpedoes outshine it against caps as well (most obvious example being the Corona) is a worrying trend in the work of the balance team towards bombers. What happened to the SNAC fix to make it do % damage like repair ship guns do? In my last conversation regarding that, it was supposed to do 90% max health damage to all snubs in order to make it viable against SHFs again as well as allow a potential instakill but only if the enemy snub messes up by not regening (just like Nuclear mines on HFs) or requiring you to hit the SNAC + a bunch of other guns (like MR+2.00s on VHFs). If this thread isn't a wake-up call, I don't know what will be.



Tl;dr Reduce Corona range.
antonio is right
Agreed.
(11-25-2018, 03:39 PM)Corile Wrote: [ -> ]antonio is right
And also bombers right now are insane. They're just tankier fighters with anti-cap capability. I'm all for buffing bombers, but I think we need to scale them back.
Snactonio is right (at least in the tl;dr, doesn't cross my mind to read the long version), but I think the devteam is too busy cooling down since the new release and for all the bug fixes, so balance changes might have to wait a week or more. You posted this a bit early.
Agreed.
Yes, that's all well and good, but what about scorchers and neutralizers? Great weapons in theory but terrible in practice, and that's entirely due to spread.

Remove scorcher/neutralizer spread so we have some alternative bomber heavies to use. You cant even hit a cruiser or gunboat with them at the stated 600m range because the shots practically fly 45 degrees out from your nose. Even hitting non-dodging gunboat NPCs at less than 200 or 300 range becomes a roll of the dice because the spread amount is too high.


Back on topic: personally I hate coronas, I feel vulnerable using them as a bomber because as soon as you start to use the thing you inevitably have an enemy snub tearing you to pieces. I would call that the counterplay: the cap shouldnt be fighting bombers alone, if you go buy the stupid rock-paper-scissors balancing act that disco devs love so much.
Agreed.
Fighters should get better anti cap capability.

Like 2 CD slots (or bring back aux slots) and longer gun range.
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