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Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 - Printable Version +- Discovery Gaming Community (https://discoverygc.com/forums) +-- Forum: Discovery Development (https://discoverygc.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=7) +--- Forum: Discovery Developers Forum (https://discoverygc.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=183) +--- Thread: Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 (/showthread.php?tid=204953) |
Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 - Haste - 10-03-2024 Discovery 5.2 Dev Diary #2- Guns And Stuff ![]() Our last dev blog covered 5.2's shield changes. Naturally, they're not the only thing changing. This dev blog will go into the changes we're making to guns and missiles in the upcoming update. Overview After wasting all his time on optimizing and stabilizing the server's performance, @Aingar finally focused on what's truly important: burst-fire weapons. This new mechanic coming with 5.2 has allowed us to bring much more variety to weapons. We've revisited existing guns like Hellfire Rocket Pods and Annihilator Rocket Launchers, added a magazine system to many types of missiles, and we are — of course — introducing lots of new codenames. We'll work our way through the changes from top to bottom: from the lightest fighter guns to the largest capital turrets. Fighter Guns Before we can get into specifics, we need to address some macro changes coming to all fighter, bomber and freighter weapons. We've adjusted the formula we use to calculate their power usage, increasing the weight of per-shot (alpha) damage; damage-per-second and velocity. This means that gun efficiencies scale down more aggressively as a gun's performance goes up. In addition, we've reduced the effect of mass on power usage, as the mass on bomber guns was not a large enough factor for the increased efficiency it provided. Finally, we've slightly reduced the positive effect on efficiency provided by dispersion. Does it sound like every gun on every snub you own is getting hit with the nerf bat? You're probably not wrong. The guns that are largely unaffected by our changes are those that are the least used: low damage, low velocity guns, in particular those with high fire rates like the Zoners' Fury 4. We're hoping to finally encourage players to try and master these weapons, instead of defaulting to the cookie cutter guns that have been popular for over a decade. There's one archetype of guns that is gaining some efficiency, which is the "hybrid" gun type. Guns with additional shield damage, like class 1 guns and some codenames — TREMOR and QUASAR for example — are penalized less for their hybrid nature. While they're still hit by the other changes, most of them will now use less power. Outliers like the Supernova Antimatter Cannon will still draw substantially more power than they do in 5.1. Class 1 Light Fighter Guns While we've seen some use of Class 1 guns, players have mostly been using them to very slightly optimize loadouts. Players will switch out one Pulse gun for two hybrid Light Fighter guns and min-max their hull damage output. Ironically, however, Light Fighters' limited number of gun slots pushes them into using higher-class guns, including Bomber ones, to try and dish out as much damage as quickly as possible. Therefore, we're adjusting Class 1 guns in the following ways:
We're also hoping that a sliding scale of velocities all the way from 900 m/s down to 600 m/s will give players an easier learning curve as they learn to aim their shots in fighter combat. Missiles In 5.1, we've noticed an uptick in missile usage on fighters. This is something we're very happy to see, as it enables weaker aimers to still be very relevant in groupfights. This is exactly what we were hoping for when we first rebalanced missiles. As such, we're very cautious with adjusting them. However, as fighter gun efficiencies have gone down on average, missiles did need some adjustments to keep them balanced. In addition, we found that the high fire rate and substantial power usage of missiles allowed players to nearly forego using guns at all, which prevented them from getting better at positioning and aiming. Therefore, the adjustment we chose to make does not directly affect missiles' power level. Instead, we're using the new burst-fire mechanic to give missiles a "magazine size" and a "reload time": As a result, missiles can still feel powerful, but during their reload time, players are encouraged to get some shots in with their guns to make optimal use of their powercore. We've also adjusted the "light" missile archetype, with a focus on putting the burst in burst-fire: Gunboat Forward Guns & Turrets Compared to our changes to fighter weapons, Gunboat weapons have received fairly small tweaks. As we're not too fond of the dominance of "Pulse-Streamer" loadouts, we've bumped up the damage output of Nullifier Pulse Cannons. Annihilator Rocket Pods — as mentioned at the start of the blog — have been switched over to burst-fire, allowing them to deal very large amounts of damage very quickly and making them a much more viable and interesting choice. Codenames have been made a bit more exciting, too, with QUAKEs gaining burst-fire mechanics and VOIDSTORMs getting a substantial DPS boost. We're also introducing new Gunboat weapons: Railguns will provide Gunboats with a punchy, accurate, high-velocity forward gun option that can be built relatively cheaply on Player Owned Bases. The new "IFRIT" heavy turret slot codename joins the QUAKE as a burst-fire option at a higher velocity (750 m/s) bracket. Gunboat primary turrets have also been adjusted. They now fire quicker, with the lowest fire rate gunboat primary turrets firing 6.5 times per second. The highest available fire rate is now 8.0 shots per second. Their overall DPS has been increased by 35%, making them a lot more threatening, but their efficiency has been reduced slightly to make sure heavy turrets and forward guns still have a role. Perhaps the biggest change to Gunboat weapons is our rework of Vandal and Silencer Missile Launchers. Both are now vertically-launched swarm missiles, (rapidly) firing four missiles. These missiles are very agile, quickly curving towards their target, but have limited top speeds, giving their target time to disengage, dodge or shoot down the missiles. Cruiser Turrets Cruisers turrets have seen the fewest changes. We're not currently sure they need significant adjustments, as the Cruiser meta is so heavily focused on the pin-point accuracy required to shoot down enemy Cruisers' engines that we believe it is warping the perceived power level of weapons like Tachyons. Instead, we have done a thorough pass of Cruiser engines: we've adjusted the hitboxes of engines we think are too easy or too difficult to hit, and the armor values of Cruiser engines have generally been increased. They're still very viable targets, but focusing solely on shooting down an enemy Cruiser's engines is now not nearly as viable. Some small changes we have made include:
Battlecruiser Turrets After the Cruiser changes we made in 5.1, Battlecruisers were in a weird spot. Their forward-firing guns now had much more limited ranges, making chasing enemies risky and awkward. So, we decided to bite the bullet and remove access to Cruiser Heavies from Battlecruisers, instead giving them their own Heavy Turrets to slot in. To avoid confusion, we've renamed their old "Heavies" to "Main Batteries". Don't worry, it's hard for us to get used to, too. Battlecruiser Heavies are not too different from Cruiser Heavies, but generally output more damage and have much higher maximum ranges. Their new turrets are:
Battlecruisers have also been slightly adjusted as a class, shifting their focus from defense to offense and agility:
Battleship Turrets In 5.1, large groups of Battleships are incredibly powerful and difficult to answer with anything other than your very own fleet of Battleships. This is in no small part thanks to their incredibly long-ranged heavy turrets — especially fast and accurate ones. For this reason, we've changed their turrets up a little. Like Battlecruiser Heavy Turrets and Main Batteries, a Battleship Heavy Turret's range is now inversely proportional to its muzzle velocity. This means that highly accurate turrets that are particularly hard to dodge now have much more limited range, while slower projectiles continue to have very high range. Of course, we wanted to preserve as much of the identity of existing weapons as we could, so artillery weapons like Mortars have had their speeds reduced, and their range preserved. In addition, all Battleship Primary & Heavy Turret power usage values have been recalculated based primarily on their velocity. Now's as good a time as any to mention some other changes we've made to the Battleship class:
Final Thoughts
There's plenty more coming this blog doesn't touch on. Either on purpose, or simply because I forgot to mention it. For example, I almost forgot this: RE: Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 - Nodoka Hanamura - 10-03-2024 Load the VLS Cells and flip on the radar, It's Nightmare season. And I'm not talking about Halloween. RE: Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 - Nectarpilair - 10-03-2024 Quote:After wasting all his time on optimizing and stabilizing the server's performance, @Aingar finally focused on what's truly important:My shout-out regarding these matter, Aingar once said the optimization enables server to do 50 snubs battle without Lags. But, for me it was The BIGGEST update that affected my Discovery experience. I was constantly get auto-banned by the system, and 90% of the time get Desync on a mid-day Fleet Battle. The game was unplayable, yet i continue to play because i loved your Dev team's work. After the optimization, somehow those problems were solved. You won't believe me if i say it directly pump me up from having near 0% winning rate, to be almost 90% winning rate just solely because the Lags fixed. Just imagine if im not only the one player out there that having this kind of experience. RE: Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 - Spectre - 10-03-2024 I asked for gun changes, and while not the ones I'd particularly hoped for, they're pretty spicy nonetheless. Battleship armor has been reduced by ~33%. This does me a frighten. Battleships should be that heavily armored anchor of the fleet, and while a focus on dodging is fine and all, the only thing battleships bring to a fight is guns and armor. Relaxing some of that armor feels like a huge nerf, especially for battleships that are essentially just massive slabs of hitpoints (Bismarck, Tempest, Legate, etc.) This, however.. The Nightmare Torpedo makes a return. We're setting Manhattan on fire with this one. Glory be to the Silo Gods. RE: Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 - Slimalou - 10-03-2024 Well my fellow BB mains, we have been nerfed again. It was fun while it lasted. I guess all there is left to me is transporting and keeping POBs stocked. RE: Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 - Culbrelai - 10-03-2024 (10-03-2024, 07:22 PM)Slimalou Wrote: Well my fellow BB mains, we have been nerfed again. It was fun while it lasted. I guess all there is left to me is transporting and keeping POBs stocked. Same. Time to become a powerttrader I suppose. St Denis has had a long fun time playing Discovery and to my knowledge he has never willingly PVPed. I’ll become St Denis junior lmao RE: Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 - TheDoctorXI - 10-03-2024 Patch 5.3 Battleship re-work, when?:tm: RE: Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 - Haste - 10-03-2024 (10-03-2024, 09:59 PM)TheDoctorXI Wrote: Patch 5.3 Battleship re-work, when?:tm: Real. In all honesty, I've played around with trying to do reworks one ship at a time, and somehow making that.. Work. We'll see. I also want to stop delaying transport balance work though. RE: Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 - TheDoctorXI - 10-03-2024 (10-03-2024, 10:03 PM)Haste Wrote:(10-03-2024, 09:59 PM)TheDoctorXI Wrote: Patch 5.3 Battleship re-work, when?:tm: Battleships are in an awkward spot. Granted there are a lot of them, so I appreciate the hefty work-load involved. Something along the lines of really, painfully slow turret rotational velocity, long-range, heavy hitting...heavies. Bit like EVE Online (don't hurt me). Smaller ships get up close and under your main battery range, you aren't hitting them. Obviously we've secondaries at the moment, but I think cruisers and the like can deal with those, presently. RE: Patch When? Discovery 5.2 Edition: Blog #2 - Dark Chocolate - 10-03-2024 33 percent Nerf on BS armour? Really? I didn't think there would be any worse news than reduction in Hegemon Cargo. Kudos for exceeding my expectations. I wish i could enjoy all those cool guns you guys made but we're just going to get obliterated by snubs.. BS are going to get eaten by snub storms like never before. This only worsens the already existing problem of snubs deciding the fate of each and every battle. Perhaps we should just fly transports into all PvPs now. |