Battleship Weapons

[iiLeRoss]

With the 5.2 update battleship guns got reworked. While I genuinely like the concepts behind many of these changes, the execution has (and as far as I can tell this is a fairly universal opinion) been less than desirable. Now let's be honest, the 5.1 guns combined with the durability and strafe of 5.1 battleships were pretty good and they did need some changes. But the current state when combined with awful weapons is tragic.

The fleet utility promised has not materialized. My action in the Aland Siege has been playing a glorified docking platform (I could bring a cruiser or BC and still do that and contribute to the fight better) and lobbing artillery that largely misses people.

Now I have been promised changes and certain assurances that the official opinion on some of these guns and the class is that they are awful, but you still made me suffer through using this rubbish, so here you go. I'll go over the ones I've used/thoroughly viewed in combat.


FWGs:

Now there are only three of these, and they're all dreadful (get it?). Rotating your entire ship to fire a 600/ms projectile is not ideal. You can't abuse the range advantage since it:

A. Isn't better than the mortar selection/equivalents.

B. Like most mortars is absolute rubbish to hit anything that isn't a dreadnought to hit with.

Now when you do hit with these they're lovely, but again, you're only really useful against battleships, specifically dreadnoughts. The projectiles do look rather comical at these speeds though.


Mortars:

Plasma Mortar - This was one of the best BS heavies in 5.1. It is now the worst. On the positive, it's the longest-range gun in the game now at nearly 5k. You can comfortably maintain volley fire with 4 of them if you aren't shield regenning, and if you do hit it's wonderful, it tears apart dreadnoughts especially. But its velocity is 550/ms. Now I won't claim to be a BS ace, but I'm not a bad shot either. I have hit a cruiser exactly once so far. And that's because it was flying in a straight line. The only battlecruisers I have hit have with one exception been stuck in asteroid fields or are new players. Against battleships with smaller profiles, it also struggles if they strafe or otherwise evade. In practical combat, it is a thoroughly useless weapon. Backed up by the fact this is a hard-to-grind encounter codename and you have a near-insulting weapon to use.

Heavy Mortar - At only 50/ms a second faster speed it shares many problems with the plasma mortar. It's not quite as efficient but this is largely moot. It's still not good, you're still not particularly likely to hit things smaller than your average dreadnought.

Mortar: Another 50 m/s increase in speed. At 650/ms you may expect to hit some targets. You can reach out to every other class pretty reliably, but the damage has taken a steep hit compared to its heavier cousins. It's still rather mediocre.

Overall just a weird category of weapon that only feels useful in fighting...other battleships.


Close-Range Weapons:

Brawlers/Cerbs/Warhawks/Whatever - These have been put in a very bizarre position. By the time you get into range, you can probably just use your prims, which do more damage, and have the ROF/efficiency to compensate for the loss in velocity. If you're in very close range, again your prims will work even better, and you have razors and the like. Even if you use 2 of these your DPS is outdone by 4 prims, you suffer range issues against BCs that play at a distance, and the efficiency is very mediocre. The only reason to take these is if you are having issues using razors and the like.

Razors/Zulfikars - They're still razors, you're just plainly outranged by BCs, so mounting these can make your loadout, especially on a ship with only 2 heavies problematic. You are at about the maximum range of a lot of cruiser heavies. If you need crosshairs to fight you might struggle to get one. Amusingly the BC razor outranges and outspeeds it, albeit with less damage.


Primaries:

Normal Prims - They feel good. A bit slow, but the efficiency is excellent, the DPS is good, and the range is good. You kinda just need them. This has created an interesting problem with the following weapons. And either way they're still not good enough to compensate for your lack of capability against, any ship class that isn't called a battleship.

Pulses - They're rubbish for one reason: You need your prim slots. When you can get the range good you can still shield pressure people, if you're fighting a dreadnought on dreadnought battle they can get outranged very easily.

EMP Dissipation Field - The necessity of carrying actual prims has made this already shitpost level weapon a net negative weapon. In a patch that brought swarm missiles that shouldn't really be the case. The only time I got to use them on said missiles was when Desolators had broken mass and it ended up accelerating them into my ship anyway.


Secondaries:

If these got changed I didn't really notice. Nobody else has really made complaints other than previous complaints about how they were in 5.1.


Missiles:

Nightmare - Probably the only success story of this patch battleship wise. Unfortunately, if you're in a light battleship (the objectively better option) you have to sacrifice 1/2 of your heavies to bring it. While you can just evade it by flying off to shake its poor turn, it does just delete core and shields once you get into flak range. More importantly, it's very amusing to use though, and you can screw over (again) dreadnoughts with it.

The Rest - Basically unchanged opinions, nobody really uses them.


Conclusion:

Everything else is largely codenames I don't own or use that often, and to be frank if I need to use them to have effective weapons something has gone very wrong. Looking at the stats a lot of them also suffer from horrific speed issues.

Dreadnoughts are giant targets that can't evade, can't tank very well, and have appalling weapons. Smaller battleships like the Elbe do better simply by being much smaller and faster. The only reason I would take a dreadnought to a fight seriously is if I wanted to kill other dreadnoughts faster. Nobody good is going to actually be threatened by a battleship if they are flying a BC or smaller. They do not have real fleet utility that a battlecruiser cannot do. I do not count flailing shots that'll only hit if people are stuck in an asteroid field.

Perhaps the bigger issue is I haven't met anyone that has claimed to enjoy flying these. Or think they're good.

Now of course, what can be done to fix this? That's an @Haste question, but I'll give it a shot. Every gun with 600 or less velocity that doesn't have an ROF over 1 is useless, they (along with some others) need an increase. Some guns suffer from slightly questionable practical range and need an increase, or have been power crept out of being useful weapons and need some buff (range, damage, efficiency). Some relatively efficient guns suffer too much as weapons to even make use of those efficiencies and also need a direct buff to whatever the specific issue with them is. Others with bad efficiency do not perform well enough to compensate for this, and need a flat damage increase or other direct performance increase.

Since we'll likely have WW3 before battleship components and most definitely GTA6, battleships desperately need:

Better health, (I doubt this will happen)

A return to silly strafe, which mostly affected other battleships anyway but gave you a chance at surviving, most other things.