Development Notice: Hellfire Rocket Pods

[Cursetantine]

Please no.

It took me 5 seconds in my Percheron to go dry and then die against a lolwat engaged without any noticements , he had 6 hellfires. -Thats right, 720 ammo. -

Revert it please. It makes no sense.

edit: Even if he RPed then attacked, there is little I could do against that opness...

---

ALG #1

[Shizune]

So I decided to check about that you know?

I enjoy that there was an attempt here at...something?
1,650,000 is the armor of a nomad battleship.
6x ammo for Hellfire pods is 3,646,800 max damage being dealed in less then 5 to 10 seconds flat

Over all. That means unless you really want to turn this into Flak88, I suggest this be completely undone

Because over all?

The smallest thing to survive one these? is a heavy battleship at least with a Cap 6 or bigger only. Not even a CAU 8 BC will survive this

I enjoy knowing the fact that this is open to basically everyone. And that this all can be done. If my math is correct again? That's 680k for a all 720 rockets

In a 5k with Ore? That's nearly 40+ reloads in total. If a player does things smart? I got 200m on one of my bombers. If it was a pirate ship and I left and keep coming back, I could kill anyone, including fighter players who were chasing me.

I mean, its more amusing that this is already being abused and no one has said a thing

[Mephistoles]

6x ammo for Hellfire pods is 3,646,800 max damage being dealed in less then 5 to 10 seconds flat

Hellfire ammo per launcher: 120
6x120: 720
Hellfire refire: 6.00
5x forward Hellfire: 30/second
720/30: 24

Time to deplete ammo of 6 Hellfires with 5 firing nonstop: 24 seconds

---

Sigma & GMG Discord Chat: https://discord.gg/d4j3W4v

[Haste]

Can you do the same for Catapult Missiles? As they are now, they're essentially Hellfires that eat energy and have half the damage.

Pretty much every ship that would consider mounting a Catapult only has one slot for them, so it'd be rather pointless to have them stack, really.

I'm working on a way to make Hellfires a bit less silly anyways.

[Connor]

Is there no way of creating damage modifiers for different ship classes? If so you could probably do something with that.

---

[Yber]

This burst damage is not okay. Bombers should have a limit to how many hellfires they can mount.

The amount will be adjusted. However I'm curious, when you talk about burst damage itself, what is difference prior to before, except that you have more ammo? Are you talking about the overall damage, or the damage at time T?

I didn't properly word it:
High risk usually yields a high reward: mounting 4 hellfires (the maximum you could) before would leave you defenseless once you use all 70 shots (which was incredibly soon and had no impact on caps for the most part, except against careless low armor gunboats), for the most part meaning you were a moving target with near 0 fighting back capability (I talk from experience). As Mephistoles' numbers show, that's not the case anymore, since the bomber has plenty of opportunities to burst anything/anyone down, not risking himself to the same.

As it stands, there are 0 ways for a fighter to deal with a bomber with full hellfires. The only possible downside to this layout is running out of ammo, which you don't anytime soon.

Bombers should have a reliable, steady hull DPS source, and hellfires are just that, but not like this.

As for EMP guns on bombers, the only way to improve those without breaking everything would be creating a new shield cathegory for caps and giving EMP bomber guns a huge bonus against it. Then again, EMPs are hard to use against caps when they can instantly switch targets (pretty much) and force the snub to dodge and stop firing. An option would be to highly increase their shield damage and energy comsumption, while making all fighter (snubs in general) shields have a high enough resistance % to reduce the damage to the current number. This would also be a nerf to bombers vs fighters.

I myself have already forwarded suggestions to the dev team regarding the balance around fighter vs everything else though.

---

inb4 Sirius gets renamed to XTF.

[Black Jack]

Really bad thing. Bomber can easy kill a gunboat now only with missles and very fast. 1 ASURAS and missles run. GB will be RIP in few seconds.

Reall really bad. I say HUGE NO to that.

[Shizune]

Right

So, before I say much else. I can see this from both sides of the tree.

_________________________

Last night, I recorded myself playing around with the BD bomber to see how it changed with HF

https://youtu.be/bTVWR_9-dvs?t=4m38s
https://youtu.be/bTVWR_9-dvs?t=7m18s

Note at both times, I did this on the server against armorless Ku Gunboat NPC's

https://youtu.be/bTVWR_9-dvs?t=23m40s

And then again I did another one against an Armorless Ku Destroyer NPC

Note in the first two videos here

The first one, the Gb was on a sliver of health, yet took 60 pods, with its shield down, to kill at 200-m
The second one, at full health, took 60 pods at point blank right on its tail
Then for the destroyer, at point blank with only 120 pods, I could barely lay a dent into it because it had backup

This was all server side on a 2 HF pod Light bomber just so everyone knows, note how eve with what the HF pods were made for, I could barely lay into even gunboats unless they were away from the pack and even that still got my a great level of damage. Then with the destroyers on the other hand, I had to watch all fire it was putting on me and keep moving in a light bomber.

__________________________

After checking this out. I can see two sides of a coin now after talking in several chats. Ya the damage is rather bad. That's true. But I got to put another thing in the light. When GC were active and fighting the Order. I took a CAU 5 Order Recon cruiser with Razors, cloak and full CM's into Okinawa. Out of all that happened? 6 GC, 1 FL and 1 Aoi, all bombers showed up to kill me

I smacked 2 bombers out of the air before I lost much of my regens. The 3rd died when it took me head on with another GC and FL in Tohoku. At the end? I had no regens, sitting 24k above the Arch, thrusted like 120k altogether, took down 4 GC players. I had no regens by the time it was just 1 GC, the FL and the Aoi left shooting me. Even then, as I when to move on to the next target, the 5th one suicide bombed into me, taking my shields down and letting the other 3 guys kill me after that

As I said in another chat. This anger seems to stem from 2 things right now. Transport players and battleship players. I even asked the people doing the 6x pod thing, and they said even while doing such in medium bombers or a light bomber, that VHFs, HFs and LFs still ate them as they had no way to defend themselves. To make it worse. They even said that the most damage they could do, is next to point blank.

So I went ingame on my FL Waran I had laying around, dropped 6 pods on it and shot the first NPC I saw. A large train NPC. How that went is far less then I see here. The NPC, in the end, survived. In seconds, ya I dropped its shield, but the shield is normally bigger then the ship anyways so that was fine. I shot at 500m as to watch for anything that could kill me, say the guard NPCs around planets.

At 500m, out of 720 pods. I'd say only 200 hit and all the others rocketed off into space.
I tried again at 400m. More hit, still didn't kill the NPC for the fact that it could get away, move and keep at range

Again at 200m. I nearly killed it here. Yet the pods on the transport took most of the damage I could deal instead of the ship itself.

Finally I killed it on the 4th try. At 72m away from the ship, point blank when I unloaded everything into it.

In a large scale outlook? The damage is huge yes. Including against large, unskilled players who joined the game.

I saw it from another eye when someone gave me a PM after reading my chat. This has become useful in another way. Some people use transports or freighters as combat ships. I know a few people who do, such as Boxew who are known to turn transports into combat ships, and even use them against bombers. We then talked about decloaking warships. Not just nomads, but like, an entire CAU 8 Lib dread dropping on your tail end could easily insta you. We summed it up that, if a cloaking battleship was to do this now against an enemy but that enemy had a heavy bomber with HF pods, they could lay into the expecting 1 liner decloaking warships or even against nomads, AI's or whatever. Like. Ya, I agree, this is broken. But out of all that happened? I was in New York last night on a pirate. I was finally caught by a BHG bomber. Out of all that happened these last 2-3 days? I've not ran into an HF pod bomber for, what many have said, it's suicide in the most part as you get instant damage but a huge defense loss.

From what I have gathered? A majority of people dying are battleships/battlecruisers and bulky transport players. I'm going to go out and say this. Ya, pirates are bad people you know? (I mean inRP) But I mean, it is their job to stop corporate players for money by whatever means they have. This is true. And ya, I can understand stuff from that piracy thread. Bottom line here is, don't do as the pirate say, I'd imagine he/she would get angry and most likely kill you. From the lawful side? Imagine the whole thing in California all over again. Valors everywhere right? Now, should the LN, LSF, LPI, GRN or whoever had these pods, it would not of been such a huge capfest. I'm not going to lie, Battleships play their roll right now perfectly, not just in being huge and heavy artillery, but inRP, their huge flying fortresses. Normally inRP if an enemy see's an battleship of any class, its reaction would be to destroy it, because I'd say a lone battleship has some deadly power. The HF pod answers that cry against caps that are usually were harder to kill. Valors, LNS Dreads, RM turtles, stuff like that, and I don't mean alone, I do mean even with other players there, GRN are known to have back up and their players know many forms of counter tactics.

HF pods also now play a part as well. They used to be good against GB's lone, but even a heavily armored GB could still take out bombers using them with ease, as can light cruisers or destroyers with razors. I'm not saying everyone should use razors, not at all, but there are countermeasures to HF pods. As they admins/devs said, this IS just a test, their looking for feed back and I'm willing to give some that does not educe anger

All in all finally?

Ya, their good weapons now against your enemies most powerful weapons. For pirates, they get the job done and over with quick and easy against transports with a large area surface. But there are counters as I showed above, that they can be useful. I'm okay with 480 pods at least in most parts. The HF pods live up to their task and that's is, to be a powerful anti-cap weapon. The fall back against bomber players, is that, once spent, they can't do much else. I'm going to throw this out there for everyone here.

Normally its easy to get upset and angry on the forums against stuff like this but, you know what is also sometimes better? Fight back. I died recently two times in a transport to players. Not on corporations or lawful ships. Not even while pirating!

https://youtu.be/ZG4Flt-m7iQ?t=2h1m48s
https://youtu.be/ZG4Flt-m7iQ?t=1h23m32s

I died to LN and SCRA ya. I knew it was a loosing situation both times. Mind you. The first time was me in an armorless LH pirate train against a LPI medium bomber. I actually did damage. The 2nd time? I was on a Corsair transport. Still died ya, but I mean, I charged a SCRA primary bomber player head on in a huge transport. For battleship players here. I understand that, ya, heavy bombers with 6x HF pods CAN ruin your life, I really do. But as of late? I've found ways to counter such. Razors, Solarisis (Or whatever their called) Or even worse that I've seen people using again. Capital ship missiles. If it were not for the fact when you get hit by a Battleship missile that is scary enough, I beat most players don't even know that BS missiles also work as CD's upon impact. Heck, I seen some players training to use things against HF's in conn or else where in game.

I notice a lot of these deaths are people alone, traders or caps. This is why when I trade alone, I at least come prepared for combat or have money if I can't fight. I know new players don't understand this fact, some pirates rush the time, or some are just lolwuts in the end ya, but sometimes you don't need to go alone. I find it not only fun to trade with others, but it even makes defending yourselves a lot more easier. Look at IMG|/ALG/AFC. They got that down by the book, and I don't know those of you who have yet to see it. Even with a 6x HF pod and 720 rockets, I sure as heck am not going to charge 7-8 Cap 8 Battlecans head on when these pods barely work at range.

And as far as I've been in and out of the game since this has been put in? I've rarely seen it used at all. Even more so, I expected BHG to use it most of all to deal with lolwuts pirate caps in Liberty. Yet after last night when Meph caught me, I was glad to be proven 100% wrong when a EMP+SNAC Moray caught me off guard with an LSF Guardian as support. People, there are ways to avoid this, Counter ya. But even avoid. Like I said, most of this sounds like single traders or lone cap players. And I mean, If there are 3-4 bombers that are ALL doing this? I'd ask why you attacked the bombers in the first place; but then there's Razors, cloaking, and all that stuff. Even as of late. I've been proven that these cap deaths are actually singled out capital ships that were attacked by wings of full Hellfire pod bombers. That's not stupid. That's a tactical strike against a weak enemy with weapons and numbers you can quickly muster.

That's all I got to say

[sasapinjic]

Is there no way of creating damage modifiers for different ship classes? If so you could probably do something with that.

^ yes , can it be done for example that hellfire if ineffective against capitols , or only partially effective , like it deals 10% of damage to BS , 20 % to Cruisers , 30% to Gunboats etc ?

---

Spoiler

welcome to Loberty
^ where you can get Freelancer ISO , in emergency

These two spoilers were too big so now they're both one ~Champ

[Haste]

This feature has been turned OFF as of now. It's very likely to return in the (near) future, when further updates to fine-tune Hellfire Rocket Pod balance hit the main server. Prior to these balance changes, the feature was deemed a little too harmful to gameplay balance to be left on.

Expect an announcement in this thread when the feature is turned back on.