Junker Ships & Guns

[Rudo]

Isn't the Collector model the same as the CSV? As I recall that is quite a small model. That also has to be taken into account when discussing balance.
Not only that, but Junkers aren't really a combat faction... are they? I can under stand your want to have your factions ships balanced of course. I guess I'm wrong but I didn't think the Junkers fought -that- often.

Also, the Greyhound has less fire power than the Collector and Kushan, with 4 forward firing guns. It's also a rather slow turning ship (so I'm told) but it has a relatively small model, which makes up for the balance.
(People call the Greyhound a HF, but really the only thing that makes it that is the info card).

Just because the Junkers don't fight as much as some other factions doesn't mean its shipline and weaponry should be sitting ducks when fights do break out. Try fighting a Xeno Eagle or Hogosha Black Dragon with our guns and ships sometime. Even if roleplaying trying to get away from the fight, you're still inevitably going to end up in one. Those of us in this situation want, I'll say it again, a fighting chance.

The change I requested for the Collector would still have it be the slowest-turning VHF in the game, just by not such a wide margin. It has the most regens by a long shot as well, so that's the big factor in the balance. The agility would be more a tweak than anything. The model is neither large nor small for a VHF. It doesn't have wings, which can lead to the misconception that it's smaller. It's just more of a box than a bird is all.

The Greyhound is actually very zippy by comparison to a lot of HFs, never mind VHFs. It's also expected to fire Trefoils or Sammaels, both of which are a lot easier to aim and do worthwhile damage with than Barragers by a long shot.

My overarching concern with the Junker line in general is the growing rift between the ships and the guns. The Barrager is a spray gun with a low velocity, balanced for ships that handle like the Chimera. I don't think the developers in Vanilla gave them any real thought, and the hard-working folks in Discovery just cloned it into higher class versions with little time spent thinking how they would work on the ships they were going on. I don't blame them, but I'm just bringing up this issue now while we're still in beta.

Giving guns like Barragers to a shipline designed to be more inagile than any other ship places that faction at a pronounced disadvantage in combat. I'm not asking for a Chimera for the Junkers here, but rather the guns be brought up in speed to a velocity it already has on its turrets from vanilla, and the ships be either tweaked or bugfixed. Maybe reduce their refire to 5.88 as well, but I won't press that request.

Junker ships will still be poor in combat compared to others, they just wouldn't be total losers.

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[AJBeast]

I must say that , at least in the weaponry department , i totally agree with Rudo. The Barragers and just utter crap when compared to other factions guns. Having to use Civillian guns all the time isnt that fun...

[mjolnir]

The Barrager: Muzzle velocity for Barrager IV and V guns and turrets should be upped to 700m/s, in line with the Barrager III turret. Energy consumption upped to 70 per shot for the Barrager V if balancing is necessary. Reasons being that Junker ships have poor agility; a gun with a higher muzzle velocity allows for just a bit more of a chance to score hits.

No speed change. Gun speeds are kind of set to stone from vanilla and I don't see a reason to change that unless there are rather special circumstances (like nobody being able to hit anything with 2.00/500 m/s guns). There are a lot of 600 m/s guns, some even 8.33.

What could change is that it could do a bit more damage, but use even more energy (just as infocard says), but still under Sammael level. So something like 255-260 damage for 75 energy.

The Collector: Increase max angular velocity slightly. Like maybe even to the Turanic Raiders LFs stats. (Im not even going to touch that ship. Whose idea of a joke was that?)

Collector is one extremely difficult ship to hit outside 1vs1. In 4.84 it was missing the tail hitbox and without it it could dodge virtually anything (remember Keeper of the Keys Xeno event?). Now it has a tail, so it can dodge a bit less than anything...

The Bull Dog: Fix the Torpedo slots firing angles. Thats all it needs for now, really. Even with its amazing Templar agility. Maybe rename it too. Can I help with that?

The torp slots had 0 ( +-20 projectile cone) degrees angle which is wrong for a fighter yes, changed to +-20.

The Recycler: Remove some of the contrails, Seth Karlo has already announced that the camera is indeed too close and this will be fixed (yay!). We'll see what that does for exhaust blotting out the camera. But please, remove the 'Bomber' tag from the thing.

It has 2 torp slots so it's a bomber, even though it has SHF-like stats. Contrails are placed by the modeler, so scream at him..

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Igiss says: Martin, you give them a finger, they bite off your arm.

[Rudo]

No speed change. Gun speeds are kind of set to stone from vanilla and I don't see a reason to change that unless there are rather special circumstances (like nobody being able to hit anything with 2.00/500 m/s guns). There are a lot of 600 m/s guns, some even 8.33.

What could change is that it could do a bit more damage, but use even more energy (just as infocard says), but still under Sammael level. So something like 255-260 damage for 75 energy.

There is only one other 8.33 refire 600m/s gun -- the Kusari Photon. Nearly all Kusari pilots (and their allies too) use the faction's neutron blaster instead. The gun is also balanced for a ship that handles like the Chimera, not flying bricks like the Junker line. There are indeed other 600m/s guns, most for faction shiplines that are a bit more agile than others, or are hard-hitting refires like 4.00 and slower rather than spray guns. The Corsairs are the obvious departure from agile ships with 600m/s guns, but they get a shieldbuster that syncs with the Salamanca. The other departure is Bretonia, with their particle gun -- but the Templar VHF is as agile as the Junkers' HF.

Note again that there are Barragers that fire at 700m/s, and they are remnants from vanilla. There were also no Junker ships in Vanilla that could be flown, and hence there's no real concept from vanilla to follow. Whoever had the idea to make the general concept "more regens, less turnrate" might have had shooting them in mind rather than flying them. When a VHF is only really known for being great at shieldrunning, it probably needs a bit more offensive tools. The guns and the ships need to mesh better.

Increasing the damage would still leave it a poor gun to use on a VHF with a 1.000 turnrate. How hard it hits is irrelevant if the ship it's on can't get the target lined up for any decent amount of time, and it'd drain energy like Bounty Hunter guns to boot.

The Collector VHF handles like a bomber, and the Bull Dog HF handles like a VHF. A high-refire gun with low speed doesn't get a lot of chance to score hits, is all I'm saying. The moon is not being asked for here.

Collector is one extremely difficult ship to hit outside 1vs1. In 4.84 it was missing the tail hitbox and without it it could dodge virtually anything (remember Keeper of the Keys Xeno event?). Now it has a tail, so it can dodge a bit less than anything...

So because it was bugged before, it should be left in the dust now? Every non-bomber Junker escort pilot is going to get an Eagle or Crow instead and I'm not going to be able to stop them. Guess we'll just load up with Flashpoints or Furies to boot as they're green in the mighty Factions & Ship Equipment List, and be like everyone else striking diplomat deals for pvp-superior equipment.

The Collector's new model is much better than the old one. The hardpoints are much more refined. Why not give it a bit of extra turnrate and make it good for something besides stretching out fights for hours until everyone gets bored?

Also, if a bug was the only thing that was keeping the ship from being blasted out of the sky... think about it.

The torp slots had 0 ( +-20 projectile cone) degrees angle which is wrong for a fighter yes, changed to +-20.

At least there's a bugfix en route. Thanks for that I guess.

It has 2 torp slots so it's a bomber, even though it has SHF-like stats. Contrails are placed by the modeler, so scream at him..

Just airing gripes where they'd be read. I'll put them over there too.

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[Tenacity]

What could change is that it could do a bit more damage, but use even more energy (just as infocard says), but still under Sammael level. So something like 255-260 damage for 75 energy.

What's your reasoning for making any one faction's weaponry less effective than the weapons of another faction? Thinking like that only causes imbalances in the game, it doesnt fix them.

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[Elsdragon]

So i should switch to zoner guns then? I didnt know the barrager sucked, and by that i meant that i couldnt tell really

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No longer a slave to the man!

[Rudo]

What's your reasoning for making any one faction's weaponry less effective than the weapons of another faction? Thinking like that only causes imbalances in the game, it doesnt fix them.

No, the Sammael was intended to be the best laser out there. Rogues get the short end of it in terms of ship size. We're not asking for that grade of hardware for Junkers as what they do doesn't warrant it, and the faction doesn't need that kind of power -- people would be taking Junkers' stuff left and right if that were the case.*

Also, this isn't an MMO and things shouldn't always be fair. If I'm in a Collector and I get caught alone by a supremacy fighter, I expect the battle to be very uphill. I just want the faction's stuff to be better thought out, and for the ships and guns to mesh better.


*on that note, when was the last time you saw Junker ships and weapons in the hands of people who had no business using them, barring the Salvager? I've gotten exactly two requests for Junker equipment since I took over the faction. I think that tells you something. I have yet to see people strike up "alliances" to get to use Barragers and Death Scythes.

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[tansytansey]

Also, the greyhound is a fantastic ship. Don't know about the Rogues, but over in Bretonia the Mollys (and even a couple of, um, "PvP-centric" freelancers, to put it mildly) have been using the Greyhound to great effect.

That was exactly my point... the Greyhound has less guns than the Collector, yet it is still put to very good use.

*on that note, when was the last time you saw Junker ships and weapons in the hands of people who had no business using them, barring the Salvager? I've gotten exactly two requests for Junker equipment since I took over the faction. I think that tells you something. I have yet to see people strike up "alliances" to get to use Barragers and Death Scythes.

Most people friendly enough with the Junkers are probably friendly enough with the Outcasts to use Krakens. It's much the same with Sammaels, best Laser weapon in Sirius and yet they aren't used that often, nor do we get requests from people to use them either. Same with our ships, people use our Gunboat but no one really uses the Werewolf, Greyhound or Hyena.

To me, though, it does make a bit of sense to have the junker fighters more manoeuvrable. They operate in massive junk fields, after all. I know our debris fields are static and all, but if they were dynamic (and we didn't have shields) much like a real world environment, you would need a highly manoeuvrable ship to avoid damage.

As for guns though, I'm still not convinced they'll need an upgrade as well as your ships. 600ms is pretty slow but it's not that slow. All guns do roughly the same DPS now as well, not exactly, but close enough that no gun is really 'weaker' than another.
Name S/DPS H/DPS EPS
Barrager MK V 999.6 1999.2 541.45
Sammael 1103.725 2207.45 599.76

It may be harder to hit with a 600m/s weapon than a 750m/s weapon, but it's also easier to hit with a 8.33 weapon than a 2.00 weapon. Junker weapons are probably average, since they're at both ends of the scale.

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|Ashes and Draya's Epic Adventure|Ashes "Nighthawk" Yotaka|Nightfall|Eva Jones|
[5:50:49 PM] JakeSG (William Darkmoor) says: I like you, Ashes. You're more cynical than God.

[Doom]

Collector is one extremely difficult ship to hit outside 1vs1. In 4.84 it was missing the tail hitbox and without it it could dodge virtually anything (remember Keeper of the Keys Xeno event?). Now it has a tail, so it can dodge a bit less than anything...

this isn't actually true....Collector always had tail hit box since it used original CSV hit box. Despite Collector model was slightly smaller then CSV for hitting it it was exactly the size as CSV. Only parts that wasnt covered by hit box were front wings and back vertical fin.

New model is larger then old and maybe even slightly larger then CSV but has new fully working hit box. That makes it somewhat easier to hit. Also, it is true that it has 5 directly forward firing weapons, but the moment aim is moved to one of the sides even slightly the rear turrets kicks in and starts firing.

Granted Junker weapons is a bit on crappy side.

[mjolnir]

this isn't actually true....Collector always had tail hit box since it used original CSV hit box. Despite Collector model was slightly smaller then CSV for hitting it it was exactly the size as CSV. Only parts that wasnt covered by hit box were front wings and back vertical fin.

The original CSV hitbox it had was missing the tail, it was there but wasn't working. Same thing that happened for example during Bastet testing if you remember. The new custom hitbox is actually smaller head on than the resized CSV was.

Note again that there are Barragers that fire at 700m/s, and they are remnants from vanilla. There were also no Junker ships in Vanilla that could be flown, and hence there's no real concept from vanilla to follow. Whoever had the idea to make the general concept "more regens, less turnrate" might have had shooting them in mind rather than flying them. When a VHF is only really known for being great at shieldrunning, it probably needs a bit more offensive tools. The guns and the ships need to mesh better.

The 700 m/s ones are turrets, just like say vanilla Salamanca turret had 700m/s. Per request it was synced with normal guns at 600 m/s. I did the same for junker high level turrets by myself, but I can put the turrets back if you really want. Guns will keep 600 m/s.

Increasing the damage would still leave it a poor gun to use on a VHF with a 1.000 turnrate. How hard it hits is irrelevant if the ship it's on can't get the target lined up for any decent amount of time, and it'd drain energy like Bounty Hunter guns to boot.

If you don't want more damage then it won't get more. But right now it's a decent gun.

Every non-bomber Junker escort pilot is going to get an Eagle or Crow instead and I'm not going to be able to stop them. Guess we'll just load up with Flashpoints or Furies to boot as they're green in the mighty Factions & Ship Equipment List, and be like everyone else striking diplomat deals for pvp-superior equipment.

Sure fly Sabres with Krakens if you so much want to. Still won't give you better stuff when used as an argument.

The Collector's new model is much better than the old one. The hardpoints are much more refined. Why not give it a bit of extra turnrate and make it good for something besides stretching out fights for hours until everyone gets bored?

Also, if a bug was the only thing that was keeping the ship from being blasted out of the sky... think about it.

It was bugged so that it was basically impossible to hit outside 1vs1. Now with the proper hitbox it's smaller 1vs1 but at least hittable outside.

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Igiss says: Martin, you give them a finger, they bite off your arm.