First i wanted to make a quick post in the balance topic, but it came out waaay too long, so i decided for a new thread:
The Centi suffers from the hardcore drain of the Salas. Back in the day you guys stated that the Salas would be balanced around the Centi - so it would be viable as a fast ship with a small core - and the Titan could play the role of the slowpoke with the "neverending" core.
The momentary status gives us Salamancas that have a DPS only second to the Sunrails if you look at the "Sair Enemy Region", which in itself is a nice thing to have, no doubt. The problem with such a high DPS is that if you take a look at the poor little Centi and its competition with an equal or smaller core (Chimera, Sabre,Katana, Blossom, Eagle + a multitude of other civvies) it simply runs out of juice way to fast.
If you take a look at a 4x Hullbuster setup you get this picture:
Centi+Salas 9440 DPS (lasts 11s - 650 m/s) Sabre+Kraken 9440 DPS +0%(lasts 10 s -9%- 600m/s) Chimera+Disinfector 9280 DPS -1,7%(lasts 14 s +27% - 650m/s) Blossom+sun 9172 DPS -2,8% (lasts 15 s +36% - 750m/s) Sabre+Wyrm 9114 DPS -3,4% (lasts 19 s +72%- 700m/s) Chimera+Frenzy 9063 DPS -3,9%(lasts 29 s +163% - 750m/s) Katana+Daito 8996 DPS -4,7%(lasts 28 s +154%- 750m/s) Katana+Cleanser 8751 DPS -7,3(lasts 30 s +172% - 700m/s)
Now as you see(or at least i hope you do) - the Centurion simply can't stomach the load of the Salamancas. Ships in the same or lower core range all can sustain their fire much much longer and lose out very little in terms of DPS - almost all get a higher projectile speed as well(Only the Kraken Sabre is in severe pain!). To add insult to injury, the same or smaller cored ships are, safe for the Sabre( Which has other merits like +1gun), all smaller than the centi while sporting the same ( Chimera), -300( Blossom, Katana), +1800( Sabre) HP.
To sum this block of stats up - The minimal DPS advantage of the Salamancas does not balance with its other stats - most pronounced with the Centi and still visible with the Titan.
Personally i would either drop the power drain of the guns which would have the advantage of actually giving the titan its mythical endurance that is so often claimed and would make a Sair-teched-Centurion viable.
Option two might be to keep the drain and bump the Centi one core level giving it a theoretical staying power of 13 seconds - still not legendary..but meh.
Ooooor if all of that is too complicated i am very sure a low DPS, high speed and good efficency gunline the sairs have been asking for is still in high demand
I'd bump the centi up a core level and drop the power drain a bit as well as bring the dps down a bit, cos then thnings will be balanced. no fun if the sairs have uber pewpower and no-one comes to play.
Centurion is awesome. Currently it's a really nice ship to fly with very good shape and agility. Yes, you must pay for it with tiny core. No, you're not bind to use Salas exclusively, you can mount 1-few lvl 7 guns to compensate. I didn't found any problems with regen. Y, you need to hold yourself from spraying out your energy pointlessly by shooting empty vacuum instead of target. Is it critical? No.
@kempetai: i think the Kusarian secret service needs more analysts - the point was not that the Centurion is bad - because it isn`t, in fact it is a big relief for the Corsairs to be competitive with its neighbours again(and also much much more newbie friendly). It is about the Salamancas that simply don`t cut it when paird with the boat!
Zayne- this is the old issue and the same discussion that was brought up since quite a bit. The baseline is this - the Corsairs and the leadership team from official and independent faction agrees wholly on the lore stating that the corsairs are quite narrow minded about tech...to the effect that we tried to get rid of non sair tech(without much success) and instead try to achieve a full and complete set of tech so all sairs can fly puretech if they wish to.
On another note, this time more my persoal opinion - disco is about diversity on the one hand and immersion on the other. I prefer to meet hessians in rheinland, sairs and mollys in bretonia, rouges and lane hackers in liberty and GC and Dragons in Kusari instead of a flashpoint eagle with generic ID everywhere. Thus - i think for atmosphere forcing everyone to use the same old super-civvie tech over the short-ended faction tech is a bad thing.
On a balance point - as you can see in my examples, there are no civvie guns or ships there - as it has always been stated that each ship is balanced around its "balance bubble" - so sair ships and tech are balanced against the ships and the tech of their enemies - and on my small listing you can see( or maybe not - taht is of course your opinion) that there are vast differences in performance that are not really easy to explain. Of course everyone could use civvie tech, but as stated this would go against everything disco stands for in my opinion.
Using allied tech - well, the picture is bleak for the Centi ( the Titan for once profits from its fat core here) - if you use Hoggie or Unioner tech you get the same mean drain due to the nerf jsut combined with lower damage and thhe same crappy speed. For the Gaians i would have to calculate the precise values to be sure - then again....i would like top point back to the whole "sairs -love- their tech" issue as well as the promise that was made by the dev team concerning the Centi and Sair guns....
As you say "the Corsairs and the leadership team from official and independent faction" are keep impressing me since the thread like this keeps appearing no matter the actual tech is already great. I'v tried the ship against rapier and odin with max level sair guns I could mount and it's performance was very nice. Go play the game please, really.
Well, take it like this - the "deal with it" attitude is not really helpful during a beta phase where you evaluate the new additions to the mod?!
Of course you can shoot stuff up with the gun as it is right now- you could do so too with 1 single gun that can breach the shield regen...so you kinda don't make a point here - otherwise: missiles op? you should have dealt with it. CM not working ? You should have dealt with it. Shieldboxes not working? You should have dealt with it and so on...really ....BETA phase!
Also i still found no reason why the salas have to pay in such (harsh) drawbacks over its peers - to me there is a smoother solution easily available....
I remember someday Blodo said that Corsairs could get secont hullbusters. Photon based weapon as I remember. If we ever get them - they can/should be ballanced for Centurion/Gladiator. Salamancas is better now then they was in 4.86 and suit Titan at best. Lighter Fighters gets own weapons now, so maybe they will get their guns not Neutrons but Photons too?. But again - if we will get those guns.
And if not - then maybe that ''deal with it'' thing. I personally dont want Salamancas get weaker to suit lighter corsair VHFs.
(10-26-2013, 09:42 AM)Rodnas Wrote: Well, take it like this - the "deal with it" attitude is not really helpful during a beta phase where you evaluate the new additions to the mod?!
Of course you can shoot stuff up with the gun as it is right now- you could do so too with 1 single gun that can breach the shield regen...so you kinda don't make a point here - otherwise: missiles op? you should have dealt with it. CM not working ? You should have dealt with it. Shieldboxes not working? You should have dealt with it and so on...really ....BETA phase!
Also i still found no reason why the salas have to pay in such (harsh) drawbacks over its peers - to me there is a smoother solution easily available....
Well, i think it is no secret that i would prefer a second Corsair gun line over anything else, too
The thing with the Salamancas is that yes they fit with the Titan now that they are more efficient again - and the Titan core can handle it so it get a medicore endurance, which is enough i guess. But the Centi really chokes hard....so if you run the numbers...and make a hypothetical example:
a Centi and a Chimme both meet a Dragon and start pewing it after deshielding. It takes exactly 3 seconds for the Centi to waste it, it takes 3,36 seconds for the Chimmie with frenzies ....the difference .36 seconds is about the time a shot of a salamanca takes to reach a 200m distant ship roughly...so not that much right?
The thing is the Chimmie is fast and small, the titan is a bit bigger and also fast, they have the same hull, the same core ..so i think it is a reasonable question why it gets to shoot 2,6 times as long for just such a small sliver of damage....
In fact reducing the DPS by a percent or two would not even change the number of hits you need to kill an enemy while it seems those percents really count big in the energy department!