Personally I don't have a problem with it and I believe the two changes made to the bombers, invokes the need to fly with others, increasing the chance of proper player interaction,
Now if your a cap pilot you NEED a fighter escort and rightly so.
this change in honesty should have been made years ago, so hats off to the devs on this one I like it,
and before anyone says anything let me clear something up, I fly both types of ships and have no issues with either at this point besides minor things,
distance on the corona 800 I think would be accepted as a fair balance as not impossible to defeat in bs but not by any means a sure fire win,
and as for the snac nef..... GET OVER IT GUYS HONESTLY,
if u can't fight without a snac go back to con and learn again or better yet stop trying to use a ship for SOMETHING ITS NOT MADE FOR and should never have been able to do in the first place,
bombers should only win maybe 1 in 5 fights against snubs at best.....and in turn 2-3 good pilots should be able to destroy a bs in them at least 3 out of 5 fights, that makes a even balance plus the need for actual fleets of all 3 classes of ship.
The way it should be and inrp a cap should never be flying alone into ANY hostile disputes....... do you see a lone navy destroyer in RL ever going anywhere alone...no and its because alone they are a easy target....why would space fairing ships be any different
I'm pretty sure the premise of a lot of the arguments in this thread are pretty far from OK.
1. I see some folks arguing against "rock/paper/scissors" balance, an opinion which I happen to agree with in the main, but still hold the belief that caps should generally be able to take on multiple snubs at the same time, which actually just translates into caps having a generally higher power level.
2. The same people arguing that the Corona is overpowered are the ones who thought the Battleship flak buff was OK.
3. The point that a couple of people have made about needing to sit pretty much still in order to maximise the effectiveness of the Corona has been made, and promptly ignored.
4. If the Corona was overpowered, you could use it as a sole bomber weapon without needing another weapon for destroying shields. Currently, that's not the case, which you can check without even needing to test them ingame just by doing a couple of calculations comparing corona damage, power draw and the heavy battleship shield. If you're having a problem with munitions, take a flak or two.
So the question I have is this:
Bombers are supposed to be the ship you pick to take to battle against caps, if you want to do so in a snub. Since Bombers are now much less powerful against VHFs, if you are fighting a lot of bombers, you're supposed to take a VHF to kill them.
What's the problem with that? I can think of a couple of issues right off the bat, but I'd like to see a coherent answer that doesn't involve suggesting that caps should be able to kill multiple players in all conditions.
EDIT:
(09-24-2018, 12:31 AM)Tenacity Wrote:
(09-24-2018, 12:27 AM)Unseelie Wrote: I'm very curious about what a capship ought be able to do to a bomber, which ought be kitted out expressly to be able to kill a capship.
What, precisely, do we imagine the proper balance of caps vs bombers to be? It certainly doesn't seem like the guy in the cap ought have the advantage, especially not against multiple other guys.
Well, tbh, if balance was proper it should come down to the skill of the pilots involved. If a bomber pilot is good, he'll keep distance, avoid the capship's fire, and wear him down over time with heavy weapons. If the cap pilot is good, he'll avoid the snacs and use flaks to take down or deter the bomber.
I dont like rock paper scissors balance, so there should be no clear cut advantage either way.
These are some good words, except that with the balance how it's been for multiple major patches, several bombers need to do that against one battleship or cruiser. I'm going to guess that neither you, nor most other cap pilots, see the issue with such a state of affairs.
1. i dont see any issues at all with all cap ships needed a VHF escort and they all should need a escort for any type of pvp conflicts unless both sides are boring as snot and only take caps in
2. yes a battleship should be able to deal with a loan bomber or 2 bombers without a cap ship of there own, and they can so no issue there
3. no offence intended but the only people i see bi*ching about these changes are players who cant fight any other way and are dead set against having to learn to fight properly as there is no longer a insta win vessel......i see no problems with that fact at all and stand by my choice of this should have happened years ago
(09-24-2018, 12:03 AM)Chronicron Wrote: Afaik, before the change, Corona was effective only at said 800 meters, even less. If the ship carrying it had to say mobile all the time.
I used one all last week and couldn't get it to hit anything until around 585-600 m.
It was like that for NPC ships and trade lanes. Is there a difference per ship? Or for players ships?
So IMO it was kind of fine as it was. Now they just drain a lot of energy and unless you get into a cap fight its pretty useless. Good for group bomber activity, but if you're flying solo its better still to use a Scorcher. And I also believe that if the range is still basically 600 m in reality, with all the nerfing that was done to it, its better all around to sick with the Scorcher, and I find its better and easier to aim. Comparing them even just on NPC transports, the Corona is already useless when I feel like it was actually cool as introduced. So there was a powerful new weapon out? To me the nerfing is backwards. It should be more powerful against fighters, transports and gunboats, and less powerful against capital ships. Ideally, it would just stay the same power level and actually just deliver the damage listed to any ship. There were only a few bombers that could mount two of them, and the power drain is considerable. So in most cases, people would only be using one. It would have been better to limit it to 1 per ship than make them useless on transports or snubs, exactly the same for the SNAC.
I had just one on the Spatial and it was nice. It actually give it some teeth, I pirated someone with an SHF. Apparently being able to use the thing, which doesn't pivot, with 600m range, was just too terrible to be allowed. I just don't see where the problem lay. People find the new weapon, enjoy it, figure it out, get good with it, it gets nerfed because of complaints by the victims. Time to face it, these weapons are either going to be powerful, or not at all. And when comparing to a Torpedo, why bother have it on there if its low/med damage with very low range.
But as to caps, I see it as about the same as it was. Hopefully this range issue will be sorted out and we can deal with either an actual 1200 m range, or half that, which seems to actually be whats in effect.
I say revert the Corona/SNAC changes and just limit Coronas's 1 per ship.
(09-24-2018, 12:31 AM)Tenacity Wrote: Well, tbh, if balance was proper it should come down to the skill of the pilots involved. If a bomber pilot is good, he'll keep distance, avoid the capship's fire, and wear him down over time with heavy weapons. If the cap pilot is good, he'll avoid the snacs and use flaks to take down or deter the bomber.
I dont like rock paper scissors balance, so there should be no clear cut advantage either way.
Keep in mind that a Rock/Paper/Scissors approach isn't a simple and single set thing.
What is good in games that balance along these lines is they tend to give people for example.... a Great Rock, Decent Paper, and a Poor pair of Scissors (Set A) -- or -- a Poor Rock, Great Paper, and a Decent pair of Scissors (Set B). or maybe just 2 out of the 3.
As someone with Set A, yea you probably aren't going to do well even with your Scissors vs someone who had Set B and ended up going with the Great Paper. However, it is better than having the Rock or Paper vs Paper.
Overall, I like where the Corona is at for the most part, but I feel that maybe a global stat drop of about 15-20, maybe 25% would allow it to stay at ~1000 range, maybe 950m as a compromise. This primarily just increases the time to kill as the amount of damage you could get out from a full core would be roughly about the same.
I fly a Cruiser most times I log in and to get friendly escorts with the player-count these days is near impossible in my TZ. Unless you are in events where a good few peeps log-on for the short-hype. I have been in 3 bombers vs me (Cruiser) before and got killed by them. I had my fun, as it was a fair 'death' of my Cruiser and also shared out some damage to my targets etc.
I haven't met a bomber with a Corona as of yet. However, if I do get to meet a bomber, after the release of the latest patch, my insta-thoughts would be - "He is coming after me; most likely Corona fitted; High-range weaponry, I will not be able to defend myself with Solaris guns; I am a 'lone' cruiser trying to have fun; 100% sure RP will not get me out of this; time to gtfo/log-off and make no interaction at all."
Not whining. Just made a quick assumption of a scenario of what that weapon can do now to a player. At least for me.
Hope this is fixed soon. As a modeler, I know it takes lots of time getting near 'good' goodies into the game. But, I for sure learned in my past that to perfect something, it must go through the low first and slowly progress after seeing its results.
I'm not sure a lone bomber with a corona can even break a cruiser's shield with said corona.
275,000 hitpoints on the cruiser shields, with 3800 regen. Corona does 2,500 damage*0.6 for the cruiser damage. So it does 25k per second.
Less the regen, it does 21.2k per second, and can fire for...about 3-4 seconds before its fully drained, so a total 92K damage. Then it takes 26 seconds to completely refill that plant, so you're only getting a lancing action for 4 seconds every 30, at which point...
In 30 seconds, you can do 92k damage to a cruiser shield. in 30 seconds, a cruiser shield regains 114k health.
The corona bomber must use a different weapon to crack a cruiser's shield, all of which require it to get inside your effective range.
For reference, the corona does this amount of damage against each shipclass:
Snubs: 750 per tick, 12k per second
Transports: 1000, 16.67k per second
Gunboats: 2000, 33k per second
Cruisers: 3000, 50k per second
Battlecruisers: 4000, 66k per second
Battleships: 5000, 83k per second
(09-24-2018, 04:26 AM)Unseelie Wrote: The corona bomber must use a different weapon to crack a cruiser's shield, all of which require it to get inside your effective range.
The ASURAS has longer range that the Corona, just sayin'...
(09-24-2018, 04:26 AM)Unseelie Wrote: The corona bomber must use a different weapon to crack a cruiser's shield, all of which require it to get inside your effective range.
The ASURAS has longer range that the Corona, just sayin'...
So it does.
As it turns out, so does the SNAC, which the ASURAS seems to be slightly better than in both range and speed, but the SNAC hasn't ruined capital ships forever.
A medium bomber with a Corona can output approximately 140K damage to a cruiser every 24 seconds, or an EDPS of 5800.
A medium bomber with a SNAC can output 132K damage to a cruiser every 16 seconds, or an EDPS of 8250.
Even taking into consideration the hitscan nature of the Corona, the danger of the weapon is signficantly overblown.
e: It should also be noted that this is the first time we've ever done a weapon like this. Expecting it to be properly balanced out of the gate is a bit much.