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xTekx wrote:

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JamesBenson wrote:

Lower space pvp damage by 60%.

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Wow! If the devs did this no one would die ever. I mean, I know I would become invincible and a bunch of other people would to. Your suggestion would solve nothing other than to make fights last indefinately.

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Thanks for the 1 star, whoever gave it to me. I was tired of getting constant 5's. If you were on Wanderhome, I'd challenge you to a space pvp duel xTekx. We'd use weapons at 60% damage reduction and you'd see that you are FAR from invincible. Our skirmishes (usually involving 15 or so pilots total, including the enemy) lasted about five minutes (and that was largely due to some fancy evasive flying). That also includes time to travel midway between the ISD and the Rebel Station (where the meeting point was to be for battle in a joust-type encounter).

I love how people just automatically assume how things work based on intuition but few people speak from experience. I'll grant you, it wasn't a 3-5 shot pvp or even a 10 shot pvp. It did take a little while to eat through those level 6-8 shields, but we had FUN while doing it. Isn't that the whole point? And I won't argue that weapon overload 3 is totally messed up (in our favor). I use it plenty in PVE along with engine overload 3, weapon cap overload 3, and reactor overload 3. It's funny that you mentioned a joust, quad, because that's *precisely* how we executed the space battles.....and it was fun for all (even us, who got creamed). People were talking about that event for a week after it happened and couldn't wait for the next one. In response to your 'awareness' statement, that's a big part of it. Whoever is most aware still has the advantage with 60% damage reduction since those people will, presumably, be on the other guy's tail. By no means am I arguing that there aren't other solutions, but I do know that forcing everyone to use level 3 weapons, no missiles, and no weapon overload made the event a good deal of fun. You should try it sometime (except limit the weapons to two because the x-wings have a significant advantage).

Forgot to mention in this post, I'd almost pay for another expansion if they'd change JTL so it were just like TIE Fighter as far as energy management. Good suggestion, Rapax.

Message Edited by JamesBenson on 03-04-2005 02:54 PM

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quadpers0n wrote:

(I have to stress that I'm talking about damage reductions' drawbacks NOT drawbacks to another mechanic enabling 3-5 hit pvp which i support)

Just looking for a little clairification on this as I want to make sure I am "picking your brain" as best I can

EDIT: i didn't adress all of your post mons. do I think the heavy bomber ships are viable? eh. they are viable, i've killed plenty of people in the krayt but it wouldn't be my first choice of something to fly.

but why? is it because they are big and slow? or is it because there's no real role in this game for a heavy bomber ship? if there was a role for them would heavy fighters automatically be superior in that role? why and what can change to fix that? well as for roles, i think the improvements we've requested for the MP ships would fix that, (those are mostly for the POB ships so far) as for the second part, that's a can of worms i don't have a solution to... missle changes, ordinance amount changes... i dunno.

Ya that is a tough one.Refering to my above post you can squeese (close to) the best engine/shield/booster and plenty of firepower inmost anyships. So I see (matching pilot skills for arguments sake) that 2 things come into play mostly:

1. Ship manuverability (YPR's)


2. Profile of target (aka hard to hit small ones and "barn-door-ness" of the larger ones)

And this tend to leave the Bombers out of PvP more or less in an even match because the Fighters win in both cases. As far as the PvE goes that is kinda true also, I find it easier to take out the ISD or Rebel Station in an A-wing or TIE then I do in a TIE Bomber, Krayt, or B-Y Wing

I am clueless as to what to do or even (personally, not as a corro) if anything should be done.In my personal oppinion too much (or even any in some cases) lowering of damage and we get un-winnable fights in fighter vs fighter.But right nowmostly only the fighters are really viable in matched-skill PvP. Bigger ships get left out for the most part. Then there is the whole "any level can particpate VS no real bonus for mastering in PvP" topic that I can't even seem to make up my own mind on how I feel about it.

One think that keeps popping into my head is high-mass shield sub-components in 2 levels. Kinda a simplified SDI.

(Just throwing numbers out of the blue)

1. A 50-75K mass say Lvl 11 one targeted at the bombers. This would allow a bomber to get just under 10K of shields at the cost of a ton of mass so they are better suited in PvP but would have to trade off enough mass to make them "underpowered" in PvE. But this would alsoallow for true missile ships for capitol ship runs as well.


2. A ~200K mass say Lvl 12 for POB ships that jacks them up even higher but only able to squeeze them in the Big3

This could also be accomplished by a chassis modifier in PvP, but I like adding to the trade-offs we allready have rather then allowing just a chassis modifier. And maybe even have the SW craftable schematics, at 1 time use, cost 1 million prestige. Could give us a reason to keep grinding for now.

Just wanting to get as much info from ya as I can while I have your ear and kinda tossing ideas around on a Friday

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xTekx: I'm not interested in making this a mudslinging thread and that's why I said 'whoever gave it to me'. I wasn't accusing

you, just noticed I'd been 1 starred for voicing my opinion. I'd much rather we cooperate and collectively determine the best

ways to solve the space pvp problem. You raised an interesting point, though. I forgot to mention that the bulk of my space pvp

experience was before the shield shunt droid command was introduced to the game. It is true that with that command, you can

last a LOT longer. One of my pilots is currently arranging for a space pvp battle with a rebel guild on my server and I'll be

sure to post results and the rules followed.

For people who don't want to spend the time to read my whole post, ignore what's between the two dashed lines and just cut to the bottom.
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I played around with some numbers and I think I may have come up with a way of normalizing pvp damage somewhat. I did some

thinking about what was said regarding a flat 60% damage reduction and how that would affect someone with, say, a level 5

weapon. I totally agree with that and I've now developed a way to mitigate damage based on the level of weapon you are using.

Feel free to shoot down the idea, but I thought I'd put the option on the table.

According to another post, the average damages for each level are roughly broken down as:

1: 284.437 - 400.593
2: 364.931 - 485.625
3: 609.436 - 846.073
4: 774.163 - 1103.425
5: 1073.259 - 1589.700
6: 1369.154 - 2032.954
7: 1575.530 - 2447.539
8: 1958.416 - 3075.668
9: 1966.440 - 3208.730
10: 2392.500 - 3813.662


For this 'experiment' I'll assume that the enemy has 1500 shields and 1000 armor (will only look at this from attacking one

side). Presently, with 25% damage reduction in pvp, this equates to an average damage of the following (assuming .5 for both vs

shields and vs armor):

1: 342.515 * 0.5 * 0.75 = 128.443125 = 19.46 shots
2: 425.278 * 0.5 * 0.75 = 159.47925 = 15.68 shots
3: 727.7545 * 0.5 * 0.75 = 272.9079375 = 9.16 shots
4: 938.794 * 0.5 * 0.75 = 352.04775 = 7.10 shots
5: 1331.4795 * 0.5 * 0.75 = 499.3048125 = 5.01 shots
6: 1701.054 * 0.5 * 0.75 = 637.89525 = 3.92 shots
7: 2011.5345 * 0.5 * 0.75 = 754.3254375 = 3.31 shots
8: 2517.042 * 0.5 * 0.75 = 943.89075 = 2.65 shots
9: 2587.585 * 0.5 * 0.75 = 970.344375 = 2.56 shots
10: 3103.081 * 0.5 * 0.75 = 1163.655375 = 2.15 shots

I'll go ahead and state that I'm highly skeptical about the level 9 data and I should state that these were averages that some other pilot (http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=profshipwright&message.id=15531) came up with from looted parts. From my own personal experience, the level 10 weapons do a bit more damage, but he's looted more of those than I have. I may've just gotten lucky. I may actually start keeping tabs on the stats of weapons I see and check out my own averages because I tend to believe that those numbers (for the first list) were slightly low. This might be because he went by the actual level of the component as opposed to the RE level of the component. I've looted some level 10 stuff that had level 5 stats (and was RE level 5). At any rate, I laid out an idea of how many shots it would take to kill someone with 1500 shields and 1000 armor. Personally, I don't even use armor and my shields are only around 1k (with 19 recharge). That's another thing, I obviously neglected any shield recharge, but I would consider that negligible in the higher level weapon cases because you wouldn't recharge much in two shots time. This is also assuming just *one* of the weapons. In my case, I can use two level 10's (and I do) with a total max damage of around 8.2 or 8.3k. Obviously this is a one-shot kill situation. Also, I calculated this info by using the average damage. If the person got max damage for their hits, it would take fewer shots.

As for my method of damage mitigation, how many shots do you think is reasonable to bring down a target? I'll go with 10 shots (from one weapon..two weapons would make it 5 and so on). What I'm going to do is remove the 25% damage reduction that's already in the game and then recalculate what is needed for each level of weapon. I know what you'll be saying "But a level 10 should kill a lower level craft faster anyway. People will just use a level 1 weapon to save mass while pvping so they can put uber shields and armor on thier ships." And with that, I agree. What I'm proposing isn't the actual fix, but a method of maybe finding a way to balance it. X represents the % damage reduction in this equation. if the number is below 0, it will be set to 0. We wouldn't be giving anyone a damage bonus for using a lower weapon for sure.

250 = 342.515 * 0.5 * (1 - X) ; X = -45.979% (assumed 0) = 14.6 shots
250 = 425.278 * 0.5 * (1 - X) ; X = -17.57% (assumed 0) = 11.8
250 = 727.7545 * 0.5 * (1 - X) ; X = 31.29% ~ 10
250 = 938.794 * 0.5 * (1 - X) ; X = 46.74% ~ 10
250 = 1331.4795 * 0.5 * (1 - X) ; X = 62.45% ~ 10
250 = 1701.054 * 0.5 * (1 - X) ; X = 70.61% ~ 10
250 = 2011.5345 * 0.5 * (1 - X) ; X = 75.14% ~ 10
250 = 2517.042 * 0.5 * (1 - X) ; X = 80.14% ~ 10
250 = 2587.585 * 0.5 * (1 - X) ; X = 80.68% ~ 10
250 = 3103.081 * 0.5 * (1 - X) ; X = 83.89% ~ 10

These damage reductions would normalize all weapons (except those that actually need a damage increase) to 10 shots for one weapon, 5 for two, and 3.33 shots for 3 weapons. Naturally, we want higher level weapons to have a higher damage output than lower ones.
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Ignoring this train of thought (reducing damage based on weapons used), and noticing the obvious 80% damage reduction for higher level equipment, this data might be useful for implementation in what I believe I understood about the deflector shield idea. Using the following mechanic for shield deflection (similar to how armor works on the ground, but not actually reducing the condition because of it..or hey, make it reduce the hitpoints/armor slowly), we can come up with a more useful shielding system.

Damage deflected = (.1 * shield level)%. Limit this to a max of .8 for levels 8, 9, and 10 and we could seriously see some 5 shot encounters. Sure, it would still be a battle of getting the best shields and using shield shunt and whatnot, but I really believe this could work. Level 1 shields would only reduce the damage by 10% where level 8's would reduce it by 80%. This way we can keep our weapon damage outputs the same, but possibly avoid one shot kills among higher tier pilots. This still depends on removing the current 25% pvp damage reduction, but it might still work out to keep it in. It would be nice if we could get them to test this on test center just to see if it would work as I envision it. What do you all think about this? I realize the limitations of my assumptions (because several people could have .9 vs shields and .9 vs armor from REing and it would probably make my deflection idea a moot point. Also, it would also not apply to the armor so it really wouldn't be 10 shots from the get-go since the shields would be down first. I suppose we could rely on shield shunt to factor in at this point, but this is just a basic idea toward solving our problem..a foundation to build on, perhaps.

Message Edited by Coran_Sienar on 03-06-2005 08:28 AM

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Coran_Sienar wrote:

No amount of damage reduction is a substitute for situational awareness and quick reflexes.

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And how much fun did you have in the 1 second it took to turn the other guy into a fireball? That's my point. Sure, you get that instantaneous burst of adrenaline, but then it's rather anti-climatic when you barely touched the trigger and they're dead. Normally I'm opposed to nerfs, but they need to normalize damage (or the absorption of damage) so that it's more like an NPC battle. It takes me several shots with my Advanced to bring down Tier 4 stuff...but with a Tier 5 uber pvper, it's just a matter of who sees who first. The greater majority of the combat is getting to them to one-shot them up the rear. The entire point of this thread is to make space pvp FUN. If that means a nerf, so be it. One solution would be to change shields so that they actually have a LOT higher shield rating (which I suspect was done with npcs...armor, too). This would make the PVE game unbalanced, though. Which means they would need to normalize the damage NPCs do so it's more in line with what we're doing to them to make up for our increased defenses. It may not seem realistic to have 250000 shields, but they could change it to be more like TIE Fighter where you had a color indicator showing how your shields were doing and we'd be none the wiser while flying. *shrug* Just another way to make space pvp more fun.

Message Edited by JamesBenson on 03-06-2005 10:01 AM

All im going to say is that i sort of dread any major PvP damage reduction.

After one or two semi long dogfights with Ostat this weekend (followed by a series of me being vapped very quickly )i honestly do dread any major PvP damage reduction. Ya i lost, got my butt handed to me, and was throughly schooled, but i expected that.

Point is however, An Awing Vs T/A dogfight at high speeds are so fast and zippy its sick. Your opportunity to fire is breif, (like, not even a second) and your aiming has to be very accurate. If i should shunt off the first hit at all, i dont see how the dogfight would end in any resonable amount of time. You only catch breif glimpses of your opponent when manuevering.

Take that as you will, i know nothing i say will change anyones mind. Just my observations, take em as you will.

More anecdotal evidence: another Starsider battle yesterday, 7-8 per side. At the final dogfight everyone died but me in my Interceptor and an A-Wing. It took roughly a minute, maybe a bit longer, to get to that point--and then it took another 2+ minutes for one of us to kill the other. We circled for a very long time, trying to get position on one another, but she appeared to have a slight turning advantage, and landed two hits on me in the course of our maneuvers--widely-spaced things which I shunted away.

I had no missiles, having used them all to kill her in an earlier encounter, so I was starting to feel a little doomed. I assessed that we were either going to be circling all night or she'd eventually land two hits in a row and kill me; I tried to break free and put the space station we were fighting above between us with the intent of turning around on her and trying to shake things up. No such luck. I flew much too straight in my escape, she lined up on me, and killed me in two shots.

Before that point, she'd hit me twice in two minutes of one-on-one fighting. I'd been chasing her around for 30-60 seconds before that (I killed another A-Wing to start the battle, then locked on her) and hit her once or at most twice. I don't see how we would ever kill each other with any kind of significant damage reduction.

(By the way, excellent fight, Kitten. I knew you'd be trouble out there.)