Pilot Archive
Thread: Focus: New POB Components
The POB ship lowdown from the point of view of an otherwise dedicated lightweight Interception A-wing starfighter pilot . (Now if that isn't a fancy title, I don't know what is).
The setting: With the introduction of a decent space related patch, I thought I'd honour it by actually testing it out. However, me being the lazy b*gger I am couldn't be bothered to mine his own parts so I spent longer in actual fact searching decent ones out on the Bazaar 
.
Anyway..I had my YKL all set up and named the 'RSS Star Tortoise' because frankly that is what a Nova Courier is. A space faring combat reptile. I also had my friend who I promised to help grind (he'd moved from Bria) so we assembled a group of people to help crew my newly outfitted starship. I ended up with Norram, Adonis, Albrand and myself onboard. So were standing at the RO and I discover Halyn is taking his uber pob up too which was pretty nifty thinking and I think...
"Hey! I know what a good way of grinding xp would be -and- putting these POBs through their paces. Lets do the t5 Ghrag duty mission that I seem to be eternally fascinated with!"
So we did it. First gunboat went down easy. Second wave's gunboat duo weren't much cop. On the third or fourth Halyn had a plasma leak, but had it patched in no time. Fifth wave was epic. Our kiting tactic was pretty well worked by then, though and we decimated them.
So that mission was accomplished ok enough, but we were still hungry for more (and wow I was finding I could have fun with the polar opposite of an A-wing o.o) so we headed to Deep Space, hungry for even MORE XP and this time, to see if any Imps could hurt us.
Oh btw, I'll add that I managed to easily get EO4 working on the pob (even though I htought i had an EO3 loaded FC initially). Maxing out at 1410 was fun. Boosting at just over 1800 was even more so. Nearly as fast as my A-wing in fact (although rather less manouverable ).
So we went about DS, this time with fighter escort and Adonis left so he could come back with his firespray of Death in order to fight us. The long and shor tof it was basically, we grinded the xp we needed without much hassle and in pvp, the POBs did amazingly.
So ok we had fighter escort but.....
Eventually, everyone was leaving and I found my POB alone with Adonis and Redbled in system. We were going to leave too but I thought 'heh why not...lets do it anyway" , so we went for Adonis, who I think was heading for us too and took some damage. We scored some on him too with redbled juking in and out. Eventually after much Cat and Mousing(ironic describing a KSE as a mouse 
), my gunners (/salutations to them) managed to blow him up (we'd sustained bad damage to shields and armour but still were otherwise in onepiece with no critical internal damage). Discovering RedBled's RG TIE next to the ISD killing rebel targets, we chased him and got him too.
My oppinion is (and my full thesis with diagrams will follow tommorow probably) is that POBs are now awesome.
1.Parts for them can be found on the bazaar. (I bought my chassis and parts from nothing within the hour of commencing my parts search on the bazaar).
2.They're awesome for PvE and PvP (imho)
3.The plus side of no.2 with PvP is that itfalls in hand with no.1 The parts are easily obtainable and don't take months of parts farming to make pvp worthy, so even the most fresh of pilots can play. Hell, your crew don't even have to be masters (my gunner was a tier 2! and still rawked!)
4.With the huge speed, shields, armour and damage coming out ofthe ship, I actually felt safer in that POB than I do with my A-wing and THAT is saying somthing my friends.
Message Edited by LeaphChausew on 10-23-2005 09:10 PM
Message Edited by LeaphChausew on 10-23-2005 09:12 PM
TomoRainer wrote:
Halyn wrote:
After our experiments this morning, I'd say that the components are fine for PvE. Not sure about PvP yet, for they're balanced for PvE.
Care to expand on that? Specific analysis would be pretty useful.
LOL...yeah, I left that pretty vague, didn't I?
Well, we logged some more flight time with rotating crews in PvE action mostly--though I picked up a couple PvP kills along the way, too. Here are my conclusions so far.
Player vs. Environment
I said before that I thought it was "pretty balanced." I'll stick by that analysis. We took the Starwind, the Nova Courier I've been flying since I mastered many moons ago, and loaded it up with freshly-crafted POB parts--stuff that's good but achievable on any server. On the weapons, I had them experimented for speed--they fired four times in just over a second. (.259 speed) Beautiful, beautiful stuff.
This morning we took it pretty easy--Deep Space, Tier 4 gunboats and Tier 5 Decimators. Two Decimators at a time wasn't too difficult, and we survived passes against trios of gunboats, usually managing to pick off a gunboat on a pass. I had a crew of three--myself flying, and two gunners, with one gunner running droid programs from the turret. During this, we ran into an Imperial pilot--but more on PvP later.
This evening, we took off with the Starwind and another Nova Courier, Leaph's RSS Star Tortoise. Our goal was to beat the Tier 5 Ghrag Mercenary duty with just POBs. The Novas seemed to be balanced well for the task--I was never deathly afraid of going after a gunboat, but I couldn't get sloppy, either. (Incidently, tonight was the first time I ever actually screamed on TeamSpeak. Leaph's Nova had lost the aggro on three gunboats and we were shields down when they turned on us. The booster bug hit us as I attempted to flee so we were vulnerable. As the little shielding we had left failed I was literally screaming "IFF Scramble! IFF Scramble!" into the mic.) The Novas were able to absorb quite a bit of damage, but it never became "trivial."
Player vs Player
I don't have any final conclusions on PvP combat in a POB, but I can definitely say it is *far* more viable now than it was before. We had a couple engagements to speak of. The first was with Bria' this morning in Deep Space. She tagged us several times with a level 8 reward blaster before one of the gunners got her, and it was enough to take a shield arc down. (I think it was three hits, but I don't know--I was a bit busy at the time. 
) We also had engaged her before when we had X-wing escorts, but that changes the dynamics of the situation completely, so I'll disregard those for the moment.
The event run on Starsider last night by Abi and Pace (I couldn't make it for the beginning--was working, and was actually surprised to see it was still going when I finally got home) involved POBs in combat. We ran flights of fighters covering POBs, and as a group it seemed to work out really well. The freighters weren't going to be killed in one pass, but they weren't invulnerable, either. Because of the relative power of the POB capacitor to the POB shields, shunting doesn't make the POBs overpowered--you're not going to be juicing more than a quarter of your shield per shunt, even at the 4th level. Listening to TS, too, proved that POBs aren't too weak...we heard things like "My escort's down, and I'm under fire!" followed a few moments later by "Alright, I'm running, but I've still got some following me" and the like. A POB isn't going to wade into combat and tank a flight of enemy players, but it isn't going to die in one shot, either.
We had a couple more encounters this evening, too. We ran into an Imperial pilot using a RGI in Deep Space. He actually ambushed us while we were attacking a gunship, but our shields and armor (though the armor was probably down to about 60% of its full strength from mistakes I made during the Tier 5 duty earlier that hadn't been repaired yet) were enough to repel him until I realized what was going on. If he would've had a better weapon he probably would've gotten us. (I strongly suspect, from the damage we took and what I saw of him inflicting on our fighter escort, that he was using a single level 7 blaster.)
Towards the end, right before I CTD and left my crew hanging in space, we ran into Adonis's firespray. If I would've had EO4, he probably wouldn't have had a chance against us, but he was just fast enough to pull away from us at a very slow rate. We got him on the turn (though Leaph's Nova and Luucas's X-wing were right behind and probably would've got him if we hadn't) in a couple of shots.
I really suspect my opinion of how viable they are in PvP could change quickly. Right now, a lot of pilots I've talked to are intimidated by the damage outpost on those new POB weapons. Even something speed-experimented with the quickshot upgrade is hitting nearly as hard as a high-end REed level 10 blaster, but with the POBs turning out four shots per second, the DPS is higher. As pilots become less gunshy about attacking a POB, I suspect their viability will drop a bit. For now, they are feasible for PvP--but in time, I suspect they will become harder to use as the pilot community as a whole adapts and assimilates new tactics.
EDIT: Called Leaph's ship the Space Tortoise instead of the Star Tortoise right away.
Message Edited by Halyn on 10-23-2005 10:09 PM
"--Michael Stackpole, RS IRC
.
Satch_of_GL wrote:
I fought against one in DS yesterday and couldn't dent it. The gunners were zeroed in on a single ship and could take me out with one shot. Worse, the damm thing could run me down in my A with my best engine (pre-nerf, level 6 reward engine). With that kind of speed, why does it need huge armor and huge shields?
So your chassis doesn't scratch the paint? :-)
Message Edited by Smerk on 10-24-2005 05:38 PM
Satch_of_GL wrote:
I fought against one in DS yesterday and couldn't dent it. The gunners were zeroed in on a single ship and could take me out with one shot. Worse, the damm thing could run me down in my A with my best engine (pre-nerf, level 6 reward engine). With that kind of speed, why does it need huge armor and huge shields?
Again, someone is overstating the advantage of pure linear speed. There are a lot of things you can do in a light fighter to get away from something that can't turn and can't slow down.
Satch_of_GL wrote:
With that kind of speed, why does it need huge armor and huge shields?
After getting acclimated to driving the thing and so forth, setting up a ventrilo server and grabbing my two mates, we set out to do one of said mate's ace missions. peice of cake, really, but then the vettes always were, and a couple other players had already taken out the fighter screen even, so no suprises there. proceeded on to DS where we had an absolute blast of a time for a few hours, and even saw and shot down someone in a heavy-X. (DS tends to be pretty empty on Tempest.) the num-lock camera is God's gift to PoB pilots, I swear it. Cruising along at a comfortable slightly-less-than-an-npc-B-wing and getting a cloud of mobs to follow you, then levelling out and letting them all chase you while the gunners pound them to hell is made much more exciting and efficient when the pilot is cycling through the targets with num-lock on and watching the motions of the fighters, calling out to the gunners which ones will be in range shortly and at what angle and whether or not those a-wings are coming back and most importantly whether there's any players around and if so what they are doing. I had a fellow neutral ace in one gunner's seat, so we were able to CTSS4 at a nice rate, making further corvettes and npc PoBs a breeze. There were a few moments when they would get to the armor, but that was rare. As for PvE, I would say that the PoBs are perfect now. Yes, they made killing multiple vettes and whole squads of Bwings in quick succession pretty simple, but with the same three people (the second gunner and I in my krayt and the other privateer ace in his vaksai) we could kill vettes and mobs even faster, though wed blow up now and then. The problem here is not that the PoBs are overpowered, its that the vettes and the ISD are such a joke. (and the rebel station, for that matter...) So the PoB is safer, but slower, for grinding parts and so forth pve. Sounds perfectly fine to me.
As for PvP, the only encounter I've had in it PvP when i actually had a crew with me, the poor rebel didnt even see us coming, and by the time I realized that, all I could to was send him an "incoming!" tell before we slid into gun range and my two lads lit him up. Turns out it was his first visit to DS, so he was hardly a good example of how the thing handles in PvP. The other encounters ive had with it were with a single nub gunner whose never even been in space before, and only one gunner at that. Some heavy-X or JSF would always slaughter us before he could even remember the targeting controls. Not to mention the fact that they were attacking the ISD usually, so I would have an FPS in the single-digit range. So that also is a poor example. However, it took the heavy-X a good 6 or so hits to off us, and we killed that other heavy-X in 2, (with a refire rate of .22!) so I'd say with a really good crew and a decent head start it would take 3 of them to take us out, and we'd certainly take at least one with us. Sounds balanced to me, but I'll report again after I've had a few more PvP battles.
As for the PoB feeling like "a mini-tank which doesnt go down easy and packs enough firepower to make it difficult to assault," I think theyre just about there. Definitely in PvE. Fixing WO3 would proboably seal the deal in PvP if my understanding of the game mechanics are correct. Oh, and someone mentioned turrets that stay relative to the world rather than the ship? Yeah, I think id give you my mousepad for that. And its a big, beautiful mousepad. I won it for crushing cups with my forehead, and i treasure it. Thats how much I would love for the turrets to stay relative to the world. Then my gunners would encourage me to take evasive maneuvers rather than always saying "hold still already!"
Glad to be part of the family.
got some general po questions that may not quite fit this forum exactly but along same line.
1.Y-8 have launchers?
2.if in a buddies pob and he kills a vette while you hold the vette mission do you win mission?
3.if you have a pob and your reb or free and doing a imp ship killing, and there a imp sitting at your op's will bombstrike work?
4.can we whine till y-8 gets a loot box?
The Y8 has one ordinance slot.
Twice now we've taken folk up that were on the Vette mission, let them gun a turret on the PoB and went to Deepspace to tackle one. They both finished their mission and got their Ace. The thing we *don't* know is if a Rebel trying for his Ace can go up in an Imp piloted PoB and complete it in DS. (It was an Imp pilot and Imp gunner in both cases we tried so far)
Side note, it was bloody easy in the PoB to do the Vette too! *laugh*
From what I have figured out it works like this (anyone feel free to correct me). Whoever is piloting the ship sets the stage for the "faction" of the whole crew. An Imp pilot allows a rebel or neutral gunner to fire on Rebel targets. I don't know specifically about how neutrals work, but if it's an Imp pilot, then *ONLY* Imps can take the copilot seat and use either droid or personal commands. At least the person sitting the copilot only has to match faction, not skill level. IE, a 1111 Imp can use every command in the FC from what we tried. It seems to be the pilot that dictates what can/can't be used and of course, the pilot is an Ace already.
It would be nice if other factions could take the copilot seats. Especially on the Y8 since there are *two* copilot seats up front. (nicest view on the ship IMHO)
Oh, here's a MAJOR REQUEST! Besides the lootbox for the Y8, lets get em to DROP THE COCKPIT FRAMES from the PoB as a pilot! Man, you can't see a damn thing from the pilot's seat on the Y8, the nose of the ship blocks your aiming point. Sure you can pull the viewpoint back but then your targetting lead cursor seems to vanish after about 300m range. I'd love to be able to get the same cockpit frameless viewpoint we can in the other ships on a PoB.
This one gets a resounding "yes".
pyro139 wrote:
4.can we whine till y-8 gets a loot box?
