Pilot Archive

i honestly don't have a problem with shield bonuses based on chassis type but it seems to me armor would still be the better avenue to take. don't want the protection? ah don't use armor. and again, you can't stunt armor back to full strength.

if they do put modifiers in for all ships, half a step is fine for heavy fighters, but it'd have to be 10x that for POB ships to achieve 100 hits in PVP.

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quadpers0n wrote:

i honestly don't have a problem with shield bonuses based on chassis type but it seems to me armor would still be the better avenue to take. don't want the protection? ah don't use armor. and again, you can't stunt armor back to full strength.

if they do put modifiers in for all ships, half a step is fine for heavy fighters, but it'd have to be 10x that for POB ships to achieve 100 hits in PVP.

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A hundred hits is high to me. I'd live with 20 hits of unopposed pounding, which can be built upon based on the actions of my crew. Ops running the shunt (which on an overloaded capacitor and droid commands with real working speeds should be rather effective) and my crew being allowed to use some kind of Chassis repair kits.

I guess what really gets me is that we have this situation where defenses are paper thin against offenses, then we have those wonderful Weapon Overload programs which just heap insult on top of injury. Which again, goes back to our ships being set up on a PvE first design scheme, with PvP as an afterthought. Our ships were meant to take a beating from hordes of NPC fighters, which is why many people can solo Tier 4 quest missions. Some people know how to roll with the punches. NPC damage is low, our defenses are balanced against that, and their defenses are outrageous, which our weapons are designed to counter. The way the system is set up, it doesn't seem to me that player defenses were ever intended to withstand player offenses. The disparity is just too glaring.

yeah, it does seem like an afterthought sometimes. but how would the system play out if our guns did much less damage? imo keeping it fast is necessary in a twitch game that allows you to modify your equipment.

i like to think about it the opposite way though,that the game was designed to be fast and merciless and inability to program adequate AI forced PVE to put odd checks and balances in to provide the illusion ofviable content.

this goes back to that other reason that i think PVP nowadays suffers. for me, i grinded to tier 3 then spent all the rest of the time outside of missions trying to fight in kessel. the pace seems normal to me and only needs minor modification, whereas the pace of PVE seems to me to be merely busywork to bide time between the real encounters.

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quadpers0n wrote:

yeah, it does seem like an afterthought sometimes. but how would the system play out if our guns did much less damage? imo keeping it fast is necessary in a twitch game that allows you to modify your equipment.

i like to think about it the opposite way though,that the game was designed to be fast and merciless and inability to program adequate AI forced PVE to put odd checks and balances in to provide the illusion ofviable content.

this goes back to that other reason that i think PVP nowadays suffers. for me, i grinded to tier 3 then spent all the rest of the time outside of missions trying to fight in kessel. the pace seems normal to me and only needs minor modification, whereas the pace of PVE seems to me to be merely busywork to bide time between the real encounters.

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quadpers0n wrote:

yeah but that's kind of a cheap shot. i'm talking more efficient use of the ships capabilities, boosting, juking, not doing the same roll combination every time, that kind of thing

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To their credit, the Devs have made the AI's intelligent enough to use throttling as a tactic for improved turns and sideslip shots. That alone is a MASSIVE step forward from what I saw in XvT and the others.

i really wish npc's would boost. maybe they already do but their components are so bad i can't tell. it doesn't seem like it though.you are right though, the throttling makes a difference.

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TomoRainer wrote:
And, as always, it's premature to be discussing any changes to PVP damage when WO3 remains bugged.

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QFE

Can we do Focus Threads on fixing Droid Commands and Pilot Specials and let this topic die again?

Timers need to be fixed, WO3 needs to be fixed, the entire frikkin Rebel tree needs to be fixed.

Pilot Specials need to be revisited. All of them shou;d be useful at some point in the game on a regular basis. I think almost all of them should have a PvE use, and a PvP use, even if it varies slightly for each.

i don't understand why wo3 isn't fixed. how can it not be something as simple as a flipped # somewhere? can't they go up to whoever and be like "listen joe this is really breaking alot, you think you can spend a morning and fix it?" then joe says "sure but i'll need an extra 4 hours for blah blah blah" and the boss says "ok joe, we'll see what we can do." then at the end of the week the boss comes and says "actually can you work till 9 tonight and fix up that blah blah blah." and joe misses his softball game. joe, if you are reading this it'd help us out a bunch and you'll just end up getting wasted and going 0-4 anyway.

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TomoRainer wrote:
Now, POBs definitely need some help in PVP, and a damage reduction or shield modifier might actually be the best solution there. Hypothetically speaking, it might be worth also thinking about a modest damage reduction for other fat, sluggish ships that currently have a hard time in PVP, but when we cross over into starfighters, deciding which ships "deserve" a reduction and which don't can get arbitrary in a hurry. That's not to say it'd be impossible to sort out some kind of system meant to flatten out some of the imbalances with PVP, just that it'd be extremely difficult when the room for error is so slim.

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Looking at this and the proposed chassis shield / armor modifier, a simple proposal would be to base it on the speed modifier.

Shield & Armor modifier = 1 / speed modifier

So by that proposal, a POB would have a 1.25 shield modifier and .8 speed modifer.

The Rebel shield commands are about useless. The irony is I have a fully loaded level 6 flight computer, but its got zero Rebel proggies.

There's your POB saviour, give us a shield enhancer like we do with weapon damage. Give us a Shield Overload programat Ace that doubles our shield strength.

i think they'd need a bit more than that though. for me, with essentially a 4.8 and 5.1 gun, i would think it would feel right to be able to kill a pob ship with a constant stream of fire going top speed.

it's basically how i take out novas now. we are talking what, 20 shots? 15 maybe? anything less than that and i think it'd still be over far to quick for the amount of work they have to put into running the thing. 15 shots with top end guns i think would provide adequate time for the POB to force the approaching fighter to move around (or one would hope) and stunt back some of it's shields. so even with a heavy fighter you are talking about a coordinated effort with another ship (unless you're a stud) or willing to take one to the face to try and bring the ship down.

it seems like a1.25 modifier wouldn't quite be enough.

do people think 30 shots on a POB with medicore guns sounds right? wrong? less? more?

I would say 30 hits would be about a minimum for how strong POBs in PVP should be. For a heavy fighter, that's just 3-5 seconds' worth of shooting. Granted, 3-5 seconds is a long time in PVP, but these things really aren't that hard to hit.

If there were a way to prevent shield shunt from making them invincible, I wouldn't mind seeing POBs being able to take up to maybe 100 shots before dying. It may sound like a lot, but if that's what it takes to make them useful in PVP, that's what it takes.