A unique buff for the screamer?

[Backo]

Screamers need to be completely deleted from the mod.

Wesker stop being bad, pls.

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Republic of the Sword and Sun

[Wesker]

Screamers need to be completely deleted from the mod.

Wesker stop being bad, pls.

>flys corsair

Calls ppl "bad"

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[Backo]

Screamers need to be completely deleted from the mod.

Wesker stop being bad, pls.

>flys corsair

Calls ppl "bad"

I flew AU7 Titan and lost 3 nanobots. You died before we even started fighting for real. Get on my level.

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Republic of the Sword and Sun

[nOmnomnOm]

Stay on topic plis

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[aerelm]

Screamers never had bigger explosion radius than nukes, at least not in the past 2 years. It's just that they had so much raw damage you could detonate it far from a snub you shot a CD at and still deshield it instantly which is why people thought it had bigger radius. The damage nerf was inevitable because of that, but I'm afraid we went a little bit too low. I'll look into it again.

As for being used against bigger ships, it's not that good in practice. Sure, you can use it against transports that thrust in a straight line, but you usually don't have a problem pvping those anyways. As for smaller ones who turret steer (and gunboats, cruisers and battlecruisers for that matter), you'll rarely be nuking them. Almost never in fact, unless they run into it in one of their steering patterns, but that depends on them more than you. What does that leave? Ships that stand still (which you should absolutely never do) and impulse strafing battleships. And even then, the battleships have a chance to insta you because of how close you have to get to mine it. Balancing it for bigger ships doesn't work unless something drastic changes.

Yeah. Screamer's one of those tricky little buggers that's a pain to balance cause in its current form it doesn't really leave much room between "OP" and "Outright useless". Back in 87 or whenever it was we kicked the radius down to nuke level there were a couple of ideas we wanted to try with Screamer and see if it'd be worth implementing (since both woulda been drastic changes and needed proper testing), but obviously never got around to because blodo someone thought it wouldn't be worth the effort and "no one uses screamers anyways".

1. Basically, kick down the damage drastically but scale up the ammo limit and refire rate accordingly (mind you, not so much so it doesn't turn into a nobrainer spamboat), so it would provide a better "EMP trap" for bigger ships, while losing the ability to insta-deshield snubs - People deciding to spam em in snub fights would've just ended up getting a few CDs thrown at em and losing their own shield, while the ability to drop a few screamers close to eachother in the path of a TSing cap would've increased the chances of doing some proper shield damage with each minerun.

2. The exact opposite of the above: Turn it into an actual EMP bomb. Kick down the refire and ammo count and add some energy use maybe, give it barely any radius (to prevent CD trapping a dozen ships shieldless in a group fight with it), but a huge shield damage - So it can't be used as a typical mine anymore but every single one that'd hit a ship would do enough damage to count. At the same time, it wouldn't be a reliable choice against snubs while making it a scary thing for caps. i.e. That EMP nova, in mine form.

While screamer in its current form might still be somewhat balancable, it'd be a pain to get it right cause as long as you have it as a typical mine it'd have to have an overall balanced set of stats, which means a good chance of making it either "too good in one unintended aspect" (vs snubs, as it previously was) or "not complete trash but not really good for anything" (current stats is one example), so imo the only way to actually balance it in a way that makes it useful in what it's meant for while not making it too good/bad when used in other situations would be to just drop the current screamer and redo it from ground up.

Just my 2sc, maybe worth a thought.

tl;dr - Blame Blodo.

P.S: As for its use against larger ships though, I'd respectfully disagree. Distracting a cap and then sending a couple of ships in for screamer spam (or the exact opposite, distracting a cap with screamer spam so other ships can actually punch through the shield from distance, for that matter) had always been a valid tactic in larger group fights. It might not work that well in a 1 BS vs 3 bomber fight, but it sure worked wonders in large fleet battles.

[Antonio]

Both are interesting ideas. For now we'll start with increasing direct impact damage and reducing the explosion radius (as @"Bloodl1ke" suggested), and see how it goes from there. It's really hard to hit the stats right because it's impossible without live playtesting, and that takes a while. Overall, one step closer to making it "balanced" and have its intended use. The two you suggested could also be implemented as an addition, we already have plenty of unused mines (anything that's not a nuke or a screamer basically), but let's see how this new one will act first. We already have plans to make all mines viable in one way or another, which includes multiple EMP options as well.

With their use against caps, I meant that they definitely have (or had) their purpose, but it's not -as- effective as you'd expect. From someone who flew bombers the most in my disco lifetime, I usually used them on ships standing still or thrusting in a straight line, or when a turret steering cap would face and/or focus me to make him ram it or distract his aim.