Snub PvP; A deep dive complaint

[Oggdo Bogdo]

This is a thread that should have been made long ago, and it's going to be much longer than I want it to be, but I want to try to make every part clearly understandable to anyone who is willing to listen, and give some context as to why I think the changes are the way they are, and what alternatives I propose.

I've played a lot of snub PvP since 2007, and I feel that snub PvP is at a very low point, not in terms of balance, but in terms of fun, as a lot of options with regards to guns and ships feel like very bad choices, and quite frankly it's also becoming alien to what most people in Discovery have been used to.

Guns that were common place in previous patches no longer feel fun to use, and in some cases are demonstrably inferior choices. Slower ships no longer feel viable after the strafe nerfs and the changes to mine + CD combos. An entire movement strategy (boxing) was gutted outside of edge cases. The shield battery changes adds a layer of complexity that detracts from the experience of what Freelancer is supposed to be. There is too much unnecessary complexity and hurdles being added to a dated game that is supposed to be simple which most people simply enjoy out of nostalgia.

There's a lot more problems that contribute to this than listed, but I've had to edit a lot of content out of this thread already since it's too long, therefore, I want to address changes that I think affect PvP dynamics the most on a fundamental level to pave the way for a future conversation about issues that are on a more micro-level. I want to only consider VHFs and below in this thread, because SHFs and Bombers have their own problems that I think are too complicated to deal with in an already lengthy thread.

Part 1:Strafing

All of this began back in 5.1 where strafe forces were nerfed across the board for all snubs. I've warned many aces that I talked to, that changing a foundational stat like strafe force, that almost all ships of the same class share, across the board, is a terrible idea, and I gave more concise versions of the explanations I will give later. However, nobody shared my opinion, if anything, most aces were extremely excited to try this. The publicly stated reason in the thread is that it's to stop snubs from boxing capital ships. That is a fair goal, but there were other ways to accomplish that goal. However, I've also been told by multiple other playtesters and aces that another reason was to gut boxing in Snub vs Snub PvP. I disagree with this line of reasoning, and I'll get into this later.

Let's first suppose the goal is to stop boxing vs caps. Well, the way this problem works mechanically in the game, logically, is that shots fired by the cap player, do not reach the snub player in time before they can strafe out of the way. This is a very simple problem with at least two solutions that are very easy to see. You can either nerf strafe forces so they don't strafe out of the way, or you can buff the speed of guns that capital ships use to engage snubs, so they can't get out of the way in time. I think that buffing the guns on capital ships was clearly the way to go. When you are just adjusting a gun, it's a lot less likely that you will irreversibly affect the entire meta for caps. You only need to adjust the guns that were changed, if at all.

However, a foundational stat like strafe forces has always been taken as a given when balancing snubs. When values such as armor, turn rate, nanobot count, powercore, etc are assigned to a snub, it implicitly takes these foundational stats into account. There are other stats like this, for example, impulse speed, thrust speed and mass. When you change strafe forces, just about every other number that is assigned to a snub now has a higher weight in determining its overall place in balance. What exactly does this mean? Prior to 5.1, the power level of almost every ship within the VHF class was actually fairly close, and all of that is now upended and invalid because of the strafe change. The most obvious implication of strafe nerfs is that turn rates are now more valuable in determining whether a ship is good or not; ships that are faster are heavily favored in the current patch. This may not seem true intuitively, since all ships are getting the same treatment, but there are scenarios that prove this is true. For example, if you're fighting a faster ship on a slower ship, every single time the faster ship inevitably out-turns you and obtains a good position that you have to dodge your way out of, you end up eating more shots even with perfect play, because it's much harder to get out of the way with strafes.

The second scenario is related to the reason that I was given privately, that snubs had their strafes neutered specifically to stop boxing in snub vs snub duels. Slower ships usually rely on out-trading the opponent in head-on scenarios because they usually have some form of compensation in terms of their shape, their armor, and their powercore, usually also in this order of importance. Armor levels are very close among all ships, and the gap can be closed by a few extra seconds of fire. Powercore advantages can be nullified with different flight strategies. Therefore, most of the advantage comes from utilising the shape of the ship to strafe and out-dodge the opponent, usually by boxing. This is where the strafe nerf comes in, strafes have been reduced to the point where you can basically never out-dodge the opponent to any significant degree on the slower ships, and this means the superior front profile now holds less weight; in a head-on pass you can never gain enough of an advantage in the boxing situation on a slower ship to make up for the deterioration in your position when you get out-turned after the box. It becomes easy to see that slower ships are now at a significant disadvantage in the current meta. The only way this could have been avoided is with a complete balance pass on quite literally every snub, retuning at least some of their stats, but as you can see from the recent patch notes, nothing even remotely close has occurred. The balance team applied an important across-the-board change to every single snub with no consideration for the consequences.

So now, I've given you something else to consider; why not do that? Just rebalance every snub to account for the strafe nerf. For one it's extremely time inefficient, but more importantly, I don't think the current strafe values are desirable. I want to consider the overall effects on the big picture. First of all, this rather counterintuitively, in my experience, affects duels between lower and higher level players adversely. Lower level players struggle to deal with any amount of strafing at all, and they can rarely hit higher-level players head-on anyway. However, this does cause a lot of grief to lower level players because higher level players can out turn lower level ones even on slower ships, and put them in a situation where they take a lot of damage, and it's a situation that most lower level players don't really feel incentivised to deal with simply because the tools that you are given are inadequate. You can't even begin to learn to strafe your way out of this situation.

Now, as for higher level fights, I think the strafe changes also aren't very good for the game. For one, almost every ace, whether they can articulate it or not, is familiar with everything I've said so far, and knows how to exploit and force these situations. More importantly, the level of aim that aces have is at a point where you are guaranteed to take a lot of damage in every single pass, and even prior to the strafe changes it was still likely you would take some damage. Now, people can do much more severe damage to you with no counter-play. This means that if you fall behind even slightly in the damage race, you are almost guaranteed to lose, because there is little variance in the outcome of every single pass; you're going to take a lot of damage, a little bit more of a lot of damage, or slightly less than a lot of damage, and the window to hope for anything to turn around the fight is much shorter. What this accomplishes is that the most likely outcome of a fight is rushed, and it becomes too punishing even at the higher levels.

So, what about boxing? Wasn't it problematic and needed to be nerfed? What solution do I propose? My honest answer is that I am still unconvinced that this was ever a problem. Boxing isn't a magic bullet in every scenario and there are ways to out-trade and cause the boxer's position to deteriorate at closer ranges. The only argument I can see being made by aces is the box and counter-box stalemate that occurs at long range, where the only optimal response is to counter-box someone that's started boxing. This is not something that should be happening often, and it actually sorts itself out rather quickly. It's also not actually optimal to base your flight pattern around getting far away and starting a box unless you're on a slower ship, in which case the faster ship is at fault for even allowing it. Dodging shots in place doesn't really award you anything positionally.

Gutting a type of movement that Discovery has always had since vertical strafes were enabled, however, changes the identity of PvP in a way that leaves a giant void. There needs to be something else in place to make a change like this work, and so far, the game has been moving in a direction of prioritizing turning-styles and promoting faster ships, without giving any tools for slower ships to counteract this, and even taking away tools that have been used to deal with it (i.e. the CD changes to prevent CD+ mine combos). A lot of factions have slow VHFs as their only choice in the line and they're often a stronger part of the faction's identity compared to the lighter ships. I do not think it's good to leave these ships in the dust just to get rid of the occasional short-lived stalemate.

Part 2: Powercore changes and gun changes.

I think most of the community might be unaware that a lot of snub loadouts are nothing short of hot garbage. This is an ongoing issue that began in patch 5.2. The purpose of the gun formula changes is very simple; to try and make all guns, regardless of their speed and refire combinations, somewhat viable. The balance team does this by having energy usage/efficiency as the output of the formula, using its other stats such as refire, speed, DPS, as inputs. There have been some adjustments made to the formula, in the recent hotfixes. However, there is clearly a very strong bias in the implemented formula towards weapons that do energy damage, and an overly strong bias against weapons that have lower refire. It makes sense but goes too far. The penalty to guns that don't do energy damage is a problem that is plaguing almost the entire class 2 lines of weapons (to be more precise, massively under penalizing guns for having the hybrid property). If you understand this problem, you realise that it makes more than half the guns in the game extremely unsatisfying to use, and it incentivises you to find a way to game the system with gimmicky weapons and to avoid certain refires.

First I will demonstrate the bias towards weapons with energy damage with the most egregious example in the game.



These are both 750m/s 4.00 guns. The problem here is not that Tremors are more efficient as a hullbuster, but that the Warrior is far too weak. Tremors are strong enough to be used as a full set of 6 and do well enough in just about any scenario. Warriors are one of the weakest guns in the game dps-wise for a class 2 hullbuster and for a hullbuster, it's not particularly efficient either, and you need some debs to make the gun viable in a weapon set, which implies that in a full set of guns (usually 2 debs and 4 warriors), the set of Warriors do substantially less damage than the set of Tremors.

Yet, the Tremor somehow costs less energy to fire because it does 18 less hull damage and has a small amount of spread. On top of that, every Tremor does a significant amount of core damage to your opponent. Most snub guns today are wildly inefficient compared to patches prior to 5.2, so the Tremor doing damage to the opponent's powercore, severely affects their ability to fire. Tremors were very strong on release, and even when they cost 187 energy to fire they were considered broken. Today, they cost 172 energy to fire, and almost every other gun is substantially worse to use. I think there isn't much else I need to say about this, other than to make one thing clear, I do not think Tremors are the sole problem, and that just nerfing it, and guns like it, is not going to fix everything. There is clearly something very wrong with the way the efficiencies of every traditional hullbuster is set up. It's not just that Tremors are too strong, but everything else is way too weak to be satisfying to use.

Next, I want to look at one example that shows my point about the overweighted bias against lower refires.

These are both 750m/s lasers at differing refire rates. For context, I picked the Sammael because to most aces from older days, it's one of the most infamous weapons in Discovery. People had skype deals and put in tech requests just to get their hands on this weapon for its extremely high DPS relative to other guns, which was balanced out by its lack of efficiency. There have been several balance passes done on both of these weapons, but the Sammael retains its DPS advantage relative to most other guns, and the Heavy Flashpoint is a gun with an average, reasonable amount of DPS. Today, Sammaels somehow come out on top of the Heavy Flashpoint in terms of efficiency. This doesn't seem quite right at all. A lot of guns that I would classify as mid-level refires (3.03 to 5.00) really suffer from this problem (3.03 is arguably a shotgun, but they're also present in mixed loadouts). They're not really used the same way that shotguns (<2.00 refire) are, but they are penalised quite heavily as if they are also used the same way.

The last part about powercore changes that I want to address is a lot less important in regards to balance, and has more to do with the fun of it, and is related to changes in shield mechanics, with regards to core drain when regenerating shields. If you look at a blog post in 5.1,

Spicing up fighter groupfights

Finally, I'll briefly touch on how we're attempting to make fighter groupfights more interesting. Currently, they're all about focusing down the most threatening enemy player as quickly as possible, while that player has to dodge their ass off and last as long as possible. This is unlikely to massively change, but to make it more viable to play more tactically and - potentially - target multiple players, we've added powercore drain to all fighter shields, which is only active when the shield is below 100% capacity. This drain has been partially offset by making base recharge rates higher, but a fighter with an actively recharging shield deals substantially less damage. As a result, it might be worth it to spread your damage around a little bit more as a group and weaken the enemy team's damage output. Of course, as with cruisers and bombers, players have the option to turn their shield recharge off using the /shields command or hotkey, maximizing their damage output but freezing their shields in place.

We're hoping this change will add a little more decision-making and tactical play to fighter groupfights, as now you may want to not just pile on Wesker, but perhaps have some players put pressure on Cobalt, too, to reduce incoming damage for your allies. In addition, AoE weapons like Cannonballs that can strip the shields off of entire groups of ships at once get some interesting additional utility.

I want to argue that the powercore drain change is entirely unnecessary for snubs, because there already is incentive to split targets. I want to give credit to Dom from [tCS] for first talking about this here under chasing manual v1.2 in the section about Roamers. Today we call them "peelers" but the concept is the same and people have been using this strategy more often in the past few years and refining it. I'll demonstrate mathematically and conceptually why we do this, and it has nothing to do with draining the energy on the enemy team:

Suppose we have a 4v4 with both sides initially focusing on one enemy target. Once the targets on both teams realise that they are being shot at, they will immediately break off the other target and start running. So we have 3 players chasing 1 target on both sides. Now, assume only 1 team starts to employ the strategy of having 1 person become the Roamer/peeler. Because of the chaos in brawls, what happens is that the Roamer can get the jump on the enemy team that is chasing the allied target and do more damage to these players, than he normally would to the hostile target. When you deshield someone who is chasing a target, in 99% of cases they will break off to stop leaking hull points to the roamer. A decent enough roamer can easily peel away 3 players in a brawl. So the resulting situation is that his team will have 2 players chasing the hostile target, and the enemy team will have 0 players close enough to do damage to the allied target. This is an entirely worthwhile strategy to use.

So, hopefully this demonstrates that there already is an incentive to have split targets in a group fight. There's a variety of responses to this strategy and I think that players can figure it out on their own. Personally, despite the game being as old as it is, there is still a lot to explore about group fighting theory. It's entirely possible to beat mechanically superior teams just by creating enough chaos with target selection. I think if the game can be solved with first principles, the balance team does not need to intervene with non-vanilla mechanics.

So what are the effects of the powercore drain change on the game? In group fights, it's an unnecessary nerf to newer players, because this is one of the least important things to deal with in the hassle of snub PvP, they're not going to interact with it. It's also a perpetual nerf to the powercore in duels. Outside of SHFs and Bombers which force you into dealing with this mechanic, VHFs and below don't deal with it at all in duels because the trade off is basically never worth it. To pre-empt the argument of using this to make the shield drain more significant, I will briefly bring this up and leave it: I've tried it on SHFs and Bombers and frankly it makes an already difficult class to play even harder to use. It's extra busy work just to get the ship to function normally. I think most people would rather just have a balanced regeneration of both without having to worry about it than to have an optimization simulator trying to maximise both depending on what you need. We got rid of STS in caps, but for some reason we want to add this extra busy work to snubs. It seems to be an inconsistency in the balance team's direction.

Part 3: Shield battery changes aka Shield Boosting

While we are on the topic of shields, I want to bring up shield boosting. This was made with the intent to make shield batteries a valuable resource like nanobots. This is a change that applies to both caps and snubs, and it makes for absolutely comical situations and it exacerbates skill differentials too much since they're capable of absorbing too much damage.

They're basically used to gain functional invulnerability via damage reduction, and players frequently abuse this to absorb mine hits (sometimes literally run straight into them), do boxing (ironically), and just make things extremely awkward. The powercore changes have made it absolutely not worthwhile to shoot at a shield that has its damage reduction up, especially if you are in front of your opponent, since they can do more damage to you. You can gain significant advantages just by timing your shield batteries better than your opponent, by negating bad situations where you will take a lot of damage, better than they can.

It was already the case before that people would follow up with boxing or absorb mine hits with the shield batteries, but they would have to pay with actually losing the restored shield value. Now, you are totally unable to interact with them; you are FORCED to break off, early turn, do anything else other than be in front of an invulnerable opponent and waste your core on a shield that's barely taking any damage while they fire back, which means the restored value is almost always retained. While these are very funny situations to be in, I do not think invincibility belongs in snub PvP.

Part 4: tldr

-Strafes are one of a few important stats in the game for snubs that cannot simply be adjusted wholesale without a total balance rework of the affected class. It ruins viability of slower ships and gives too much relative power to HFs and other faster ships.
-The formula's current iteration makes too many guns extremely unfun to use and it creates problematic guns that are clearly overpowered
-Powercore drain due to shield regeneration is unnecessary busy work that nobody really wants to deal with
-Shield battery damage reduction is overtuned to the point of virtual invulnerability in snubs vs snubs and adds too many ridiculous situations to a fight

Part 5: Recommendations

Now that I've stated my case, hopefully it becomes clear how I am justifying what I suggest:
-Reversion of the strafe changes; Buffs to the speed of cap guns if snub boxing is a problem.
-Upward adjustment of efficiency for class 2 hullbusters. Lower efficiency penalties across 3.03 - 5.00. Downward adjustment of armor penetration will suffice for anti-cap balance.
-Remove powercore drain and readjust powercore regeneration values as needed
-Shield Batteries: No idea - but the damage reduction needs to at least be toned down if not reworked. Increase in regenerated values if needed. I'm well aware that certain shields are relying on this mechanic, so I won't recommend removing it entirely. Not in the main body, but I think being immune to damage vs caps is braindead anyway.

p.s. This is too lengthy for me to verify I edited everything correctly and that my train of thought is always complete. Hopefully it is, but you can post in the thread and I'll edit it if you think something is not clear.

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[Eternal.Journey]

Have you tried Bombers?

Edit: This is a genuine question. Bombers are fun and theyre a snub. i know you said "SHFs and Bombers have their own problems" buuuuut. have you really tried 'em?

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[Goliath]

The current iteration of snub PvP is so convoluted and full of useless features that it makes cap pvp feel like a breeze to understand in comparison (because it is at this point). Every now and then I'm asked if I can explain how snub pvp works, because I'm one of those gremlins that fly fairly well despite the massive pile of slop that snub pvp is now. A newbie that wants to get better or see if he can get into this stuff.

So what do I reply with? "I'm just as confused as you are."; "I don't fucking know" or "Just fly around and get a feel for it.". There's shields, strafe changes, mass, gun efficiency and DPS, missiles, mines, powercore regen etc. If I were a newbie all over again I'd just neck myself with a steel rope and let "Hurt" by Johnny Cash play in the background. Because it really hurts when my guns won't fire 'cause they eat up too much energy for what they're worth, my ship either moves like a brick and the other guy throws a swatter (which I'm forced by to disengage, take it in the face or focus on instead of the actual target), the shields are down so regen is even more fucked and the other guy runs with guns that also drain powercore.

If I wanted to play EVE or Elite: Dangerous I'd go play those games, not this. I like the ideas the balance team came with, but they are either too overtuned or too taxing on what is supposed to be easy to understand, hard to master combat. Now its hard to understand and hard to master. Not a combination I'm a fan of.

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[Levenna]

Have you tried Bombers?

Edit: This is a genuine question. Bombers are fun and theyre a snub. i know you said "SHFs and Bombers have their own problems" buuuuut. have you really tried 'em?

Bombers are extremely fat and easy to hit. They aren't particularly viable on these grounds at a higher level.

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[03.07.2024] LNS-Beast***: we can do this every day but you have to buy bigger stronger ships...and i'll help you

[Oggdo Bogdo]

Have you tried Bombers?

Edit: This is a genuine question. Bombers are fun and theyre a snub. i know you said "SHFs and Bombers have their own problems" buuuuut. have you really tried 'em?

Short answer: Have you tried VHFs?

Long answer: (I'll write SHF and bomber interchangeably in this answer, Levenna has it exactly right)

I didn't want to get into them because they're more complicated in implementation compared to VHFs, as they have a lot of non-vanilla characteristics. These things also include glaring issues, one of which is similar in principle to what this thread focuses on, so I'll elaborate slightly on this.

Bombers are poor at dodging, and their movement is a lot clunkier than VHFs. This is because of their mass and strafe force/mass ratios (to be clear, lower mass is better, higher strafe/mass ratio is better). Before adding any bomber guns, VHFs sit at 150 mass, and 100 strafe/mass. Bombers sit at 350 - 450 mass, and 66 - 86 strafe/mass.

This influences bombers negatively a few ways: The initial burst you get from tapping the strafe key is extremely weak. If you try switching strafes to dodge shots, it's going to be highly ineffective, it takes time for the strafe speed to accelerate up to where it needs to be, and you not only have proportionally less strafe to compensate for the mass, but also more mass to overcome.

Next, it makes movement clunkier. In duels, there is a movement strategy that is quite fundamental, called "outer strafing". What you do is that you thrust at the opponent from an angle, while holding down the strafe key that puts you further away from the opponent. When you do this on a bomber, it's a lot clunkier even when you have fully accelerated to maximum strafe speed, because there's higher mass, which increases the ship's inertia, and causes the ship to drift slightly in the direction you were moving in. With "outer strafing" it's like being dragged in a direction you don't really want to go in, exposing yourself to more shots, and it's quite annoying to players that are used to VHFs.

The higher mass also does one more thing, it makes accelerating up to full thruster speed slower. VHFs have no problem reversing, and immediately thrusting forward at full speed. SHFs need a second thruster, and because they sit at over 2x the mass, they still do this slightly slower. These 3 things make SHF movement extremely hard to vary and limits skill expression drastically. It has virtually no ability to dodge shots because there is no burst of strafe to work with. It often gets outpaced by theoretically slower turning VHFs because of the drag, and it doesn't do boxing nearly as well. To make up for this, it just has a lot more health and nanobots to work with. They usually make for 1-dimensional duels with the faster ships because it's pretty obvious what the SHF is trying to do and it just comes down to whether or not they can kill the faster ship in time. It's akin to being put on a timer, similar to the current meta with VHFs, but it's exaggerated and multiplied since it's the same problem on a much bigger scale and with more and different stat issues compounding the problem.

One last thing is that SHFs/Bombers don't scale well into bigger fights. Being big and poor at strafing is a recipe for eating lots of shots with no counterplay. It's impossible to give SHFs enough health to not make death inevitable in bigger fights, because this makes them oppressive in duels. I think people remember a time when SHFs had more bots/bats than gunboats and they were impossible to kill outside of instakills.

The reason I didn't include all this in the main body is because I don't know a solution to this. SHFs are meant to fulfill this role. They help newer players be useful in fights by allowing them to survive longer than in a VHF where they haven't developed the skills to justify the extra freedom of movement. Most aces prefer VHFs and other lighter ships precisely because SHFs limited range of movement isn't as fun or nimble as VHFs and lower and they aren't as easy to gang up on and kill off.

The current iteration of snub PvP is so convoluted and full of useless features that it makes cap pvp feel like a breeze to understand in comparison (because it is at this point). Every now and then I'm asked if I can explain how snub pvp works, because I'm one of those gremlins that fly fairly well despite the massive pile of slop that snub pvp is now. A newbie that wants to get better or see if he can get into this stuff.

So what do I reply with? "I'm just as confused as you are."; "I don't fucking know" or "Just fly around and get a feel for it.". There's shields, strafe changes, mass, gun efficiency and DPS, missiles, mines, powercore regen etc. If I were a newbie all over again I'd just neck myself with a steel rope and let "Hurt" by Johnny Cash play in the background. Because it really hurts when my guns won't fire 'cause they eat up too much energy for what they're worth, my ship either moves like a brick and the other guy throws a swatter (which I'm forced by to disengage, take it in the face or focus on instead of the actual target), the shields are down so regen is even more fucked and the other guy runs with guns that also drain powercore.

If I wanted to play EVE or Elite: Dangerous I'd go play those games, not this. I like the ideas the balance team came with, but they are either too overtuned or too taxing on what is supposed to be easy to understand, hard to master combat. Now its hard to understand and hard to master. Not a combination I'm a fan of.

Completely agree with this sentiment. Most aces can barely keep up with the new mechanics. Newer players not only have to learn the fundamentals but also how the changes function. The new swatters and missiles are not uncommon either, and a lot of these newer ammo-types have extremely counter-intuitive responses. The swatter for instance, acts exactly the opposite a normal mine functions: It disarms when shot at, while other mines explode. It explodes when it times out, while other mines disarm themselves. They don't even track targets and they fly relatively far backward, while normal mines will track the closest ship and exit relatively close to the mine launcher. It can be quite disorienting.

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[Karst]

I'm about ten years past my pvp prime and quite honestly just not in the current meta enough to comment on most of the finer aspects, but there's a general observation here that I share:

There is too much unnecessary complexity and hurdles being added to a dated game that is supposed to be simple which most people simply enjoy out of nostalgia.

Now its hard to understand and hard to master. Not a combination I'm a fan of.

I've been concerned for some time now about the general rise in complexity, the number of operations the player must familiarize themselves with in order not to be completely useless in a fight. Like I'm glad that the previously stupidly simple gunboats got useful forward guns and mine droppers, mechanics which fit comfortably into their operation and feel rewarding to use.

However. This approach of adding layers of complexity to every class, every matchup type, is going too far. The best example of this is shield drain/shield toggle, at least on snubs (arguably all classes, but we're talking about snubs here).
This feels as a mechanic like a pure "punishment for failure" setup, rather than "reward for success". What I mean is that, say, landing a Mini Razor hit grants a sense of achievement for using this tricky mechanic right, while effectively using shield toggle just feels "normal", while leaving a sense of frustration if you feel like you didn't use the function optimally.

That....isn't fun. This is an added layer of functionality that when utilized properly, adds nothing, and when not, diminishes enjoyment. I don't WANT to set up yet another keybind that I have to micro in order to perform competitively. The addition of this mechanic is just stressful and confusing to me, a veteran player who at least at one time was pretty decent at pvp. I can only imagine what it's like to a new player.

So yeah. I can only echo those sentiments about rising complexity, and I hope that any future added balance layers undergo scrutiny as to if they actually make fights more enjoyable, and if they are really worth further building up the already massive entry barrier into combat. And that some of the existing ones, like said shield toggling, are reviewed as well (other things come to mind like the inscrutable variety of bomber weapons, but that's going off into side topics.)

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[Madvillain]

I haven't had as much fun with snub PvP as I am having since returning to discovery a couple of months ago. I feel like the changes since I left (about 5 years ago) have actually lowered the skill ceiling quite a bit, and on top of that made heavy and light fighters much more viable choices to fly, even for an average pvper such as myself.

I have been consistently punching above my weight since my return not by suddenly becoming a lot better at aiming or better at positioning, but simply by accepting the new changes and adapting to them.

I do fly VHF's a lot less, and I do think that there's an issue with torpedos now being too weak against transports and caps.

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Baila Morena | Toilet Trouble | Elder Presidente[TBH] | The Titan Combat Manual | Confession
♰ Join the Corsair Brotherhood ♰

[L1ght]

It's been three days and no official response yet, wonder why? Then again it's hard to argue with valid points made and considering the upcoming patch is going precisely on the opposite direction and making what was said here WORSE by 10x , goes to show that certain devs specifically @Haste don't really care or are willing to work with the community or even consider their input. A massive shame that threads like this just get brushed off and that's considered the "norm" now by the staff team.

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[Sombs]

It's been three days and no official response yet, wonder why?

I know it might look dismissive on first sight, but this thread is very in-depth about this criticized issues, and thus warrants an at least partially equally in-depth response. Considering Haste has a lot on the platter aside from Balance, and given this real life always comes first, even for the head dev, I'd kindly ask for a bit more patience on his behalf. In his defense, he usually responds with a not disrespectable quality, even if his perspectives might not align with the ones who criticize him and his work.

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[Oggdo Bogdo]

I want to reserve this post to address an argument brought to me that is supposedly in defense of shield toggles. I want to remark that this argument has nothing to do with the stated purpose of shield toggles or the rest of that section in the OP. It's also been phrased pretty much ad verbatim, by multiple people in the same way. This makes me think that this argument did not originate from them. I'm not too involved in the rest of the community, so I figured I will share this answer here.

The argument that's been brought up is that this is just an "APM-intensive mechanic to give you minimal gains" and we don't have to worry about it. So, without addressing the truth value of this argument, I want to ask, even if this is true, why exactly is this mechanic being kept? Shield toggle could award you with a grand total of 1 energy per second and it would still be something you should get rid of. The argument I made was against the principle of this mechanic even existing. As I said in my original post, STS was removed from caps for being too APM-intensive so I fail to see why snubs should have something like this.

Now I want to address this argument about "minimal gains". It's really hard to tell exactly what people mean when they write like this: Do you mean that the net gain to your PvP situation is not meaningful? Do you mean the powercore gain is insignificant? From further questioning, the general sentiment I get seems to be the latter, that the effect on the powercore of shield toggle off is rather unimpactful. It's not. I will do some basic calculations using numbers from FLStat of LF-VHF ships regarding powercore regeneration and powercore drain, but I will exempt certain outliers (Anubis, Shihai, Maintenance/Mining/Scanner Drones) because I did not check them before, and cannot check them in-game at the moment, to accurately confirm certain things.

LF: Powercore drain -> 510 | Powercore regeneration after drain: 905 - 1050 | Result: Gaining 48.6% to 56.35% of core regeneration from shield toggle off
HF: Powercore drain -> 305 | Powercore regeneration after drain: 920 - 1120 | Result: Gaining 27.2% to 33.2% of core regeneration from shield toggle off
VHF: Powercore drain -> 380 | Powercore regeneration after drain: 950 - 1070 | Result: Gaining 35.5% to 40% of core regeneration from shield toggle off.

I would argue these numbers show that it's very impactful. It is true that the net gain to your PvP situation isn't very high from toggling it off and in most cases I would say it severely harms you. This is because shield regeneration values are a lot more valuable than even the gain in powercore from shield toggle off (this requires more analysis in this post to prove it, so I will just leave it as it is). However, arguing that there is almost nothing to gain requires some stretch of the imagination.

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