I've yet to see a single compelling argument in this thread for bringing the old cerbs, which essentially did nothing but double as extra primaries, back. I keep hearing "they were better", "the new system is bad", "you don't need variety", "it's causing people to leave/not fly caps".
Those are statements, not explanations. What the removal of Cerbs has done is shifted the meta of battleship combat away from heavies to lights, which are more capable of dodging mortars and less capable of dodging saturated fire. In layman's terms, multiple shots are better than one against a smaller ship, and that's edge heavies had that the cerb nerf took away.
Is this a good system? Not particularly, but it is more or less on par with the way .85 worked save for the addition of TS/TZ. It's not particularly worse than the old meta of heavies everywhere which could throw what were basically an extra four super prims at long range and dominate the battlefield.
I don't think bringing back old cerbs is the answer at all. I do think that the playing field could stand to be leveled a bit. Some ideas I threw around for this back in the balance chat awhile back were:
- Increasing the energy consumption for mortars, making it more difficult for light battleships to dodge around and spam them with impunity.
- Buffing battleship missiles, giving heavy battleships yet another edge against lighter ones which can more easily dodge.
- Switching the current system of "five prims on lighter caps" to be the other way around, since it is heavies that need more shots to deal damage, not lights. With some of the better heavy battleships however I think that might need to come with the removal of a heavy slot.
