Is it time to nerf cruise disruptors?

[Grumblesaur]

Just because everyone's already used to it doesn't mean it's good for game balance. Cruise disruptors are an extremely versatile tool -- far more so than most other kinds of equipment. Tenacity has a point.

Every other kind of equipment in the game has, generally speaking, one or two uses:

• Guns and turrets deal steady, reliable damage, and even come in specific varieties to deal different kinds of damage. Most ships have slots for several of these. Other than pulse weapons dealing powerplant damage, they don't really have any extra uses.
  
• Torpedoes deal large bursts of damage at the expense of energy and sometimes ammunition. Highly useful in piracy or a cap fight. Limitations on ammo (or the expense of the ammo) or high energy costs limit their usage. Spam them, and you waste your own resources. They don't have much use in a furball (unless you're using a suicide tactic in an asteroid field). They're tailored to specific uses.
  
• Countermeasures are solely for attracting ordnance, unfriendly or otherwise. Nothing else you can do with them.
  
• Capship razors are for high-powered sniping shots. Not useful for a steady stream of fire, difficult to hit some ships with, but well worth it if you can reliably land hits, especially against ships smaller than your own.
  
• Mortars are for high-powered sieging. Also not useful for steady streams of fire, but great for going after ships bigger than you.
  

I imagine you get the idea. The cruise disruptor? It's too useful. Generally speaking, unless you're flying a bomber that's not for piracy, or flying with an ID that only lets you engage in self-defense, it makes sense to have one. Stop a transport or a fleeing ship. Detonate mines, missiles, and torpedoes. Cancel somebody's engine kill. Disrupt cloak charging.

Most people in particular use the Train cruise disruptor, since it'll stop pretty much anything reliably. We have the Mosquito which claims to be better suited for popping ordnance, but it hardly matters when the TCD can do it just as well and stop transports with wide-apart engines.

The superiority of the CD is detrimental to distinguishing ship roles from each other. So many loadouts have a very do-it-all quality to them, especially the ones that include a CD, since it gives them all the abilities outlined by Tenacity. Given how much effort the devs have put into the game to make ship classes and the roles of those classes more distinct (different cruise speeds, different weapons for bombers and fighters, different slot types for capital ships), it's contradictory to the mod's logic to let the CD be such a powerful trump card.

Either breaking these different functions out across multiple types of disruptor properly (so that there aren't so many redundant pieces of equipment) or reducing CD ammo capacity to something like 25 would be fine fixes in my eyes.

I’m with Crucible on this. It isn’t broken, so don’t change it. Go fix SNACs and then we can talk.

The SNAC is only tangentially related to this discussion (since it occupies the same slot), but if all you want to do is whinge about how the SNAC should be reverted (and it shouldn't be), how about you go to a thread where that's more on-topic? Your one-liner doesn't contribute anything to the conversation that your first post didn't already.

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