Version 5.0 "Fire and Fortune" - Everything I DISLIKED Part 1 - Balance and Stuff

[Dark Chocolate]

I will try my best to be constructive. I love this game, it is nostalgic. I love this community and mod despite it’s flaws. I only want things to improve.

::: Capital Ship balance :::
-Capital ship mobility has been severely NERFed especially the BS/Dreads. They have more mass. Drastically slow turn rate and Nerfed Strafing. Now this won’t be as troublesome on it’s own but then, The weapons systems have been changed in such a way that it’s tiresome to fly caps now. I don’t even know where to begin lol. Anyways I’ll try.

-I don’t know what has been done to the Powercore but I find myself 90 percent of the time with a dead power core while the same thing has happened with the enemy as well. Then both shoot each other with dead Powercore lel.

-On BS/Dreads, all weapons have their range up to 3-3.5k. There is in general removal of Hit and run Weapons and conversion to spam weapons. Primary Turret refire rates have been drastically increased. Sledges are like chainguns now. Mortar fires every 2.5 sec? Damn.

-Strafing Eats thruster like it never ate anything before. Even if you strafe for 2 seconds your thruster will die. Why was this necessary? So that strafing should be used in response to incoming shots? Well, that would have been good if people couldn’t Fire Mortars every 2.5 seconds! If it’s a Cruiser/BC vs a BS/Dread, or a Light BS vs Heavy BS You’d most likely die to Mortar spam. Well, at least cruiser could use their turns, do donuts and what not to avoid getting hit, but that would be very difficult for BCs and Light BS. It’s even worse if your opponent decides to chain fire double mortar and throws shots at you every 1.25ish seconds.

-Cruiser Light Mortar used to be hit and run weapon. You get in position, land a shot, get off before the enemy could grab your neck. Quite a lot of times they would and you’d perish. But now, You just have to stay at range and spam Light mortars. What’s with all the hate for hit and run weapons.
Cruiser heavy weapons now rotate 360 except for Light Mortars, Storms, Shards, Cerberus and Missiles.

-I performed various tests and compared the guns in dps as well as in actual battles in Conn 1v1s and Fleet Battles

Click here for Video - Storms compared to Other BC Guns
As you can see here, Storms were hilariously overpowered when the patch initially came out. Which people did realize and started abusing. Thankfully they got nerfed in a hotfix.

-Shards are chain gun now, just like sledges and don’t seem as good as they used to.

-And out of all the 360 firing heavies, Impacts really are the best overall.

-Cruiser Cerberus + Orthorus on Donau has more or less same dps as double Orthorus, so why would anyone bother putting Cerberus. Infact Double Impacts have better dps than double Orthorus.
Click here for Video - Cruiser Cerberus vs Orthorus vs Impacts vs Cruiser Siege Guns
So Orthorus and Cerberus have shots dispersion which is hard to control with additional worse dps.

-So really why would you even bother with anything but double impacts? (except missiles)

-I also think Cruiser primaries need to be a little bit better to shoo away Gunboats and destroy missiles like Battlecruiser Primaries can. Speaking of missiles,

::: MISSILE LANCER :::
-In earlier patch, the missiles were a serious threat as well. They’d deal huge amounts of damage when hit.

As you can see here, in the previous patch missiles did do quite a lot of damage if not countered.
But even though the missiles could do tremendous amounts of damage, they could be countered very effectively by countermeasures and cruise disrupters.

-In the current patch Missiles now chase you to oblivion. They have highest dps, weather it is Cruisers/BCs or BS/Dreads. Click here for video : DPS comparison Marauder, Impacts, Shards, Tachyons
To make matters worse, we have so very limited number of counter measures. Oh and the counter measures are also very ineffective many a times.
Yes BCs get new flaks that can deshield snubs, but As I fought other BCs with missile spam, they weren’t able to flak them all. Counter Measures are needed and they need to be optimal.

As you can see here, quite a lot of battles victories are decided which side can spam more missiles at the other. Kiting suffers as well, if you have 1 or 2 low numbers now and you decide to kite, you will be missile spammed by everyone and their mother by the chasing side. And why wouldn't they. It's so damn easy. Get in range, and just keep throwing missiles till the enemy dies. Even if it's one guy with Full Missiles on heavy loadout, he can spam missiles with 10 sec delay and you can barely do anything. You can surely dodge a few but he can just keep spamming more and more. Worse if he decides to chainfire. How are we supposed to deal with this?

-Oh and why were the Silo Missiles deleted? They were good. Big Slow payload crawling towards you to ruin your day, Not sure why we needed to delete it. There was this once I was flying a Liberty Insurgency siege cruiser being chased by the 1st Armada and a nightmare hit an asteroid beside me and I took HUGE amount of damage and died. I laughed pretty hard, it was quite epic. And even though Trinity torpedo wasn’t as effective before, may be we could improve it a bit? But that got deleted too. You only got two options on missiles now and that’s bland.

-In the previous update, I had different cruisers with different playstyles. I had one with missiles for missilelancer, shards for close combat, blasters/tachyons for anti-cruiser/kiting setup. No gun was best overall, they were all good for different scenarios.
Now I just have to fit every cruiser with the same double impact + one/two missile and every battlecruiser with double impact + double missiles. Or may be just go full cowabunga and slap 4 missiles on heavy slot. That really kills the diversity.

-I think the other weapons need to be just a bit more better at doing their jobs so that we can actually use them all in different scenarios.
And we need Counter measures ( like the old Heavy Counter Measures) that are actually effective against missiles with ammo capacity comparable to last time coz now a days everyone and their mother equips missiles and spams them in fleet battle.

::: Gunboats :::
-It is nice to see the gunboats getting some love. I like the Ravager mine. But then Gunboats have dps slightly less than cruisers but with the same agility they had before. They are very hard to hit but they will do quite impressive damage. I think that’s somewhat broken and needs to be fixed. Fighting gunboats is obnoxious on anything other than Gunboat.

::: Bombers:::
-Since we’ve been bomber swarmed many times, People might think I’d have liked the heavy bomber nerf that came with the patch. But I actually did not. Bomber swarms were a threat before, and we needed snub support/Gunboats to deal with them. May be they needed a little nerf. But when the update arrived, bombers struggled like never before.

-You can’t fire Double Nova now, coz too many people cried to Lemon slaughters. So It is best to get 1 Scorcher 1 Nova loadout, which again kills the diversity.

-The recent Hotfixed has buffed the bombers, and they may be viable against caps now, But no matter how much the bombers are buffed, I still hate the current Bomber changes due to the following reasons.

-All SNACs are Anti-shield weapons now, moreover you don’t have to hit and run like you used to. Now with the refire rate of every 1 sec, you gotta spam them to get the shield down. Same for the new Railgun. Oh and ASURAS? That is also Anti Shield. Hahaha.! Who comes up with these ideas?

-Ever since the “balance magic” plugin had dropped and added a damage multiplier on SNACs I hated the idea. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. It’s like a rocket launcher is meant to be used against Vehicles, but people are using it against infantry so you gotta nerf the rocket launcher in such a way that a direct hit form a literal rocket wouldn’t kill a human. Lmao. It's so freakin' Stupid.

-And now SNACs are anti shield. All these changes are focused towards making them not insta-kill other snubs. And now they are swatting fighters with hellfires anyways..

-I loved the old SNACs, and various factions having different colored SNAC effects.
Click here for Video - SNAC effects comparison
Even made this video showing all the cool SNAC effects various factions have.

-It was amazing to take dives at the enemy, get that one good SNAC shot and Run away before the enemy can obliterate you. It was High Risk and High Reward. That made it fun.

-Why is there a need to keep making radical changes to SNAC again and again. How about we stop making radical changes to weapons which have been awesome and fun to play since they were developed. Oh the snub killing problem, that’s the issue with SNAC yes.? Well. I have my own opinion about it.
So have you played this game Halo: Combat Evolved?. Well it was one of the coolest games of my childhood, right beside Freelancer. So (Spoiler Alert), After like half the campaign, we fight zombie like creatures called “The Flood”. They are fast, agile, more or less immune to melee damage and basically swarm you to death. You have to adjust your in-game strategy accordingly to fight them. Shotguns are very effective but you gotta get close and personal. But Sometimes, randomly they will spawn with Rocket launchers. They are absolutely reckless with the rocket launchers, they will fire at you the second they notice you. They will not hesitate to blow themselves or their own kind in the process. So, to deal with them you have to adjust your strategy accordingly, watchout for incoming rockets, jump sideways may be and shoot them down first or throw a grenade whatever.

-Similarly, If you are a snub and you charge headfirst towards a SNAC equipped bomber, May be you deserve to get destroyed? Instead of the entire SNAC system being changed radically, may be the snub players should learn to adapt and overcome SNAC bombers.?
If SNACs are still one sided may be nerf them, may be increase their reload time, energy consumption whatever, but why change them so much that they are absolutely unrecognizable from what they were designed to be.

-Even though bombers were quite powerful and overtuned in the previous version of the game, if they still get too close or too reckless they could get blown to pieces by Cap fire. This high risk high reward was the most fun part of flying a bomber, Why was there a need to have it radically changed?

-If there is something that should be balanced in bomber vs Fighters,

How about, Balance This.

::: MISSIONS :::
-Whenever I try to do a mission it spawns 3-4 Cruisers/Battlecruisers with Full Storm loadouts and infinite power core. Even if it spawns 4-6 Gunboats, they will obliterate you with forward guns within seconds.
Moreover since there are no armor upgrades, every NPCs have same health as you flying the same ship.
I find killing a player easier than killing NPCs. Does it need to be this difficult?

-I miss the days when you could just get 2 people and chill doing missions after a busy day at OP RL Lancer
Click here for Video - Old missions with bombers
The Good Old Days. Sadly this can't be done no more. I don't even want to fly bombers anymore.

::: Summary :::
-I think Weapons like Mortar needs to have their refire rates increased, and may be damage increased as well to balance that, So that the "responsive strafing" that people are talking about is actually effective and rewarding. And so that simply spamming mortars won't work on BS/Dreads, You'd actually need to aim, time and fire your shots correctly.

-Missiles can stay fast and dangerous and chase you to oblivion. But again the refire rates need to be increased and damage can be increased to balance that. Along with this we need viable counter measures with reasonable ammunition as Cruise Disrupter ain't gonna work.

-Cruiser guns other than Impacts and Storms need some buff so that they are viable in the scenarios they are designed to be. Cruiser primaries need to be able to slightly more effective against Gunboats and effective counter against Missiles

-Revert the damn SNAC changes and make it awesome again.

::: Conclusion :::
All I want is the game to be FUN to play. These are just my opinions about what the present state of the game is and how I'd like it to be.

Also
-I could not review Fighters coz I am not an expert. If you're a Snub expert/veteran, Please do post what you disliked about the new changes
-Comments/Criticism/Feedback of my opinions as well as your own opinions are most welcome.

-Thank you for listening to me.