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

[Haste]

You are missing a lot of key balance factors.

You're glossing over velocity when analyzing virtually anything compared to Impacts. Every single cruiser heavy that isn't an impact is faster than them. Shards, for example, are 33% faster and deal almost 40% more damage per second. Sure, they're less efficient but are bound to hit things you are very likely to miss with impacts at anything but absolute point blank range.

You're missing the fact that weapons like Storm Cannons do energy damage. This means they add extra shield damage which you should not simply ignore. It's strong utility to have in a pinch. In addition, energy damage is dealt to enemy powercores on hit. Unless they're completely out of core, that means you're subtracting 7902 powercore from your opponent every time a Storm hits. For the sake of more convenient math, subtract that from the Storm's own energy use (you're creating an 'energy differential' after all) and you'll notice that Storm Cannons are pretty close to Impacts in efficiency while being 50 m/s faster and serving as pseudo-pulses in certain situations.

Missiles probably need an efficiency nerf as they do indeed currently beat Light Mortars rather handily. It is however worth noting that you can shoot down and/or dodge missiles (depending on what you're flying). Marauders/Devastators are utterly non-threatening to Gunboats, while Light Mortars are best in slot for Cruiser v Gunboat combat.

Orthrus/Cerberus might just suck, I honestly don't know as those things got overlooked a bunch of times because they're a weird class making them not show up in FLStat and making it easy to forget about them.

But yeah. You can't really analyze guns as if you are shooting a stationary Rheinland Battleship every time. You do in fact shoot targets that can avoid your shots. Velocity is the most important stat for guns of basically every class.

I had a look at Orthrus/Cerberus and the only thing I noticed being off about them is Cerberus clearly being missed when I doubled cruiser heavy DPS at some point. Other than that, they are once again faster than Impacts (Cerbs are technically also 800 meters longer range as they were missed, again, when we made range changes, lol) and that is a factor you seem to consistently ignore despite it being the most important variable to weigh. PvP isn't about shooting stationary objects.

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