5.1 "Aftershock"

[SeaFalcon]

Their strength is not raw DPS. It is not intended to be. Bombs are absurdly efficient, offsetting the fact that bombers have less recharge to work with while their shields are up. They are two out of your eight total weapons. There's a reason you have eight.

Effiency at 100% hit rate, perhaps. They are not if you calculate with expected hitrate. Having to practically ram your enemy and put yourself in harms way to have a slight bump in DPS is not worth it.
Remember bombs have a tiny arc and fly off wherever they want to go, your ship needs to be a specific position to try and get them to go where you want while any other regular fighter weapon you can snap shot anywhere you like.

Right now the bombs are not worth the strain and effort for what they bring to the table.
Same for the torpedoes. You want a reliable weapons and not a role of the dice when that's your only proper weapon against your target.

I agree with the low hit-rate, which is why the latest hotfix increased their turn rate from 30 to 50 degrees per second. Their seeker cone angle will likely go up in the future, too. Obviously they objectively do large amounts of damage for their energy expenditure and modern-day capital ship health values. 5.58 efficiency in a post-armor removal world is nuts. Do also remember that capital ship players are expected to either flak or shoot down Novas as they have no other counterplay against 2k+ range weapons when prims and secondaries stop hitting past ~400 meters. As with bombs, you are expected to use a mix of guns and torpedoes and really use everything your bomber has mounted, not a tiny subset of equipment.

Capitals should be scared when facing bombers. Thats why fighters are a thing, to take out bombers. They were fine in previous patches until the fighter-bomber was introduced with lasers. Those weapons were removed so why nerf the other weapons so far, they are practically worse than regular fighter weapons?

This simply doesn't match what I have seen fighters and bombers do in-game since the patch. Remember that you've got eight total guns, don't just use two of them.

Bombs are practically impossible to aim unless you are basically ramming your target which is unwanted behavior for everyone involved anyway, so why this is recommended is beyond me. The 6 guns that are not bomber guns do more damage against targets than the current dedicated bomber slots do. So why even bother getting myself in a position where I have to loiter 300m away from heavy guns while I can just turn fast and get some primary gun shots off and leave without getting hit? What sort of gameplay is it that it wants you to ram your target to get 20% more DPS for 1 second?

We set out here to make fighters a viable ship in anything but their own little bubble (fighter versus fighter). We have achieved this goal. Bombers are still viable and are at most minor number tweaks away from being very solid choices in most, or even all scenarios. This is a massive improvement from 5.0 where bombers absolutely trashed fighters by virtue of their insane DPS numbers, and fighters were entirely useless in the game as a whole. Both classes now have their place.

Might as well revert back to 4.85 balance then and delete the snac, although with the fuze, the old snac inta killing would not matter anymore either since fighters just regen.

The things people were "abusing" that they "weren't meant to do" was to fire infinite core weapons designed to kill 6 million health ships at fighters and bombers with anywhere between 8,000 and 20,000 health. You can't fundamentally fix this without doing what we did, which is to make it so bombers have to play the same core management game every other class has to and bring damage output between the snub classes much closer together.

They added the FLhook to do less damage against fighters and more against caps. That worked really well, just tweak it more instead of trying to revamp the whole system that you can't possible test enough yourself to know if it'll even work ingame.

Tweak more, revamp less.

Whenever I try to get back into this game, it's completely different. New hidden mechanics are added that are poorly explained or shown. Ships stats are completely changed, not just slightly tweaked no, instead all values are different. Same for the weapons. slots are poorly named and shown which weapon goes where and why. Why even add 2 thrusters to bombers, mass does not even affect gameplay enough to have such an elaborate change.

I could go on about all the changes that I find frustrating and unnecessary, but it really is a pain to try and adjust to something you know will be revamped next patch anyway so why bother learning any of new mechanics at all.
The snub-guns and ships are so convoluted right now it's easier just close my eyes and buy random guns and not care at all.

oh yeah one last major gripe I have is the slow and steady decrease of weapon ranges over patches, stop forcing me to ram someone to get my shots in.

/rant