5.2.1 - patch notes

[Haste]

What's the actual reasoning behind the cruiser primary turret changes? They seem to hit like a wet noodle.

Competent snubs just straight up didn't get hit by old prims, resulting in nonsense like quad flak Cruisers with no prims whatsoever being quite popular. Or quad pulse, two flak. When people omit prims entirely they probably need changing. This patch aims to equalize flaks and prims by slightly weakening flaks (they do less core damage, mostly) and making prims more reliable. The eventual aim, on top of this, is to make cruisers and up scale a little better against snubs when played properly in fleet fight settings, by letting them cover one another better. Without massive amounts of flak spam that wasn't really a thing in the past, and flaks being the crutch for just about every aspect of cap versus snub balance was a little silly.

Hitting like a wet noodle is a lot better than not hitting at all. It is however possible that after the last batch of nerfs (these things were generally overperforming during testing, as I am sure you can imagine from them being nearly 3,000 m/s velocity) made them very slightly on the weak side. A reduction in dispersion isn't impossible. Efficiency can't really go up - Gunboats just get absolutely decimated by 100% hitrate prims hitting all the way out to 1750 meters range.

It is also quite likely that eventually all this will solve into smaller-scale brawls favoring snubs more (i.e. 2v1ing a Cruiser being theoretically possible for the top snub players) while coordinated caps covering one another will scale better in group-/fleet fights. That sounds good to me, personally, as generally snub scaling has been a pain in the ass to deal with as eventually snubs hit a critical mass where capital ships just can't physically cover one another against them.

Also note that the core damage on prims (they probably need a more fitting effect to reasonably pass as ion weapons) isn't insignificant, and it's there because it helps a lot with fending off snubs but does virtually nothing against Gunboats and up.

I suppose the best way to TL;DR the changes is that Cruiser & Battlecruiser prims are now a little bit like snub class 1s. Higher hitrate, lower damage. If the dispersion is too high (I don't know yet, I'd like to see some actual fleet fights to properly judge this) then we can always gently tone it down. It's mostly there because we wanted to try and make Cruiser & Battlecruiser prims feel a little distinct despite having the same role.

---