5.2.1.1

[Haste]

Now imagine that in a group fight or fleet engagement, where said cruiser is probably already engaged with other capital ships and likely doesn't have the power core to turn its flaks onto whatever pair of snubs decide to take the easy pickings.

This is a bit of a moot point, though. If all those snubs were instead Gunboats pouncing on that powercore-less Cruiser things would be much worse for the Cruiser. Powercore is a limited resource, and spending it intelligently is a huge part of (capital ship) skill expression. If you're in a fleet engagement and you find yourself having to both do loads of damage against enemy capitals and defend from snubs, your allies are not pulling your weight.

For the record, we'll do some further testing of BC/Cruiser prims soon enough and tune things further. I'm not claiming they're perfect. The goal here was to make prims more reliable and functional. They really weren't very good before these changes, and it's remarkable to me how rose-tinted the glasses are in this thread. Prims weren't good against competent players, and the biggest performance gap is against NPCs of all things.

It seems like cruisers lack the tools to actually KILL fighters on current patch.

This is kind of inevitable and the only "fix" for this is to remove snub death fuses. And even then balance ultimately would solve to average-and-below snub players getting deleted on their first pass, with competent players plinking away at caps from relative safety, if everything is designed around a lucky instakill. Old prims really weren't any more threatening in terms of their ability to burst you down since their hitrate past 200-250 meters quickly approached zero, and the only weapons I really saw triggering fuses were things like Storms, which remain unchanged. In fact, grouping your defense turrets with a single prim is a pretty nasty hack to instagib boxing snubs. This is admittedly quite difficult to do in the middle of a chaotic fleet fight.

I think that in the healthiest possible balance environment, pure snub versus pure cap would just solve into a sort of stalemate. This doesn't exactly sound exciting, but it's the only way quick and agile snubs that are free to restock 520 times if they so desire can be balanced against capital ships that are locked in to a fight with little room to disengage. The best fleet we would encourage therefore would have a mix of different classes, which is kind of where we're at as it is anyways.

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No matter what direction we take prims in, players shouldn't expect being isolated in a lone cap against multiple snubs to be a particularly good situation. Those snubs need one another to get any work done against caps - caps need one another for cover. I suspect further reducing dispersion will get us there eventually, rather than efficiency buffs.

forgot to mention that even if you've got the core, missing roughly 45% of your shots and not having the damage to make the ones that land matter adds up there, too.

Edit: I do have to quickly point out how staggeringly high a 55% hitrate against snubs actually is.

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