5.2.1.1

[BobMacaroni]

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.

Not necessarily, no. You can have reliable, strong turrets that can kill fighters while still keeping death fuses and not relying on instakills. Remember the whole point of primaries is not to kill snubs (they can just run away no matter what you do), but to deter them and get them off of you. This doesn't exclude death fuses at all, it just means that if they don't dodge your fire and let their teammates work for a little, then they will take heavy damage and die, as they should. But low damage, low efficiency, fast speed turrets lead to the opposite effect, providing light damage always hitting them which can be good, but isn't a deterrent. It is not the necessary firepower needed to defend yourself from them from getting all up in your face and walking over you, and not letting them do whatever they want. Remember the main point (and the goal you are alluding to) is to make primaries to deter snubs, which the current setup does not provide the best solution to account for, as other methods would.

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.

Of course not. And the more snubs there are the better they should stack against capital ships, but I think you've come to the wrong conclusion given the right data. Further reducing dispersion will help yes, but it still doesn't tie in to the root issue - capitals need a concrete weapon that they can use reliably against snubs to at least do something, so they can at least attempt to defend themselves. That was the point for the new cruiser primaries, and instead of increasing efficiency or damage, speed was increased. Naturally this has to be balanced so efficiency and damage went down. But was increasing speed the best solution? Yes it gives capitals the ability to reliably defend themselves (by hitting the target) but in return it takes away their ability to be able to reliably defend themselves (by having any energy or damage left to hit the target with.) I agree that capitals should learn how to manage their power core, thats fundamental. But their power core is taken up so fast by primaries for so little return, that it doesn't matter how they manage it, with the current system they will still get the same result regardless, due to the way it is set up. Personally I would keep the old 5.1 turrets and increase efficiencies (they weren't that bad! I found them quite decent, if a little inefficient for what you got) but thats a topic for another time.

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

A 55% hit rate does not make weapons good on their own. If we were talking about a 55% hit rate using defense turrets, that would be a much different story. The point they were making (at least from what I gathered) is that a 55% hit rate, under 500 meters no less, weighs poorly given the incredibly low efficiency and damage of the weapons. When your point blank defense can not reliably be expected to deter the enemy snubs, that is the issue.