bomber balance

[looqas]

Ok, I'm gunna drop in to this.

In the last version (4.85), the problem we had was that fighters could not kill bombers in time to save the heavy cap they were escorting. Take the following situation as an example.

- Four fighters are escorting a battleship.

- Four hostile bombers attack said battleship.

- The fighters fail to kill the bombers in time to save the battleship because they are incapable of doing enough damage.
The above situation had nothing to do with bombers being able to use fighter guns. Nothing at all.It was to do with fighters being too weak in offensive terms. The way to cure that problem would have been to increase the projectile speed of fighter's guns making them more accurate, and thus killing the bombers faster, allowing the escort fighters to protect their cap.

Rather ironically, the current bomber guns, particularly the shieldbuster, have made bombers more effective against heavy caps. Those shieldbusters strip a battleship shield in almost no time at all. Since battleships are easy targets to hit, the projectile speed doesn't matter.

The new bomber guns give fighter escorts less of a chance to protect heavy caps.

However, these bombers guns are not fast enough in order to hit gunboats to any great effect. In order to hit a gunboat reliably, you have to get very close to it. This leaves you being a fantastic target for razors, missiles, solaris guns, regular guns, everything a gunboat can throw at you.

Gunboat vs bomber balance was already broken in favour of gunboats . Now it is worse.

Bomber vs heavy cap balance was already broken in favour of the bomber. Now it is worse.

What has this new bomber thing achieved? Nothing.

To top it off, it is no harder to supernova fighters or bombers. All you need is a fighter with you to drop their shield.

I was thinking along the same lines. To me the original bomber problem was not about them being too good against the fighters in 1 on 1. It was this that fighters were/are useless as escorts. Or in 1 vs 1 it took considerable amount of time to grind down a single bomber. I guess that's not changed in any way. The fighter still risks the SNAC and now the new more beefier hull busters.

Anyone who's been in fights with fighters vs bomber vs caps knew that caps had very few chances to make it out alive. As well as bombers are not the end it all weapons in a furball. Sure, there are people in the server that are good shots in SNACs in group fights chasing someone up, but the general consensus was you are better off having a fighter in those furballs than a bomber. Unless there are a lot of bombers around, when sooner or later you are going to eat the snac. In 1 fighter vs 1 bomber the bomber was way more practical since people get tired of dodging and start jousting.

All in all. It's well and good that bombers got their special slot weps, BUT at the same time fighter weps should have been buffed more to enable downing a bomber faster.

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Flying under radar.