Is it time to Reconsider

[Kazinsal]

I am writing an incredibly long effortpost on capital ship and bomber balance and gameplay that I will be posting eventually. It was going to be an explanation of the SNAC nerf and such in response to this thread but it is now a lot more than that and has a whole exploration of the numerical implications of things like armour upgrades and nanobots.

But the summary of the SNAC portion of it is "the nerf exists because the SNAC exists to fill a role that was needed back before we understood how to make large ships in Freelancer work passably".

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Retired, permanently.

[Invoker]

1) Every day I see a lot of people flying light and medium bombers. Not less than other classes of ships.
2) Bombers must be weaker than fighters in terms of balance or we will get redundant class. Why even bother piloting VHF if you have bomber with cool toy called SNAC, good against everything?
3) Instakilling small fighter with big capital ship is okay. Compare their sizes. Caps are powerful and slow, snubs are fragile and agile.
It should be so.

To accurately say why the activity falls, you need to investigate. Connecting two random events does not require a great mind.

Having an instakill weapon in game is okay as long as it has sensible drawbacks. And speed is not enough. You just need to box your opponent one time to kill instantly. If your opponents are not bombers with SNAC, bad to them. SNAC-boxing is cancer.

[Thexare]

Nah chief no thanks

[Lythrilux]

Instakills feel necessary in the current framework of Disco where people will just pile tons of shit on you. SNAC, Razors, Dual MR, Snub Mortaring.... they're all mechanics that, for better or worse, are necessary when people throw fodder at you and you need to make use of your skill advantage to efficiently thin their numbers. WIth the reduced spawn timer, I think instakills are also a lot less problematic (it was bad being cheesed out of the game for 2 or 4 hours, at least it's only 1 now). I feel like there should be a rule, however: he who can be insta'd, should be able to be insta'd themselves.

Really though, the one good thing balance magic could be used for is making it so that caps and snubs can't touch each other {:

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[Dark.Star]

1) Every day I see a lot of people flying light and medium bombers. Not less than other classes of ships.

I have a few med/light bombers, but my majority of bombers are heavy. And 2/3 of the heavy ones have SNAC, especially fafnirs that already have 1 nova/incapacitor
SNAC is a good weapon, if it was still good against snubs itd be interesting

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[Immortality23]

I personally think there should be one final vote, that gets left up for a week.
Be all, end all. If it passes that the change is reversed, so be it. If it's voted that it stays, so be it. At least then there's a final vote.

[Lythrilux]

another SNAC referendum

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[Kazinsal]

To understand why the SNAC nerf exists we need to look back and see why the SNAC exists at all.

In the old days, when Discovery started having something that could be charitably called balance, there were some really wacky unsolved bugs with Freelancer and large ships. Notably and most relevant to this issue was that missiles just sometimes straight up didn't work on them. This was most noticeable when capital ships had their shields up; you would need the explosion to hit the exact middle of the ship in order for the shield to take damage. In true early Freelancer modding fashion, the workaround was to add an energy equivalent to anti-capital torpedoes; thus was born the Supernova Antimatter Cannon.

Eventually the bug with capital ship shields and missiles was fixed, and along came the Incapacitator, an anti-shield equivalent to the Nova. But everyone kept using the SNAC, because it wasn't constrained by ammo capacity and you couldn't deflect it with flaks (which is an issue that still makes Novas a bit subpar today). Eventually people figured out how to reliably hit smaller and smaller targets with it.

Now, before 4.85 Update 1, bombers could run fighter guns and torpedoes. This, in combination with their size and power plants made them effectively harder to kill, marginally larger VHFs. SHFs were completely disused, and bombers were generally fairly good at doing just about anything. In that update, they were given their own guns and were no longer able to mount fighter torpedoes, just bomber torpedoes and cruise disruptors. This, compounded with the previous fact that you could just throw out SNACs like nobody's business due to no ammo constraints, meant that the primary anti-fighter capabilities of a bomber were its ability to just unleash 132,000 damage in a single blast of three-fifths of its power core. Which, you know, is pretty awesome (in the "inspires awe" sense), but is not exactly good when A) your purpose as a bomber is not to blap fighters; their purpose is to blap you, B) you can eat more damage from a VHF while sitting perfectly still with your shields down than their power core can put out before emptying, and C) you had your VHF guns taken away from you because you were already way too good at killing fighters.

Eventually someone had the bright idea to put ammo-based anti-fighter weapons on bombers that were "balanced" by the fact that they only did quarter damage against shields instead of half. Thankfully, no one used the things because until six or seven months ago, ammo didn't stack on launchers (and no one tells newbs about autobuy so a lot of people are running around blissfully unaware that they have a lot less ammo than they could theoretically carry, but that's a separate problem). The Corona is later added, as a potential replacement for the SNAC, but no one bothers to balance a hitscan weapon mounted on a platform that people have been using for years to instagib joust fighters with. What little bomber balance existed is now ruined, which is like saying you've ruined the carpet that the cat uses as a litter box by lighting it on fire.

The logical conclusion of this is "we need to nerf *both* of these against fighters", so after several hours of drinking, a lonely programmer sets out to write a plugin that does this and accomplishes it. Everyone hates it, but at least bombers are a bit more balanced. The problem that we haven't solved is that bombers are chunkier VHFs with the ability to dish out more DPS than VHFs, tank more than VHFs, still kill VHFs, and mount a greater variety of battle-shifting hardware than VHFs. One of their primary weapons exists solely because of a bug that hasn't existed for eight years, and another one of their primary weapons exists because that one that is no longer needed was too good for too long. Now both of those weapons are somewhat redundant -- one doubly so as the other was *intended* to make it redundant -- but kind of crap.

The SNAC was nerfed against fighters, but it's too iconic to remove. The Corona was nerfed against everything, and that's just a consequence of how it functions. In the fight to balance optimal engagement ranges for each class, bombers got shafted against their intended targets for so long that by the time it would have been possible to rebalance them to do what they were supposed to, everyone got comfortable with them being good at the exact opposite. And now it's so ingrained that we can't fix it (using a hella royal we here -- no one in their right mind would make me a developer again let alone put me in charge) without requiring a complete redesign of PvP and PvE in Discovery.

Which is, to some extent somewhat needed, especially PvE, but I have a whole different post in the works for that.

TL;DR read the goddamn post

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Retired, permanently.

[-Rax-]

To understand why the SNAC nerf exists we need to look back and see why the SNAC exists at all.

In the old days, when Discovery started having something that could be charitably called balance, there were some really wacky unsolved bugs with Freelancer and large ships. Notably and most relevant to this issue was that missiles just sometimes straight up didn't work on them. This was most noticeable when capital ships had their shields up; you would need the explosion to hit the exact middle of the ship in order for the shield to take damage. In true early Freelancer modding fashion, the workaround was to add an energy equivalent to anti-capital torpedoes; thus was born the Supernova Antimatter Cannon.

Eventually the bug with capital ship shields and missiles was fixed, and along came the Incapacitator, an anti-shield equivalent to the Nova. But everyone kept using the SNAC, because it wasn't constrained by ammo capacity and you couldn't deflect it with flaks (which is an issue that still makes Novas a bit subpar today). Eventually people figured out how to reliably hit smaller and smaller targets with it.

Now, before 4.85 Update 1, bombers could run fighter guns and torpedoes. This, in combination with their size and power plants made them effectively harder to kill, marginally larger VHFs. SHFs were completely disused, and bombers were generally fairly good at doing just about anything. In that update, they were given their own guns and were no longer able to mount fighter torpedoes, just bomber torpedoes and cruise disruptors. This, compounded with the previous fact that you could just throw out SNACs like nobody's business due to no ammo constraints, meant that the primary anti-fighter capabilities of a bomber were its ability to just unleash 132,000 damage in a single blast of three-fifths of its power core. Which, you know, is pretty awesome (in the "inspires awe" sense), but is not exactly good when A) your purpose as a bomber is not to blap fighters; their purpose is to blap you, B) you can eat more damage from a VHF while sitting perfectly still with your shields down than their power core can put out before emptying, and C) you had your VHF guns taken away from you because you were already way too good at killing fighters.

Eventually someone had the bright idea to put ammo-based anti-fighter weapons on bombers that were "balanced" by the fact that they only did quarter damage against shields instead of half. Thankfully, no one used the things because until six or seven months ago, ammo didn't stack on launchers (and no one tells newbs about autobuy so a lot of people are running around blissfully unaware that they have a lot less ammo than they could theoretically carry, but that's a separate problem). The Corona is later added, as a potential replacement for the SNAC, but no one bothers to balance a hitscan weapon mounted on a platform that people have been using for years to instagib joust fighters with. What little bomber balance existed is now ruined, which is like saying you've ruined the carpet that the cat uses as a litter box by lighting it on fire.

The logical conclusion of this is "we need to nerf *both* of these against fighters", so after several hours of drinking, a lonely programmer sets out to write a plugin that does this and accomplishes it. Everyone hates it, but at least bombers are a bit more balanced. The problem that we haven't solved is that bombers are chunkier VHFs with the ability to dish out more DPS than VHFs, tank more than VHFs, still kill VHFs, and mount a greater variety of battle-shifting hardware than VHFs. One of their primary weapons exists solely because of a bug that hasn't existed for eight years, and another one of their primary weapons exists because that one that is no longer needed was too good for too long. Now both of those weapons are somewhat redundant -- one doubly so as the other was *intended* to make it redundant -- but kind of crap.

The SNAC was nerfed against fighters, but it's too iconic to remove. The Corona was nerfed against everything, and that's just a consequence of how it functions. In the fight to balance optimal engagement ranges for each class, bombers got shafted against their intended targets for so long that by the time it would have been possible to rebalance them to do what they were supposed to, everyone got comfortable with them being good at the exact opposite. And now it's so ingrained that we can't fix it (using a hella royal we here -- no one in their right mind would make me a developer again let alone put me in charge) without requiring a complete redesign of PvP and PvE in Discovery.

Which is, to some extent somewhat needed, especially PvE, but I have a whole different post in the works for that.

TL;DR read the goddamn post

Thanks for your accurate response, that's answering the decision of the nerf itself. I still feel, though, that other mesures could be taken into consideration. I've already proposed some of them, which could work to drag Snac-lovers' attention and keep using them in a certain arena / conn. There are solutions, we just have to accomodate to them or think about.

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[~Chio]

I would like to see SNAC back.

SNAC instantly killing people was why this weapon got nerfed? I think this is a terribly wrong decision. Rax already explained perfectly. I will share my opinions here. SNACs are hard to aim with, and it requires skill to hit someone with it, especially ships below VHFs. People who are not skilled in fighters, people who go straight at their opponent hoping not to get hit by SNAC, is mistake of that player. That's when you must to dodge. Sometimes it's hard to dodge the SNAC if you face an experienced player, and this can refer to every other weapon in this game.

Another good point here that nerfing this weapon will only lose fun and players. There are some players that used SNAC against snubs for years, and which is why they can hit SNACs more often than people who don't use them for many years, depending on how much you train. SNACs were a fun weapon, weapon that requires some skill to be used correctly. Nerfing such a weapon will not lead to anything good, it will to people who were constantly crying of getting killed by someone who uses a SNAC, which is their fault. I got killed numerous times by a SNAC, because I wasn't dodging as I was supposed to, and I also managed to kill some people with it. You can't expect to be a professional without a training. 10 percent is talent, 90 percent is training, and people must understand that.