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Ships with the power to kill

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Eukari:
I agree with Thaago. The only way to improve the attractiveness of disable builds is to make combat last longer, giving you a reason to want to shut down the enemy's weapons. Muse has repeatedly said that they don't balance for 1v1 in this game- they don't worry about whether a Squid can go up against a Galleon one-on-one or whatever...and therein lies the problem.

Most engagements in this game are 1v1. And in 1v1 battles, the Piercing/Explosion combo wins. Period. This is why the Pyramidion is currently so popular/overused- against anything but a rather experienced crew, the Pyra has an edge in 1v1.

Increasing hull strength, so that an individual ship has a harder time of simply killing another ship, would do a lot to make disabling a more viable strategy. Two direct-damage ships will always have an edge in sheer DPS, but if my Blenderfish teams up with a Spire, we're less likely to get separated and torn apart by the dual Pyra team we're facing. If it takes me longer to kill something on my own, that's an incentive for me to work with my allied ship and concentrate our fire.

Echoez:


I'll just post this here and say that, buffing hull health is a stupid idea, just because of this.

On the other side, if you buff disablers to a usable level, you prolong engagement legth by default (disablers being naturaly non-lethal by themselves hence they naturaly prolong a battle), without pissing on kill weapons.

And that should conclude my contribution to this thread, you beautiful people.

TL;DR: Let the people that want to play kill loadouts play that and have their game, but buff disablers so people that prefer an other playstyle aren't crapped upon by everything else. Variety is what we want, no need ot nerf something that works well.

Thaago:
I'll try to put this diplomatically: that chart completely undermines your position. You've put up a neat chart, gave it a sarcastic comment about how it backs you up, and completely ignored what the chart is actually showing. Observe that the red bar is longer. Guess what? Thats time that a disabler can successfully disable before getting blown up. And once it gets a disable, the kill ship's bar grows enormously. Yes the blue bar grows proportionally longer. But the scenario is more complicated than just trading DPS. Its all about how long it takes to disable, and the effect that disable has on the other ships killing power.

Throw in allies and the situation still favors more hull. Example scenario: Red team has two kill ships. Blue team has 1 kill, 1 disable. If they go 'man to man' (not optimal, but usually what ends up happening), then the disable ship now actually has the opportunity to disable one ship and help with the other: the kill vs kill fight is not already over. Other example scenario: focused fire. The kill ships bear down on 1 of blue team. At the moment this is an instant destruction of blue ship. With more hull health, the ship has time to climb/dive or disable or tar or something before being blown up. In that time, the ally can engage one of the other ships, either disabling or forcing them in turn to break off.



We are both trying to do the same thing: make disablers more attractive. However, there is a strong limit on how much you can buff disabling weapons: if you make the other side so completely screwed that they are not having fun, then that is bad game design and it will never stay. If however you make it so that disabling can tip the balance, but both sides still have fun, then you can have disabling be competitive. To me buffing disablers is the first option and will never happen. Lowering the kill ships power a little is the second option.

Echoez:
I simply disagree.

I have personaly tested the added hull health on the App already anyway and it wasn't enjoyable in the least.

Chrinus:
I have to make mention that the cascading effects are quite large to any tweak in weapon specialty and strength, however there's an acceptable medium that we should be making an effort to correct here. Simply throwing perfect case scenarios will provide counter arguments to any idea. What I'd like to see are some proposed ideas to field in a test server and check the effects they actually carry into the game. Some maths or at least an idea of what exact adjustment seems to work well with the game rather than some basic generalizations.

We've already proven health buffs to be ineffective at what they need, why not try some adjustments to piercing and explosive weapons as well as some boosts to the secondary power of disabling weapons to see how both pan out. Really both sides here are targeting the same idea with a different approach. Maybe something new will come to light.

Another proposal I would like to see is the possibility of expanding the light weapon hitboxes to some degree to make them easier to hit (I cant tell you how many times I've fired a merc through a gatling and received no weapon kill), which in turn can make disabling weapons more powerful in the same method you mentioned, Thaago: by extending the engage time for the kill ship by dropping a vital part of the ships loadout and keeping it down.

Anyhow, thought I'd chime in here and try to introduce a different approach to the issue as well. You all have a good day/evening/night, I'll be around tomorrow to check the thread again.

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