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Artemis

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Crafeksterty:
I said that the mercury should be giving a window to killing which is still true, but an artemis would disable a mercury.

As the mercury has to point at even or up at an artemis while the artemis has to point down or even at a mercury. The mercury is going to be disabled while the mercury rarely disabled light weapons. Lesmok does the trick and burst only makes the chance of light gun disabling with merc bit better.

but you said
--- Quote ---A mobula with a 2x artemis+merc will make the difference at killing speed if you dont get the permanent disable on the enemy.
--- End quote ---

The tri art will be more likely to disable.  Tri art kills slow but the issue is that once disabled, its pretty much dead. While with the merc and 2 art build sacrifices a bit on disabling in comparison for the quicker killing power.

If you are lower, then your 2 art will miss. If you are higher the mercury will miss (also depends on distance). But you are on a mobula so leveling shouldnt be an issue.
However, constant hits with mercury versus a junker tri art is not always guranteed. But a mobula is much more likely to be hit. Etc etc.


I can only imagine disabling first by being higher, then leveling your self with the enemy for the merc to shoot. You know.. mobula power.

The Djinn:

--- Quote from: Byron Cavendish on December 24, 2013, 01:58:58 pm ---That brings up an entirely different issue though: is this a casual game played competitively, or a competitive game played casually? You cannot have both (although I know they want to), and the answer determines this issue, and many others.
--- End quote ---

You cannot have balance perfect for both, but you can indeed have a game that performs both admirably even when balancing for one specific level of skill. See League of Legends as an example: they attempt to balance for competitive play, but they will also address things that are turning out to be overpowered in lower levels of play by tweaking them to require more skill to use effectively.


--- Quote ---Some ships and some guns are harder to use, and yield better results. The squid and the lumberjack are the most dramatic examples; in the hands of the most skilled they yield the best results, but new players beware.
--- End quote ---

Completely agreed. The issue I see is that the Artemis is not harder to use. It's hard to get perfect results with it, but let's compare -- a bad Lumberjack gunner is useless. A bad Squid pilot is a huge detriment to his team. A bad Artemis gunner is...still effective, because the gun is incredibly straightforward. It has a high mastery for precise, long-range shots...but it's way to ease to get good results with barely any skill or effort. That's the issue.


--- Quote ---I think there would be a great travesty if we lost these nuances to builds.
--- End quote ---

I would argue that changing a gun slightly to require greater skill is, in fact, increasing nuances, as the guns become ever so slightly more specialized, which increases the varying differences between them. My suggestion of decreasing the vertical arc of the gun isn't ruining the gun or ruining builds...it's merely putting more emphasis on the captain and crews ability to position the ships, which allows skilled players to still snipe + disable while making the gun harder to use in the hands of those of lesser skill.


--- Quote ---So to reply to your post, should we be balancing this game around the low skill level of new players? Because that would get silly fast.
--- End quote ---

We're not balancing around that, no. But one of the important aspects of game balance is to make sure that power isn't freely and easily accessible. The Merc has restrictive arcs. The Lumberjack and Heavy Flak require high skill to hit with. The Carronade is close range and requires distance closing versus other long-range weapons. The Hwacha has an incredibly long reload time. And so on.

The Artemis...has bad upper arcs. There is no other real downside to the gun, and that downside is easily negated by flying high. I don't think the gun is overpowered...I just think that power is way too easy to access. We're NOT balancing for newer players: we're making sure that skilled players require skill to use guns to their full effect. The Artemis is just too easy to use effectively compared to other guns. It's damage and range and disabling power are fine...the amount of each of those things that it is capable of inflicting with a relative minimum of effort is currently to high, and I'm trying to find ways to increase the skill required to use the Artemis.

I don't think it's a bad thing that a weapon that excels at zone control and disabling at long range, enables safe positioning via disabling components and weapons, and is still moderately effective at close range be tweaked to need better pilot/gunner communication and/or better altitude control to use. In fact, I think it will only serve to distinguish the truly skilled Artemis gunners + captains from the others.

Omniraptor:
So, let's review the artemis. It does a small amount of explosive damage, enough threaten junkers and spires, but other ships can take a few hits. Nobody seems to be worrying about that part overmuch.

The problem is the shatter damage, which simply killls components in 2 or 3 hits. The shots are easy to land because of the wide burst radius, and even easier since muse added in the projectile expansion mechanic and made light gun hitboxes bigger. Naturally, the artemis is most effective on ships that have components clustered together, most notably junker lower decks, pyramidion engines, galleon broadsides, spires  in general, and possibly squid engines.

Now, how to counter it- You could always fight fire with fire, and take more artemises. The mobula is very good at this, because unlike a junker the 3 guns are very spread out, so you can't hit two guns with one rocket. A three-artemis junker WILL get outsniped by a merc/art/art mobula. This approach is good because none of those guns require much skill. I would probably take this ship if I wanted to make sure I would win in a long-range slugfest against a junker with a pub crew, but it would be boring as hell for me as a captain.

The other approach is to disable their artemises indirectly by popping their balloon. A lumberjack+merc spire (or maybe galleon) would probably do the trick, but it requires skilled gunning and coordinated crew- if the enemy goes for your lumberjack, you take out their guns with your merc.

 The third and probably my favorite approach is by using the good old blenderfish- you get to rob them of the satisfaction of breaking your front gun by doing it youself with lochnagar, then the second you come in range you rebuild then gun and pop their balloon with one shot.

Alistair MacBain:
The thing is crafeksterty that you may take perfect hitrates into account but you will not get those against a mobula.
And the killing power of the mobula will make a difference if you cant get the perfect disable on it.
And the hitboxes on a mobula are much harder to find than on a junker.
I saw that many times in our training that we lost a kill just because of one or two missing shots on the merc. And if the enemy pilot avoids some shots you will not get this disable.
You can beat a artemis junker with a sniper mobula.
ITs not that you dont have a chance. And the increase in killing speed cause of the piercing dmg of the merc will make a difference.
And dont forget the longer range of the merc. You can get 2-4 hits of the merc in the enemy before you get in artemis range.

Ruairi:
The funny thing about all this is that whether it be an Artemis Junker or Sniper Mobula, or Sniper spire albeit less common, etc. the power of the Artemis is brought to bear quite severely on whoever opposes these builds. Either through slow painful deaths or overwhelming firepower usually very unforgiving.

Now although these builds can be beaten, it will often require the use of similar builds or attempting to exploit the weaknesses of the guns. (As mentioned previously) The later option isn't always possible, especially when the Artemis totting builds are crewed by experienced users and piloted well with the use of good team coordination. The bottom line is it will be an uphill battle most of the time (or sniper fest if both teams employ similar strategies), especially when the map layout is somewhat unforgiving. (Almost sounds competitive :P )

As said before and re-highlighting what I've said previously something has to give. I'd prefer seeing a slight vertical angle adjustment over tampering with damage output. (A slight reduction to the area of effect of Artemis shots would also be nice so some ships which have more clustered components aren't so severely punished, but I'm not getting my hopes up....)

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