Hwacha and Pyramidion Balance?

[MightyKeb]

I think it's about time that we've discussed the current Hwacha. I personally think it was a damn fine gun that was overshadowed a little bit by heavy clip heavy carro up until this buff, which not only solved that problem but created another- that being guaranteed 2-3 component snipes with burst rounds every 12 seconds and the occassional midrange complete disables of ships like pyras and junkers. It's easily the best heavy weapon in the game at the moment.


Regarding pyramidion, I stand by the idea that it would be in a good place if atleast one of the nerfs were reverted, but I'm conflicted as to which. 700 hull would definitely fit with the theme of the ship, but at the same time, there are only 3 "Dogfightey" ships in the game: Squid, Goldfish and Pyramidion in comparison to Spire, Mobula, Junker and Galleon, which all promote firepower and battlefield presence (Exceptions can be made for Junker). Pyramidion fits much less so in this classification after the acceleration nerf and I think it would be beneficial for the game to return it instead.

[BlackenedPies]

The hwatcha jitter reduction should be reduced from -30% to at least -20%. Heavy clip also needs to be addressed. Currently it's -70% jitter -25% clip and I think both should be changed. Jitter can be increased to around 80-90% and clip size should be -20%. A clip size change would only affect the hwatcha and gat with 1 extra hwatcha shot and 4 extra gat. The issue with hwatcha is how overly effective burst is while the use of heavy clip is severely limited.

I think the pyra needs a speed or acceleration change. Increasing the hull health would make it more tanky but wouldn't make it any better. Pyra was my most flown ship that clearly needed a nerf and I think the hull nerf was good. What wasn't good was giving it the speed of a galleon (30.35 vs 30.02 m/s and 2.25 vs 2.10 m/s2). A charging pyra is not scary anymore and increasing hull health wouldn't change that. It needs at least some of its old acceleration back. Another option is giving it speed to rely on sprints. Keep the hull change speed or accel.

[Frostbound]

Everyone knows that Hwatcha is overpowered in this patch. It was good even before the patch, nowadays it's just so much stronger you see nothing else. Revert back the jitter change, it was not necessary even with the heavy clip nerf. It's almost unnecessary to use the heavy clip for shorter than 800m ranges depending on the target you're firing at because it will most likely break more parts if you fire with burst and hit some, compared to using heavy and hitting all.

Pyramidion is awful to use. Acceleration nerf hit it so hard because Pyramidion already was slow. Sure, you can gat mortar down anyone still, but trying to use it against players who even have the slightest idea about how ships work just focus you because they know that they can take you down with 4 buffed mortar shots, which I think is just ridiculous.

So because of those changes we have a ship that's really fragile AND really slow, which compared to ships like Junker, which is slow but has hull armor to make up for it, or Mobula, which has weak hull but vertical mobility to use to it's advantage, doesn't really add up. Before you could use Pyramidion for ambushing, but since now it's really slow and dies to the slightest focus fire in an instant that use is really overshadowed by most other ships in the game.

Disclaimer, I think Pyra was really good before but one of the reasons why people flew it also was because carronade was too strong, now that's been dealt with can't we look at Pyramidion again, since other ships has been buffed and Pyramidion has only gotten nerfs

[Dementio]

The Hwacha was only buffed, because it would have been pretty bad in mid to long range with the current heavy clip and why would this gun have so much range as it does when there is no way of making use of it? What I would like to see is some sort of abstract arming time or some extreme case of projectile expansion, so that in close range the AoE is much less and you have to actually aim at the visible components and in long range with heavy clip it is much easier to destroy the visible components.

I found the Pyramidion to have always been bad, they only nerfed it because Gatling and Mortar ruled the skies and they still do, even though nowadays the disable Meta is preferred. And if you ask me, a charging Pyramidion was never really scary, because you can beat it up from a mile away. I would like to immitate Skrim here and say that the Pyramidion is at its best when it ambushes people, because it can do that better than any other ship, next to Goldfish and Squid, while keeping its front two guns (mostly Gatling and Mortar) in perfect arc, making for persistent damage output.
A real nerf to the Pyramidion is a nerf to the light guns, not to the ship. Gatling and Mortar can kill a Galleon in one clip respectively and the light Carronade used to be able to destroy the balloon in one clip.

[Crafeksterty]

True, nerfing light guns would nerf the pyra. But that would go across all ships then.

The thing is, pyras gat mort game was good not only because of the gat mort, it had much more factors to it.
The ram which actualy protects it from damage when ramming. It also protects the guns from being disabled at times.
And the ease of management made it easy to abuse pilot tools with.
When they announced that you can now shoot trough your own ship, that was a major buff to the pyra as it was the only ship with prevelant blockage for its gun when aiming up angles.
And now with stamina, you can bypass the speed nerfs with kyrosine/Pheonix claw+Stamina.

Pyra had alot going for it, The nerf that we have now has actualy slapped it straight so that it cant willy nilly do anything without fear.
I think the nerfs should stay, but encourage greatly to press on with pyra despite nerfs. I mean, is(Or was) a pilot good if he no longer can fly something nerfed?
Cus the pyra still does what it did.

[MightyKeb]

 I mean, is a pilot good if he no longer can fly something nerfed?

The problem is that you are effectively inferior when fighting against equally good pilots who use ships that arent really nerfed- Ships you counter have a better chance against you and ships that counter you will effortlessly farm kills off of you.

[HamsterIV]

The Hwacha's Achilles heal was always its slow reload rate. The Gunner Stamina has helped reduce that, and since gunners get stamina back for breaking components the Hwacha becomes even more powerful. Even if we reverted the Hwacha back to its old stats, the Gunner Stamina mechanic still makes it a more desirable weapon.

[MightyKeb]

The Hwacha's Achilles heal was always its slow reload rate. The Gunner Stamina has helped reduce that, and since gunners get stamina back for breaking components the Hwacha becomes even more powerful. Even if we reverted the Hwacha back to its old stats, the Gunner Stamina mechanic still makes it a more desirable weapon.

At the same time, Burst is really the only viable round for hwacha atm so even in that aspect a buff engi can be preferable.

[BlackenedPies]

It's clear to me that the pyra needs something whether that be acceleration, speed, or something else. I think the hull and maneuverability are fine. Stamina doesn't replace the acceleration loss and using it for speed leaves you vulnerable in combat when other pilots have extra options with their stamina. Does anyone know the old accel?

Fully draining gunner stamina can reduce a hwatcha reload by 1.6 seconds max and destroying 4 components fills it up by 1/3. Gunner stamina regenerates the slowest and the best use for it is the arcs- which the hwatcha can greatly benefit from. Otherwise you're much better off with the power of spanner mallet buff burst.

[Extirminator]

Some random heavy clip heavy carronade nerf thread

My suggestion is still to give heavy a 95% spread reduction instead of 100%.

Response

After I ran some calculations it doesn't seem like any change to the way heavy clip jitter reduction works will do the trick. I mean, it might do the trick but it will ruin other weapons that use it.

95% reduced jitter will mean a maximum jitter angle of 0.2 degrees on the heavy carronade when applied heavy -  giving you a maximum spread of 1.5m at maximum range. due to the way that aoe secondary damage type works, and decreases linearly after the point of half the radius, at maximum range, with extreme end cases, you will be doing 86.7% of the damage on average at the center point of impact - which is still able to one shot destroy a heavy gun.

In addition to the still quite devastating damage, the carronade's heavy gun kill radius will be be increased from 2m to about 2.6m on average(so it actually makes it better).

(I am intentionally not talking about balloon killing and only the component destroying - more commonly heavy weapon destroying because only the aoe damage of the carronade, the shatter damage will get affected. Due to a spread at maximum range of 1.5m, any balloon will still be fully vulnerable to it, with slight exceptions with the pyramidion's balloon in various angles, that might cause some armor hits.)

Now for this change to be actually effective in the sense of taking away the carronade's extreme ability to snipe guns and or balloons with heavy clip, one will be forced to decrease jitter by 70-80%.
Right now with the proposed 95%, not only that it doesn't do the trick, it is already starting to ruin the hwacha with heavyclip - you will have 6.25m of spread at maximum range, and with only 7m of aoe radius and the way aoe damage behaves, you are starting to lose quite a bit of damage. Decreasing the spread even more is simply not an option because it will ruin everything that uses heavyclip. Concentrate on the carronade, it is the problem, not the ammo type.

in-game nerf

- Heavy Clip now reduces recoil by 95% (was 100%)

Response

While gatling and banshee are affected by it, they are affected in a very minor way. The only one suffering from the 95% is hwacha, and possibly minotaur which was already harder to shoot but I can't calculate by how much because I don't have the jitter stat for it.

The point is, 95% doesn't do much and in most cases makes the carronades even easier to snipe with. To get an actual effect you will have to drop it even further which in return will make other weapons namely hwacha, minotaur and arguably banshee suffer too, and the nerf is supposed to affect carronades and not other guns which were completely fine before.
That is why going down the road of heavyclip changes is completely senseless and damaging rather than benefiting.

in-game nerf

- Heavy Clip
  -- Reduced jitter reduction to -70% (from -100%)

>>*Facepalm*

[Daft Loon]

-Burst rounds + 30% jitter (no this won't break artemis, 130% of 0 is still 0)

-Reduced turning speed on the hwacha

[BlackenedPies]

Burst increasing jitter would affect the light flak because burst is the most potent mid-long ammo. Reducing turning speed would only be a slight nerf to not using gunner stamina. Even with a quite slow turning speed the long reload would allow sufficient time to turn with the possible exception of buffing during reload. I think the best option for hwatcha is reverting back to near the old jitter value and fixing heavy clip.

Another option for heavy clip is adding a burst radius bonus ex +20% which would have a slight benefit on banshee and light flak. Of course the simplest option is to increase the jitter reduction closer to 90% and possibly reduce clip reduction from 25 to 20%. I like heavy clip not fully eliminating jitter which can have a positive effect on guns like light carro.

[Byron Cavendish]

As far as the pyra goes, I will state what I and other old vets have been saying for a long time: make it the old charging vanguard it once was. It should be much, much faster with very little ability to turn. We are talking slower than a galleon. I remember the days when if you let a junker or a squid behind you, you were dead. That was it's weakness and balance. I'm not sure why it evolved to the way it is, but it used to be a beefy, tankier little rhino that would kill you if it hit, but if you were smart and could juke it then it was in big trouble.

[ShadedExalt]

As far as the pyra goes, I will state what I and other old vets have been saying for a long time: make it the old charging vanguard it once was. It should be much, much faster with very little ability to turn. We are talking slower than a galleon. I remember the days when if you let a junker or a squid behind you, you were dead. That was it's weakness and balance. I'm not sure why it evolved to the way it is, but it used to be a beefy, tankier little rhino that would kill you if it hit, but if you were smart and could juke it then it was in big trouble.

This, PLEASE

Either that, or paper mache fighterplane Pyra.

[Squidslinger Gilder]

Lot of the words you all write point to the original Pyra from 1.1. Where it could turn and was a decent fighter. The thing could keep turning pace with squids/Fish when it used tools. Well, they could still out turn it but the Pyra would turn fast enough to make sure they couldn't just sit on it's blindside firing away. People charged with it but honestly it wasn't a strong rammer. They just did it because it had a pointy end. Hull HP wasn't super. Back then I called it the "multirole fighter" of GOIO. Which it literally was.

If you keep it weak and up it's speed but don't address it's turn rate, you've still got a problem because good pilots won't be scared of extra speed. Making it turn a little better, now you've got something to worry about. Which if you consider it's huge blindside, is something Muse forgot. The Pyra has the biggest blindside yet no real way to counter it. This worked under flying turrets gameplay where ships couldn't get close. But now you've got better CQC. It just can't function.