I know I'm a little late jumping in here and I haaaave missed official testing, but I wanted to echo a few thoughts and maybe add a few more:
nerfing Spire turning? WWWWWHHHHHHHY?! That's, like, the only thing it's got going for it, aside from sheer firepower (in the off chance you get that ambush juuuuust so). The Spire does, indeed, need a buff. Desperately so. But I'm not convinced just upping the armor or the speed or whatnot is going to be the answer. The weakness of the spire lies in its geometry. So much vertical hull to hit, all the guns clustered together so you can blindly shoot artemis or hwacha at the middle of the thing and start making life miserable. Ok, maybe an armor buff would be nice, but it'll still fail miserably in the face of an artemis or two. Also, the spire is weak enough to carronades WITHOUT the new gravity modifications. So, we're going to have to think about how to make it tanky AND not die to carronades in an instant AND make it less vulnerable to arts. So, basically the ship needs a complete redesign. We may not remember it, but Muse has sort of half-way done it in the passed. When the Spire was introduced, the balloon was on the top deck - so close to the helm that the pilot could repair it in a pinch - and the hull was down bellow where the balloon is now. We might think about spreading those guns out a certain amount (so shooting arts at a spire feels more like shooting arts at a mob) or providing some shielding (a la the nose of the Pyramidion), maybe rerouting the paths to hull and balloon so that wider gun placement doesn't mean longer runs to repair; otherwise balancing repairs and shooting would be so much harder that an armor buff would be moot). Actually, here's an idea that just dawned on me while I was typing this paragraph: Stagger the gun decks. The Spire is already in the shape of a spiral, so perhaps elaborating that so top deck guns are not at the same elevation and the bottom light gun sits lower than the heavy gun *might* create enough space to make dissabling harder. This, coupled with a mild buff to the armor and slightly reducing the mass of the ship could be all it needs. ... *could* Oh, and someone mentioned ditching the lower light gun? For heaven's sake no. Having the gunner be able to run two guns effectively was the best spire buff Muse ever established (with the reload mechanic where by you don't need to be on the gun at the end of the reload for ammo types to stick). Whether it's reload cycling (like what you do with hwacha and gatling. I've also done it with Hellhound and banshees, amongst other things), or having situational guns (ie a Lumberjack for range and a mine launcher for close range defence), you REAALLY want that lower light gun.
With regards to the squid, does anyone remember the dev app squid from when muse was first working on the buffs to the spire and squid along with nerfs to the pyra? It was ridiculously light and fast. It was the most fun and most terrifying time I've ever had playing this game, especially on paritan. Every terrain bump was worth an expletive, mine hits were terrifying, but the damn thing was so fast I had an enormous smile on face the whole time. THAT was what I wanted the squid to be. Its speed was its strength an its weakness all the same and I bet that would have been absolutely balanced because of this. But instead Muse reeled back the speed and upped the hull value. WHYYYYYYYYYYY?! The squid became less fun and its balance aspects less defined. It became the new pyra.
But here's another thing I wanted to touch on since we've been talking about making the squid more accessible, while some of us insist on keeping it a "hard" ship, has anyone ever thought of having the squid run with two heavy engines instead of 4 light engines? That could dramatically decrease the "Squid Chaos Crew" nature of the thing while, actually making things a little tougher for the pilot. Well, it would be harder and easier for the pilot, because you could burn the engines harder before you hit diminishing returns (both in terms of actual thrust as well as your crew's ability to keep the ship buffed and shooting guns), but as soon as an art lands on an engine, you're thrown catastrophically off balance. Couple this with a buff to squid speed (both strait-line and turning) and lightness along with nerfing the hull value tremendously and you might have a ship that's more accessible to newer crew while being a terrifying b**** to pilot. Whatcha guys think?
On the subject of the pyra, I've long contested that it should be a lawn-dart. In other words, slow to turn, fast in a straight line. It's always either been both or neither. I'm not offended by a buff to pyra hull, for that matter. With the mobility stats as they are, a pyra will still lose in a face-to-face with a spire any day of the week. Make it faster in a strait line and keep it slow (or maybe even slow it down a little more) on the turns, and you've got a game of skill and planning rather than a counter game.
The 5 degrees on the mobula gun arcs I'm a little up in the air on. The artemis' turning as it is already makes upper-deck arts a little slow to the draw in the release version of the game. That's why recently I've started running both my arts on the lower rung and simply using gat/double art as a close range option. The difference in how quickly my crews artemis fire becomes on-point amounts to orders of magnitude. So, I feel that making those upper-rung guns face further out further encourages more specialized mobulas where the loadout simply relies on the lower rung guns as far as the engies are concerned. However, with that in mind, I don't want to see the Hades Funhouse go away. I don't expect to ever use it in competitive because, even in the release version, the arcs are too damn tight. But it's a lot of fun to pub with and I'm afraid that widening those arcs by 5 degrees is going to make it worthless even in a pub match. So, with that I'll echo what others have already said: The Mobula is a weapons platform. Emphasize this when you make your balancing tweaks. If it's overpowered, maybe we need to think about its mobility rather than making it less a weapons platform.
With all that said, I want to make a more general statement: Even looking at what muse is doing with "When Ambush Comes To Shove", I still think they're making bandaid changes to things that appear overpowered. What is actually the problem is that Muse hasn't the slightest idea what the purpose of each ship is supposed to be. Once they can establish the very purpose of each and every ship, then maybe we can make some meaningful changes to the balance of the game. Once we've decided that the pyra is "The Vanguard To Lead You Into Battle" (which kind of implies it's fast and tanky and little else, not even manoeuvrable), that the squids purpose as being fast and manoeuvrable, but NOT tanky, that the weapons platforms (mobula, spire, galleon) are treated as such and have their own uniqueness to them as well (for example, I like the notion that the trade-off for running spire vs mobula is I get better manoeuvrability where I lose in having a more vulnerable geometry, but in the current metagame I don't get enough to make it worthwhile).... ... and what about the junker? How's the junker supposed to fit into this? The Junkers kind of been lost in all of this because it doesn't really seem weak, but in the current metagame everything the junker does the Mobula does better. This is why I'm REALLY disappointed to not see junker changes addressed so far. Or perhaps a nerf to the mobula's mobility could act as a junker buff. You decide.
