Mobula
-Outer top guns fanned out 5 degrees
-Inner bottom guns fanned out 10 degrees
The Mobula is boring as hell to fly for noobs and vets alike in sniper battles. In fact boring is not the important issue. It was just plain too easy - I'm pointing to the typical artemises on wings / merc or hades in middle setup you see so standardly in sniper battles. And take note when I say too easy I do not necessarily mean something is OP. I define it as super easy since, even though an experienced pilot would only be threatened by it if it was manned by a formidable crew, it's so good on so many maps that any semi-intelligent level 1 crew can win with it if they have merely one person to demystify the mobula to them.
Now I run matches on this ship often enough myself. But I don't think the laziness this super easy kind of ship encourages affects higher level people as, er, profoundly as it does newbies. Because what happens is they very quickly fight a bunch of matches, win a bunch of matches because they looked up the meta, get a super inflated ego, and then spend some time reading "Hwacha Makes Your Guns Irrelevant, and Other Valuable Lessons" in the form of a bunch of humiliating losses when they enter the double digits. Here you are in the realm of people who have figured out at least some of the fundamentals on how games are won beyond google ship builds.
Not saying there shouldn't be plenty of highly noob-accessible ships - far from it - there should be lots. But each one should teach some kind of lesson, like how eventually anyone who changes the guns a few times when they'd been winning with a metamidion figures out what guns pierce armor and what guns kill ships. I don't think this particular build does that though. It really just makes some unfortunate new captains think they can turn their ship in the right direction in the first 15 seconds of the game and win the match.
So I guess what I like about this change is that it will keep new pilots more engaged and reduce the artemis/merc/artemis build tendency if only by a little, because the truly lazy of the laziest new captain would not want to have anything to do with something that makes you become skilled at turning your ship more precisely at long range than "the enemy's general direction." I assume that's what it'll boil down to, and the low turning acceleration with high turning speed would support it.
But the problem is then that what it'll really probably end up doing is making where mobula is played less all together. 'Cause yeah those that would find this new ranged ship too annoying to fly in general, or those that may feel now they have to make a better ship choice sometimes, are not going to take another mobula build instead. And while short range mobulas aren't exactly popular if you feel at all threatened, pre patch they were a common choice among newbies. It's not great that where they've slid by with it with enough luck and aggression in the past, now they're going to just shrug and assume anything other than a long range mobula on a long range map is basically the new squid that, within a certain range of levels, everyone will deride you for choosing.
Another problem compounding this case is that turning radius of guns in particular is not a stat people become aware of, or if they are aware of it, it does not factor into their strategy or choice until they've got hundreds of matches under their belts. I feel freaking accomplished when I can explain the difference between piercing and explosive to someone new. Explaining why the guns on the front of the ship actually suck at shooting things directly in front of them seems fairly futile.
I tried to think of the perfect solution for this but quickly shrugged and decided I don't actually care if only because I'm curious if people may come up with more asymmetrical crew placements. It's fun to see what people come up with when they're stubborn to make a ship work, and this nerf isn't near potent enough that plenty of people won't try. Maybe in a couple months from now we'll be living in a crazy nonsense world where three gunners crammed onto the left wing of the mobula is the new meta. >____>
Heavy Flak
-Damage moved to direct hit for a 70/30% split between direct and AoE (from 45/55%)
-Higher clip capacity to 4 (from 2)
-Damage per shot reduced (115/50 explosive, from 150/180 explosive)
-Increased RoF of 2 shots/s (from 0.8 )
-Reduced reload time of 4.5s (from 5)
-Reduced camera shake
Super. Yes. Good. I hated this gun before the patch; literally was my least favorite. Reason being: I don't have access to someone who's going to run the same gun over and over and over just so I can practice a gun. I was able to learn other guns that most consider more difficult - hades, lumberjack, and mining - but that was because the payoff of choosing those guns are good enough for people to give to me and give to me often. In fact I bet every gunner who says they are great with flak has a pilot friend with an all gat / flak spire fetish. So yeah, this actually not only makes it where more people will give me this weapon, but it also takes care of another compounding annoyance of the low clip and reload time which made it difficult to get used to the arcs in the rare cases someone does hand me one.
Spire
-Reduced turn acceleration to 10d/s2 (from 15)
-Reduced top turn speed to 10d/s from 12
Good. It shouldn't be a shock to anyone who has seen the hwacha + kill gun bottom deck, both taken by gunner / two gats going at once up top by engies build (and its slight derivatives) that's been very popularly devouring ships in close quarter maps for the past few months that the spire had the highest kill rate in the stats. If I'm on that ship with a good captain & crew I feel unstoppable. It's probably the only build / strategy in the game before the patch I thought was truly broken OP (at least on Canyon Ambush and to only slightly lesser extents Paritan & Duel) ... (any chances on some win rate by map data??).
Like 1/5 matches do I feel like I really help on that ship by being a great gunner. Honestly I think this turning nerf makes a great deal of sense, since I can recall many times in the past couple months where we get so lazy on that ship that people sneak up behind us and it doesn't even matter, even against good people. And as fun as it feeling like an unstoppable godking, it's like, wow, they were clearly better than us on this, they did a great ambush, they deserved that point.
I’ll point out that any nerf to the hwacha has to be viewed as also a spire (and goldfish) nerf as it stands now, since the spire is generally very hwacha dependent. But, I guess I’m in the minority of being stoked to try the new hwacha. If how I’m guessing this will change the way the hwacha’s fired is correct, then it would probably not hurt the spire as much as I thought it would when hemming and hawwing with friends over the “is the hwacha too powerful?” question before.
However rather than explain myself I am going to stop rambling and sleep at some point… Yeah… I can dig it… Good job, probably… k love you nite
