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Topics - Nikola Brackman

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Q&A / Suggested Ammo for Heavy Accelerator and Nemesis
« on: June 09, 2017, 03:55:57 pm »
I've been testing out the Heavy Accelerator and Nemesis to determine good ammo types to use on them, and would like to see what experience other people have had with them.

What I have seen so far:

On the Heavy Accelerator:

Greased is good on the Accelerator because it improves your charging just enough (from 12s to ~7s, timed on a wristwatch) that you can get a follow-up shot in before a mallet cooldown finishes, and it still does a bit more damage than a mallet can repair, allowing you to two-shot some ships despite repair attempts.

Lochnegar can be good on the Accelerator because it has just enough HP to survive self-damage, is off repair cooldown by the time it can fire again, and usually one-shots armor with the 125% damage boost.  The slower turning can be difficult to deal with if a target is evading or your own pilot is moving erratically, though.

Charged is situational: against weaker ships it can give you just enough of a push to one-shot their armor, but if it fails the target will have more than enough time to repair all the damage you did.

Burst is situational/an oddball.  Can swat planes and allow you to use the rail as an improvised disable, but definitely sacrifices killing power due to how it affects the charge mechanic.

Heavy is useless, because the Accelerator has no appreciable jitter in the first place.

Lesmok is useless, the accelerator is already so fast the bonus isn't noticeable.

Incendiary is of questionable value.  While the accelerator can hit many targets at once, it's not nearly fast enough to refresh the stacks.

Heat sink is heat sink.

On the Nemesis:

Greased can be somewhat favorable because it speeds up the gun's slow rate of fire and takes advantage of its fairly quick reload, but the projectile velocity reduction can be pretty noticeable.

Charged aggravates its already low rate of fire,  but it can still fire a volley of three within one repair cycle so it's pretty punchy.  Potentially good.

Lochnegar is situational.  Very punchy if you double-tap someone with it, but it damages itself faster than it can be repaired so in a sustained fight, repair-breaks will be necessary.

Burst has similar problems to charged, but the Nemesis already has pretty good disable power and burst can definitely help it lock down a whole ship.

Heavy has some potential value as a range extension, since the Nemesis' jitter is similar to the Banshee (looks a bit smaller to me, but close).

Lesmok competes with Heavy as a range extension, since the Nemesis' slow projectile definitely benefits from a speed boost.

Incendiary is questionable.  A full volley might be able to set quite a few fire stacks, but burst is probably the better disable option since that will just immediately break stuff.

Heat sink is heat sink.

That's my opinions on how those two guns interact with ammo types, and overall I do like the feel of them.  Their personalities show up quite a bit in their ammo types too: the Accelerator is very much a specialist gun that does one job well, while the Nemesis feels like a nice jack-of-all-trades.  Anyone else have something to say about them?


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Feedback and Suggestions / Cavitation Cannon Feedback
« on: February 28, 2017, 11:26:33 am »
After playing with the new Heavy Cavitation Cannon for a bit, I thought I'd pop over here to offer my thoughts on it.  And fish for information, since Google hasn't turned up any kind of existing discussions about it.

Positives:
+A dedicated AP heavy weapon!
+A long-range successor to the ancient pre-nerf Field Gun of yore.
+Very satisfying to use.  The overall feel and sound of the gun gives it the feeling of a powerful main cannon.
+Very wide firing arc, comparable to a gatling gun.
+Can one-shot armor on test-targets and common Alliance enemies (on normal). 
+Shockwave does a good job of damaging or disabling multiple components.

Negatives:
-You're going to have to bring something else for hull.  Justified, as it is a dedicated AP weapon after all.
-That charge time.  I timed it as 12 seconds to auto-fire, 8 seconds with greased rounds.
-Low overall DPS due to said charge time, this could potentially lead to problems if it encounters armor it can't one-shot (lochnagar to the rescue?) or drop with an uncharged follow-up.
-Slow traverse rate.  A fair tradeoff for that firing arc, in my opinion. 

Unknown:
*I have not tested the gun in PvP, so I do not know how it performs against the various player ships.  Anyone got some experience they want to share with that?  Actually now that I think of it, I haven't checked if any of the new guns are available in PvP.  This may be a moot point.

*I do not know how the gun does on higher difficulties.  I can see some potential for it falling behind if enemy armor scales to the point that it can't one-shot them, as 8 or 12 seconds is plenty of time to repair.

*The lightning gun has a mechanic where its damage ramp-up finishes quite a bit before the gun auto-fires.  Does the cavitation cannon do the same thing?  The firing animation doesn't seem to indicate this (the gun auto-fires as soon as the pistons finish retracting), but if it is the case that means the actual charge time would be shorter than it appears.

What's your opinion on the new Heavy Cavitation Cannon?  Good, bad, noob-trap?  Will it hold up on higher difficulties or PvP, or will its charge time be its undoing?  Which ships/weapons/ammo would pair particularly well with it?

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