Zander's appraisals of the patch so far!: i spent a lot of time today with Cakes and Overwatchers, and i even piloted a little bit, i flew a Banshee top, Hades bottom, junker with some success, i'd like to see what a good pilot could do with that build. then the rest of the day i found myself on Spires and Pyras, the first Spire was Hades/??? top and lumberjack/flare bottom, i got to fire the Hades and man was it hard to get used to the way it fires, honestly i spent most of the day firing this gun, and i was having issues landing hits, but oh man when it does hit it wrecks stuff. for those using it i recommend lesmok and/or greased. later on i found myself engying for Puppy Fur on his double Artemis/lumberjack Spire which was used to great effect unsurprisingly, my biggest comment on this is that the spire's health buff it pretty noticeable, as for the health debuff on the Pyra i can't really comment on because i wasn't able to main engie on one, though while on Ace's ship we had an instance of two moonshining pyra's ramming each other, we exploded, Ace claims we were at full Armor/hull but i remember it differently, but i wasn't the main engie so *shrugs*. The other ship i spent most of my day on was Puppy Fur's double Hades front/gat/mort side Pyra, it was brutal (when i was able to land my shots), while with this ship we faced a gat/mort pyra and a junker of some sort and i noticed that we took out their balloons at around the same time we stripped the armor off the ships. The other thing i noticed about the Hades is that other people can't see it arm like you can with other guns, so as a captain you'll need to learn to eyeball the distance you have to stay at to use the gun.
OH and at some point i was the gunner on a shotgun goldfish (piloted by B'Elanna) and despite the longer reload time on the shotgun, i didn't really notice any difference, i think that due to the increased range i was able to pop the balloons earlier, and as they dropped i was able to get the next two shots into them before they were too low, and i don't know if it was my imagination or not, but it felt like it stripped armor even faster than before.