"Artemis - Mercury" Role swap.

[Echoez]

This is a suggestion I e-mailed to muse briefly before 1.3 launched, I haven't received a reply yet, though I am infortmed they looked at it, but I can see how the team is busy and can't personaly reply to everyone. Anyway, I decided I should share it here as well to see how the community reacts to it as well.

I am not gonna post the whole e-mail, just a brief summary. So let's start with the changes.

Change Log:

GUNS:

Mercury Field Gun: Penetration through the whole ship now included, Piercing damage is now 10 (from 75), Reload time increased to 7 seconds (from 6), Magazine size reduced to 1 (from 2)

Artemis Light Rocket Launcher: Explosive damage swapped out for Piercing, Now deals 35 piercing damage per shot, Shatter damage reduced to 85 (from 120), Range Increased to 1500 meters.

What we accomplish with the changes:
-Shortening the long range game
-The Mercury doesn't accomplish 2 roles at once anymore and can't be spammed across the maps for easy armor piercing.
-Penetration can work as it was intended
-Retain both a long range disabler and a long range armor piercer
-The shorter version of the long game should greatly help ships choose their engage distance
-By making the Mercury's piercing weak and not a Jack-of-all-trades, we'll finally see a variety of light weapons for used for long range instead of just 2 mercuries.

The Artemis has a stock of 4 rockets, these, as you noticed with my changes, now deal less overall damage than 2 Mercury shots, that's to compesate a bit for ammo types that give it extra shots, hence giving it more armour piercing power than the current Mercury, but, it doesn't do so at a ridiculous range. It still keeps some disabling power, but can't take out Heavy guns as reliably as the Mercury. Turning into a component bruiser and armor piercer.

The Mercury on the other hand loses all of its armour stripping capability, being the extremely long range gun that it is, I believe it restricts a lot of movement from the enemy team with few to absolutely no drawbacks for the defending team, but now it is a very powerful disabler, able to penetrate through whole ships and knock out multiple components. It's clip was reduced to 1 shot per reload as to prevent the weapon from being an absolute bane to Galleons and along with the longer reload, it only rewards an accurate gunner that goes for components.


Why these changes though? Well, the Artemis is underused, only ever utilized in Junker/Spire trifectas most of the time and can only disable and probably provide a little bit of a kick to your finishing power, yet is not that effective at either.

The Mercury is both a very efficient armour breaker (at a very long range might I add?) and component disabler, making people favor it over the artemis immidiently unless the gun slot doesn't allow it to overlap arcs with an other gun and is very detrimental to many more loadouts and playstyles that could occur if it wasn't for the Mercury's immense power at range.

Well, that's it, hit or miss, I shared my thoughts, you are free to agree or disagree or blast them to the ground and never look back, but whatever it might be, remember, have fun and fly safe

[Serenum]

It could work.
I personally like the idea.

[Nidh]

I like the suggested Merc changes at face value, but instead of making the Artemis piercing, because it doesn't make sense to me that a rocket would do piecing damage, have a new weapon with those suggested Artemis specs. Then maybe buff the Artemis a little. Only a little though, it's borderline perfect imo, just needs a tiny bit more shatter to make up for the difficulty of hitting specific targets.

[Echoez]

I like the suggested Merc changes at face value, but instead of making the Artemis piercing, because it doesn't make sense to me that a rocket would do piecing damage, have a new weapon with those suggested Artemis specs. Then maybe buff the Artemis a little. Only a little though, it's borderline perfect imo, just needs a tiny bit more shatter to make up for the difficulty of hitting specific targets.

Well, missiles have more piercing capabilities than most think, I am aware that HEAT tech wasn't invented till near the end of WWII, but hey it's a Diesel/Steam Punk game, we can invent crap on our own as well instead of just looking for them in old wreckages

The Artemis's missiles are very close to what HEATs look like anyway.

[Chrinus]

There was already piercing ammunition in the era as well as being the early age of tanks. Something like HEAT was bound to come along in short order if war research continued at such a pace. According to wiki articles, the WWI armor piercing rounds were tempered stainless steel tips bored out and given HE ordinance. Basically it penetrated armor, then detonated inside the armor leaving a large hole at point of impact.. Which, while being bullets, sounds an awful lot like something that can easily translate into the structure of the artemis rocket.

[Queso]

Huh, this is actually something that was coming under consideration when the artemis and mercury were first being separated role wise a couple patches ago. You know me though. I tend to always be a fan of harder kills.

[Echoez]

Huh, this is actually something that was coming under consideration when the artemis and mercury were first being separated role wise a couple patches ago. You know me though. I tend to always be a fan of harder kills.

Well it seems like they lost it somewhere in the middle cause the Mercury is pretty supreme now while the Artemis is the 'I only equip it cause it can have an arc' weapon, this level of tetriary usage is pretty ridiculous for a missile launcher of that caliber, plus the Mercury can do what the Artemis does and do it better and at a safer range.

[Nidh]

Huh, I didn't know about the HEAT rockets... the things you learn

[Lord Dick Tim]

I like the proposal direction (and the suggested changes), specialization should definately come from the options a weapon provides you for changing the long game, not with just shortening the overall engagement by immediately destroying the target completely.

[Captain Smollett]

Not to be too critical; but based on the new stats of these weapons relative to other weapons currently in the game, I don't think a single person would use either of these anymore.  Far too little dps in any category to be worth a gun slot.


Also not saying the arte couldn't use a tiny bit of love but I almost always use an Artemis on my squid and sometimes as my trifecta gun on my Pyra.  The gun also gets frequent usage on the Goldfish leaving only two ships it's almost never used on.

[Echoez]

Not to be too critical; but based on the new stats of these weapons relative to other weapons currently in the game, I don't think a single person would use either of these anymore.  Far too little dps in any category to be worth a gun slot.


Also not saying the arte couldn't use a tiny bit of love but I almost always use an Artemis on my squid and sometimes as my trifecta gun on my Pyra.  The gun also gets frequent usage on the Goldfish leaving only two ships it's almost never used on.

Why not? The Artemis deals the same total damage as the Mercury right now and can deal even more with the right ammo with the range change it has more than double the Gatling's range, let alone you won't be hitting anything at 700 meters with the new gatling anyway, so even more of a difference.

The Mercury will be able to penetrate through the whole ship which gives it tremendour disabling power against Heavy gun ships, so I don't get what's the problem?

The Artemis is harder to use than the Mercury as well, providing some well needed skill indexing to the mindless mercury spam wars that the game becomes in sniping matches. So, explain your reasoning?

As for the fact that the weapon 'appears' sometimes doesn't mean anything and you yourself proved, it is just the 'I can get an arc' weapon so you just use it because it can get an weapon arc, I don't think this reason is good enough to bring a weapon alone.

So, if you have anything to suggest go on as well, unless you like Mercury spam wars that is. I want something to be done with that weapon, both the Artemis and the Mercury require some looking at, especialy the Mercury and its stupidly high power of both disabling and armor breaking, if people think that is fine to do that at the range the Mercury has, I think I don't know, maybe I'm not playing the same game . _.

DPS can be fiddled with as well, this is just a speculation after all, but still I don't believe that long range light weapons should bring such power at that tremendous range, pick and choose what you want to do, not just pick one gun that does both things and does them too good as well.

[Plasmarobo]

These are interesting ideas.
I usually turn my ship in weird ways to attempt to prevent Merc rounds from ruining my everything. With this penetration change that'd be moot, but I'd still retain my lovely hull armor.
Part of me fears that I'm behind the non-duality of the Merc just because I'm not good enough to effectively use it though.

Perhaps a slight reduction on the shatter damage of the Merc, so it requires 1.5 shots to take down a heavy weapon?

This might be a realism vs authenticity argument again, but I've managed to close the gap against Mercury-equiped ships and take them down. It's just a bit more of a challenge and your engineers need to be amazing at prioritization. Or you need to select the right tools.

I guess I'm on the fence with this one. I'd love to see it demo'd in the dev app, just to see how it changes the game!

[N-Sunderland]

If the merc has to take more than one shot to kill a heavy gun, then the best counter to the sniper Galleon is dead.

[Echoez]

If the merc has to take more than one shot to kill a heavy gun, then the best counter to the sniper Galleon is dead.

Exactly, this is why it has to retain all of its Shatter damage, it only gets on shot and I think it's proper to reward it well if its a good one, but it is still limited by making this one shot count, the Mercury needs to retain its long range disabling capabilities.

[Chrinus]

I'd much prefer the Merc be a specialized component killer so you know.. it takes skill to use effectively. That's the major issue with the long game right now: Any monkey can merc and the weapon is able to cause immense pressure due to being far too effective at two jobs.

Meanwhile, the Artemis takes a backseat as the "I cant get an x-fecta without this arc" weapon instead of being what it was originally intended. On top of being limited in its use, it's a bugger to master and land long hits with. So as was mentioned above, there's no reason to ever take this weapon unless you need its firing arc since a merc will do the artemis' job better as well as punch through their armor like nobody's business.

Considering long range piercing is what causes real pressure to a ship at range and a leading factor to their death. I would say it makes sense to make a long range piercing weapon require effort and skill while a less-than-lethal disabler not as much. With penetration on the merc, as is being proposed, you might even find a varied sniping loadout base.