Tar barrel

[Zormac]

I posted this on the Steam forum but it hasn't seen as much player movement as here, so I'll try it again.

My engineer and I have noticed that now our engines seem to be destroyed much faster than before when I turn tar barrel on. However, I can't find anything about this in the patch notes. I have no actual data to compare it with, but it really feels that before I could use tar for much longer.

I used to be able to run away while leaving an extremely long tar trail, and now it will only run for about 5 seconds before completely destroying my engines.

Have there been any changes recently, since patch 1.3?

[Captain Smollett]

You know nothing was in the patch notes but it does seem to do a good bit of damage these days.

Anyways, a good tip for dealing with this is to turn tar on and off.  Since tar only shoots out every three seconds but damages your engines as long as you leave it on; you can simply cycle your tar on and off for the same amount of tar with far less engine damage.

[Zormac]

Yes, I do that. I turn it on and back off, but the damage is just so great that even that has to be rationed. This broke some of my maneuvering strategies and if this is a new thing, I think there should at least be info about it somewhere. Otherwise, it's a bug.

[Squidslinger Gilder]

Yeah I've noticed it too. It is like a moonshine rate, if not worse, of engine dmg now with it.

[Captain Smollett]

Officially Moonshine is 30 dps to engines tar is 25

[Zormac]

I just timed it. Steering engines are going down in 12-13 seconds and main engine in 20-21 seconds.

According to the description, tar does 25dmg/sec to engines, which means that steering engines have 300-325 HP and main engines 500-525 HP. I imagine MUSE would have preferred that component health were round numbers, so I'd say steering and main engines might have 300 and 500 HP respectively.

Upon testing with kerosene (10dmg/sec), steering engines went down in 30-31 seconds, for a total of 300-310 HP, which is within the aforementioned range, so supposedly the description is accurate. Now all I need is confirmation from devs that these are the actual values of engine health. If this is the case, then I just might have had the wrong impression all along.

[Zormac]

I just timed it. Steering engines are going down in 12-13 seconds and main engine in 20-21 seconds.

Ok, I wasn't happy with the data so I timed the damage taken by both types of engine several times, using kerosene, moonshine and tar, and averaged the results. The time it took for the steering/main engines to go down and calculated damage taken were, on average, as follow:

Kerosene - 31.44s (314.4 HP) / 54.41s (544.1 HP)
Moonshine - 11.04s (331.2 HP) / 18.75s (562.5 HP)
Tar Barrel - 12.96s (324 HP) / 22.15s (553.75 HP)

From this data it's possible to infer that the steering engines have around 325 HP and the main engines around 550 HP. Moonshine probably had higher results because the last hit to the engines does much more than necessary damage.

The results are so close together, with each tool working less than a second more or less than the other (which accounts for human error), that I can only accept that the damage is actually working correctly and I'm the one with incorrect feelings about them.

My second hypothesis is that maybe there was a bug before, causing it to deal less damage, which has now been incidentally repaired.

[Squidslinger Gilder]

Could have easily been a bug before where it did less dmg than it should have. Heck the squid still hasn't been fixed after months now.

[Captain Smollett]

Or, Muse changed it and didn't put it in the change logs.

Guess we'll never know.

[Zormac]

It wasn't an intentional change. I talked to Keyvias about it.

However, I was participating in the Dev App event and noticed tar was taking much longer to break my engines. So I went into sandbox mode and timed it.

This is what I got:

Kerosene - 31.08s (310 HP) / 54.60s (546 HP) - CHECK
Moonshine - 10.95s (328 HP) / 18.65s (559 HP) - CHECK
Tar Barrel - 49.51s (1237 HP) / 1:26.34 (2158 HP) - ERROR

That means that the tar wasn't doing the 25 damage per second as the description stated. Instead, it was doing around 6.5 damage per second (25%). Now, it is doing the damage it was supposed to do. What I care is that I wasn't crazy :p

I, for one, think that maybe that having the tar run for 50 seconds before repairing side engines or even almost a minute and a half for main engine isn't fir, but doing 25 dmg/sec and running for a little over 10 seconds turns the tar into a bad choice. Maybe it could do 60% of that damage to the engines (15dmg/sec). That way we could use it for about 20 seconds (steering engines) or 36 seconds (main engine), which is fair.

Anyway, I'm sending this data to Eric.

[Captain Smollett]

Well that's continuous use without repairs or turning it on and off.  25 dps happens to be the exact repair rate of the mallet, so theoretically you can tar indefinitely.

[Zormac]

Regardless, 25 dmg/sec seems too much. 15-20 dmg/second would make it a much more viable option.

[N-Sunderland]

Tar barrel is already an extremely viable option. It's amazing at deterring pursuit.

[naufrago]

Ah, yeah, I reported to Muse that tar barrel seemed to do 1/4 the damage it was supposed to, as Zormac noted. They're quite responsive at the feedback@musegames .com address.

So you can blame/thank me for the tar barrel nerf/fix.

[Zormac]

Ah, yeah, I reported to Muse that tar barrel seemed to do 1/4 the damage it was supposed to, as Zormac noted. They're quite responsive at the feedback@musegames .com address.

So you can blame/thank me for the tar barrel nerf/fix.

That's awesome! I just thought it was really strange they didn't add any of this to the patch notes, I thought I was going crazy.

But now, with it doing the correct amount, it seems too much :p I hope they lessen it at least a bit.