SomethingSomething 'Destroyers are fine' SomethingSomething

 

Hahaha 162k hull goes so far now. Ha…ha…ha…ha…

1*RSuZC5ZglLe7zyVcYcrmBA.jpeg

I don’t even know what he wants to tell us with those vids… are destroyers OP or UP now?

What if they are both?

20 minutes ago, xXThunderFlameXx said:

What if they are both?

DingDingDing we have a winner. Vigilant has basically fallen from grace and trying to survive a battle without dieing requires absurdly careful play whilst on the other hand the Tyrant can close the gap on enemies and escape unscathed. The main point? The fact that destroyers, or more specifically - empire destroyers - can’t regenerate efficiently drastically lowers their usefulness and forces the pilot to face the music and pay up to 400k a battle.

 

Also can someone tell me what the sh*t happened on my first death in the second video. Like half my hull disappeared in a literal instant.

Edit: Yeah looked it over and 60k Hull just disappeared instantly when I died. Nice.

 

Oh and btw Dessies kinda got nerfed again. Explosives now add a flat bonus damage (which is visible in the damage feed) which is effected by crits + the AoE bonus. This is probs why deconstructor is still slaughtering dessies.

46 minutes ago, TheDerpNukem said:

DingDingDing we have a winner. Vigilant has basically fallen from grace and trying to survive a battle without dieing requires absurdly careful play whilst on the other hand the Tyrant can close the gap on enemies and escape unscathed. The main point? The fact that destroyers, or more specifically - empire destroyers - can’t regenerate efficiently drastically lowers their usefulness and forces the pilot to face the music and pay up to 400k a battle.

Not all destroyers are created equal…

And that is sadly true vigilant went from the top straight to the bottom, but tyrant has a pretty broken main gun.

1 hour ago, TheDerpNukem said:

DingDingDing we have a winner. Vigilant has basically fallen from grace and trying to survive a battle without dieing requires absurdly careful play whilst on the other hand the Tyrant can close the gap on enemies and escape unscathed. The main point? The fact that destroyers, or more specifically - empire destroyers - can’t regenerate efficiently drastically lowers their usefulness and forces the pilot to face the music and pay up to 400k a battle.

 

Also can someone tell me what the sh*t happened on my first death in the second video. Like half my hull disappeared in a literal instant.

Edit: Yeah looked it over and 60k Hull just disappeared instantly when I died. Nice.

 

Oh and btw Dessies kinda got nerfed again. Explosives now add a flat bonus damage (which is visible in the damage feed) which is effected by crits + the AoE bonus. This is probs why deconstructor is still slaughtering dessies.

Explosives add flat bonus damage? Or are you talking about those +20% damage feeds? 

BTW: I don’t think Tyrant would survive such kind of barrage. In both of those videos you were receiving fire from 6-7 players + with 2-3 in proximity mallus range without ANY healing except your drones. I would say you lasted pretty long under those circumstances. 

 

And why you died? In the last second you got hit by EM torp from that Styx and fully charged energy converter from the same source (if you go frame by frame you will see torp incoming just above your capacitor) . Torp hit you for 28k from what I see, reducing hull from 58k to 30k, the rest from EC. But to be sure check combat.log. 

Well, I know ONE thing for sure.

If Destroyers will be as crappy as the ONES we have now, I surely won’t bother spending one billion Credits and several thousands of other resources just to get an Ellydium Dessy.

 

*but maybe the Ellydium dessy will work differently*

 

Yeah it’ll take triple damage, collisions will destroy mods, can’t regen because ellydium debuff, everything costs billions of credits and resources, impossible to level up without GS, will be completely cost prohibitive to use in any mode, at least one turret will be able to instantly destroy any ship (that is poorly built and flying straight) so people will call them OP and they’ll be nerfed even more through later updates.

8 hours ago, TheDerpNukem said:

Hahaha 162k hull goes so far now. Ha…ha…ha…ha…

All of your deaths had the same pattern. You kept charging right at a beacon, which is of course getting swarmed by many smaller ships. You got focused by at least 3 players every time and most of them were dealing double damage due to the damage aura. Some of them dealt quadruple damage because of explosive weaponry.

You forced your ship into scenarios it couldnt win by design.

 

Loosing xxxx**tons of money after each death aswell as the long respawn and the generally slow and agonizing death in a destroyer make that very frustrating.

 

You were still able to dominate every mid- to longrange encounter however.

 

 

I said it times and times again: remove the damage aura, normalize repair cost, respawn time and warp speed, BUT reduce the overall shild and hull volume by about 30%. Destroyers will become much less frustrating to play and less inconsistent in terms of tank.

 

Destroyers are not weak. Period. They are however massively frustrating to use.

49 minutes ago, Scar6 said:

You got focused by at least 3 players every time and most of them were dealing double damage due to the damage aura

Not double, it’s actually ~150% now.

 

49 minutes ago, Scar6 said:

Destroyers are not weak. Period. They are however massively frustrating to use.

No, they actually are pathetic, the damage bonus is not much now. 

5 hours ago, Scar6 said:

All of your deaths had the same pattern. You kept charging right at a beacon, which is of course getting swarmed by many smaller ships. You got focused by at least 3 players every time and most of them were dealing double damage due to the damage aura. Some of them dealt quadruple damage because of explosive weaponry.

You forced your ship into scenarios it couldnt win by design.

 

Loosing xxxx**tons of money after each death aswell as the long respawn and the generally slow and agonizing death in a destroyer make that very frustrating.

 

You were still able to dominate every mid- to longrange encounter however.

 

I said it times and times again: remove the damage aura, normalize repair cost, respawn time and warp speed, BUT reduce the overall shild and hull volume by about 30%. Destroyers will become much less frustrating to play and less inconsistent in terms of tank.

The deaths all had the same pattern because of one reason; I was using Vigilant like it was a Tyrant. The only reason I rushed the beacons is because as every other ‘genius’ states - you should always be with your team. And where should your team be in a beacon match? Attacking the beacons. 

It didn’t help I was already lacking focus because of how annoyed I was at the time, but regardless my team was near me in every situation like every other ‘genius’ states and tried to hold my position utilising modules effective at close range and general damage and still failed to 1v2 a guard and engineer whom both were practically sitting still soaking up damage whilst my hull practically fell apart.

 

Keep in mind I was also  trying  to draw aggro to get the most out of crystal plates + the rank 9 implant as the second video I went in with the intentions of stress-testing my build (recently refitted).

 

Excuse me if my logic is disjointed - I’m tired and annoyed still.

 

Oh  and before I forget: whilst DevWAR and I were testing kill times + the hidden explosive changes to destroyers we found that module + component destruction were key factors into the stupendously short kill times that dessie pilots suffer against covies. If module + component destruction were to be removed it would not only alleviate a hoard of bugs but also make destroyer tanking viable again without a waz’got or brokk supporting you.

 

Destroyers are not weak. Period. They are however massively frustrating to use.

Oh and this statement couldn’t be more wrong. Only Sirius and the Tyrant are okay. Every other destroy is basically kill fodder atm.

 

1 hour ago, TheDerpNukem said:

The deaths all had the same pattern because of one reason; I was using Vigilant like it was a Tyrant. The only reason I rushed the beacons is because as every other ‘genius’ states - you should always be with your team. And where should your team be in a beacon match? Attacking the beacons. 

It didn’t help I was already lacking focus because of how annoyed I was at the time, but regardless my team was near me in every situation like every other ‘genius’ states and tried to hold my position utilising modules effective at close range and general damage and still failed to 1v2 a guard and engineer whom both were practically sitting still soaking up damage whilst my hull practically fell apart

I’m not a genius, but the name of the class is “suppressor” it means it’s supposed to suppress enemies - the same way as heavy machine gun on the ground battlefield. You are not charging with 20kg+ machine gun into CQC, you are watching if your team is being sneaked on and lay support fire. As long as you used your Vigilant in this role - you had your kills, no one was able to do any significant damage to your ship. First video 1:52-4:00 - that’s where Vigilant fits the best - control 7-8km area around your ship, lay cover for your team capturing the beacon 2-3km from you. You were even in range of your team’s engineering that was giving you healing support when you were dueling with guard and another destroyer (dunno why you warped away from that support - wrong direction?). In the meantime you killed few ships and heavily damaged few others, which were finished off by your teammates. Thats the purpose this whole class was designed for, not going to the beacon, being sucked by gravi lense with 7 people shooting your ship simultaneously. If any ship would survive that - THAT would be OP. 

Destroyers remain the best mid range crowd control and support fire option. Their survivability usually allows them to fulfill that role sufficiently. Thats my experience with Jericho destroyers at least.

 

It doesn’t feel right however that a single interceptor (Stingray is in fact a recon/covops hybrid) can shred such a ship in a matter of seconds (or render it useless. Destroyers are incredibly helpless in close range fights. Their ridiculous repair cost makes that even more agonizing.

 

The effectiveness of the ship is very sensitive to weather or not the enemy has such ships. Use it against frigs and fighters and you can dominant much of the fights dynamic.

Put it versus a team with reasonably capable interceptors (or bubble gunships) and you won’t stand a chance. Especially the ECM spam hurts them.

 

A large hull volume, constantly receiving damage, getting extra damage from many sources and no real way of ever regenerating effectively adds an extra layer of frustrating, since this renders a destroyer helpless to hit and run attacks.

 

Much of that experience could be rectified with my previous suggestion. Additionally, repair drones could receive a buff. There could also be an exclusive imperial active module for hull restoration, to provide a counterpart to the multiphase shield.

 

Hey, hi, hello! I’m back kinda and recollected my thoughts and I’ll get to a wall of text of summary of the exact thoughts running through the labyrinth that is my head after I dump a couple more runs in here as I had some better luck with the MM and have been able to run vigilant more without being arc’d every 30 seconds.

 

The video will be up in… 30 mins? 

 

The reason my sleep deprived self left such little context to the original post btw was to try to create a discussion highlighting both sides of the problems - which kinda happened, slightly - as although it didn’t quite reach the conclusions or run over the topics I thought it would, so my apologies for being so disjointed with the logic in my posts.

 

Working on wall of text now…

 

The above video displays what I believe to be an acceptable performance from a Vigilant in one of the few ideal destroyer maps (thanks to the masses of open spaces and exposed objectives).

 

OKAY.

 

So let’s get this right out of the way. Out of the 9 Destroyers in the game right now, only 2 (maybe 3) are legitimately viable in the current state of PvP with those two being the Tyrant and Sirius (of course). The reason why they’re the two viable along with Antares with a strict hull tanking build is because of one reason. Regeneration and mobility respectively and even more so if you manage to somehow squeeze a hybrid build in. 

 

Lower ranking Jericho ships only appear poor thanks to the gargantuan gap between Sibyl and the Tyrant thanks to the Warp-Stream detector, as shield tanking is barely viable anymore without it due to the importance of reinforcing your hull now with the presence of Covert Ops ships in almost every match, with at worst 3-4 Covert Op ships present in a game all with plasma arc equipped. The Tyrant can only escape the trap of shield tanking due to the allowance of hybrid hull + shield tank builds which rely on getting kills to reinforce your shield.

 

Empire destroyers on the other hand (as in all of them) are bad now due to their lack of any relevant regeneration for both shield and hull, stupendously smaller shield capacity making them seem as if they had no shield at all in most cases (I’ve seen some people sacrifice all mobility for a hybrid shield + hull tank build) and low base mobility. So how could this be fixed? Give repair drones a passive similar to guards, in which after 5-8 seconds the regeneration effect of the drones is increased which for Empire destroyers would require the effect to be doubled or tripled to regenerate effectively out of combat.  BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!  Empire destroyers by default also happen to have a stupendously long secondary slot cooldown at 15 seconds whereas Jericho has an 8 second cooldown and Federation with a 5 second cooldown - so in order to bridge the gap in regeneration between the 3 factions secondary cooldown would need to be normalised, potentially to Jericho’s default 8 seconds or 6-7 seconds to stop shield spamming. The energy cost of secondary slot items should also be reduced by 50% or outright removed, as currently it costs approximately 1200 energy to activate once which for comparison a base vigilant will have 3978 energy at max synergy, meaning that almost 25% of the capacitor is drained instantly just to begin hull regeneration or to defend themselves from projectile based weapons.

 

Now then, with hull regeneration and general secondary irrelevancy aside the other problems that render so many builds and ships in general irrelevant are thanks to… *sigh*… module destruction and the bonus damage field. As previously stated, Sirius and the Tyrant sit atop the pile of corpses known as the Suppressor Class (lul no one has called dessies that in ages) is thanks to their ability to regenerate from hull damage + shield damage after concluding a battle or moving between objectives. Now then, as for… *sigh*… how to solve this… one of two things needs to happen. Either:

a) the AoE bonus damage field is removed

_           or _

b)module destruction is removed or the damage on destruction is removed

 

As I’ve also previously gone over, module destruction damage largely contributes to the ridiculously low kill times against rank 8 and 11 destroyers as they have lower base hull capacities and thanks to the stupendous destruction damage of the two turret modules (2 of the 9 modules total for rank 8 and 11s as well as 2 of the 5 only free modules for destroyers) with the plasma turret inflicting 4000 hull damage to the host ship on destruction which may be modified by the bonus damage field and the blaster turret also inflicting 4000 hull damage to the host ship on destruction. Given that both of these modules are common choices (and honestly nub traps at this point) this would mean the host ship would be receiving 8000 white damage on the death of both of these modules, excluding the 12000 damage received from capacitor and engine destruction and 5000 extra damage from the more obvious other module choices (Photon and Gravitational lens) means that the instant the host ship is plasma arc’d or attacked by a bubble-gunner they will receive 25000 white damage.

Okay cool, so a small chunk of the hull is gone? Right? Wrong. With the base values of the rank 8 destroyers alone without passives being _ 84700 for Archon,  90750 for Procyon and 1 21000 for Invincible  _- Archon alone will be losing close to 30% of it’s hull just from module destruction let alone the modified damage from the likely offenders of Deconstructor and Front Blaster - the host destroyer is almost guaranteed to die on the first assault or in the case of invincible  IF  it survives it will be left with an insignificant amount of hull left and no way to regenerate the damage taken in under… 3 minutes? Unfortunately to compensate for module destruction loss a higher hull capacity is required in turn drawing out the regen time from critically damaged to full hull sooomewhere near half the duration of the battle. With that, this brings us to yet another issue.

 

On the likely occasion the destroyer is killed, you are suddenly hit with one of the more… obvious… hinderances of destroyers. The f**king respawn time and the f**king repair cost. At a fantastical 192k credits to a death, more than one death will put you at negative income once you wait the 30 second respawn timer. There really isn’t much to add to this… lower repair cost to be inline with rank 17 ships and lower respawn time to be inline with frigates and everything is fine again. Oh wait this was done before? Well do it again. Why was it ever rolled back.

 

*sigh* this is gonna be a long post.

 

NEXT ISSUE.

 

MOBILITY. DESTROYERS. LET’S WRAP THIS UP, BECAUSE F**K THIS POST IS LONG.

DESTROYERS CAN BARELY KEEP PACE WITH A CARGO SHIP.

CARGO SHIPS GO 100m/s.

THAT MEANS THAT DESTROYERS NEED TO BE ABLE TO GO 150 AT LEAST TO CATCH UP TO A CARGO SHIP IN A RESPECTABLE AMOUNT OF TIME.

BUFF BASE SPEED AND AFTERBURNER SPEED. INCREASE WARP SPEED TO BE INLINE WITH OTHER SHIPS. INCREASE ROTATION SPEED TO BE THAT OF WHAT WE HAVE RIGHT NOW WITH A VERNIER. OKAY. WE DONE HERE.

 

Oh and also forgot again…

being sucked by gravi lense with 7 people shooting your ship simultaneously. If any ship would survive that - THAT would be OP. 

You haven’t played a guard recently I guess? Because they can survive that and more currently.

 

7 hours ago, TheDerpNukem said:

 

You haven’t played a guard recently I guess? Because they can survive that and more currently.

 

1

Resitance stacking (Conformist booster, pulsar, spectre field), faster speed, less damage from gravi.

20 minutes ago, Rob40468 said:

Resitance stacking (Conformist booster, pulsar, spectre field), faster speed, less damage from gravi.

Don’t forget adaptation mechanism, ballistic codebreaker and signature masking allowing for even further damage resistance.

6 hours ago, TheDerpNukem said:

Don’t forget adaptation mechanism, ballistic codebreaker and signature masking allowing for even further damage resistance.

Of course you are right that those resists will stack. However your Vigilant lasted almost 40 seconds under concentrated fire. In similar situation (almost) max resists Patriarch lasted 19 (signature masking + pulsar active) and was killed by only 3 ships shooting at that ship  (Thar’ga, Covops, Destroyer). I didn’t test the adaptation mechanism as it’s not available for R15. 

Build tested:

image.png.dd1abcd8eb0073259bd231a81b0b419d.png

 

 

 

 

 

Repair costs. 2 deaths.

Spoiler

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45 minutes ago, Scar6 said:

Repair costs. 2 deaths.

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They should just change all Destroyers to Premium ships. Problem solved.