First and foremost, I’m so glad to see all these familiar names around. Been a long time, feels kinda nice to be back.
Had a couple of matches just now. The whole meta is so familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time… I’m kinda bumbling my way through at the moment.
Implants look good, but I would probably switch R7M for R7B so you can keep using modules while under fire and running for you life. Xp
I shall cease to be biased towards tacklers :fed004: Got caught out of position a bit too many times in my frigates, and I would really appreciate an energy boost.
Also, with engineers, it is less energy regen and more energy volume that you want. The more volume of energy you have, the more effective your healing modules will be. They have a passive mode that heals less than the passive hull modifier, but their active mode can heal up to 2k health per second when you set your ship up right, so keep that in mind.
Noooo your styx is bad. Go with a lot more energy for heals. Engi heals changed.
Yea, the Styx felt kinda off when I was playing it. I was terribly confused for the first few matches because of the module change (should have looked through everything carefully rather than jump straight in). A welcome change, I suppose, for increasing the skill cap and reward for playing engie. I assume this has helped reduce frigballing as well?
I don’t fly tackler or ECM, but the builds look okay to me. I’d probably swap the flares for a shield heal on the ECM, and one of the adaptives for a thermal or EM resist, but that’s just me.
Your Ira Deus build is practically the same as mine is, but I use positrons with pulse discharger and IR scanner instead of coils with heatsink and range.
Your styx looks okay, but shield volume on Empire has always been mostly useless. I’d either swap it out for an adaptive for further hull resist, or a compact shield for better team heals.
IIRC I went with flares for the ECM because of the R8 implant. All the guard and tackler speed debuffs made it hard to escape, and flares had a shorter cooldown timer so I could use it more often. The lag seems to have gotten worse, and I might not be playing intys for a while, especially since I’m still getting used to the game.
Compact shields for the Styx, I suppose, and pairs well with R9 implant. I think I went for more shields in the past because I played the Styx as an off-tank to take the heat away from guard frigates, but with destroyers that might be suicidal.
I thought adaptives were more of a Fed engie thing, though I gotta say there seems to be a lot less camping and turtling than before. Gotta keep moving to catch up to the rest of the team.
As to the differences between when you were playing and now, there’s, uh, quite a few.
Most obvious is the existence of destroyers. They’re a new class that’s heavier than frigates, with about four times the tank and the firepower. I highly encourage not engaging 1v1, you’ll probably lose every single matchup unless the pilot really, really sucks. Best way to deal with them in a smaller ship is to run away behind cover while dodging, and letting the destroyers on your team take them out. Although if there is only one destroyer on the enemy team, it’s possible to orbit them like orbiting a frigate.
Passive modules have been changed a bit. The biggest is that stacking passive modules now gives diminishing returns – two of the same gives 90% effectiveness of each, three gives 80%. But the negatives of each module equipped also diminish in the same way. The only other one really worth mentioning is that horizon now gives -5% damage when equipped.
A lot of weapon changes have been made, as well. Beam cannon on frigates now has about 3km default range (mostly because 10km crit lasers were stupidly good before the nerf). Eclipse no longer heals yourself. Pulse laser now has terrible heatup time. Plasma cannon is now an accurate and fast, but much lighter damage version of RF blaster. Assault rails have a much better heatup time. Gauss now builds one charge without heating or breaking cloak.
And also, active modules probably look a lot different than they did before. Engineer (and command!) modules are now always active, with a smaller effect than normal throughout the game. Activating engineer (or command!) modules now gives a short burst with a stronger effect, whose strength depends on how much energy was in your capacitor at the time of use. The module cooldown only affects the number of times you can use the burst. You won’t find the command numbers anywhere, but if you search hard enough in the dev Q&A forum you can find some numbers on the engineer modules. Besides that, I highly recommend looking at the descriptions of active modules again, as a lot of balance changes have been dolled out.
A lot of changes expectedly. I’ll miss the Eclipse heal, even though IIRC we were the ones who proposed the change. Plasma cannon looks interesting… might try that on another ECM without the railgun bonuses. Assault rails felt better than I remembered, and now I know why.
That gauss change though… I was tempted to go back to Jeri tacklers, and this might convince me to actually make the switch.
