I’m not overly concerned about the EM Torp. It’s always been a strong ordnance. People didn’t pick it up as often before simply because mines had more versatility on top of sharing essentially the same self-defense function. Now that mines are off the menu, we see more torps taking over it’s place.
Roles on the field have changed. Torps might have a part in that but definitely not the only underlying factor.
Fact is, Interceptors have been relegated away from frontline brawling down to almost a purely supportive role. Alot of things caused that not just the torp which; barring one buff, is still the same missile from ages ago. And the commitment of those who claim themselves to be dedicated interceptor pilots are put to the test. I’ve always found it ludicrous that a single Covert Ops could troll another ship 6 times bigger in HP three times in a row unabated. That provided balance back when you had ‘unbreakable’ frigballs. Now that it’s no longer possible nor needed, the balance of power have shifted towards Inty > Fighter > Frigate > Inty. Question is - what happens now?
Frig vs Frig is a stalemate. Fighters can bring about change in the status quo and interceptors are still the best ones to take on a flaky Gunship. This is the new game. Inties are not able to plasma arc - nuke - orbit frigates solo anymore. They need to double team just to kill off fighters even and unquestionably ignore any Frigates in normal cases. Citing not being able to easily kill a frigate = give up interceptor only points out why ppl picked to fly them in the first place. Easy win. I mean look at the moans in patch thread. Not enough energy etc. It’s utter BS. You can perma AB + manage activation if you wanted to but ppl blatantly refuse to make the trade-offs. Job functions have changed.
People giving up on inties not because they aren’t functional anymore. It’s because their purpose for flying them have shifted elsewhere.
It’s not the ship.
Not the missile.
But the motives.
Bullshit, and you know it (or should know it at your skill level). At the moment, the #1 counter to gunship is a guard frigate performing counter-fire with EM torpedoes and mortar/positron. #2 counter is engineer doing the same thing. #3 counter is LFR doing the same thing. #4 is the another gunship with assualt rails.
For last two patches, interceptors were hard countered by singularity gunships. They have been soft countered since the beginning of 0.9.0, and current changes changed it to absolute hard counter. As it stands now, a gunship can often go 1v2 against 2 interceptors of any kind other than full suiciders and win (and draw it or win against suiciders depending on luck with CR). This is because of changed energy/afterburning mechanics which mean that gunship under overdrive utterly shreds any light close range opposition that is choking on its lack of energy and speed. Additionally the huge nerf to interceptor weapons in this patch made the issue so bad, that 1v2 win is not exception but a rule at this point. Shrapnel cannon has severely reduced accuracy resulting in severely reduced damage on enemy. Other weapons barely scratch fighters.
Right now, frigates are hard countering fighters and interceptors, resulting in the current no skill necessary just spam EM torps frigate meta that is actually more boring then 0.8.0 patch. I’m saying this as someone who flew nothing but lightbringer in last couple of patches in PvP because for me, interceptors became half worthless in the last patch. This patch just featured a lot of beating on the still warm corpse of interceptor. Doesn’t really matter, it was killed in the previous patch and falling out massively out of T5 play as more and more people realized it. This patch just hastened the transition to “slow tanks in space”.
Frankly, at this point, anyone claiming interceptors are useful belongs in one of three following categories:
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Is utterly clueless about the game balance.
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Is lying because of having a hidden agenda.
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Is flying a low level tier, where all ships are functional as usual, as no one knows how to play and a pair of guns on any ship would be more then enough to be successful.
This is underscored by the fact that essentially all top interceptor players and squads flying with them largely abandoned interceptors with exception of using ECM+disintegrator combo to get the hilarious imperial LFR kills. Most followed my path and changed to gunships, as federation gunship is the closest thing to non-brick ship that has some utility in the game, while everyone else is using one of the frigate types or “light frigate” lightbringer build.
Finally, word on russian forums is that someone managed to finally build around 90k survivability T5 guard mainly on resists. No screenshots of that build as of yet (highest I’ve seen so far is only over 75k), but considering the levels of survivability that have been observable in T5 after this patch, it’s certainly within realm of possibility.