Oh boy… discussion is up finally.
New ships
Singularity
As the only ship I’ve gotten from this update it is really the only one I can give feedback on (and concerns) since I doubt I’ll be getting the others any time in the near future.
The ship itself is a fairly solid tackler and can’t really be played too aggressively lest you be killed due to an issue I’ll talk about shortly.
The trap mine is good CC but horribly inconsistent and the “rubberbanding” effect when an enemy is trying to escape the field makes the target impossible to hit.
Accelerator gun is effectively a better plasma gun. The damage against shields is respectable but is literally laughable against hulls in PvP as (from what I’ve seen) most people have been stacking EM resistance on their hull thanks to the trauma of the front blaster meta. The gun itself has decent projectile speed which ramps up after a crit and manageable overheat and good fire rate.
Long descent is troubling however. Although I love it for the ability to literally have infinite invisibility as the module actually cools down before the duration is up; the shield regeneration malus whilst it is active is actually horrifically annoying since if you play the singularity like a standard tackler then you’ll be using invisibility the moment your shields drop but when you leave invisibility your shields are still down and you’ll have to find a corner to hang out for a few minutes to regen slowly.
The ship itself has decent shields and with the right implants will also give you a free shield slot without compromising your resistances or capacity HOWEVER the singularity has the weakest hull of any ship I’ve ever seen. The moment your shields drop you are almost guaranteed to die unless you have an engineer supporting you as with only 5k hull total and a singular hull slot to work you’re either going to be sacrificing a regenerative coating dependant build or sacrificing a module slot for a repair kit so you have more than a second of life once your shields are down.
Drone booster is also the most irrelevant passive modifier I’ve ever seen. Singularity has access to no companion drones that will actually keep pace with you in order to stay in the bonus damage field and the ship is too fast to have attack drones as a relevant alternative. It doesn’t belong with this ship.
Zhen
I haven’t encountered one in PvP or PvE so I’m working off of observation I guess.
-The ship model appears to be the smallest ship in the game
-Geyser is a kinetic front blaster based off of stats
-Virus attack looks good on paper but I fear is next to useless in practice
Project 1’s and 0’s
The ship itself I haven’t fought but I have dealt with the remote disintegrator before, which has far too much durability and range. The malus seems almost completely irrelevant as the ship itself will be 3km away from the drone making it difficult to deal with.
Also why the flying f*ck was the disintegrator buffed against destroyers? It was already far too effective against them. Why did it need to be buffed?
Spike
It seems to be yet another glass cannon akin to the Singularity, but with the typically overpowered Covert Ops modules performs the task much better since it has so many different methods to escape harm.
-The weapon does decent damage if used well, but apparently is lack-luster without a specific build.
-Energy burning mine does decent damage but knocks about the host ship
-The special module seems okay?
Acquisition
The way the blueprints for the new ships are acquired just simply IS. NOT. OKAY. The only reason I have singularity is because I lucked out and got what I wanted from the idiotic caches.
If they are going to contain the blueprints for two different ships it should not cost 300 iridium AND only give one blueprint
My main issue with the damned rank 16 and 17 blueprint cache is you pay so much and get so little in return. Getting what you want is down to pure luck and as I said in a different thread it is possible to have acquired all the resources for a rank 16 before you even have all the blueprints due to poor luck. This shouldn’t be possible.
Do these ships feel like they are worth a similar material cost as a rank 14 destroyer? No. They feel like standard ships, play like standard ships with the only difference being a unique model and some fancy modules and weapons.
Fleet upgrade
I honestly can’t care less at this point since ‘testing’ this new stuff means farming for hours in different sectors to get all the new modules, weapons and modifiers.
Summary of upgrade
New engineer stuff isn’t OP so that’s nice. Recon stuff needs tweaking and the bow laser sucks.
Also the static barrier became relevant since allies can fire through it, so yay I guess.
Customisable UI
This is honestly the best part of the update since you can fiddle around with the UI until you get something you like out of it, including moving the buffs/debuffs sections to a part of the screen a bit more obvious.
The only bad part of this addition is you need to be in battle to access it.
Overall
The update itself is nice but the new ships feel like they either don’t belong or their deployment should have been handled better as currently obtaining them appears to be more of a chore then something to work towards as you have to divert so much iridium just to opening the caches to try and get what parts you want. The aggressor bug in open space is still a thing, Destroyer modules/components bug seems to be fixed (haven’t played Tyrant much since the update, so haven’t noticed) and the upgrade seems like an afterthought at this stage.
My only question is what comes next since all the upgrades have rolled out?