I like the idea of Combat Reboot on Tacklers, but they would be almost always protected against Spy Drones, Pulsar, Plasma Web, etc, and maybe it would make them OP.
But Imo Gunships don’t need any kind of speed suppressor, their bubbles are powerful enough.
And about Tacklers being faster than any non fed ceptors… that’s not true. Unless you put heavy hulls, Empire ceptors will run at 400-500 depending on the set up. Jericho ceptors are also faster, specially the ECMs, they usually have a good amount of engine modules.
I’d rather go with Engine Overcharge on tacklers instead of Combat Reboot. But i wouldn’t want it removed from gunships either. The sentry drone is useful in PvE (witnessed in a Blackwood round), but i’d rather lose all friendly ships and restart the round than wait 20 mins for the pitiful drone to finish the job on the nav stations. They will never take down the Punisher. Other than that little use they are utter crap.
If the Recon greatly suppresses Tackler, why dont make Tackler do the same?
-Target Painter: Prevent cloak
-Engine Suppressor: Prevent microwarp
-Spy drone prevent cloak, but activation of cloak would shake off drone.
Other ideas:
-Inhibitor beam: prevent afterburner and reduces strafe and rotate speed. Add greater cooldown for it or make the effect not very strong
-Drone cloaks between shoots. Blinking beacon capture stopper! P.S. It’s model is too big. Old drone was better.
-New module: Afterburner catalyst - increases afterburner speed by 20% for 15s. Obvious downsides: constant energy drain, vulnerable to guard MPI and other tacklers. Maybe it would leave greater engine trail as well.
Kostyan made a valid point. In T1 the tackler is a monster, kills anything on their path, unless they are put against some T2 ships, then they are screwed (and since the MM always do this, sometimes it becomes abyssaly weak depending on the T2 enemies composition).
On T2 things get more balanced, but again, they are put into battles against T3, so they suffer even more since even the T3 tacklers doesnt fare well against T3’s.
On T3 i confess i dont have too much experience with tacklers, but for me it seems they are only there to fill the blank spots, they can anoy a little interceptors but if an int fights back the tackler is dead unless theres ppl around to help it out.
T4 and up, i have no clues.
But i agree that some buffs in some skills or ship atributes are a must, but not all across the board as the devs usually do (they did with the guard and T1 and T2 are useless and even T3 are in a bad spot) they should buff the tiers where the problems kick in, otherwise could make them completely OP in T1 and T2 if those tiers are afected with such bufs.
Or the other way around, make the ceptors less efective against tacklers somehow, like someone posted adding countermeasures against ceptors modules and skills.
i.e. Why is combat reboot on gunships of all ships in the first place?
So that they can brute force their way through everything?
If the Recon greatly suppresses Tackler, why dont make Tackler do the same?
As scouting ships, recons are meant to counter ‘sneaky’ ships: covops, tacklers, and other recons. Spy drones and micro locator = hard counter to these classes. So in a sense, tacklers should not be hard counters against recons specifically; these two classes are supposed to counter each other: recons reveal tacklers, while tacklers are supposed to have an advantage when it comes to a dogfight. And in theory tacklers are already a hard counter to intys by virtue of their ability to slow down intys.
So TP should not prevent cloak. And cloaking should not shrug off spy drones; that pretty much goes against the rationale behind spy drones.
Random suggestion: in Gratuitous Space Battles, fighters can be equipped with a target painter; missiles and rockets become more accurate when launched against the painted target. Maybe TP can have make the target more vulnerable to missiles somehow (either greater damage, ignore flares (but not guard’s MS), or better tracking)? (I hope this wouldn’t contribute to the missile spam though…) This also gives tacklers more utility: you could pair them up with Jeri LRFs.
Because it’s kinda illogical to have a ship that’s “designed” to kill mostly frigates can have an anti-interceptor module and the ship that’s actually “designed” to kill interceptors don’t. Give the Tacklers the Combat Reboot, and the Gunships… Idk, perhaps an anti minefield module or something like that.
But leaving the theory behind, in actual gameplay the Gunship is OP and kills everything that moves, plus it’s highly abused, so I doubt it’ll ever be “balanced”, meh.
Because it’s kinda illogical to have a ship that’s “designed” to kill mostly frigates can have an anti-interceptor module and the ship that’s actually “designed” to kill interceptors don’t. Give the Tacklers the Combat Reboot, and the Gunships… Idk, perhaps an anti minefield module or something like that.
But leaving the theory behind, in actual gameplay the Gunship is OP and kills everything that moves, plus it’s highly abused, so I doubt it’ll ever be “balanced”, meh.
It is as much anti interceptor module as anti fighter or anti frigate
Using cloak shakes off the spydrone (but doesn’t cloak) sounds OK.
Other option is to tweak Recon:
Spy drones causes two debuffs on enemy:
Other debuff denies cloak, but it wears off quickly (10 seconds or less).
Other debuff halves the healing, lasts as long as now.
So shorten the duration of spy drone cloak denial, without shortening the healing debuff (divide the spy drones into two separate debuffs).
But doesn’t that completely negate the point of spy drones? We’ve got to be fair to the other classes as well and not squelch them just for the sake of bringing tacklers up to par with the other fighters.
But doesn’t that completely negate the point of spy drones? We’ve got to be fair to the other classes as well and not squelch them just for the sake of bringing tacklers up to par with the other fighters.
No:
It still has the cloak denial feature, just for shorter time.
It still has all the other features of current spy drone.
