BALANCING:
- Dampened Mount hullmod:
. Only affects projectile weapons, not beams,
. Increased OP cost to 10/15/25/40 from 10/15/20/30,
. Now reduces the firerate of the weapons by 20%.
- IBIS pd:
. Flux per shot reduced to 3 from 9 (60 flux/s from 180),
. Range raised to 350 from 300,
. Added limited ammo and regenerating clips.
- Raptor pd now also has limited ammo and regenerating charges.
I want to ask about some of these changes if that's okay please.
Starting off, what was the primary reason behind the dampened mounts changes? I understand that they're because it's now a learnable and equipable hullmod, but originally it was made to help counteract the range disadvantage that the Maelstrom and Pandemonium had due their length and the large weapons at the back end. Now though, because dampened mounts is built in for them it feels like they're getting heavy nerfs of more fragile weapons and a straight damage loss of 20% from the lower fire rate to make up for the hullmod being usable with any ship which feels a little bad I guess to read the description of a built-in hullmod for a capital ship you just got and see its full of disadvantages to the ship and you can't get rid of it.
While it is nice to see that the IBIS got a hefty flux/dam buff to make it usable in comparison I'm unsure as to the change to make the IBIS and Raptor have limited ammo. AFAIK, this makes the Lazyhorn Warp Projector the only DA PD weapon without limited ammo. I haven't had the chance to test out the changes so its only theory crafting, but wouldn't this make DA uniquely weaker against sustained missile spam? It seems counter intuitive that the faction specialized in missile spam and fighters would be weak against constant missiles.
I might not like the Frost wing's change but I agree that they were necessary, frost wings along with zephyrs were my go to for wiping out frigates and destroyers very quickly. Fragmentation can help keep them good against missiles as their interceptor role would say, though it hampers their anti-fighter capabilities and zephyrs become ever better in that regard for DA.
I'm assuming that the Opfer was given limited ammo to help balance its overpowering Storm Needler++ capabilities? This takes it away from being the weapon role of "more dakka" that it was envisioned to be it seems and make it more like the actual large version of the needler series.
Thanks for your time for reading (or responding to) this!
Does anyone have a general guide on which fighters from the mod are best for each role? I just go by the card description, but would like to hear other opinions.
These fighter observations are from what I remember in 0.8 barring the frost which was changed but I never got to look into and the Arbitrator Z which was added after I had stopped playing.
Spoiler
It should be noted that despite their built-in hullmod. DA wanzers, though generally tough otherwise, are exceedingly weak to EMP damage and will die rapidly if the enemy fields them in decent numbers like in Dassault-Mikoyan Engineering or if they field a decent amount of EMP fighters like High-tech might do. This is because if a fighter loses its engine and collides into anything they die immediately and EMP specializes in disabling weapons and engines. This nullifies the otherwise tougher DA fighters armor and hull strength. Bonus points too if the offending EMP user has Advanced Countermeasures 3 or the enemy fighters have Wing Commander 3. This observation came about when seeing my Wanzer focused strategy break down and be stopped by EMP heavy fleets.
- Arbitrator: Arbitrators are decent for what they are. Although they are classified as interceptors, their speed actually makes them inaccurate against missiles and fighters but when combined with their range makes them great for hunting down lone frigate flankers and a few wings can go for lone destroyers as well. Their artassaults combined with fighters generally getting around shields allows them to get away with this, though the booster "attack" generally misses these targets it can be used as an impromptu bombing run on something bigger though generally ineffective.
- Arbitrator Z: I can't say anything on these as they were created since I had stopped playing in 0.8. As I haven't yet had the chance to play 0.9 any length of time I can only theorize. On the one hand this gives DA a much needed second bomber, and they seem to be closer to Khopesh or Perditions in vanilla by using unguided heavy rockets.
- Frost: Again, I haven't been able to test them out since their nerf so grain of salt and all. Back in 0.8 they were extremely efficient wanzers and nearly outperformed the others in many aspects. They were not the best at, but very good at tackling missiles, fighters, frigates, and destroyers at a steal of only 8 OP and 20 second refit time. Cheapest for DA wanzers which are typically major OP/refit time hogs. Now with frag damage shotgun (and the occasional HE sword) they may still perform against missiles, but will have more trouble fighting against fighters, frigates, and destroyers depending on its frag damage output. At this point you wouldn't be wrong with replacing them outright with the zephyr wings who, although they deal soft flux, were better at crushing fighters in 0.8 and good enough with their system and guns to handle frigates unless you really need anti-missile fighters as zephyrs use limited burchel PD.
- Strife: This one I'm not really sure what to do with. Its supposed to be a good finisher because its system allows it to output a lot of frag damage, but armor left over in hull just about nullifies rapid fire frag damage which this does though it does have a couple of thunderbolts at least. Otherwise, it doesn't shoot at missiles, tends to perform poorly against other fighters, and because there's only one in a wing makes them extremely weak as more fire will be focused on them and all their firepower is in a single fighter basket. If anyone can tell me a time that they've been able to have good success with these I would be interested to learn how they used them.
- Warlust: These guys make really good escorts as they will stay by the sides of their escorting ships and provide a nice decent "flux free" 900 range energy and PD separate from the ship keeping it safe while it vents or overloads. Though in 0.8 AI have the terrible habit of having escort fighters escort you above all else regardless of the situation, leading to my carrier having 6 warlusts uselessly on it while I was on the back lines. They worked much better when I went into the wing_data.csv and changed their escort range to 0 so they were forced to stick with the ship they were put on (no other fighter changes were made in the file). Though if you want to be on the front line you could use their player escort priority behavior to have a bunch of extra floating ship guns following you around dealing "free" energy damage and providing IBIS PD.
- Valiant: This wing is a bit of a shadow of its former 0.7 and early 0.8 self. Even so they still remain fairly reliable, just be aware that their weapons quickly overheat themselves and will lose their initial damage capabilities early in an engagement and weaken its defense as under the shield its really very fragile. A couple of wings still perform well enough against fighters, frigates, and destroyers. MM packs also helps defend them sometimes by being a weaker, non-guaranteed version of fighter flares. I have observed though that even with recall selected in the player controlled ship, valiants tend to go all in toward the enemy formation in speed mode over 1000 range sometimes 2000 range away and get themselves killed while you're trying to wait for fighter replenishment. As a result they tend to quickly drain the replacement rate of the carriers they're equipped on.
- Raven: These guys are very good for brawling with larger cruiser and potentially capital ships in a sustained fight with support backing them up. The Glowtusk anti-armor with GraveHMC being very good DA brawling weapons equipped on a fighter makes it a dangerous opponent for shield loading and armor breaking. It is hampered by its incredibly expensive 14 OP cost, 30 second refit time, slow speed, and having only one fighter per wing. Otherwise, if you'd prefer a fighter to constantly harass a bigger ship with bigger guns rather than do bomber runs, Ravens perform well in that role.
- Blizzaia: Your standard fighter bombers. They do carry a large amount of ordinance with Plovers and Banish with two Blizzaias can deal a respectable amount of damage to a bigger ship and are well worth including in a fleet. If you want to save 4 OP, and 10 seconds of refit time you can interchange these with Arbitrator Zs which only have the plover, but add another fighter to the wing. Though Plovers are HE while Banish are a lot of energy which means you lose out on anti-shield potential that way.
- Zephyr: These are very excellent craft after their change to give them two in a wing. Since they're beam focused, they devastate enemy fighter wings and in my testings were the only DA wing that didn't get completely wiped out by four EMP fighter wings and were even able to fight against them if they didn't have any support. Along with their strong anti-fighter properties, two wings can handle most enemy frigates if you get Wing commander skill for increased speed so that they can keep up with them and even destroyers so long as they get around shields. Though since they rely on mini-burchel their anti-missile is decent but enough will get through their defenses.
Please let me know if you would like any clarification with any of these and I can try to respond when I'm able to. Thanks!