The loss of Optimized Assembly perk + only getting 10% OP boost from Tech is pretty damn brutal—gonna ruin pretty much all my favorite builds. Yes, I'll have to think of new ones now, but they'll all obviously be less powerful and I won't soon forget that!
Nerfs suck! I can't really figure how this will make building ships more fun and satisfying now that I have to use fewer hullmods and lower grade weapons. But oh well, all in the name of balance, huh?
yeah, nerfs aren't fun, but having 30% more OP, even without the reduced weapon cost perk, is a
huge advantage, which causes some pretty serious issues:
- it's one of the major contributors to the game starting off really hard (since your ships initially have about the same amount of OP as your opponents') and progressively becoming easier as you level up and battles become larger.
- you really have to take max Technology aptitude and the two +OP skills in every game. they are so powerful that taking them isn't really a matter of preference or playstyle, it's a matter of doing it right or wrong.
- it just screws with balance of ships, weapons and hullmods. a hullmod that isn't worth taking in the early game (and standalone missions) might become really strong when you have so much more OP to spare. the variety might sound interesting, but it makes it really hard to properly balance that hullmod so that it's never either useless or a no-brainer, since both of these are bad.
personally, i'll gladly have less powerful ships in the late-game, if it means addressing these issues. and keep in mind, the base OP of ships will be slightly increased across the board, to partially compensate for the lower bonus from skills. you will have less OP than you do now, but the main difference is that there won't be such a huge gap between your early-game ships and all enemy ships compared to your late-game ships.
I have experimented with the current options and slow juggernaut that has massive frontal firepower while very effective is just boring for me(same with fleet swarms). I have found that glass cannon is what feels best for me since it lets me be active much more often. If I could I would strip away all my armor form the Conquest to make it go faster if I could.
i quite like glass-cannon builds as well. but when it's rather easy to make a loadout that can keep firing at enemies without giving them much chance to shoot back (because they have neither the firing range nor the speed required to do so) then all other loadouts quickly become suboptimal. it's understandable that it's frustrating when your preferred playstyle is the one getting hit with the nerf-bat, but it's because right now that playstyle is pretty much just the best one. so for all players who do
not prefer kiting at long range over all other playstyles, this should hopefully make their preferred ones more viable.
and it's not like the goal is to make the glass-cannon with long range builds unusable. the goal is to make that build one of several, close-to-equally powerful choices. :]
