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[Thaago]

Personally I judge by my in game experience, so in a fleet. Though most fights that matter have the player outnumbered, so I guess thats the real metric we should use? In a fleet but outnumbered.

[Sutopia]

Just going to throw my thoughts in because I was doing something like this anyways:

Enforcer: C?  I look at the loadout and keep thinking it should be better, but I've almost never been impressed with them.

Afflictor: no idea.  I've almost never gotten one.

Hyperion- Can't really class it.  From what i've seen it's no where near worth it in the hands of the AI and fails critically in every possible way, even with builds that don't really take advantage of it's nature.  In human hands it's a very expensive way to get to delete a few ships before leaving.  I suspect it's really more of a B since it's just so damn impractical when you can accomplish most of the same effect that it has with other, less interesting, ships.

Monitor- D.  Might just be me again but this is like a Brawler/Mora, but with shields....oh and unlike those ships you never actually care if it's still alive.  The mora is a real threat and the brawler is a big enough thorn that you're often stuck trying to avoid it since killing it is a pain.  I mostly just ignore monitors and feel that it's gone the same way when i've used them.

Shade- another phase ship, another hard to say.

I'd give enforcer a B+ for it's easiness of obtaining one and extremely durable for it's class.
They can deal tons of damage if you managed to get a few of them cluster together since medium ballistics are good enough in most cases.

Afflictor definitely B++++
AIs cannot really handle them properly after phasing needs 2 seconds cool down but human player just turn them into capital terminator.
Fortress shield? Quad reaper + F, goodbye.
I almost ALWAYS buy or capture one if I manage to meet any, but yeah as you said they're quite rare.

Hyperion I'd give it a C++ for AI can use the system to survive but not making it's best.
Players can use it much more effectively.
However it's just too rare to obtain one when it still have a use in battle.

Monitor, maybe C+. Dedicated flak and tank ship.
In player hands it can solo a shieldless REDACTED station no kidding. Ramming can pack a punch you know  

Shade I'd give C+ something. EMP emitter surely can be handled well in AI hands, but not much more than that.
The small energy mounts kind of restricted it's ability to deal heavy burst damage making it only good at assaulting no more than cruiser class.
In large fleet engagement it can't really make valuable moves, not much as afflictor can with AM build. It's more focused on small size engagement.

[Tartiflette]

Also how are we judging a ships ability when alone vs in a fleet?

A Griffon alone is kinda bad, but when escorted can murder entire frigate fleets when equipped with a locust launcher.

Always in fleet, always as an AI ship first then +/- as a player ship

[Philder]

@Cyan Leader
I don't think it indicates that. Flux/cost tends to decrease as you scale up in ship size, which is a good balance concept. Gaining access to better weapons, range, defense and longevity are offset by a lower equivalent of flux stats and mobility. Ideally, it works and it's interesting. Reality, however, is that it creates imbalance hotspots because of the weapons are useable across classes and the change in piloting dynamics makes them better or worse. Large weapons on a frigate, for example. Without the larger flux pool and defenses to platform it, it's garbage. Capital armor busting weapons on a frigate with near fighter-level mobility, though? Das unbalanced.

BTW Frigates also tend to have more OP/cost. ie: more weapon mounts, powered by that higher flux/cost.

@TaLaR
Fighters are a whole other ballgame, and especially when contrasted against the meta of frigates. Frigates have 3 classes of larger ships above them, making it more useful to equip them with loadouts that are effective against them. Loading them with PD is a hard hit to their offensive capabilities, and the flux efficiency of PD wastes their flux->damage potential. Add in the fact that they also don't have effective defenses against them (typically) and you've got yourself a hard counter in the way of fighter->frigate. There are some exceptions, however, in the way of ships like Centurion or Scarab with a ton of small energy mounts all over the ship and the flux to fuel it all and defenses to last.

I disagree about energy(EN) weapons. I'll just focus on blaster weapons.

First off, gotta remember that HE does NOT get a damage bonus against hull. Only armor. HE damage percentages are 50%/200%/100%. Second, both kinetic(KE) and HE tend to have very low base shot damage(with some exceptions), meaning that KE is terrible against both armor and hull, and HE is likewise terrible against hull in addition to how bad it is vs shields. And an additional on KE; not only does KE tend to have low base shot dmg, that 50% damage against armor is a multiplicative penalty, essentially guaranteeing your KE weapons are doing the minimum 7.5% damage (50% * 15%) against armor. That's atrocious. Worse than useless vs armor. High shot dmg KE weapons even see similar base flux/dps efficiencies as blasters, but are much much less effective against armor and hull, and how lower base dps anway.

Blasters, on the other hand, tend to have much higher shot damage even compared to HE against armor (with one exception), in addition to NO damage penalty against anything and a much much higher base dps.

So the conclusion is that blasters are much more damage capable than both KE and HE, and you don't need multiple mounts for cross effectiveness vs shields/armor/hull. They are balanced, however, by shorter ranges and lower overall efficiency....but not by much overall, and high-tech ships tend to have high flux stats and mobility to help make up for that.

BTW, Hyperion is a very unusual ship. It completely defies the class archetypes, and IMO shouldn't really be considered as a frigate for balance.

I don't agree with your proposed balance fixes. Phase ships aren't too offensively imbalanced in AI hands. They're just nearly unkillable until their CR runs out. It's player piloted that is the issue.

[TaLaR]

@Philder

On fighters - PD does not improve Tempest's chances vs Talon swarm, too low dps and distract-able by swarmers. Best option are pulse lasers, and they barely get a win against the most basic Talon Carrier.

HE does not get bonuses against hull, but is still better than Heavy blaster.  HB is 1.44 flux per damage, while Heavy Mauler is 1.125(at much higher range).
1.44 also means that you spend more flux then enemy gets on their shield even for super-inefficient ships like Conquest (1.4 shield). HB can't crack shields of ships in roughly same class, they work only vs ones far below you. Skills do somewhat improve efficiency against shields, but they never make HB a good anti-shield weapon.

On Kinetics - you never fire *just* kinetics against enemy that can shrug them off. So Railguns alone are enough vs a frigate, but for larger targets there must always be either some HE shots mixed in or a threat of fast projectile weapon ready to exploit shield drop.

HB is good for 2 things:
1) Quickly dumping flux reserves when enemy is brought close to overload by other means (Railguns on Medusa, for example).
2) Provide anti-armor threat, while said Railguns build up flux. Due to shot speed and no windup just pointing them in enemy direction is enough to counter armor tanking.
... which is entirely dependent on having access to kinetics. So it works best for Medusa or Falcon. Or Aurora used against much weaker opponents (but even then it's better to generate majority of hard flux by IR /Pulse Lasers, with HB being dedicated armor piercer and finisher).

Note that if you nerf HB, it will likely become completely useless, because we already have Mining Blaster as sub-par HB alternative and it doesn't see much use (only Hyperion has argument for using it over HB currently, due to importance of higher per-shot damage for shield-bypass jumper).

I don't have issues with properly piloted phase frigates and Hyperion being Capital-grade threat (well, phase ones are too supply-cheap for what they can do). They'd make interesting opponents, radically different from anything already in game. The only problem as I see it, is that AI can't do it.
They also do have counters, that AI doesn't use (except QD, but Afflictor will lose it next update anyway).
- Shield bypass phase cloak maneuver is hard countered by accelerated shields hullmod.
- Hyperion would likely be countered by it too. But just NOT raising shield before Hyperion jumps (or shoots if it's already close) could work too. There is enough time to raise shield reactively, but not enough to drop shield at one point and re-raise at other. And ships like Paragon could just refuse to drop shield, maintaining full 360 in 1v1 vs Hyperion (or similar situation where Hyperion is the main threat).
- They have very little CR time. You can just wait them out. If they didn't have advantage while CR lasts, what would be the point?

[Philder]

Again, fighters are a whole other bag of worms. IMO they're unbalanced. Regardless of that, that's just a small aspect of Tempests balance issues. As a player you can work around it in several ways. Use your allies as decoys. Field your own fighters. Rush the carrier and gtfo.

Again, blasters are balanced in their own way. See my previous post. In addition, shooting weapons generates soft-flux. Taking non-beam hits generates hard-flux. That's another part of the flux war. Having a higher dps than the enemy means that they're taking more hard-flux than you. HB isn't an anti-shield weapon. KE is, obviously. KE is horrible against everything else, however. Flux-wise, blasters are mediocre against everything, but dps-wise they're King-Of-The-Hill. Especially against hull. Only frag can compare, but frag is comparitively the opposite of ideal even in spite of its fantastic flux efficiency because of its poor dps against shield and armor and very short ranges. And finally, the high shot damage of blasters make them fantastic at overloading shields. Even if you grab the higher shot dmg of Gauss or HVD, their flux efficiency drops substantially overall as well as being much much lower DPS.

Again, with ballistics you have to mix-and-match KE and HE to make an effective stand-alone ship loadout. This causes problems in the way of lowering your overall dps compared to blasters, requiring more mounts firing in the same direction, and if you're equiping weapons with a higher-than-average OP cost, you're also lowering your spare OP.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think ballistics are bad. I also don't think that energy is unbalanced. I just think they're different, but balanced. Mostly. They each have their own give and takes, and you have to remember that they also have their own set of ships that change the dynamic of the weapons. The lowtech vs hightech differences are very substantial and play a huge role in bringing out the best of both.

Unfortunately your proposed fixes aren't simply made, and neither are they the currently reality. AI isn't effective at parsing huge varieties of contextual awareness. It takes a lot of work on the devs part. Like, a LOT. It increases exponentially as the more complex and subtle the desired behavioral profile gets. And when talking about balance issues you have to consider the current state as is, not scenarios that don't yet exist.

If you'll reread some of my earlier posts in here you'll see my proposed changes to phase ships. Again, having highly volatile ships/weapons/systems/etc presents all kinds of balance issues. Of course it's fun. Who doesn't like parading around with overpowered game avatars and blowing everything away? Doing so, however, destroys a games ability to present an appropriate level of challenge and progression. If you want to be overpowered and break the game, there are ALWAYS mods, addons and cheatcodes for that. To many people, however, that kind of thing gets boring fast and makes the game somewhat meaningless.

[TaLaR]

@Philder

Well, that's way more agreeable than previous post. HB sure do have higher dps per slot/weapon-OP than any Ballistic weapon of same size, but as always it is balanced by ships that get to use them - high-tech ships tend to be comparatively under-slotted, with Apogee being the poster child.

The only thing I don't agree with is that HB can be good on their own - they still need KE or at least more efficient energy weapons to stack hard flux (IR pulse or Pulse Laser). Unless it's shield-bypass Hyperion, of course.

Getting perfect Hyperion AI or phase AI would be hard - sure. But getting it a lot better than now should be straightforward for Hyperion at least. It commits absolutely atrocious mistakes, like jumping in front of Onslaught and eating TPCs(2 mistakes in 1, because it could jump out near instantly). Or simply using it's system only once per few seconds - that's just artificial limitation, it can cycle every second.

As for progression - Hyperion is already super rare. Phase frigates should be close to that.

[Megas]

I do not want phase ships as rare as Hyperion.  Fleets that use them are common enough, somewhat like Tempest.  Currently, the easiest way to get more Tempests is to farm them from enemy fleets, because shops very rarely sell them.  Before 0.8, Tempests were too rare, but now I can recover several without too much grinding.  Ultimately with blueprints to come, it seems player might be able to crank out as many as he can afford.

I dislike too rare ships and weapons.  This game is not Diablo 2 or various online games that profit from players grinding for days on their server.  My solution to ultra-rare stuff is to save-scum to get the rare drop and to reload the game the moment an ultra-rare gets lost in battle.  I do not have the time to grind days for rare stuff I want to use.

I think phase ships are already too expensive, especially as AI ships.  The only one worth using is Afflictor, and only as a playership.  If phase ships had their old cloak, they would be more useful for AI.  As is, AI runs out of gas too quickly.

[TaLaR]

@Megas
Well, Afflictor is superior to Hyperion in many scenarios. Shade is comparable as a downgraded Afflictor. Rest of frigates are far behind on power curve.
As it is now, Afflictor is too easily available and cheap for what it can do. Also QD may be plain overpowered - I mean what could you theoretically do against perfectly timed QD + Reapers? It shuts down shields and any systems, only high base speed can help. So larger ships would be doomed if AI used it properly.

I do like time dilation cloak way more than old mechanics. It's just that overall game balance does not recognize phase frigates proper place after these changes.

AI runs phase frigates out of gas pointlessly - that's the real issue. Spending CR quickly (in world-time) is normal for them, not getting kills in process is where AI fails (notably AI does at least try with phase frigates, unlike Hyperion)

[Megas]

I do not find too many (non-pirate) Afflictors in game.  They are already relatively rare, even with occasional Black Market sales.  Yes, Quantum Disruptor is extremely powerful, which is the only reason why I use Afflictor.  Anything that can counter Afflictor can itself be countered by Afflictor.

If I use Afflictor for Reapers, it is only good for one-shot against a specific target, namely big capitals (before I have found a capital for myself to use).  Blaster Afflictor is a bit of a pain to use.  It is generally an annoying ship to use despite being effective.

Afflictor is mostly superior to Hyperion due to maintenance/DP costs and availability.  If Afflictor costs as much to use as Hyperion, I would probably ignore Afflictor (if I already have Hyperion).  I already think Shade is a bit too expensive, and I see no reason to use it.  Due to AI's mismanagement of phase cloak, I do not want to use any of the phase ships for AI.

P.S.  I like new cloak of Afflictor due to the disruptor.  Without disruptor, I would want old cloak back so I can use a brawler configuration similar to a Lasher and twitch phase through incoming bullets.  With old cloak, Afflictor was a better Lasher than Lasher.  I dislike new cloak on Shade, where it used to be a better tank than Monitor with the old cloak.  I liked old cloak better on Doom because it could brawl like a typical cruiser.  With new cloak, Doom cannot get in range without eating too much damage.

[Thaago]

So I've found a Shade variant that works horrifyingly well with the AI. 2 lmg's, 2 AM blasters, reinforced hull and hardened subsystems, 12 vents, 9 caps, and a skilled reckless officer.

I know we usually evaluate in the absence of skills, but this thing is a beast. Its performing as a nightmare cruiser, partially because the AI is using its system really well - the usual sequence is it pops up in something's engines, fires 2 am blasts, then activates its system, both locking down the enemy ship and recharging its flux.

[TaLaR]

So I've found a Shade variant that works horrifyingly well with the AI. 2 lmg's, 2 AM blasters, reinforced hull and hardened subsystems, 12 vents, 9 caps, and a skilled reckless officer.

I know we usually evaluate in the absence of skills, but this thing is a beast. Its performing as a nightmare cruiser, partially because the AI is using its system really well - the usual sequence is it pops up in something's engines, fires 2 am blasts, then activates its system, both locking down the enemy ship and recharging its flux.

But does it come to close to what same Shade could do player-piloted? Take sim Medusa (as example of decently omni-shielded opponent).

3 AM blaster player-piloted Shade can one-shot it skill-less. There is no error margin, since you need to hit perfectly (same place, same time, bypass shield, from enough range to avoid death aoe) and spend very little time in phase (otherwise not enough flux to fire all 3).

Also as I just found, Shade seems to have shorter invulnerability window while unphasing than Afflictor, making point blank kill technique unusable.

[Thaago]

Well, to be fair, the point blank kill is an exploit. I know its staying in the game but... * shrug *

The loadout I'm talking about will kill a Medusa when AI pilots, though it does take longer than when a player does it. Against front shields enemies its of course more vicious.

More importantly, when used in a fleet its consistently diving into enemy formations, landing its am blaster shots, then disabling 2 or more ships before darting out. Its not going to solo an entire enemy fleet in AI hands, but its wicked powerful for 8 supplies.

[Edit] I guess I should give a comparison: its doing better than my Tempest is and I don't have to worry about losing the Shade to a swarm.

[xenoargh]

if you nerf HB, it will likely become completely useless

Totally.

The Heavy Blaster's incredibly sub-par already.  It's a negative Flux-trader that has one and only one use case; shooting at Armor and Hull, at ranges that put a ship in danger. 

So, while enemy Flux remains good, it's totally useless; when they finally are nearing Overload or you flank them or whatever, it's less-terrible, for one shot, than a Pulse Laser... but that's literally it.  It doesn't have the range to be useful as a skirmish gun whose poor Flux performance is addressed by range-band advantages, like the Heavy Mauler.  It doesn't have a positive Flux/Damage ratio, so it cannot be used to push Flux, like the almost-as-bad Arbalest.

All it can do is be a poor substitute for... uh... the Heavy Mortar, kind of.  It's even worse for pure-alpha than the AM Blaster.  That's not exactly giving the weapon a thumbs-up, let alone calling for a nerf, lol.

[Thaago]

...

[EDIT]

Blarg that was too snarky, I apologize.

I disagree most strongly about the Heavy Blaster, and consider it a powerful weapon. Just not all powerful.