My bad. As in all balance discussion, when talking about ships, I assume there's no player input or skills in play. With player input (and skills), all bets are off and you have to declare Paragon OP for being able of soloing a Remnant Battlestation, Low-Tech and Midline Star Fortress and High-Tech Battlestation (mines are too difficult to deal with, when you spend so much time fortress shielding), Conquest for being able of soloing Remnant Ordos (though I'm not sure if it counts, because Ordos can vary in size and I didn't really pay attention to what I was fighting, so long it was named Ordo), Tempests for being able to solo all bounties that don't use too many cruisers (my best fight was wrecking 5 cruiser and 20 ships total hegemony bounty), so on.
Though, well, I think you mentioned this was about player control, so that's on me. I tried that loadout (or my approximation of it) and I was surprised Wolfs were stupid enough to let shields down in Dominator's rather short range. Big ships will tank all kinetics that come their way, but an itty bitty wolf with tin foil armour will happily tank four heavy machine guns and multiple light autocannons on with the hull. It feels as if Alex messed up how AI handles this at some point.
Additionally, I think you have missed a part of my post.
outside of strike builds that can damage the Wolf, while it's overloaded from the initial strike.
Was that not a strike Dominator?
Praise the Ludd for He has teached us the importance of range above all else!
Could you record your fight Hammerhead versus Onslaught fight? I have trouble doing it without skills and without flanking the Onslaught.
Also, aren't railguns a suboptimal choice there? Machine guns would deal more damage for lower flux. While they would struggle against Onslaught's hull, you've got assault chainguns to handle that.
I think your problem is that you find the AAF system boring, as you said it's just ''press F to do moar dmg'', super simple. Hammerhead as a destroyer does is job and that's it, destroys *** but dies super quickly if it gets in trouble. One fighter wing can end it, one unlucky frigate behind it as well, it's really not absurdly broken as you say it is in a fleet setting. You can't look at ships in 1v1 scenarios and then come to a conclusion that x is strictly better than y in every situation.
Hammerhead isn't as fragile as you think. It certainly isn't the most fighter-allergic destroyer, as that award goes to Medusa. My biggest gripe with it is that it's quite difficult to justify using destroyers that aren't Hammerhead (or Drover, but that's another discussion, one I already had).