Xyphos now 18 OP? I’ve never thought they were in need a nerf. You’re trading actual damage for utility and if you put it on a capital, they’re typically outranged. I don’t understand this at all.
Nah Xyphos nerf was spot-on. You get 360 degree PD as well as 2 ion beams. The fighters hover by your ship so they rarely die, which means they are active even if you're venting, or overloaded, or at high flux, etc. Also, since they don't die, it also helps keep the fighter replacement rate for other fighters.
Take the Odyssey for example. Realistically it's going to be fighting within the 1200 range of the Xyphos, since it doesn't have ballistics. It only has 2 bays, and energy and missile slots, so you don't really have the OP to put a lot of fighter buffs on it -- it's not a dedicated carrier nor even a battle carrier, the fighter slots are too few to use a build that revolves around them. So the Xyphos works perfect in that role. You can go with dual Xyphos, though for me, I stick a Longbow on the other slot so that the Odyssey has some additional anti-shield; because the Xyphos stays alive, the replacement rate for the Longbows won't get below around 65-70%.
The Xyphos also works well in a Converted Hangar setting for ships like the Fury or destroyers. Odysseys backed by Xyphos/Sabot Furies is a very strong fleet combination against [REDACTED] fleets, because the Xyphos will stop their offense cold once the Sabots go off.
It's much easier to make a flux-light loadout on a hit-and-run high-tech ship with basically all the benefits of having a Heavy Blaster.
I'm not sure how that works out though. Phase Lance is sort of 40% of a Heavy Blaster, so certainly there are some (lighter) ships where Heavy Blaster would be too much flux but you can mount Phase Lance instead due to lower flux consumption. In those cases though, then it also means you're amortizing the cost of HSA across fewer weapons, so HSA is essentially "more expensive"; basically, the overall weapon cost is more expensive, i.e. like a hard-flux Phase Lance for 16 OP or whatever (depends on the ship size and how many weapons the cost is being spread across). Same reason why Expanded Missile Racks might not be worthwhile if the ship only has a couple of missile slots.
Now if the ship has enough flux and weapon slots to mount 2 Phase Lances, then the comparison is actually between 2 Phase Lances or 1 Heavy Blaster (the other slot can be left blank). In the case of 2 Phase Lances, you're doing 477 DPS (with HSA) for 522 flux, compared with Heavy Blaster's 500 DPS for 720 flux. So you spend 8 more OP plus the cost of HSA (amortized over your beam weapons) to gain that flux efficiency, at a cost of losing 23 DPS. It's basically a high-OP cost option for more flux efficiency (like Heavy Needler vs Heavy Autocannon). That means the ship is giving up other stuff that it could've used with all the OP.
Phase Lance does 1250 damage per 1.75-second burst, then nothing until the next burst 4 seconds later (the cooldown period). So it takes 7.5 seconds to do 2500 damage. During that 7.5 seconds, the Heavy Blaster will have fired 7 times, for 3500 damage. In fact the Heavy Blaster will have done enough damage to equal those 2 Phase Lance bursts before the second burst even starts. So its overall damage is higher than the Heavy Blaster only during the first few seconds of the first burst, but after that, Heavy Blaster will always be higher. Even with HSA adding 10% damage, the results still wouldn't change much.
So basically I don't see how HSA meant Phase Lance would obsolete Heavy Blaster. (If anything, it's Cryoblaster that does this, but of course Cryoblaster is a limited, endgame weapon.)
The weapon that
might be too powerful with HSA I think is actually the Rift Lance. It's 1 OP cheaper than Phase Lance but requires 44 less flux to use. It's also a small energy weapon, so it can be put in more places than a Phase Lance (since small energy mounts are much more plentiful than medium energy mounts.) So I can see that say a Medusa with 2 ballistics in the small universals plus 4 Rift Lances with HSA may be pretty formidable. That's very OP-intensive, however, and I'm not sure it would actually work out better than 2 IR Pulse Lasers and a Heavy Blaster. And since it's a limited, endgame weapon, like the Cryoblaster, I'm not sure it's an entirely fair comparison to make. Plus, it essentially competes with the IR Pulse Laser and/or the Pulse Laser for anti-shield at that point.
Otherwise, though, I'm still having trouble figuring out where HSA results in a better loadout than just using the closest projectile weapons in those energy slots.
At any rate, perhaps letting players using AO in conjunction with HSA again would make it an acceptable balance, because AO means an additional OP cost for ships that want beams to do hard flux at longer ranges.
Equip your Doom with a Phase Anchor, HSA, 2x Phase Lances and 4x Rift Lances. If the enemy is clustered, you will destroy them far more quickly. It's clearly dependent on the situation, but the advantage here is that you don't need to wait for the SRMs to reload. Not nearly as safe, though.
Didn't work. It simply lacks the punch. A single AMSRM+cryoblaster burst can one-shot a Fulgent (assuming mines successfully re-oriented their shields) -- that's 6000 energy damage at 1000 hit strength, plus an additional 2800 frag damage at 1400 hit strength (which really becomes 350 to armor/hull). Usually a second dual Cryoblaster burst gets fired before the Doom can phase again. 2 Phase Lances and 4 Rift Lances comes out to a 5500 energy damage burst at 550 hit strength (since it has HSA), then a weaker 2750 energy damage burst (while the Phase Lances are on cooldown). You'd need to do 2 bursts (a strong and a weak), and even if you flicker into phase in between, it's less efficient (a smaller fraction of your cycle time is spent in phase, since you're on unphase cooldown more often), and sticking around for the 2nd burst makes it more dangerous. Even 6 rift lances wasn't as good.
Basically, the Rift Lance cooldown is too short to make good use of phasing in and out to accelerate the cooldown.
Generally I've found that I don't really have trouble with AMSRM running out of ammo on my Doom -- I tend to hit high-value targets, then retreat to vent, and during that time, my AMSRM will recharge just fine. The Cryoblasters can take care of stragglers as well without wasting AMSRM charges. Nowadays, in 0.95.1a, I've taken off Expanded Missile Racks (and Missile Specialization) entirely and haven't had trouble running out of charges even though I only start off with 3.
What's the idea behind HSA, anyway? To make beams into hardflux weapons? Just use weapons that are already hard flux.
To give ships with energy weapons another way to use beams. But since it's new, it takes several iterations to figure out how to make it work out, just like all other new stuff.
Edit: Forgot HSA also gives 10% more damage, though it doesn't materially change anything in the post.
