Chiming in with my agreement that the Pandemonium overall just sucks now.
Please note that I never played with its old version. I just started trying it out for the first time and was baffled about how it was so garbage compared to other capital ships. Here are some things I've noticed.
1. The shield is front-facing. If a missile explodes against where it meets the ship's bow, the ship TAKES DAMAGE. The shield doe not protect the ship for explosive hull/armor breaking impacts. Yikes!
2. I need way more OP to make this thing functional. I saw someone mention it got a 60 OP nerf, and trust me, I can feel it. This ship feels like a half-capitol ship, and a really bad one. It loses to every other capitol ship in the game.
3. It only has two large mounts, and they are on the rear of the ship. Do you know what that means? On a ship this long, you lose 200-300 units of firing distance because the shots have to clear the ship's bow. An 1100 range weapon fires as if it were only 800-900 range. That is really bad, since it effectively makes anything below 600 range unusable unless you literally battering-ram the enemy.
1. Basically the only thing that is wrong with the ship(combat wise anyway), its terrible shield. Bad arc, huge upkeep. Luckily, the thing has a mobility system that lets it turn like 45 degrees nearly instantly and also shunts a good chunk of flux at the same time and also cools down your weapons. However, its shield is not that bad if you leverage it's main strength, range. The further back you are shooting from, the harder it is for enemies to get around the shield.
I don't know what you are talking about with the shield not protecting the bow of the ship. I fired reapers at it and no damage was taken on armor.
2. Idk, I just killed paragon, onslaught, and maelstrom 1v1 with a no smod, no officer panda, only took damage on the paragon and that was about 300 damage. Maybe you just don't know how to build ships? Just in case, here is the build I used: 6x recson v, 2x uhlan, 3x hoars, stabilized shields, extended shields (unnecessary in a 1v1 really), ITU, heavy armor, 60 vents, 38 caps. If I dipped into other mods, I could replace those uhlans with some 1200 range HE damage for even better results. I didn't use any of the smalls because no long range HE smalls (again without dipping into other mods) and don't need PD thanks to the hoars.
3. Yes, if only it had something to make up for this range disadvantage, like a built in hullmod. A hullmod that affects all its weapons, giving it range advantage over anything that doesn't have something similar (in other words, anything that isn't a paragon).