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[Blothorn]

The dread eagle is way too good. It has mobility that put almost any frigate to shame. I can down onslaughts with it easily. I think the long distance null skip jump thingy has too much range. I know its more fragile than a normal eagle but I don't think that compensates its super mobility + "firepower right into your ass" capabilities. That said it's really fun to pilot.

The Dread Eagle has excellent burst mobility, in that it can move within the range of the teleporter quite quickly. But its non-system mobility is pretty pedestrian, even by cruiser standards, and the system cooldown is quite long--it can't jump into the middle of a fleet and expect to make it back out. (And since the system takes quite a bit of flux, it can't use it as a panic-button escape; if you can flux it out it is relatively immobile.)

So yes, it is a great flanker, able to exploit vulnerabilities in enemy positioning and support--but it is nowhere near as mobile as a frigate in practical terms.

[Shad]

Balance wise, am I missing something or is Disavowal amazingly good? A PD burst beam with 0.34 flux/damage, which is far above other PD weapons.

[Nia Tahl]

Disavowal currently has an error in the config files causing it to have that silly efficiency. Will be fixed next patch, too

[Shad]

The Dread Eagle has excellent burst mobility, in that it can move within the range of the teleporter quite quickly. But its non-system mobility is pretty pedestrian, even by cruiser standards, and the system cooldown is quite long--it can't jump into the middle of a fleet and expect to make it back out. (And since the system takes quite a bit of flux, it can't use it as a panic-button escape; if you can flux it out it is relatively immobile.)

So yes, it is a great flanker, able to exploit vulnerabilities in enemy positioning and support--but it is nowhere near as mobile as a frigate in practical terms.

I noticed that the AI-controlled dread eagle is very prone to going into a death spiral vs even light fighters, where it tries to move back out, but is hard pressed on flux so can't properly use its PD. It tries it again, and again, losing a bit of hull at a time. A few times I would look on the tactical map and find the DE in a corner on half hull getting taken apart by a single squardon of broadswords.

[Blothorn]

I think the Raphiel Pod still needs some tuning. Its burst size is sensible, but it has a quarter the refire delay of a Sabot Pod (for 520 DPS vs. 230). This means that it can keep an enemy under near-continuous fire with no time to drop shields--and taking the 600-damage projectiles on armor is punishing. In some tests a Falcon (P) with four Raphiel pods could solo almost anything without fortress shield or multiple flaks--up to and including a Chronos, even without any help from anti-armor weapons.

I would propose (ideally both, but I think at least one is necessary):
- Halve damage, reduce HP somewhat, and double burst size/ammo, to reduce effectiveness against armor.
- Increase refire delay--at least double it in conjunction with the per-shot damage reduction, or increase it even more if it keeps its strength against armor.

I think it will still be a very dangerous weapon after these changes--it is very reliable with good range and guidance--but with these changes it would not stand on its own so well, requiring some other means of punishing a target for lowering its shields.

[Shad]

I would not say reducing Raphiel damage is a good idea, the total DPS is per missile is actually higher for Sabots already. Sure, sabots are less good against armor, buth they also do more total and EMP damage. It's actually better to compare the missile to the harpoon

What is an issue is that the missile is allegedly based on the harpoon, but has more ammo (20 vs 12), fires 50% faster (6 sec vs 9 sec) and the missile flies a lot faster. Which makes it a straight-up upgrade. These advantages either need to be reduced, or there needs to be some other offset.

[Blothorn]

The Sabot is absolutely the right comparison for the Raphiel because both are kinetic--for missiles especially, kinetic and HE damage need to be balanced differently. (And "Which makes it a straight-up upgrade" is rather laughable; the Raphiel is vastly worse than the Harpoon in the Harpoon's primary role.)

[Nia Tahl]

okay, Raphiel now does 1 damage

More seriously, though, maybe try thinking your ideas through about doubling the burst size and halving the damage of a missile that comes in a rack of 3, Blot. Gonna rework the missile anyhow, probably tripling burst size and lowering damage accordingly.

Also, comparing the missile to a harpoon when it's a kinetic missile is really speaking towards your intelligence there, Shad. Learn the difference between lore and mechanics.

[Wyvern]

I will admit, my first encounter with the Raphiel missile was in its bomber-launched version, where I couldn't see that it was kinetic damage type; I was very confused as to why it didn't seem to be doing much to armor...

[Blothorn]

My apologies; I haven't seen the small in ages and forgot it was a rack of three. Tripling the burst size is sensible.

[Shad]

The Sabot is absolutely the right comparison for the Raphiel because both are kinetic

They not kinetic, they are Kinetic + EMP. And that's where similarities end. Sabot is an EMP slow short range missile which splits into submunitions, where EMP damage is the big goal, while the kinetic damage is the bonus. Sabots can be uses as anti-shield, but only because vanilla does not have anything else. Raphiel is a fast mid range conventional missile which tries to overload shields while while EMP is the bonus if the enemy tires to armor tank it. The closest vanilla equivalent would be the Squall, since it has similar range and missile behaviour (but again, not directly comparable since squall is a Large slot weapon).

[Silver Silence]

Hey there, Nia

Just wanting to post about a quirk I've noticed while flying the Metafalica for a while. I seem to be having a consistent thing wherein the Metafalica's guns are failing to track targets that are moving laterally across their field of view while the ship is in motion. Case in point. The ship being in motion is an important aspect as bringing the ship to a stop allows the guns to hit all the time. I want to say that autofiring AI doesn't account for Sylph engineering witchcraft that allows them to speed up while cruising in straight lines. I disabled the AI on this frigate so that it stopped moving and until I slow the Metafalica down, it repeatedly but narrowly misses when going over the ship's usual 60su combat speed thanks to Sylph engineering. When I slow down, the issue immediately resolves itself and the Metafalica lands its hits. I am amusingly getting a lot of friendly fire incidents because of this as my ship thinks its safe to fire and hit then barely misses and dumps energy bolts into some friendly flanking frigate. Thankfully this isn't an X game where the whole sector turns red because I nicked a M5 one time with turrets. I would imagine this could happen with any Sylph ship but as the use case seems to be in having an edge in running down ships you give chase to, those targets are barely moving side to side compared to when the Metafalica is orbiting a target to allow for broadside fire.

[Nia Tahl]

Nothing to do with the hullmod. It's just vanilla's aiming AI being stupid and there's nothing I can do about that. You'll get the same results if you remove the hullmod. Best advice I can give is to aim the broadside guns yourself.

[Wyvern]

I believe that's an issue with using the ballistic-as-beam tag on the weapons, which causes the motion of the firing ship to continue to interact with the weapons' trajectories while they're in flight.

(That said, I'm not in front of the game right now, which makes it hard for me to double-check this statement.  I think I got that right?)

[Nia Tahl]

The shots on those cannons are spawned as normal ballistic projectiles and 2 of the 3 ammo types are ballistic. All of them are equally affected by the issue and it's simply a case of the autofire AI not accounting for lateral motion of the ship properly.