Ion pulser range is 500 and anyone who has used it knows it.
Whoops, had a brain fart and was thinking of cryoflamer when I typed it, but the point still stands, it's a short range weapon. Numbers change slightly but the main point is still the same: you criticized Xyphos's 1200-range ion beam (edit: I keep forgetting about Xyphos's Advanced Optics) as too short since it's not affected by ITU, yet you consider ion pulser's 500 (700 with ITU) good enough as a counterargument.
And I just gave you the fit: replace your HB with IP, replace your Xyphos with long bow and replace your sabot pod with harpoon pod (or reaper if you trust AI using it - I don’t).
IP is short range because you’re already fighting short range, so the “extra” range on xyphos is not needed. It’s not even a counter argument.
As OP stated, it’s not good for kiting, so your use of it in a CQC ship is somewhat legit. But again, in such scenarios a long bow can safely launch its payload without even leaving the mothership shield range, rendering long bow a superior choice.
Did you ever actually try this out in combat before proclaiming it to be better? I went and built a fleet of Furies (ion pulser, 2 harpoon pods, IR pulse lasers, longbow) and tried it out against my 2-Ordos test fleet, and the results were pretty much as expected: The longbows are fine early on but they die quickly as they're sent out, thus they're relegated to 30% irrelevancy for basically the rest of the fight. So much for them staying close by just because their mother ship has short-range weapons. The AI will spam harpoons against early weak targets, resulting in a lot of overkill and wasting them. Thus for the rest of the fight, the Furies are basically limping along with their 2 IR pulse lasers and their ion pulser. By the time peak time hit (510 seconds), the enemy still outnumber the fleet on DP and the Radiants haven't even shown up yet.
I've attached a screenshot of the moment peak time dropped to 0 seconds. You can see (lower right, bottom bar of radar) that the red bar (enemy) is still larger than the fleet (green). You can also see that all the Furies are pretty much at 30% for fighters, and no Radiants have appeared yet. Nor have the Furies clustered around the spawn point (using Xyphos + sabot pods + heavy blaster, they'll kill so fast that they're clustered around the spawn point by the time Brilliants start showing up en masse, basically killing ships as they spawn in). So it can't even handle 2 Ordos fleets, much less 3.
You can see this play out on a small scale by trying it in simulation under AI control against an Astral. Xyphos/sabot wins (eventually the Astral runs out of squalls, and fighters to an extent, Fury gradually approaching all the while, eventually Fury gets close enough to sabot the Astral directly and then it's dead), while Longbow/Harpoon basically runs down to 30% early on and eventually dies because it doesn't have enough firepower.
And btw an officer can has both tech skills, idk why you would mention it.
If you're doing it via Officer Training, then you're giving up at least one of Systems Expertise/Missile Spec (very important for flagship depending on which it is), Special Modifications (extra s-mod for all ships), and/or Reliability Engineering (+5% damage dealt, -5% damage taken, +5% speed, etc. for flagship). Perhaps you don't care enough about your flagship to optimize it when possible, but that's giving up a lot when the flagship is the single most important ship in the fleet.
If you're doing it with 5 officer skills, then you're giving up at least one of Target Analysis (extra damage), Shield Modulation (-20% damage taken by shields), Missile Specialization (+100% missile ammo capacity), or Reliability Engineering (+5% damage dealt, -5% damage taken, +5% speed, etc.). I don't see how any of these is less important than +15% range, which actually ends up being +11% overall on a cruiser with ITU.
I admit it is hard to intuit what people are doing with incomplete loadout descriptions. I'm for example assuming ITU and shield conversion, but people could arguably skip those. Also, linked or unlinked Harpoons + Sabots? These all can have fairly substantial impacts.
My Fury setup is:
Weapons: 1 Heavy Blaster, 2 Sabot Pods (linked), 2 IR Pulse Lasers, 1 Xyphos (if you have Cryoblaster, I highly recommend that over Heavy Blaster)
Built-in hullmods: Expanded Missile Racks, Hardened Shields, Integrated Targeting Unit
Other mods: Shield Conversion - Front, Solar Shielding, Converted Hangar
11 Capacitors, 10 Vents (although I still experiment with the exact mix from time to time)
Officer skills: Target Analysis (Elite), Shield Modulation, Missile Specialization, Energy Weapon Mastery, Reliability Engineering
My skills are (all elite where applicable):
Combat: 1L 2L 3L 4L 5R
Leadership: 1L 2L 3L
Technology: 1L 2R 3L 4L 5L
Industry: 1R 2R
I use 7 of them. Usually my fleet will also have a flagship and an "other" ship that's somewhat "bigger" or more important than the Furies. My flagship has typically been Aurora or Doom, whereas the other ship depends on whatever I feel like trying out or seeing how the AI handles it (Champion, Aurora, Doom, Onslaught, Legion, etc., I've tried out a lot of different things). A bunch of different loadouts work. But the main backbone of the fleet is the Furies. Or Falcon (P)'s using a similar setup (Xyphos + sabot pods), but Fury has better finisher in the heavy blaster (or cryoblaster when you get it). Messing around with doing it with a regular Falcon now, which won't get the fun sabot spam, but has ballistics to help make up for it. This fleet handles 2 Ordos fleets fine. If I use a Doom and switch out the heavy blasters on the Furies for cryoblasters, then it handles 3 Ordos fleets.
Converted hangar favors support fighters since they nearly never take losses.
However, they lose out to non-converted hangar fits most of the time thus voiding the comparison to long bows in the first place. Ah, I took the bait.
Eh, you're the one who brought up using longbows instead, so I guess you took your own bait. You still haven't come up with a loadout that's better than Xyphos.
Honestly I don’t know what we’re discussing about anymore.
The original statement was about Xyphos not good in any scenarios as there’s always something better.
So far there are two challengers: Xyphos Odyssey and C_Xyphos Fury, the later is dedicated for Remnant farming.
I have not commented on the former atm. Uh, not until this reply.
For the latter I think all I need to do is use a non-converted hangar fit in campaign that do better to beat the argument. A fury vs fury fit proves nothing as it’s not the same as the use case the challenger is arguing for. The reason I brought up long bow is due to Odyssey - I tried making a good Xyphos Odyssey fit but always find long bow with the exact same fit superior to Xyphos, thus made the bold assumption that converted hangar will be the same - it’s not the same due to the loss of speed and increased damage taken. I also did not account for shield sizes - Odyssey obviously has a much better coverage to protect long bows.
All I need to do now is prove that converted hangar cringe?
No. The original statement is you claiming that Xyphos is overpriced and only good in simulation. I claim it's the opposite, i.e. you need to take it out to full fleet-on-fleet combat to see it shine. You won't really see its worth in simulation nor against simple, easy fleets. My position is based on testing out a bunch of different fleet setups (ships, weapons, etc.) against full [REDACTED] fleets; in other words, practical, full fleet combat use. I went through the logic behind the use of the Xyphos. I explained the logic for testing against [REDACTED], that if you have a fleet that can handle [REDACTED] (in this case, 2 full Ordos fleets at once), then it can handle anything easier than that -- which means pretty much the entire game, barring possibly a couple of specific exceptions. (I've never tried it against that phase fleet, because I never encountered it while doing the quest, and I've finished the quest now so I can't go back and test it out.) So it's not "dedicated for Remnant farming", it's "can handle everything up to and including Remnant farming", a very big difference. Nobody is interested in finding out whether A or B is better for killing a pirate Lasher, because there are a million ways to do it. I explained that Xyphos is the key to making this loadout strategy work, and why. That's the relevance of using Xyphos. And this is based on "real world" experience, so to speak.
If you're able to find a fleet loadout that's better, I'm all ears. I'm always looking for a better fleet setup. Converted hangar or not doesn't matter. Fury or not doesn't matter. Fury as a platform is just for convenience, multiple ships can work.
Edit: forgot the screenshot. Edit2: Keeping forgetting that Xyphos ion beam is actually 1200 range due to Advanced Optics.
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