These skill and balance changes sound good. Except for the Damage Control's elite effect which sounds bad. Heavy hitters like reaper torpedoes are exciting for those on the giving and those on the receiving end. It's better if they cannot be neutralized with a passive skill.
I'll just say, I understand what you're saying! From the testing I've done, though, Reapers still felt pretty great. I'll keep an eye on this, though.
Personally, I've always seen Reaper as armor crackers primarily. Which the Damage Control skill doesn't change at all. A fully skilled Onslaught XIV with heavy armor and armored mounts is still going to have 0 armor in a spot hit by a reaper with Elite Damage Control or without. So the primary use, to open a hole that your other weapons can exploit is still there. Sure, you can use them to wipe out hull, but that's always struck me as inefficient compared to using other weapons, especially when factoring misses in.
To be honest, I'd be worried that the skill is too
narrow, not that it is too strong against reapers. It really only comes into play under some very narrow circumstances, which the player doesn't control - namely what weapons the enemy is equipped with. And even then might affect only a single attack depending on how much incoming alpha there is (overkill harpoon swarms come to mind). And I'd argue for the majority of fleets and majority of ships (although not all), sabots are scarier than reapers. You need to win the flux war before you need to concern yourself with how fast you're dealing hull damage. At the point you're taking hull damage, all other defenses have failed. Range, speed, shields, armor.
For example, I don't think I'd ever consider making it elite on an officer, for example, even if I did take damage control for the officer. Especially with a 2 second cooldown. Whatever the field modulation elite effect for shields is likely to prevent more meaningful damage and potentially change the fate of the ship. Or the elite Combat Endurance if you really are relying on hull tanking - that works against small weapons better which tend to be more common. If an enemy officer has this as elite as opposed to something else more useful, I'll probably just be glad and most likely won't notice a difference than if they didn't have any elite skill in terms of outcome.
At best it's going to be a minor perk for Brilliants and Radiant's with AI cores installed. And you're already better of going kinetic DPS instead of large single shot HE heavy against those ships anyways, and Reapers will open up 1500 armor on a Radiant for kinetics to do hull damage just fine if necessary.
Of course, I'd like to get to play with it first, just to see how much of a difference it really does make, but for a lot of my fleet configurations, just based on their weapon loadouts, it is not going to be noticeable.
Also, kind of annoyed that the projectile speed skill is still attached to ballistics bonuses. I'll still take it for my plasma cannon apogees, because that bonus is the difference between them shooting down frigates and not, but taking "Ballistics Mastery" for a build that is anything but that, does not feel good. Don't suppose we're getting a projectile speed hullmod any time soon?
Actually, according to the description it is +50%
ballistic projectile speed. I don't think taking the skill does anything for plasma cannon projectiles. So, as far as I can tell, nothing speeds up energy projectiles anymore.