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[Timid]

Now that the dust has settled... what do we think about the Phase mini-rework?

It seems like a good change (aside from almost every modded phase ships needing to be rebalanced). The hullmods look nice.

I like the Phase Anchor's implementation and effects Although I very much dislike how the phase anchor can only be used once per battle. That means some random gremlin can have an anchor and suicide to deny an intense phase ship work like the Ziggurat without the fault of the player (lucky that only the Tri-Tachyon has access to this but still...)

Adaptive Phase Coils feel good in design, but the cap I feel needs to increase on smaller hull size. Smaller phase ships seem to take the bulk of the damage worse.. perhaps something like 80%/80%/75%/75% as the hard flux cap might do?

Edit: At least player-perspective wise they feel clunky since you feel the effect of eating a -66% speed debuff in a 0.33x time dilation as opposed to an AI that's high-fluxed on phase just going 1x its speed in phase from 3x.

What are your guys' thoughts?

[Amoebka]

No, please no more speed 400 afflictors, thank you. Adaptive coils are fine as is.

Phase ships with brawler builds feel strong and interesting. Phase ships with assassin builds are dead outside of player flagships. Good riddance, to be honest.

[Brainwright]

I'm rather liking it.  Phase ships simply weren't able to fight in the previous iteration, which is why they needed the speed to get around the backside.  It was boring.  Now phase ships can actually soak some incoming fire, and they can technically move through the enemy fleet like before, but it's much more tenuous and the NPCs can't do it.

Phase anchor isn't used by the NPCs very well, which is probably for the best.  Personally, I'll probably never use Adaptive Phase Coils.  Even for my Afflictors built like bombers, I want them in the front line, inflicting casualties as quickly as possible in coordination with the other ships.  I don't like them zipping off to the other side of the map at a moment's notice.

But they can still sneak past the front lines to attack carriers, which is good.

[LeBlanc]

I don't really like it in all honesty, it makes my hit'n'run ships from the previous version feel very clunky and slow.

Don't get me wrong phase really did need a nerf considering how OP it was in the players hands and how little counter there was to them, but these changes will probably make me steer well enough away from buying or salvaging any phase ships I see simply because I don't see any point to using them anymore.

I also feel like it doesn't make sense lore wise. These phase vessels were supposed to be able to slip past battle lines and patrols undetected and bomb the planet they were defending or harass trade fleets. How are they supposed to be managing that when they can barely make it a fraction of an in-game battle map without getting overloaded?

To sum up, I believe these changes could have been done by making ships that directly counter phase vessels (e.g. something that makes it cost more flux to go into phase) or mechanics that make it harder to waltz through enemy lines (e.g. increased hardflux gain when going through or nearby ships and asteroids and heavy penalties for coming out of phase inside something) instead of heavily nerfing phase speed

(sorry in advance for any formatting errors or readability issues it's my first time posting here)

[Vind]

    Balancing is a nutshell - lets increase all guns range and reduce phase ships speed by -25% then phased immediately then reduce by another 25-50% in seconds just due to cloak insane flux requirements.     
This is the worst kind of balance - default ship stats is terrible and must have improvements via skills/hull mods to even be usable. Just unbelievable.
Why phase ship penalty must be universal across all classes of ships? Frigates still usable and anything above is crippled.
     PS. Also very ironic how phase ships now worse than initial version with zero speed/time boost in p-space. So phase ships now slower than normal ship and pay double CR time for phase travel.

[intrinsic_parity]

I played with a doom for a while and was slaughtering things (didn't even take the phase ship speed boost from tech, and it felt fine tbh). The phase anchor hullmod with phase lance/ion pulser/light needlers is really good. The AI sucks at using it though.

I don't use phase frigates at all, so I can't comment on that.

[bowman]

I think Harbinger got hit pretty hard, but I think everything else is doing fine. Notable that my experience is a little limited so far- hoping to fix that once I get more blueprints.

In what testing I did, it seems the AI has almost no idea how to use Phase Anchor so it's pretty much useless for them, which is pretty disappointing. I can't tell if it costs too much OP or not as a result: my initial thought working on builds was 20 OP vs 6 (for destroyer, for phase anchor vs the other one whose name escapes me) was pretty extreme but then again Phase Anchor's buffs are actually kind of crazy. I think part of its problem is the dive mechanic, which I'm not really a fan of it turns out. It feels like half the cost of the hullmod is just the fact you get a free pass on death and given all the other stuff in the game (reinforced bulkheads, captains passively making things recoverable now, Hull Restoration) that seems unnecessary, and also has the potential to be very annoying if you fight an AI with it (though as far as I know nothing has a variant using that hullmod, probably for that exact reason- but that's arguably even worse because the hullmod itself is very interesting otherwise).

TLDR: Harb feels a little bad but rest is good, AI needs to understand Phase Anchor, the Dive mechanic seems unnecessary bloat on the hullmod both OP cost and mechanics-wise

[bob888w]

I don't know how the other phase ships are just due to the nature of my playthrough, but the dew harbingers I have seen to be dying at a rather alarming rate, they spend too long in phase then die to regular destroyers

[intrinsic_parity]

Phase anchor is close to worth the cost ignoring the dive stuff IMO. It's pretty close to just double your damage output. I agree that the dive stuff feels like unnecessary bloat though, and could 100% be removed for a small OP buff.

I think the mechanic of getting slower on high flux is just generally super punishing for positioning, and it's the perfect AI trap. You need to get out of bad situations early or you won't be able to get out at all, and identifying whether you need to back out is really not trivial, even for a good player. I constantly see enemy phase ships just get pinned in phase until they can no longer move fast enough to escape when they could have easily backed off and vented many times over. Feels like the AI is still playing like it has the old mechanics, and that just doesn't work anymore.

[LeBlanc]

I just slammed out a couple hours worth of starsector and I feel like these changes have really gutted phase ships, for both the AI and the player. As said by intrinsic_parity phase ships just get caught out with no real way to escape and IMO makes phase feel like a complete hinderance instead of the defensive way out it once was.


spoiler for the galatia academy questline below

Spoiler

The once challenging mercenary phase fleet from the academy blacksite questline now feels like nothing more than a single 2x4 lego piece on the floor. It'll maybe leave a slight indent on your foot an hurt a bit, but ultimately nothing life threatening like the game makes it out to be.
And thats not even touching the fact that the ziggurat becomes a literal snail. its not some big bad to be scared of, just acts like any ol tiny frigate and will suicide itself into your capital ships just about as soon as the fight starts

[close]

IMO the only real reason to ever pick up a phase ship anymore is the passive sensor profile reduction it gives you.

[TaLaR]

Afflictor - still slaps anything. Even easily available Afflictor(P) is good enough to be 2nd best frigate (or just 2nd best ship?) for player piloting.
Shade - weaker Afflictor wannabe.
Gremlin - utter failure at being a phase ship. What's the point without speed, appropriate slots or system?
Harbinger - was bad, became worse. 30 sec cooldown system is basically useless. Harbinger is down to bruteforcing lesser opponents or not doing much otherwise.
Doom - probably still fine? I usually don't pilot these, but I know they have their uses.
Ziggurat - massively nerfed in speed, is almost twice over phase skill DP cap alone.

All of the above is for player piloting. And as long as I pilot phase myself, no AI is allowed to touch them - phase DP cap is too low to waste like that. Going over cap or not having skill in the 1st place is not an option - slow phase ships are useless.

Lower phase speed hurts and definitely makes them a lot more vulnerable to pressure, but a player piloted Afflictor is still fast enough to do it's job of deleting any ship it sees. Some of lost speed can be compensated by Coordinated Maneuvers, which was essentially a locked out skill in previous tech tree due to conflict with Wolfpack tactics.

[SCC]

Sounds like it was just me Phase Mastery speed bonus that was the issue. Perhaps what should happen is that just frigates should get hard flux slow down and bigger ships should be left alone. And no phase specific speed boosts whatsoever.

[Tadas]

Haven't played with phase ships before, my only experience is with current Ziggurat, phase anchor build. It is easily the most powerful ship in the game. With 6x soft flux dissipation compared to radiant (while in p-phase), no ship comes close to damage this baby puts out. Speed is very manageable by not letting flux build up and doing frequent mini-vents. Like shoot, dive, dissipate soft flux, vent hard flux if needed, repeat. Oh and you have motes. Just did a fight my fleet against a fleet with 3 radiants, it was not close.

IMO phase ships suffer from similar problems as rogues in WoW pvp. They are very hard to balance fun wise. In previous patch I would mostly skip fights if it had dooms in it, because unless I got I just couldn't kill them before CR runs out. So having full power when to engage/disengage and opponent can only react to you feels fun if you are piloting it, but kind of bad if you are playing against it.

[Megas]

I want Phase Anchor primarily for the Emergency Dive feature.  If I use a single phase ship, then I want it as proof against d-mods.

Afflictor - still slaps anything. Even easily available Afflictor(P) is good enough to be 2nd best frigate (or just 2nd best ship?) for player piloting.
Shade - weaker Afflictor wannabe.
Gremlin - utter failure at being a phase ship. What's the point without speed, appropriate slots or system?
Harbinger - was bad, became worse. 30 sec cooldown system is basically useless. Harbinger is down to bruteforcing lesser opponents or not doing much otherwise.
Doom - probably still fine? I usually don't pilot these, but I know they have their uses.
Ziggurat - massively nerfed in speed, is almost twice over phase skill DP cap alone.

Agreed that Afflictor is still good.  The fundamentals are still there.

Shade is tankier than before and (when piloted by AI) can serve as a phase Omen that can torpedo a ship or two.  AI can get into a brawl against smaller ships and do fine.

Gremlin so that player can have something for Phase in Fleet Doctrine.  Have not tried it yet.

Harbinger with Doom skills was strong last release.  Not Afflictor or Doom strong, but it could still punch well above its weight.  Today, it needs to be built like an armor tank (Heavy Armor is a must), but it can brawl.  That said, Quantum Disruptor overload duration is too short with thirty second delay between uses.

Have not acquired the other two phase ships yet.

Phase anchor is close to worth the cost ignoring the dive stuff IMO. It's pretty close to just double your damage output. I agree that the dive stuff feels like unnecessary bloat though, and could 100% be removed for a small OP buff.

I want the Emergency Dive somewhere.  On phase ships that I expect to act like Vanguard and die, I want Phase Anchor primarily for the dive.

[Astasia]

I hadn't used any phase ships before. Started a new game with the current version with the idea of making a stealth phase fleet. The first ship I tried was a Harbinger and I don't even know what it's supposed to do other than waste supplies. It just constantly goes in and out of phase when it's not near any ships, meaning most battles it never makes it into combat and just causes the battles to take longer because of the slow motion effect. When it does get into battle, it just sits there and eats damage and dies. It can't 1v1 a ship half its size.

Like what is even the concept for this ship? What does moving slowly in phase while building up flux even accomplish? It can't get behind enemies because it goes from slow to slower while phased, maybe it gets one volley of shots off before they raise their shield if it's a 1v1 fight but then it's GG because they have a shield and the Harbinger has nothing anymore. I suppose if I manually controlled it I could try to retreat and rephase and repeat, blast ships before they can shield up one plink at a time, but that sounds incredibly slow and tedious and the AI obviously doesn't do that.

I don't know if it's better or worse than before, but it doesn't seem like a remotely viable option currently, at least with a "stock ship."